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Archive for the ‘Guest Columns’ Category

Guest Columnist: A Robot

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on September 18, 2023| 4 Comments »

Longtime reader Mark Draughn, AKA Windypundit, was recently talking about playing around with ChatGPT, and after I joked that it might be amusing to see it try to write an essay “in the style of Maggie McNeill”, he couldn’t help himself.  This is what it produced; it’s more like a collection of talking points that a coherent essay, and it lacks my wit, style, and verve.  But for something produced by a soulless collection of algorithms, it’s not half bad.

The Myth of “Saving” Sex Workers

One of the most pervasive myths society loves to cling to is the idea that all sex workers are helpless victims in need of “saving.” This narrative is not only overly simplistic but also incredibly harmful to those in the industry.

Let’s be clear: no profession, including sex work, is devoid of exploitation or abuse. However, it’s egregiously misleading to paint an entire community with such a broad brush. By perpetuating the belief that all sex workers are victims, society erases the autonomy, agency, and diverse experiences of countless individuals.

When was the last time you heard someone say they want to “save” a coal miner from their job? Yet, isn’t it interesting that many who loudly proclaim their desire to “rescue” sex workers often have little to no direct experience or interaction with them? Their intentions might be well-meaning, but the implications are patronizing and often lead to policies that further marginalize an already stigmatized group.

Moreover, the “rescue industry” — those organizations and individuals claiming to help sex workers exit the industry — often has a one-size-fits-all approach. In doing so, they disregard the numerous reasons someone might choose this line of work: financial independence, flexibility, or even, believe it or not, passion for the job. Not all sex workers want or need to be “saved.”

It’s high time for a paradigm shift. Instead of viewing sex work through a lens of pity or disdain, we should approach it like any other profession — with respect, understanding, and a genuine desire to listen to those within the community.

Decriminalization is a step in the right direction. By removing punitive laws that push sex work further into the shadows, we can pave the way for better working conditions, increased safety, and access to essential services without the fear of persecution.

It’s simple: if you truly want to help, listen to sex workers. Respect their choices, experiences, and voices. Let them tell you what they need, rather than assuming you already know.

Please note that while this post is inspired by Maggie McNeill’s advocacy and style, it is a fictional piece and does not represent her direct views or writings.

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Guest Columnist: Laura Agustín

Posted in Guest Columns, History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on September 4, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Regular readers need no introduction to Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist, whose groundbreaking book Sex At the Margins introduced the term “rescue industry” and set the bar for conversations about sex work and migration for two decades.  When she told me of her new project, I invited her to write about it; I think you’ll find the result as interesting as I do!

What do you do when you get pretty old and have no pension but do have your health?  I had to confront this during a couple of years of lockdowns, living in someone else’s house because I was trapped by airports closing.  But for some years before that I had wanted something new to happen.  I wrote a crime-novel, The Three-Headed Dog, and would have been glad to write its sequels, but it seemed impossible to get the book seen by more than a small number of readers, and anyway I didn’t want to sit in front of screens all the time.  So after enormous amounts of walking and exploring during lockdowns, I thought about becoming an on-the-street guide.  Not to take tourists to the bucket-list sights but to lead the kind of walking tours I like, with guides who take you to places far from the obvious, such as weird industrial areas, backwaters, and neighbourhoods no one ever tells you to visit.  I’ve been a house- and cat-sitter for many years so was always doing this on my own, but here were guides who could tell me histories of these places.  So I thought I might run walks where I could give my own kind of history, ignoring mainstream events and personages – monarchs, prime ministers, wars, celebrations of capitalism – and instead talk about ordinary working stiffs, especially women, who usually get left out.  It would just be me having my own point of view as always, only on the street, talking with anyone who wants to sign up – no institutions or classrooms involved, even virtual ones.

Is it possible to include sex work in guided tours without being a jackass?  Ever since I began talking in public about the sex industry, I’ve dealt with the problem of language; always someone is offended, if not by the topic itself then by the words used.  I wondered if I would ever discover the perfect vocabulary that would enlighten without someone in the audience looking hacked-off.  Then I realised it was a hopeless goal.  My PhD thesis-proposal was called The Production of “Prostitution”, a term impossibly fraught and divisive and yet it’s the one everyone knows.  “The Sex Industry”, “Commercial Sex”, “Sex Work”: all require explanation and endless quibbling about which phenomena are to be included.  Spin-offs like “the Sex Trade” and “Survival Sex” and absurd inventions like “the Sex Work Industry” add to the chaos.  On top of that, many sex workers use and affirm the word “Prostitute”.

For my own label, I’m keeping the “Naked Anthropologist” handle because it continues to describe my point of view.  “London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class” tells what my commentary focuses on, and I’m still the same person thinking about sex work and other ways women choose to get by, make ends meet or make more money than they would in the usual jobs available to them.  Remember, I got started in the Caribbean 25 years ago listening to poor women planning to migrate to work in Spain, where they had two job-options: live-in maid or sex worker.  Conversations went like this:

Woman 1:  I’m going to be a prostitute, I’d rather die than be someone’s maid.
Woman 2:  I’m going to be a maid, I’d rather die than be a prostitute.

My walks will always include people who sell sex.  For my walk in September’s Totally Thames Festival, “Scratching Out a Living”, I created six characters whose jobs were common amongst the poor in 14th-century London.  One is a laundress who can’t make ends meet unless she also sells sex part-time.  Another prefers picking pockets to selling sex.  The language of the time called these two women “common”; being without a husband was grounds enough to assume the worst.  A third woman is a migrant who manages a regulated brothel with her husband and is on the house’s roster of prostitutes: married but fully professional.  Historical language shows us how women who deviated from the norm were stigmatised. In another walk, “The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks”, a woman from the country comes to London to work as a maid; she meets a dashing horseguard in the park and becomes his dolly-mop: This term for an unmarried woman having sex with a soldier indicated to listeners of the time that she was “an amateur prostitute”.  She gets pregnant, he helps her out from his paltry pay, and after a couple of years they get permission to marry.  Their daughter grows up, marries and leaves home, but that doesn’t work out and her life ends when Jack the Ripper finds her sleeping in an East End courtyard.  There’s no evidence she ever sold sex, but police and newsmen of the time said she did.  In this same walk Harriette Wilson is an author and demi-rep: this term, composed of “demi” meaning shady or doubtful and “rep” for reputation, indicated Wilson was a certain type of prostitute, who tries to blackmail the Duke of Wellington.  Catherine Walters, courtesan on horseback in Rotten Row, sometimes got the label horsebreaker (another term for prostitute); she lives a long life discreetly listening to old men’s stories and persuading them to contribute to her maintenance.  I’m creating other walks all the time, full of ideas about the women omitted from histories.  And I suppose I’ll never offer a walk that doesn’t have paid sex in it because it wouldn’t be real life.  Sometimes the women are called mistresses, and sometimes they may have managed to preserve their technical virtue by sticking to hand-jobs, but the language always marks them out.

Luttrell Psalter, Add. 42130, British Library

If you come to London and are interested in Plain Talk on the subject of sex work, come on a walk with me.  Selling sex isn’t going to be a special emphasis, but it’s always going to be there, the way food, drink and politics always are.  To know the dates of scheduled walks, follow my blog and see the Walks Calendar tab on the top menu of my website.  Or follow me on Eventbrite: The Naked Anthropologist.  You can also contact me for a private tour, either on the platform ToursByLocals or via the contact-form on my website.  For private tours I’ll do the research required to come up with history of a particular area or person that I can recount on a series of pauses in a walking tour of a few hours.  I like research, and I’m good at it; I do it in the British Library, where during lockdown-years I focused on the late Middle Ages because I was annoyed at the superficiality of commentary on the medieval regulated brothels of Southwark.  When the dearth of references to the existence of working women was a yawning crevasse I took to perusing illuminated manuscripts in a special room, because for a short period illustrators in East Anglia decorated the margins of religious texts with figures: mostly antic, often grotesque, occasionally realistic.  Just above is an example: a detail from the early 14th-century Luttrell Psalter described as “A Lady at her Toilet with her maid”.  Some interpreters of these marginalia go further, however, to say the lady is obviously a prostitute.  You know what they mean by prostitute?  A woman looking at herself in a mirror.  Go figure.

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Guest Columnist: Victoria Bateman

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on May 8, 2023| 1 Comment »

Dr Victoria Bateman is a Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, England, and author of the new book Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty.  You can see more at www.NakedFeminism.com.

What determines a woman’s worth?  Is it her conscientiousness, her open-mindedness, how kind and generous she is to others?  Or is it what she shows, or doesn’t show, of her body that somehow determines whether a woman is valued and respected by society?  I pose this question not only as a woman but as someone who has, among other things, delivered public lectures, attended a Royal Economic Society gala, and appeared on national television, all while wearing no more than shoes and a smile (albeit accompanied by my trusty handbag).  While you might imagine that women today would be free to do what they want with their own body, the reality, as I have seen for myself, is otherwise.  Women who refuse to “cover up”, and who embrace sexiness, femininity and beauty, are seen as the maidens of patriarchy, and certainly not as “real” feminists.  Since using my naked body in art and protest, I have been called a “whore”, “common”, “trashy” and “stupid”, and have been cast out by many of my fellow feminists, some of whom like to hold me personally responsible for womankind being treated like “sex objects”.  It seems that immodest women are not only expected to face the forces of patriarchy, we are also expected to face the judgement of the sisterhood.

I am just one in a long line of “naked feminists” who have had to stand up to those who (in the name of feminism) would prefer to censor our bodies rather than address the way they – and the rest of society – choose to judge women.  In 1975, the artist Hannah Wilke was invited to submit a piece of work for the “What is Feminist Art?” exhibition.  Her submission, subtitled “Beware of Fascist Feminism“, contained at its centre the artist posing provocatively, her shirt wide open to her low-cut jeans, with a tie hanging between her breasts, and her largely topless torso covered in miniature vulva formed from chewing gum.  It was a direct response to the “chorus of critical voices” she faced in relation to her previous sexually suggestive performances.  As Jeanette Kohl noted, “ideological feminism did not approve of the double game of a self-aware Venus who was both a Muse and an artist, a beauty and a feminist, subject and manipulator of (male) desire”.  Wilke was accused of objectifying herself and of reinforcing, rather than subverting, traditional depictions of women.  Her artistic submission, part of a wider series, highlights the way in which  “women who are beautiful, witty, and successful are usually accused of conspiring with men against other women” and “that a feminism that prescribes how a woman should look or behave is as harmful as the objectifying values that feminism seeks to redress“.  She “warned of the dangers of feminist puritanism that militated against women themselves, their sensuality and the pleasure of their own bodies“.  More recently, in 2011, during the Arab Spring, Aliaa Elmahdy, an Egyptian art student, “launched her nude body into the blogosphere”, bringing “sex to Tahir Square“, by uploading a nude photo of herself to her blog, A Rebel’s Diary.  It was an act that challenged the “dualisms of secular and religious, erotic and sacred, real and virtual“.  And, since her full frontal nude was accompanied by stockings, red shoes and a flower in her hair, it was sexually charged.  Within the first week, her blog had received 1.5 million hits, and “incited discourse and rage”.  Many feminists jumped to criticise Elmahdy for claiming that her nudity was liberation.  She was, instead, told that she was playing to the ideal of women as ornamental and sexual creatures, reinforcing the “pernicious toxic Western aesthetic codes of man as surveyor/subject and woman as surveyed/object of the gaze“.

Nakedness is, however, certainly not a Western invention.  In 1929, thousands of Igbo Nigerian women used their bodies in a show of resistance to colonial authority, in what became known as “the Women’s War“.  Alongside attacking symbols of colonization, such as cutting telegraph wires and attacking post offices, they used “lewd gestures”, and they danced and they sang.  On numerous other occasions, African women have used naked protest to fight violence, corruption and multinational oil companies, facing criticism well before any modern-day naked protesters.  As Tricia Twasiima writes:

Nudity as a form of protest upsets the very ideas of what respectable womyn should be…The belief that womyn’s bodies must be clothed, until decided otherwise, is why womyn’s nudity as a form of resistance is exceptionally remarkable. The reclaiming of our bodies, and the self-determination of what they will be used for, undermines the patriarchal narrative which makes it even more powerful…By freeing ourselves from the limits of what is acceptable, we give room to new ways of resisting and ultimately new ways of liberation…This of course is difficult considering the consequences dealt to those who reject the set standards, but perhaps we can begin by unlearning our own biases and internalisations about our bodies. Questioning ourselves, and pushing back against the narratives that take self-determination away from us is a good place to start.

Nevertheless, Gabby Aossey argues that while “women who wear hijab have freed themselves from a man’s and a society’s judgemental gaze; the Free the Nipplers have not…they have fallen deep into the man’s world”.  Following a series of my own naked protests, a member of a Radical Feminist group tweeted: “Does it not even make you pause for thought when you realise that men overwhelmingly support your feminism”.  Many women offer a comment along these same lines: aren’t you just giving men precisely what they want?  But to resist naked protesting so as to avoid the male gaze is, to my mind, allowing the male gaze to dictate what I do or do not do with my own body.  I am perfectly capable of respecting myself and confident enough to pursue my goals, irrespective of what men might think or feel.  For women to live their lives in a way that is limited by the male gaze as a means of escaping the male gaze is a pyrrhic victory.  As I argue in my new book, Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty, a puritanical strain of thought runs deep within feminism.  This feminist puritanism is not only bodyphobic, whorephobic and femmephobic, it is intellectually elitist, hypocritical and unfair.  Implicit is a view that while it is perfectly acceptable, even to be encouraged, for a woman to “show off” and monetise her brain, it is not acceptable for her to do the same with her body.  And by holding immodest women responsible for womankind being treated like sex objects, women themselves are expected to shoulder the sins of men.  Our bodies become “the problem”, rather than what goes on in other people’s heads – how they choose to judge (and thereby treat) their fellow human beings.

Explicitly or implicitly, and inside as well as outside feminism, a woman’s worth and respect still hangs on her bodily modesty – on the degree to which her body is “unseen” and “untouched”.  As a result, crimes and inappropriate behaviour committed against what society judges to be “immodest” women are trivialised, with women who “show off” their bodies, along with those who are deemed “promiscuous”, being seen as “fair game”, and deserving of punishment.  The consequences affect all women; from virginity testing and honour killings to revenge porn and female genital cutting.  No woman is left unscathed – from sex workers and strippers to schoolgirls.  Feminists need to stop problematising what they see as immodest women and instead switch their focus to challenging, rather than reinforcing, the belief that a woman’s worth and respect hangs on her bodily modesty.  Challenge that belief and you challenge the whole set of policies and practices that constrain women’s lives across the globe.

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Guest Columnist: Rikki de la Vega

Posted in Guest Columns, History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2023| 2 Comments »

Rikki de la Vega is a writer and activist in Boston. She has written 17 books of erotica and erotic science fiction through Sizzler Editions. Her nonfiction book Prudery and the War on Sex (from which this is excerpted) is due for publication by Digital Parchment Services sometime in April 2023.

Among the indictments included in the Declaration of Sentiments, issued in 1848 from the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, was this condemnation of male privilege:  “He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.”  We still face this gendered double standard today, where men suffer far fewer consequences for sexual license, and women much more.  Many first-wave feminists, as they were strongly influenced by the religious attitudes of the time, believed that the answer was to insist on male chastity.  But another branch of the movement was convinced that a radically different approach was needed, that of empowering women to insist on equal partnerships based on mutual choice, affection and pleasure.  This was the Free Love movement.

Most people these days associate the phrase “free love” with the hippies of the 1960s and their unbridled approach to sexuality.  The original movement, however, was focused more on the legal, religious and social strictures that went hand in hand with marriage at the time.  Marriage in the nineteenth century meant women were subsumed under their husbands, with no legal identity or rights; divorce was also difficult to obtain, and virtually impossible for women even in cases of abuse by the husband.  Free Love advocates proposed the alternative of “free unions” of consenting partners, without the need for any legal or religious sanction, and likewise dissolved by mutual agreement.  The freedom they were calling for was freedom from archaic and oppressive laws and attitudes which kept women in bondage, as well as perpetuating the link between marriage and social or financial status.  Free Love advocates also affirmed women’s right to sexual pleasure, and of decoupling sex from reproduction by promoting the use and availability of contraception.  This was controversial primarily because it went against the Cult of True Womanhood’s view that women were (or ought to be) only interested in sex as a means of fulfilling the goal of becoming mothers, but also because birth control was seen as obstructing God’s design.  While the movement to promote birth control availability was separate from the Free Love movement, there was considerable overlap between the two, due to their commonly shared belief that women should have more choice and independence around sex and procreation.

Two other movements that intersected with Free Love, and one another, were the political Left and the freethinkers.  Utopian socialists such as the followers of Robert Owen, as well as various stripes of anarchists, often saw the oppressive marriage and divorce laws of their day as part of capitalist and state oppression, and many Free Love advocates embraced radical political views.  The freethought movement’s rejection and critique of religious beliefs and institutions, and their devotion to free and rational inquiry, led to at least an open discussion of Free Love ideals, and acceptance of them in practice as well as theory by many of their leaders.  One of the earliest and most vocal advocate for all three of these was Frances “Fanny” Wright, a Scottish-born intellectual, writer and activist who had established one of the first utopian socialist communities in Nashoba, Tennessee, and gave public lectures on labor rights, freethought, Free Love and women’s equality at a time when it was considered taboo for women to speak in public at all.  The Free Love movement’s overlap with both anticlerical freethought and political radicalism was one reason why so many feminist leaders regarded them as something of a liability.  But more pronounced was the entrenchment of Social Purity advocates within the drive for women’s suffrage and their mischaracterization of the Free Love agenda.  British feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme had scandalized more conservative women’s rights activists with her free union with Benjamin Elmy, a freethinker and feminist like herself.  While she was initially recognized for her tireless efforts, British historian Laura Schwartz of the University of Warwick notes: “Wolstenholme became the subject of an orchestrated campaign against her continuing public association with feminist organisations.”  In the United States, mainstream feminist leaders turned against Victoria Woodhull for openly stating in a public address in 1871:  “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

While it may be argued that the Free Love movement did influence other feminists of their time to demand substantive reforms in marriage and divorce laws, the influence of the Social Purity wing still predominated well into the twentieth century.  This is exemplified by British suffragist Christabel Pankhurst’s 1913 book on sexually transmitted disease, The Great Scourge and How to End It, which insisted that votes for women be linked to the imposition of “chastity” for men and the ending of prostitution, dismissing questions about the role of poverty in pushing women into commercial sex, and not once mentioning the use of condoms (which were not only available at the time but often distributed by various armies to their soldiers).  To her, the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea was the result of a male conspiracy, and women needed political power to rein in men’s sexual appetites.

This division within first-wave feminism over responding to the sexual double standard runs along a continuum between two poles which I’ll call restrictive (as in restricting options for sexual expression, especially for men) and expansive (as in favoring an expansion of such options, especially for women).  It goes on into the second wave and beyond, fueling conflicts over how feminists respond to sexual imagery and literature, sex work, transgender issues, and the inclusion of men in the movement.  This is not to say that every feminist neatly fits on one pole or another, but their place on a spectrum depends upon a number of attitudes and approaches.  The first is the attitude towards gender, and especially men.  There is a tendency for those leaning towards the restrictive pole to uphold the gender binary, to describe gender in collective or even essentialist terms, and especially to view men with skepticism at best and outright hostility at worst (sometimes even ignoring the contributions of men to early feminism, such as John Neal, Marquis de Condorcet, Frederick Douglass, and John Stuart Mill).  When you consider the focus on sexuality issues, it would seem that the restrictive tendency has embraced the old-fashioned stereotype that: “Men only want one thing from women, so watch out!”  But it is more specific than that; the restrictive attitude is that men are likely to link sexuality with dominance, aggression and even violence.  Hence Robin Morgan’s maxim: “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” – even when careful studies show no link between viewing porn and acceptance of sexual violence.  In contrast, the expansive view embraces a more fluid, nuanced and individualistic view of gender, affirming transgender and nonbinary people, as well as seeing that men’s attitudes and behaviors fall on a continuum and can change with education.

The second pair of tendencies is based on how each group tries to achieve their goals.  The restrictive side tends to seek to protect women from real or perceived harms, often through laws that prohibit or punish; the expansive side tends to favor efforts that empower women to find the solutions that would work best for their individual situations.  This difference also shows how the two sides tend to analyze and understand a problem.  The restrictive side takes a more simplistic approach; they see something as bad, they want to do away with it, so they embrace a single approach (such as the Dworkin-MacKinnon model ordinance on pornography, or the Swedish model for dealing with prostitution) and hang onto it for dear life.  By contrast, the expansive side tends to take a more nuanced and pluralistic approach; they will look at the issue, the factors behind it, and the consequences of various approaches, sometimes advocating a more multifaceted strategy that addresses the matter more holistically, such as providing nonjudgmental harm reduction for street-based sex workers, including changing the law towards decriminalization so that sex workers have better tools to deal with the issues in their lives.

The irony that seems lost on members of the restrictive group is how easily political and religious conservatives appropriate their tactics and language.  It should come as no surprise, considering the conservative tendency to adapt in order to gain and maintain their hold on politics, not to mention the tendency of both conservatives and restrictive feminists to see women in almost infantilized terms.  By contrast, the expansive feminist group’s dedication to individual autonomy puts them more in the position of critics to any political administration regardless of ideological label.  Indeed, it would seem that the expansive group is the one which is ultimately more skeptical of government, and thus less likely to be co-opted as their restrictive counterparts appear to have been.

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Guest Column: The Consequences of Hysteria

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged , , , , , on October 11, 2021| 1 Comment »

I’ve mentioned my friend, Dr. David Ley, in this blog many times before, and he wrote a guest essay for me back in ’14.  I recently saw him tweeting about this, and upon my request he expanded those thoughts into this new guest essay.

In 2020, the world saw a tragedy unfold in Atlanta, Georgia, as Robert Aaron Long committed multiple murders at massage parlors.  Long later identified himself as a “sex addict” and claimed that he engaged in these crimes in order to rid himself of temptations.  When arrested, Long was allegedly also on his way to Tampa, Florida, in order to commit similar violent attacks targeted at aspects of the adult film industry.  Long pled guilty to some charges, but still faces trial in Atlanta for other murders.  In September, 2021, a former Marine burst into a Florida family’s home, executing and torturing the family of four.  The assailant identified to police that he believed the family held a kidnapped, sex-trafficked female child, and he was intending to rescue her.  In August 2021, Instagram influencer and former stripper Mercedes Morr was slain by an obsessed male fan, apparently enraged by the idea she had betrayed him to be with another man.  In December, 2016, a North Carolina man fired multiple shots into a Washington, DC pizza restaurant, having come to the restaurant in order to rescue children that he believed were held there for sexual-trafficking and exploitation.  This theory had abounded in conservative media, connecting Democratic politicians and public figures to conspiracy theories alleging rings of pedophiles hid throughout society and government, secretly abusing and exploiting children.

Sexual anxiety and fear is a favorite target of media hyperbole, as it serves as an easy means to create uncertainty and interest in potential consumers.  Suggesting to an audience that their spouse may be unfaithful, or even that the viewer/reader is not a skilled lover, are guaranteed ways to hook an audience, and keep them reading, watching or clicking.  Claims of sex-trafficking, and cries to “save the kids” are remarkably effective ploys to raise money, has been demonstrated numerous times with groups such as Operation Underground Railroad, where daring raids to save children are staged to raise donations, though the activities achieve little and may actually promote children being put at risk.  Unfortunately, while these tactics trigger donations, salacious interest or mild insecurity in many, these tactics can trigger intense panic, even delusions, in persons with severe underlying mental illness.  In the 1990’s, media sex panic over Satanic ritual abuse sex cults led to countless individuals developing false memories that they themselves had been sexually abused by secret cults of brainwashing Satan-worshiping doctors, daycare providers and neighbors.

Earlier this year, I appeared on The Dr. Phil Show, where a woman was interviewed who held beliefs that she had been sex-trafficked, raped, and brainwashed by a host of assailants, ranging from Beto O’Rourke to Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and even her adult son.  My role on the show was to gently try to invite her to consider that her beliefs might be inaccurate, and less important than her desire to re-establish a relationship with her son.  During the recovered memory movement and the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, families were destroyed as people developed false memories.  Many later recanted these memories, and had to try to restore their relationships, though sadly, many did not and families remained sundered on the basis of these delusional beliefs.  I found it fascinating how this woman’s beliefs in the men who had abused her reflected the names and headlines of sex scandals, suggesting how these names and stories had infiltrated her vulnerable thinking.

Media sex panics do far more than just sell books and commercials. They destroy lives, families, careers.  They affect the thinking of vulnerable individuals, who act based on those panics, and the degree to which those hyperbolic claims infiltrate their disturbed thinking.  Sadly, some of those individuals act in dangerous, violent ways.  We must begin to discuss ways to hold the media at large responsible for the consequences of their exploitation of sexual anxiety.  Perhaps then we can invite the media to temper their clickbait driven reporting with an understanding of the potential impact of their words on vulnerable minds, and people who become innocent targets of their sensationalism.

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Always Alternatives

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, tagged , , , , on September 13, 2021| 2 Comments »

Even though OnlyFans reversed its recent decision to banish sex workers, any company who turns on us so quickly can be counted on to do so again at the slightest provocation.  I’ve never gone the porn route myself, so I know very little about the ecosystem; however, I recently saw a Twitter account called “Dream Girls Fan Club” post this on Twitter.  I asked what name the creators would like me to credit and received no answer, but I’m not going to fail to share it because it seems to me they did a very thorough job, and if there’s anything here that can help sex workers to find a more stable work environment, I’d be remiss if I didn’t pass it on.

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Guest Columnist: Val Elefante

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged , , , on April 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Regular readers know that I feel strongly about promoting online resources for sex workers, especially if those resources are owned and operated by sex workers!  I recently met Val on Twitter and asked her if she’d like to introduce my readers to her sex-work-friendly social media site, Lips.  So without further ado:

Hello lovely readers of The Honest Courtesan!  My name is Val, and I am a tech researcher, erotic filmmaker, sex worker activist, and the community manager of Lips, a community-designed social media platform for women, non-binary folks, & the LGBTQIA+ community to express themselves openly & honestly without fear of censorship or harassment.  I am beyond honored that Maggie has entrusted me with this opportunity to introduce myself and Lips to you all today.

Lips began as a print zine on a college campus in 2008, and was founded directly in response to the mainstream media’s representations of female & queer sexuality – often through the paternalistic, patriarchal lens also known as the “male gaze.”  Lips invited folks to mail in (or anonymously drop into a P.O. box) stories, poetry, and artwork for the publication, and over time it grew into a much-needed community-led space for self-expression – including sexuality – that was safe, open and honest.  As the community grew and the zine moved online, it became increasingly apparent just how radical this project was.  The community faced tons of obstacles: internally, it was difficult to combat the shame that society projected and foster self-esteem and self-love, and externally, stigma, whorephobia, digital censorship, and harassment all posed threats to Lips’ existence.  This was when the team came together and decided to build our very own social media platform called Lips.social.  We hosted co-design sessions with groups of artists, sex workers, sexual health and wellness educators, and LGBTQIA+ young people to bring the community’s ideas together for what this app should do and be.  We co-wrote our own Community Guidelines that reflected our community’s values – not the values of the mainstream society we aimed to resist.  And finally, thanks to the generosity of a grant from the Headstream Youth Mental Health Accelerator, we were able to build and launch the first version of the Lips app.  On December 31, 2020, all of the hard work paid off and we welcomed a vibrant community of over 14,000 members into our new little digital paradise.

Of course, we continue to face obstacles like whorephobia, but will always respond with the care and best interests of our community at the forefront.  With Lips, our main mission is to design and build technologies that make the internet a healthier and safer place for marginalized communities – including sex workers.  We do this through:

  • A more nuanced, community-led approach to sexuality moderation
  • UX/UI that protects against harassment and trolls
  • A business model that is directly linked with the economic success of marginalized creators
  • And finally, most excitedly, the co-ownership of our company with the community members!


That’s right!  We are very excited to announce that we are now selling equity in the company to the community, so if you are interested in joining our team and becoming an investor, visit wefunder.com/lips to learn more, and reach out to us at team@lips.social if you have any questions. (Anyone can invest, minimum is $100).  Join us in building a better (digital) world for marginalized communities.

My parting words – Personally, I need Lips to exist because women, non-binary & LGBTQIA+ artists, activists, educators, sex workers, healers, and more have created the kind of body and sex-positive art and experiences that have saved my life and the lives of so many people around me.  So, if you’re still here, thank you for reading this far – you’ve already supported our work – and please become as involved with Lips as you’d like.  Every investment, every share, every new community member counts. Thanks y’all.

XX, Val

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Guest Columnist: Leah

Posted in Guest Columns, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 22, 2021| 3 Comments »

I recently saw this young woman’s story on Twitter, and immediately asked if she would be willing to retell it in a guest column; even most people who support sex worker rights don’t really understand the extent of the ugliness and depravity of what cops and their prohibitionist co-conspirators call “rescue”.  I’m also very concerned to see that these FBI stings violate a lot of our safety indicators; they’ve clearly figured out how to subvert our procedures, clearly demonstrating that, as I’ve said many times, these pogroms are specifically intended to harm us no matter what their copaganda claims. 

I was arrested 2 years ago in one of the FBI’s “Operation Cross Country” stings.  I was really inexperienced and working for an agency at the time, and there probably wasn’t much screening done (if any).  The appointment was booked a week in advance, unlike local cop stings where the appointments are often rushed and same day; it was for a couple, which is also unusual for a sting, and they made adjustments to the appointment date.  When I arrived, I parked on the street and was alarmed to see 4 cop cars drive past me, stop about a block behind me, and then pull into the parking garage.  I called the agency and told them about it, but they told me to go in anyway; this is not to put all of the blame on them, because I really should have just listened to my gut and left (as I would if something similar happened today).  But I had only $25 in my bank account and a $600 bill the next day, so I felt I had no choice but to go against my better judgement.

I met the couple outside of the apartment complex; there was almost nobody else around, and I later learned that this was a newer complex that the owners were allowing them to run stings out of before any actual tenants moved in.  The woman hugged me and we went upstairs; she was an excellent actress, which helped to mislead me even though the guy was acting a bit weird, such as hesitating when I asked them what they did for work.  There were boxes everywhere in the apartment, and they claimed they had just moved in.  We sat down, and they handed me the money and started asking questions like “What is included with the rate?”, “Will you eat me out while he is fucking you?”, and “How much of a cut does your agency take?”  I now know better than to answer such questions, but as I said I was inexprienced at the time.  After the questions the woman excused herself, and the guy asked if I wanted water; suddenly the door opened and 5 or 6 cops came in, and before I knew it my hands were in handcuffs.  They started aggressively interrogating me, asking me where I had put the money and how I got there, asking for the passcode to my phone, and threatening that they were going to impound my car.  Meanwhile the woman was patting me down, supposedly checking for a weapon.  I was in a state of shock, but I remember wondering why the fuck there were so many cops there when I was just a single woman that had no chance of taking them down; months later, after watching Maggie’s The War on Whores (which I recommend you check out), I realized that they are just there for the show.  And what a show:  I was having a full on panic attack, crying, and although I was luckily not naked yet, it was completely humiliating.  I distinctly remember some of them lounging on the couch while I was panicking.

They hustled me out, and two of them took me to a car in the parking garage while I remained handcuffed.  I was then driven to the police station, where there were snacks laid out and clothes to change into; I think this is rare and solely due to the FBI being involved.  There was also a “human trafficking advocate” there for me to speak to; she was of no help whatsoever, but at least she was nice.  The cops tried talking to me, saying they wanted to catch me specifically because I looked so young; I don’t show my face in ads, so this didn’t make any sense.  But I wasn’t giving them the information they wanted, so the FBI agents tried to interview me and the woman asked what would ever compel me to “sell my body” and put myself in a dangerous position.  Then the county cops came back in, told me they wouldn’t be recording (I realized this was a red flag), and asked me why I didn’t just get a job as a substitute teacher to make money (???) and if I do this for the “sexual thrill”.  Later, they asked me about my relationship with my dad and told me they were keeping my (really expensive) iPhone as “evidence”.  The whole time the kept referring to my escorting as “pimping myself out” and “self-pimping”.  It made no sense.

I was really lucky in that I had a friend to lend me cash for bail and a lawyer.  Since I was a first time “offender” I got a “human trafficking” pretrial diversion; I had to take a class and promise I would never do sex work again, and if I had been arrested again for anything while out on bail the diversion would have been out the window.  The cops later asked a few questions through my lawyer; they were really, really interested in whether or not I had a P411 or Eccie account, or if any of my clients did; they flat-out told me they wanted to take over client accounts so as to book providers with them.   Because of this, I will NOT see anyone with only P411 and no further info; I know for a fact these accounts get compromised, because cops will offer a plea deal to clients or providers that hand them over.  I also won’t go to personal residences anymore unless they’re an established client, and I have learned to trust my gut; I saw the cop cars that day, yet ignored my instincts and paid for it.  Thousands in bail, lawyer fees, and pretrial diversion fees, and at the end of the day I still couldn’t pay my bills and couldn’t work either.  But it could’ve been much worse:  one other woman I knew had a driver and a child waiting in the car for her, and the cops charged her driver with “sex trafficking” and gave her child to CPS.

I hope nobody reading this ever has to endure what I did, but if you do please don’t talk to police except to ask to speak to a lawyer, and to make it clear you’re invoking your right to remain silent.  I know it seems like common sense, but when you’re having a panic attack or sitting in an interrogation room, they will try anything to get you to talk. They will lie, ask stupid or silly questions, and do anything to use your words against you.  Cops are not your friends; no matter how many snacks and “victim advocates” they put in front of you, at the end of the day they are just trying to lock up as many people as possible.

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Opportunity Knocks

Posted in Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on February 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This is the first of a new irregular feature in which I’ll post job opportunities which might interest people in my readership.  Many of you may know that I’m on the board of Prostasia, the first child protection organization which does not pretend that attacking the civil rights and free speech of adults will somehow support that stated mission.  A few weeks ago we received a major grant, and the board allocated part of the funds to hiring three part-time employees; I therefore asked our director Jeremy Malcolm to write up a description of what he’s looking for:

Prostasia Foundation, the only child protection organization that supports sex workers and includes them in leadership, recently received a major donor grant and is now hiring for its first three paid positions.  Prostasia’s Development Officer will be responsible for leading Prostasia’s fundraising efforts, including memberships, donations, sponsorships, and grants from charitable foundations.  Its Social Media Manager will have the primary responsibility to manage Prostasia’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram social media accounts.  The Video Editor will put their own stamp on Prostasia Foundation’s video communications, and grow its brand within video-sharing communities.  These roles may be filled at any level from intern through to part-time, with advancement to a full-time position, depending on the applicant’s qualifications and experience.  Further details and an application link are available on our website.

I probabably don’t need to add that since we’re judging applicants on their qualifications, sex workers are just as eligible for these positions as anyone else.  But since that’s so rarely true these days, I’m adding it!

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Body of Work

Posted in Biography, Guest Columns, Perception, tagged , , , , , on January 18, 2021| 1 Comment »

My friend Brooke Magnanti has a new project named Body of Work on the new platform Substack, and to call attention to it I’d like to share my favorite of the posts she’s published there so far. It’s both a moving memoir and a powerful rebuke to the sheltered puritans who pretend sex work is “The Worst Thing a Woman Can Do“, which is incidentally the title of this piece.

My dad was mowing strangers’ lawns on the day that he died.

He woke before sunrise – the habit of a blue collar lifetime – with his schedule for the day written out on a piece of college-ruled paper, copied from the app where homeowners booked him for reasonably priced lawn services. He had the rest of the week drawn up as a grid too, with blank spaces for last-minute jobs that might pop up on his newly purchased smartphone.

He loaded the truck with the tools of his trade: edgers and whips, a spade and a rake, a refurbished secondhand push mower, and drove the ride-on mower (also a refurb) onto the small trailer behind his 15-year-old F150. He put a lunchbox with two turkey sandwiches and four bottles of frozen water into the cab. They would melt during the hot Florida spring day, keeping his food cold and providing hydration as he worked in the full sun.

Sometime after 8am, he started having abdominal pains. The worst of his life. My father – no hypochondriac, also the habit of a lifetime – called 911. The hospital did some tests and discharged him by 10am, diagnosis mild constipation, prescription two kinds of laxatives. He didn’t feel better. His last few outgoing texts were to friends letting them know he couldn’t meet up later, he was sick. He went on to complete 3 of the 5 jobs on his schedule.

He died that night. 70 years old, retired not even one day of his life. When we found his phone, most of the missed texts and calls were from the app, set to automatically ping when he didn’t check in online for his agreed jobs.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What, are you too proud to scrub a toilet?”

That was a question I have heard a lot. After coming out as a former sex worker in 2009, I could count on at least one know-it-all standing up to pronounce more or less this exact accusation at every book signing, public speaking event, or festival I appeared at.

The question askers never stuck around to hear, really hear the answer: it’s hard to get a job in the UK as an American student, I couldn’t work more than 15 hours a week, no one was allowed to hire me if any qualified EU applicant was available, and that wouldn’t have made a dent in my bills anyway. ‘Too proud to scrub a toilet’ also seemed to be the takeaway most columnists went with when discussing my writing. According to everyone with a public opinion my problem was not lack of cash but that I was too proud, or precious, or whatever to do real work. I was spoiled.

Thing is, I wasn’t just spitballing about whether or not scrubbing toilets pays the bills. I knew already, from experience, that it would not – because cleaning was the very last job I held before moving to London. I worked for months at a hostel in Aviemore while writing up my PhD thesis. In between changing beds and mopping bathrooms, I collated data on forensic pathology cases and assembled chapters on the processes of human decomposition. Because I also was the hostel’s cook and lived on site, I was able to save almost everything I earned. I thought this would put me in good stead for the autumn, when I planned to submit my PhD back in Sheffield, then move to London to look for work.

Long story short: my calculations of expenses for life in the capital city were way, way off. By the time I paid the extortionate deposit and rent on a sad little room in Kilburn, I was already out of cash. But with my PhD not yet approved I couldn’t apply for science jobs. So I became a call girl. A choice that I thought (also mistakenly as it turned out) would be lucrative, not require a particular visa, and that I could leave behind as soon as I started my “real” career.

That was then.

This is now: I’m scrubbing a toilet in a million dollar house in one of my county’s fanciest neighborhoods. American Standard. The water in the American Southwest is mineral-heavy and leaves rings on everything; I’m not so much scrubbing as chipping away at stalagmites of built up lime.

It’s the first toilet I’ll clean today, the first of four bathrooms in this house, but it’s not the last time I’ll think about those people who imagined I was too proud to scrub a toilet. I’ve been scrub-a-toilet poor before; it’s not that big a deal. No, instead they were telling me the thing they considered to be the last-resort job of choice before “selling your body.” Their deepest fear, the most undignified thing short of being a whore (which as we all know is the worst thing a woman can do).

That’s the calculation according to society. Whore is worst, cleaner is second worst, and no one in their right minds would do either. Let alone both. Yet the jobs persist. Even in a recession. Even in a pandemic. Key workers both. Not the front lines, accumulating accolades and sometimes hazard pay, but the back lines, doing jobs few want to admit always need done.

Even in the midst of a global pandemic it seems cleaning after oneself is still a job for someone else. Lifestyle columnists Sarah Ditum and Janice Turner raised a few eyebrows when they staunchly declared the unavailability of house cleaners in the first wave of covid to be beyond bearable. Not for them picking up the mop, or worse yet, asking one’s husband and children to chip in. No, went the logic, cleaners wanted the work. They loved their clients.

I’ve heard people say things like that before almost word for word. People who are the customers of sex workers. Do I have to tell you women like those are just the sort of people whose husbands I once would have fucked for money? I know it, and I guess they know it too.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

If you too are in possession of a house and neither the time nor the inclination to clean it, you could book me or someone like me through any number of websites and apps. They all have slick, modern sites, enormous market capitalisations, and most importantly in this buoyant gig economy: they employ none of the people who show up at your door to do the work.

The landing pages show clean, modern homes resplendent in bare wood, white tile and brushed metal fixtures. Homes with six-burner gas ranges and fresh cut peonies in fishbowl vases. The kind of homes that few of the cleaners could ever dream of calling their own. The vibe is upscale, quiet suburb or cool high-rise urban.

And if you don’t mind what happens to your body, to your health, then there are always jobs like this, just not careers. With ubiquitous smartphones and widespread internet services that previously were available mainly to the well-heeled can be booked at the touch of a finger. In many ways the rise of sex workers on the internet when I was an anonymous blogger presaged the way many would soon be working in the 21st century.

My entry into cleaning for apps is straightforward. Sign up, submit a photo of my driver’s license, wait for a background check. Answer a few (very few) questions on my experience as a cleaner. I have a bit, from the aforementioned pre-London days turning over an 80-bed hostel in the Scottish Highlands for a summer, to helping out friends with holiday cottages.

I’m accepted on the platform and my rate is set at $15 per hour. That’s 4 dollars an hour above the nearest city’s minimum wage, more than twice the Federal minimum of $7.25, but well below anything that could result in the “thousands” the app’s ads on Craigslist promised. Up to thousands, I remind myself. Technically that means anything above zero. I’m assured through a short series of videos that work is straightforward and easy to come by, and that any problems I might experience with the app itself are quick to figure out. I’m told if I book 10 jobs this week my rate goes up, maybe as high as $22. I complete the series of Youtube videos that constitute training and log on.

There are no jobs. At all. Not today, and not tomorrow.

There’s one in three days! I click, eager to “claim” before anyone else does (because that must be what’s happening, right? There are no jobs because they’re already taken?) But when I google the location I find it’s in central Colorado – a 330-mile round trip from where I am now. Sure, there’s a $20 “bounty” for picking this one up, should I choose. But I decide to forego it. There is zero chance at this rate I will ever earn more than $15 an hour through the app.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We live in the age of the side hustle. Everyone I’ve met since moving back to the US has one. The fine artists with an Air B&B, the candle maker who cleans for them, the solar installer who is also a part-time fire captain, the fire captains who sell third party phone cases on Amazon. The jiu-jitsu instructor with a window washing business. The college professor who works as a part-time paramedic on ski patrol. The ski patroller who proctors exams at the college.

There is no mystery as to why. None of these people are rich or have any illusions of becoming so. Side hustle as a phrase sounds cool, as if a few hours of your week here and there will make it rain and make the Moet pour. The reality is more prosaic. Life in the land of opportunity is expensive. With a stunted public transport infrastructure, cars are a necessity if you want to get by in most of America. The college degree has more or less taken the place of a high school diploma, sought out even for entry-level customer service, and the expansion of the student loan industry leaves many in debt long beyond their 40’s. Credit rating determines everything from your ability to rent accommodation to even whether or not you get a job, obliging people to spend and keep spending in the name of being a trustworthy consumer. Being a consumer obliges you to work. Once entered, the cycle has no end. Not even retirement, for those (unlike my father) lucky enough to contemplate it: in 1985, 10.8% of people over 65 in America were still working. The number in 2017 was double that, and expected to become still higher when the twilight years of Baby Boomers give way to geriatric Generation X.

It gets worse. A shocking number of America’s personal bankruptcies are due to inability to pay medical bills. From a high of 1.5 million in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act came into law, it declined to 770 thousand in 2016. And yet the problem is not solved: the requirement to buy insurance even on price-capped markets still leaves a lot of room for expenses in the form of deductibles that can be thousands of dollars or more. People still avoid accessing preventive care and instead end up in the emergency room, sometimes not until they are on death’s door. We may be in post-Obamacare America, with many on the left making noises about some form of universal, free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare, but the wolf of sudden medical emergency could turn up and destroy your life anytime. Even in the coronavirus pandemic America did not manage to elect a candidate who promises universal healthcare.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Four-Toilets is not a bad job as these things go. I know that immediately. It isn’t a 330 mile round trip to get there, for starters; only an hour from my house. The place is owned by a couple of about my age, pet- and child-free. They are not hoarders, and while some of it requires elbow grease (the aforementioned hard water in toilets situation) they’ve not left cleaning so long that any of it is out of hand, save a giant walk-in shower I spend about a third of the allotted five hours scrubbing.

The man goes out, and when he comes back, has brought me a sandwich. I don’t have time to eat on the clock of course. The app’s clients feed in the size of the job and the app gives them an estimated finishing time (no breaks). I do the last toilet, vacuum and mop, and am done bang on the hour the app predicted. I can’t help but wonder if there was a box they ticked that said “our house is already pretty clean” (it was) or if, in the future, similarly-sized jobs with less scrupulously tidy clients will be assigned the same five-hour time slot.

I don’t think about that, just sign on to the app to confirm completion of the job, load up my car (you are required to bring all supplies, including mop and vacuum, and more recently, PPE), and accept a shyly-offered $30 tip from the man. They want to book me again, once every fortnight. I say I’ll have a look on the app but I’d like that.

I have no illusions: few jobs will be as straightforward as this. On the drive home, I start making a list of what I need to replenish. Paper towels, microfibre rags, oven cleaner, furniture polish. Pick up some limescale remover! And some drain unclogging liquid. The tip covers my time driving to and from the house, and the gas, just about. It reminds me of being an escort when the client’s tips usually covered my transport.

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