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Archive for the ‘Guest Columns’ Category

Guest Columnist: Madison Graham

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, tagged , , , , on July 11, 2016| 33 Comments »

Madison Graham is the pseudonym of a sex worker who was working for one of Dennis Hof’s brothels in Nevada; she recently contacted me because of her deep distress over an immense ethical violation Hof committed in the full view of the entire world last autumn.  Here in her own words (edited only for style and brevity) is what she told me.

Dennis Hof, self-promoting buffoonDennis Hof courts the media and has specialized in hijacking news; he takes current relevant stories that have nothing to do with him and finds a way to insert himself into the story.  For example, when Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, suddenly the Bunny Ranch issued a press release about their working ladies forming a “Hookers 4 Hillary” campaign, a maneuver I am certain did not impress Mrs. Clinton.  When hackers released the names of millions of Ashley Madison members, Hof boasted, “Ashley Madison hacking victims’ privacy would’ve been safe with my prostitutes.”  Hof then launched a media tour to every Morning Zoo style radio show that would have him, focusing on how Ashley Madison should have taken the BunnyRanch’s approach to client privacy and not stored anyone’s information.  He often bragged that “If those guys who are about to have their lives ruined had been meeting beautiful women on BunnyRanch.com instead, their identities would’ve remained completely anonymous…”

No one had reason to question the BunnyRanch’s privacy policy until basketball player Lamar Odom was picked up by an ambulance from Hof’s southern Nevada brothel, Love Ranch Vegas, after being found unconscious in the VIP suite where he’d been staying.  Within minutes, TMZ had the scoop on their website, utterly destroying Lamar’s career; he will never receive another endorsement deal again, and the various children’s charities he has been involved with will distance themselves.  But Hof fed off of Odom’s crisis and milked it as hard as he could, so that he could get his face on TV as much as possible to say “LoveRanch” in front of millions of viewers.  Hof displayed absolutely no empathy, no awareness and certainly no consistency; he contradicted himself in just about every media op he got.  First Lamar didn’t have drugs when he came in, then Hof fired the two girls who were with Lamar because he feared they gave him drugs, then a 180 degree turn to claiming there were no drugs at the Love Ranch.  Well, the truth is I have never seen so many drugs and drug-addicts in my life until I started working in legal brothels; hardly a week goes by without an incident of a lady getting too drunk to work, or the management discovering drug paraphernalia in a lady’s room.  If the lady makes good money, her problem is largely ignored; once she becomes too impaired to make money, she is quickly packed out and told to get herself into a treatment program.  One top earner at the Bunny Ranch was caught over and over with drugs in her room and giving drugs to other girls; eventually cops pulled her over and found drugs in her car and now she is in prison, but when she is released I guarantee she will be returning to the ranch:  She makes a lot of money and America’s Biggest Pimp wants his 50%.

The careless way Lamar’s personal information got out is disturbing because it reaches far beyond surface titillation.  Lamar Odom will never get another endorsement deal ever again – a multi-million dollar loss.  The revelation was a violation of the Hooker Code that is understood by most sex workers:  loose lips sink ships, so you keep your mouth closed.  That is the real reason we make so much money:  it’s for remaining quiet.  But Emperor Hof just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and now he’s in denial about the severity of repercussions he and his empire are about to incur.  Hof is a defense lawyer’s worst nightmare; he appears to think he is in one big never-ending infomercial for his corporate brothels.  For example, once the Odom news veered away from the brothel and began to focus on the human-interest element, Hof blurted out that if Odom’s wife, Khloe Kardashian, contests the credit card charge, he will sue her because she “has the money”.  What kind of human-being would make such a statement to a grieving wife?  Whether you like her or not, she is clearly suffering and being as supportive as possible to her husband, but all Hof can think about is $ signs and publicity.  Hof is like that semi-lucid grandfather who blurts out the most ridiculous and offensive rubbish and you just sit there in shock, mute with embarrassment for him.

After this, I can’t imagine anyone with real money would walk into one of his establishments; they know they can’t trust Hof’s nonexistent discretion.  And what if Odom, Kardashian or whoever sues the brothel over this?  The suits and reputational damage could destroy all that Hof has created, and this is a shame because whether you may think of Hof’s character, he knows how to run his brothels.  He knows how to train his girls to make money, and to provide a level of service that keeps the clients coming back; the working conditions in his brothels are also better than those in any of his competitors’.  The biggest threat to Hof’s brothels comes from Hof himself, the self-proclaimed “Pimpmaster General”.  Rather than recognizing the danger posed by the Odom situation, Hof truly believes this is the best thing ever to happen to the Love Ranch Vegas (in spite of the onslaught of death threats the employees receive on the phone daily); he thinks this will triple his business.  But the locals are getting restless.  You can sit at a restaurant or saloon and hear the people saying things like “When are they going to close Hof down?”  Public officials are elected and if they don’t give the locals what they want, they won’t be re-elected.  Lamar Odom’s overdose at the Love Ranch Vegas could result in the closure of one or more of Hof’s brothels, and trouble for the entire industry.

Love Ranch signBrothels are an ideal place for men who have been going through a divorce, or breakup, who need to have their ego-stroked a little, feel desirable again.  I consider myself a sexual healer offering a public service.  If a man has a need for sexual intimacy, and he isn’t able to get that from his wife, he has this safe, legal outlet for his needs and when he leaves, nothing follows him home.  He is truly anonymous and there will be no negative consequences from his visit.  A big part of my sales pitch to potential customers during the negotiation was about how his family and friends won’t ever find out…but how can I possibly offer that guarantee now, after Hof blasted one of his guests’ name and secrets all over the media?  I have always said that I wouldn’t work for any other brothel owner, and I still feel that way; as bad as Hof is, he is much better to his employees than the other owners are.  However, I don’t think I can remain working for a man who would do the things he has done.  I may take my chances and go back to working independently and screening out the cops and the creeps.  Or I may return to the work I did before I became an escort, which I left because I burned out.  But that’s fine for me; what about the people who can’t just move over to escorting, such as the cashiers, bartenders and housekeepers?  What about the money Hof’s businesses bring in to an area that isn’t exactly overflowing with other industries?  If Hof continues to destroy the reputation of his businesses in his constant pursuit of publicity and self-aggrandizement, he’s going to hurt a lot of people beside himself and those whose secrets he betrayed.

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Guest Columnist: Mike Crawford

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged on June 13, 2016| 4 Comments »

Mike Crawford is a sex worker, sex workers’ rights activist, and occasional writer.  He tweets about sex work and social issues, and occasionally posts pictures of whatever record he happens to be listening to at the moment.

It’s All Greek to Me

Sex work is a female-dominated field, so much so that the existence of male sex workers is often omitted entirely in any discussion of the topic.  I hope that offering some perspective on being a male sex worker  will not only be informative, but will also highlight the very troubling, highly-gendered way common arguments and tactics are used to advance the prohibitionist agenda.

There is less stigma associated with being a male provider

Mike CrawfordThis should hardly be shocking as there simply is no “fallen man” trope to link to male prostitution.  Sure, sex addiction has become the new go-to for men to hide behind when they’re [often literally] caught with their pants down, but the thought that sex could truly “ruin” a man is laughable in all but the most fundamentalist of circles.  No matter how much organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD attempt to whitewash the LGBT image, sex workers have a long and rich history in our culture.  Sex workers were instrumental in the Stonewall Riots; we marched in the first Pride parades; Go-Go boys have long been a fixture in our bars; we even have a unique vocabulary dedicated to the various types of sex workers and clients.  As a percentage of our total population, more of us have also participated in sex work – even if informally – often as a means of survival when abandoned by parents after we’ve come out.  In general, sex work in LGBT culture isn’t a shameful secret; it’s a fact of life.  That having been said, because sex work continues to be viewed in a very heteronormative way, the unique needs of LGBT providers are often left unconsidered.  Whether it’s outreach services or policy discussions, LGBT sex workers continue to be underserved and often unrepresented.

The money is in catering to male clients

From porn to prostitution, the best way to make a living as a man in sex work is almost invariably by catering to a male client base; there’s a reason straight hustlers have been around forever, and there’s a reason straight guys perform in gay-for-pay porn.  Whether it’s the result of socialization, arousal and desire patterns, concerns for physical safety, or – my guess – a combination of all three, most women don’t purchase sex.  More and more women are viewing porn, however, so I’m interested to see how this dynamic might shift in the future.

The logistics are a bit … different

The proverbial money shot is pretty aptly named when it comes to male sex work.  Whether you’re in the penetrative or receptive role (or both, or neither) on a call, your clients most likely want the full show.  When coupled with the need to maintain a steady erection, let’s just say the performance pressure can be fairly intense.  A certain, now ubiquitous, little blue pill can often provide the assistance needed to get the job done, but one can build an immunity to these meds over time so that’s an ongoing consideration.  Our clients’ desire for us to climax is also a natural limitation on the number of bookings most of us can do in a day.  True, occasionally you can fake it, but more often than not, you can’t – no 76 clients per week for me.

Male sex workers are not immune to abuse

I’m a small guy: 28” waist and weighing in at a whopping 140 pounds fully clothed.  When people contemplate sex worker safety, they understandably tend to view it in a gendered way.  The reality for me – and really all male sex workers – is that we’re vulnerable too.  This isn’t because sex work is inherently dangerous (it’s not); rather it’s because criminalization means that if we’re victimized, we’re unable to report the incident to law enforcement without implicating ourselves in a crime.  Potential abusers are aware of this dynamic and, consequently, they often target sex workers for exploitation or violence precisely because they know the offense is likely to go unreported.  Like women engaged in sex work, male providers need the harm reduction benefits associated with decriminalization too.

No one is trying to rescue us (not that I’m complaining)

I have a Google Alert set up for stories related to sex work; every day I receive a reminder that I could be arrested at a moment’s notice for trying to do my job.  While that’s not an unrealistic fear, the vast majority of arrests for the actual act of prostitution are of women.  Data on male sex work is hard to come by; most sources that capture statistics by sex only report using the catchall “prostitution related offenses” making it impossible to parse out if male offenders are being charged as clients, facilitators, or workers.  That said, at least one study validates the common knowledge that women are much more likely to be arrested for prostitution than men.  The rescue industry is also entirely unconcerned with male sex workers.  Men are coerced into commercial sex (though, just like women, they’re far likelier to be trafficked into another sector) and forced into prostitution, but you’ll rarely hear even the most cursory acknowledgement of that fact; this is unsurprising if you understand the very gendered, often racist narratives used by these organizations to raise the funds necessary to keep themselves in business.

We’re an inconvenient reality for prohibitionists

no data foundMoral scolds who wish to completely prohibit commercial sex generally fall into two categories: the family values crowd (often religious fundamentalists) and radical, carceral feminists.  Fundamentalists rarely attempt to make any form of coherent argument against sex work, preferring to bully others into submission through sheer force of moral authority.  It’s trickier, however, for radical feminists who often do attempt to use pseudo-logic to advance their agenda.  In their limited, dated, heteronormative view, all sex work is the exploitation of women by men – women are “prostituted” by some invisible hand that apparently strips them of their agency and personhood in the process.  Correspondingly, all sex work is damaging, both at an individual and a social level; for the individual, it is demeaning and destructive, for society, it is a perpetuation of the patriarchy that feeds male entitlement to women’s bodies.  Setting aside for a moment all of the troubling implications of that world view, you can easily see how the very existence of male sex workers is problematic.  After all, as a male I’m an instrument of the patriarchy, but as a whore, I’m a victim.  Am I simultaneously the victimizer and the victimized?  Am I actually feeding male entitlement to male bodies?

Superficial differences in the experiences of sex working women and men aside, the broader context in which our rights are debated and our work is policed reveals much about the real beliefs and motivations behind the ongoing stigmatization and criminalization of sex work.   If these efforts are really about “rescuing” people “from the life” why are male sex workers not targeted by the rescue industry and law enforcement in their quest to offer their unique brand of “assistance?”  In rare instances such as the Rentboy raid where male sex work is targeted, why is the dialogue framed as cracking down on vice rather than saving victims?  The answer lies in a new social conservatism – one perpetuated by fundamentalists and inexplicably embraced by radical feminists.  This trend is as infantilizing as it is paternalistic; it tells women they can’t possibly really choose to enter into sex work while making no such claims about sex working men.  It maintains that sex work is inherently abusive – that it is the paradigmatic manifestation of male exploitation of women – yet offers no explanation of how this dynamic applies when men purchase sex from other men.  It can’t adequately address the very existence of male sex work because it is nothing more than classist concern trolling, a Victorian ethos repackaged in Post-Structuralist, radical feminist bullshit and marketed to the masses by the likes of Lena Dunham; anyone who truly believes in the full equality of women and men should reject it roundly.

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Guest Columnist: Endza Adair

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged , , , on May 9, 2016| 8 Comments »

My dear friend Endza is wise beyond her years, as brave as she is beautiful, and far more together than I was at her age (in those long-ago and far-off times of the 1980s, Best Beloved).  You may be interested in following her (NSFW) Twitter feed or reading her “lackadaisically updated” blog, and she appeared with me (and many other sex workers) yesterday on the cover of the New York Times magazine (top row, first on the left).  Oh, and I have a dinner date with her a week from today; eat your hearts out, boys and girls.

I am that annoying girl sitting in the front row of class who knows the answer to every question the professor asks.  I am also that girl who had just finished washing the cum out of my hair before I got to school (I will never understand porn’s obsession with cumming on my face).  For me that is an unremarkable day.  I have no problem with carrying the labels of honor student and porn model; to me, they fit together like two of the many puzzle pieces that make up who I am.  It is the rest of the world that demands these two labels be a contradiction.  When I am at school I am allowed the label of “brilliant”.  I am nerd who adores learning just a little bit too much.  Yet, soon as I speak out in my public persona, as soon as it is mentioned that I am both a sex worker and a student. I become “a whore pretending to be an intellectual”.  Every ounce of my intelligence is degraded by what I choose to do for work; people cannot seem to believe that I can be both intelligent and happy in this world.

Yet, I am very happy with what I do.  I have an amazing job that celebrates my sexuality, facilitates me have amazing sex, and supports me in getting my degree.  Sex and learning, that sounds like the perfect life to me.  It is the stigma that makes these two worlds hard to coexist in.  One day I am in San Francisco surrounded by a whirlwind of makeup artists, costumes, sex, and cameras; the next I am two states away sitting in a classroom, my hair hidden under a hat hoping no one will recognize me.  You see, I have plans, plans that involve a grad school degree in medical neuroscience.  If I was outed it could put all of my academic plans in jeopardy.   Society is constantly trying to take away the autonomy of sex workers; I am fearful that someone may take it upon themselves to decide that just because I enjoy sex, it means I can’t handle a rigorous academic program.

And that is one of the best-case scenarios if I am discovered.  Belle Knox, a lovely porn star who attended Duke University, received death threats when one of her friends let her secret slip; people were so offended by a porn star going to college they felt the need to threaten physical violence.  I can’t even begin to understand the logic behind their threats; don’t sex workers deserve an education just as much as anyone else?  As a result, I take measures to make sure I am not discovered.  I look remarkably different without makeup or curly hair and that’s before I hide under baggy clothing.  I do my best not to make any close friends at school, because I know I will have to lie to each and every one of them.

Now this is the point where most people ask me why I don’t just quit?  Find a job that is less stigmatized and prioritize my academics?  This is because I am stubborn.  Porn is my chosen profession.  I am a consenting, autonomous adult and my right to chose a job will not be taken away from me.  Every time someone tells me I should quit, my resolve grows stronger.  I love my job, and I am good at it.  I refuse to let society’s opinion of my life change my behavior.  I am a 23-year-old honor student who is managing to not only support herself but also follow her academic dreams.  I adore my life.  So here I am.  I am just stubborn enough to stand and defiantly tell the world that it needs to change its opinion because I am not changing anything about my life.

Endza

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SWOP Behind Bars

Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on April 11, 2016| 8 Comments »

SWOP Behind Bars is a new project, which attracted my attention soon after its formation; I think it’s incredibly important so I asked the organizer, Alex, to explain the project herself.  I’ve already donated a copy of my book (and will donate more to other prisons as the project expands), and I’ve given Alex carte blanche to use any of my columns in the newsletter she compiles for our incarcerated sisters.  As a former librarian, I well know the power books have to change lives, yet they’re so inexpensive; please consider donating at least one book to this program, and read on for other ways you can help. 

prison art 955No one really knows how many women who are imprisoned have done some form of sex work, but guesstimates from prison and probation officials run as high as 70%, and it’s difficult to ignore the probability that the criminalization of sex work has a major impact on the prison population.  According to the Florida Department of Corrections almost 6800 women are currently serving a sentence in Florida prisons, and another 38,000 are on state-supervised probation.  Women make up approximately 7% of the Florida prison population, with 144 under the age of 21; black and Hispanic women outnumber white women 3 to 1.  Programs for women behind bars are very limited, inadequately funded and mostly faith based, and re-entry services are pretty much limited to $50 and a bus ticket home, wherever that might be.  While the biggest fear for a sex worker might be arrest, the biggest fear for imprisoned women is what will happen to them when they are released.  These women return to their communities desperate and defined by their experience;  their families are disconnected and they must find their own way to rebuild their lives.  There is virtually no housing for those recently released, and they will be denied almost all public benefits because of their criminal records; they can’t get decent employment and they won’t be able to get a student loan in order to advance their education if they can’t or don’t want to engage in sex work.  When this discrimination is combined with whore stigma and the ever-present shaming of current or former sex workers, those who have been incarcerated have virtually no opportunity to thrive on release.

The SWOP Behind Bars project at Lowell Correctional Institution is working to reach out to sex workers behind bars by donating books to the prison library, sending newsletters to those currently incarcerated and building a nationwide network of sex worker-supported letter writing.  Women in prison who receive regular mail are perceived as “highly valued”, and it is the hope of SWOP Behind Bars to flood our incarcerated sisters with mail.  We are currently working to integrate with other prison book donation organizations to duplicate our efforts nationwide, in the hope that over time we can create a sense of community and support that will help them cope while imprisoned and rebuild their lives once released.

This didn’t happen overnight and it’s not even an original idea.  In the early days of sex work activism, Margo St James sued the state of California to improve programs and services for women in prison.  As the sex worker rights movement grew over the next 20 years and the Amnesty decision support decriminalization thrust sex worker rights into mainstream discourse, we still loudly protested the criminalization of sex work and have worked diligently to minimize the danger of being arrested; however, there are still so many sex workers in prison and they need to know we are here for them.  Many do not identify as sex workers, yet it only takes a cursory investigative search of the Department of Corrections websites to recognize that there is a large incidence of previous convictions for prostitution.  Women in prison do not know about the vibrant sex worker community that is rising up in the US, and we think they should.  Those of us who live in the free world have connected with each other via social media and through the organized efforts of Sex Worker Rights Organizations.  We have shared our experiences and our knowledge with each other on Facebook, Instagram, Tumbr and Twitter.  We have Art Shows and Operas and International Days we recognize together.  We have at last created our own community that – for the most part – has given us all a solidarity that is unprecedented.  We even have our own insignia…the Red Umbrella.  Now we need to get back to our roots and reach out to those behind bars because that is where those who have suffered the most from criminalization reside.

prison art 969Reading books is a popular prison pastime and unless one has somebody sending reading material inside, she is limited to what is in the prison library.  But prison libraries are limited to what was left behind by others, legal books and a flurry of faith based material; our goal is to provide books to improve the lives of prisoners, to provide educational resources, and to help reduce the likelihood of their returning to the prison system.  Our communities fare better when prisoners returning to society have had an opportunity to learn, grow, and mature as individuals, and books can provide inspiration and knowledge for that growth.  We believe that books about sex workers, provided by sex workers, for sex workers, and to sex workers are the greatest way we can invite them to participate in our community and let them tell us how we can improve our efforts to make sure that they have the tools to develop the best version of themselves.  Already the Lowell Correctional Facility for Women has been inundated with books donated by authors and individuals that tell about our history, our stories and our hopes for the future.  The generosity of the sex worker community has been overwhelming.  Each book donated will have a label placed inside that will identify our community and let them know how to reach out to us by phone and by mail.  The SWOP Community Support has been activated with a new flock of enthusiastic volunteers to answer calls.  Our first newsletter will be sent to more than 100 incarcerated recipients in the next few weeks, and we will be asking them to write to us and tell us their stories, and to organize support groups inside.  We will be providing evidence-based material for them to learn more about us and about themselves.  We have been invited to participate in the creation of a program that will launch this summer, in which we’ll have the opportunity to provide trauma informed, sex work positive training to corrections officers and other prison officials in the State of Florida.  We are also working to create re-entry support services that are available to assist those who have recently been released find the resources they need to accomplish the goals they set for themselves.

Our call to the sex worker community is to join us in reaching out to sex workers behind bars.  Here are 10 ways you can help.

  1. If you know someone who is in prison whom we could include in our monthly newsletter, send their mailing information to swopbehindbars@gmail.com.
  2. If you are the AUTHOR or PUBLISHER of a book you would like to donate, instructions are listed here.
  3. If you have your own newsletter or if you want to start writing to sex workers behind bars, we can send you our current list of sex workers.  We are not publishing an online list of incarcerated sex workers until they request us to do so.
  4. If you want to send a book to a specific resident of a jail or prison, you MUST send it using Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. There are no exceptions to this requirement in any US jail or prison.
  5. If you want to submit a story to the monthly newsletter, please send it to us at newsletter@swopbehindbars.org.
  6. If you want to donate NEW BOOKS to the Lowell Corrections Institution Library, we have a wish list on Amazon.com.
  7. If you want to donate USED BOOKS to the prison library, please send an email to swopbehindbars@gmail.com and we will tell you how this works and send you instructions.
  8. If you want to start your own book donation program in your state prison or county jail, let us know and we will be happy to share our tips and tricks.  We want to keep a record of books that are donated and a list of facilities where they are going so we know how to face future challenges with Books Behind Bars projects.
  9. We are building a toolkit for sex workers to use to reach out to recently arrested sex workers, and we will publish that information on the website and on Facebook and Twitter when it is complete.
  10. Finally, if you have ideas or resource material that you think would advance this project or assist in the creation of re-entry resources, please let us know about it.  We are particularly interested in people who are willing to engage directly by phone, mail or email with recently released sex workers who need a sex worker friendly, non-judgmental mentor.

prison art 956
The books most often requested are biographies, short stories and self-help books, particularly those that assist with addiction and trauma related issues.  SWOPUSA will be happy to send you a tax deductible receipt for the published price of the books, the cost of printing newsletters and any shipping or mailing costs you incur.  You do not have to use your own return address for mailing books or newsletters; you may use the SWOP USA return address:

SWOP-USA
340 S LEMON AVE #7566
WALNUT CA 91789

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Melissa Gira Grant Puts Heroic Escort Heather Through The Buzzsaw On Buzzfeed

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , on April 5, 2016| 4 Comments »

This is an important article by my friend Mistress Matisse, cross-posted from Medium.

Notorious MGGIt’s ironic that journalist Melissa Gira Grant decided to write an article on how media attention can cause chaos in someone’s life, because in the life of a West Virginia woman named Heather, Melissa Gira Grant has become an agent of exactly that sort of chaos.

It began late last summer, when serial killer Neal Falls contacted Heather through her escort ad, and when they met, he tried to murder her. Heather fought back against Neal Falls and killed him. In doing so, she removed a dangerous predator from the world. Charleston police say she almost certainly saved the lives of other women Neal Falls would have gone on to kill.

At some point, a few weeks after the attack (she does not specify when), Grant says she came to Heather’s house and spoke with her. A lot of reporters came to Heather’s door after the attack, and many of them were vague about details such as to exactly what publication they wrote for, or when any piece they wrote about her would be published.

Fast forward to March 30th, almost seven months later, when Grant published a meandering and somewhat confusing Buzzfeed story about Heather. Part of it touches on the sex worker community’s peer outreach to Heather and our ongoing support for her. Grant portrays our efforts as problematic, and singles me out in particular as having questionable motivations for offering Heather my friendship. Bafflingly, she also chooses to spotlight the voices of three other people who, while they only had contact with Heather briefly, caused her further distress in that time: Kathy Brown, Laura Gandee, and a man known as Nostra-Thomas Koenig, aka Charles de Koenig. Brown and Gandee’s behavior towards Heather could be described as “well-intentioned but coercive”. Koenig, on the other hand, was openly controlling and abusive to Heather from the start, and quickly escalated into public harassment and threats aimed at not only Heather, but at the group of sex worker/activists who were supporting her, and all sex workers in general.

The hard truth is: sex workers (and sex worker’s rights activists) expect biased treatment from journalists who have no ties to the sex work community. But people could be forgiven for thinking Melissa Gira Grant was different. In her past, she did sex work herself, and since then she’s written extensively on sex workers’s rights. She uses that position to get insider-information about sex worker-centered stories as they develop. She watches such journalism closely and often critiques it in a territorial manner, calling such stories “her beat”.

Grant focuses exclusively on the weeks immediately following the attack, but she does not present a sharp timeline. Here is how the first stages of sex worker rights activists community’s outreach to Heather occurred.

The attack on Heather occurred July 18th.

July 29th, I talked to Kathy Brown and Laura Gandee, and also to the man calling himself Nostra-Thomas Koenig/Charles de Koenig, who were doing the already-existing fundraiser.

On July 31st, I talked to Heather personally for the first time. I was the third member of the sex work community to have direct contact with her.

Around Aug 2nd, desperate because money raised by Gandee, Brown and Koenig was not being released to her for rent and utilities, Heather asked sex work activist Tara Burns to set up a Crowdrise fundraiser that she could have direct and sole control over. A group of sex worker/activists coalesced to promote Heather’s fundraiser and offer her support: Tara Burns, Meg Munoz, Marisa Anne, Lily Fury, and myself. Kristen D’Angelo had also reached out to Heather in this time and was in frequent contact with our group.

On Aug 5th, an article was published in Cosmopolitan about Heather’s fundraiser, and the sex worker community outreach to her. “Meg Vallee Munoz, a former sex worker and co-founder of Abeni, an organization that offers individuals with experiences in the sex trades practical services and holistic support, is the spokeswoman for the new campaign.”

So for Melissa Gira Grant to say “Seattle dominatrix Mistress Matisse…led her own effort to help Heather” is incorrect. Grant either didn’t bother to research this, or she excluded these activists from the narrative for reasons of her own.

But more trouble arose in August, when Koenig began posting extremely abusive statements about Heather, and about sex workers in general, on the Facebook page he made about Heather. He began harassing and threatening her. He said repeatedly that anyone who contributed to Heather’s fundraiser instead of his would be arrested, and that Heather herself would be too. There was an article documenting this on Tits and Sass. (This article also documents the incident of Brown and Gandee calling the police to force Heather to see them.)

Upon getting Heather’s agreement, and after discussion of the group of SW/activists, I went to West Virginia on August 3rd and spent four days with Heather, to offer her coercion-free support. On this visit, we accomplished the following: we negotiated that Brown, Gandee, and Koenig would turn over all funds collected to her immediately. We opened a bank account (in Heather’s name only) that linked to her fundraiser, so that all funds would be transferred directly to her. We also bought her a new phone. During this period, I observed Koenig constantly harassing and threatening Heather and her mother by phone, and I related this to Maryclaire Akers, assistant prosecuting attorney for Kanawha County, who agreed to contact Koenig and warn him off.

In Grant’s presentation of the narrative, these behaviors are somehow suspicious. I think that says more about how she approaches Heather than how I do. There are many kinds of predators in the world, but they all have one thing in common: predators take, they don’t give. Neal Falls was a predator of the most extreme variety. Nostra-Thomas Koenig was a different type of predator in Heather’s life. But what about Melissa Gira Grant? Grant came into Heather’s life to get something of value to herself and her career. She gave nothing whatsoever to Heather. She certainly did not offer her friendship or support. At no time has she donated to Heather’s fundraiser, or promoted it using her platform. One might say that she could not have done so before she published her story, for fear of seeming to display journalistic bias. But she hasn’t done so since the article was published, either.

The other feature of predators is: they don’t get consent for what they do. There’s a lot of good discussion of what the word consent means, and who can give clear, fully informed, and unimpaired consent. I myself am a strong believer that consent in any interaction is crucial, and that the person who has the most control over the situation is morally bound to make absolutely sure they have fully-informed consent at all times. Consent cannot be assumed by silence, and it can be revoked at any point in the process. Melissa Gira Grant did not have Heather’s consent to publish their interview.

You may think, “But the question of consent doesn’t apply to someone who gives an interview to the media.” I would say perhaps it doesn’t apply to someone who has power equal to (or even greater than) the journalist, and who has put themselves forward to the press. For example, someone running for public office has given blanket consent to being asked questions, and to be quoted in ways that may or may not reflect what they think they said.

Heather SaulHeather is not such a person. She is a private individual, leading a quiet life, who was thrust into the spotlight because she was the victim of a terrible crime. Heather had never dealt with the media before the attack. I think it highly likely that when Grant approached Heather, she mentioned the names of sex workers who’d already befriended her, in order to gain Heather’s trust and make the visit seem more like friendly outreach, not an actual interview. Once Grant left her house that day, Heather was never given any further say over where, when, or how her words would be used.

After such a violent attack, a victim could be in a state of emotional and intellectual shock for weeks, and Heather was. Grant clearly describes Heather’s intense post-traumatic stress symptoms. She also notes that Heather was injured in the accident and has impaired movement, and that she’s in pain. So she knew that Heather was in shock, injured, in pain, and thus probably taking pain medication. No one can give meaningful, informed consent in that situation. To ignore that, and make use of someone’s extreme fragility and media inexperience like that is breathtakingly predatory.

Grant also knew that Heather was battling an addiction issue. Notice: Heather chose not to speak of it to Grant — Grant calls this “talking around it” — so Grant tells us about it in through the words of her abusers, with their shaming and stigmatization of her. This is what troubles me the most about this article: Melissa Gira Grant gives a platform to Heather’s known abusers. Nostra-Thomas Koenig harassed, insulted, and threatened Heather and her mother both online and by phone for months. His voice has absolutely no place in this article. To have him quoted talking about Heather’s life is intensely re-traumatizing to her.

Reporting the opinions of Laura Gandee and Kathy Brown is also highly questionable. They literally called the police to force Heather to see them. That’s a blatant abuse of social power. Why are the opinions of these people being reported as if they had value? And why would Grant then juxtapose non-violent peer outreach with the actions of an abuser and two carcerally-inclined ladies? To call this a false equivalency is to do it far too much justice. This article lends credence and legitimacy to the non-consensual brands of “help” that for Heather, ranged from controlling and coercive all the way to violent.

In that way, Heather’s experience is unfortunately not unique. For a sex worker who wants to exit the industry, especially women as isolated as Heather, there is almost no non-violent peer support available. Many anti-sex workers openly support the idea that arresting sex workers is a good way to get them services and protection — but statistically, police are the worst perpetrators of violence against sex workers, and being arrested makes any situation worse, not better. Grant does not go quite so far, but she does lend authority to the idea that sex workers offering non-coercive peer support to other sex workers is something to be viewed with suspicion, and discouraged. This is not acceptable to the sex work community.

I navigate consent for a living, and judging by the quotes of mine she pulled from another story, perhaps Grant took exception to my comparison of how that’s done within a BDSM scene to how I practice obtaining consent when I do outreach? Regardless of how you frame it, you either have someone’s consent or you don’t, and there are very clear steps that must be taken if you get this wrong. Heather has made her statement. Now Melissa Gira Grant needs to acknowledge that she violated Heather’s consent. She needs to take total responsibility for how her actions re-traumatized Heather. She needs to reach out to Heather, publicly, apologize to her, and do whatever Heather feels is appropriate to atone for her violation. Only then can she ethically continue to report on sex worker issues.

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Guest Columnist: Mark Draughn

Posted in Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on March 14, 2016| 27 Comments »

Mark Draughn blogs and tweets as Windypundit, and has been reading this blog for at least five years (and maybe more).  He’s a staunch ally and has written some good pro-sex work articles on his own blog in the past, so naturally I had to ask him to do one for me sooner or later.

Mark DraughnAnyone who follows sex work issues has probably seen reports claiming that prostitution hurts the economy.  Sometimes the accuracy of these claims depends on subtle issues of data and methodology, but often you can deconstruct these reports by watching out for a few basic economic issues.  (A disclaimer: I’m not a trained economist.  I like to think that I’m an amateur economist the same way some people are amateur astronomers — I lack the breadth and depth of the professionals, but I pay attention to what they’re doing, and I try not to say anything that will make people stupider.)  The big problem with this narrative is that anti-prostitution crusaders use it to buttress the argument that prostitution is a bad thing that must be stopped, yet when you look at how they’re calculating the costs of prostitution, it turns out they’re implicitly assuming that prostitution is a bad thing that must be stopped.

Thus the first thing to note when you see one of these reports is that they almost never mention the economic benefits of prostitution.  Anti-prostitution crusaders would no doubt object to the very idea that there are benefits of prostitution, but if you begin your analysis by assuming away all benefits of prostitution, then of course your analysis will show that prostitution hurts the economy.  Sneaking your preferred answer into the calculation is no way to reach an honest conclusion.  Economically speaking, we know the sex trade has benefits for the participants because they keep doing it.  One of the foundational assumptions of economics is that people are smart enough to make choices that will improve their lives.  Obviously that isn’t literally true in all cases — people make mistakes — but it’s close enough, because people making choices about their own lives (a) can understand their situation better than anyone else, and (b) have the most to lose from deciding unwisely.  Most people don’t make perfect decisions, but it’s hard to see how distant cops, politicians, and do-gooders could make better decisions for thousands of people they barely know.

Actually, these reports sometimes do mention the benefits of prostitution without realizing it, usually when emphasizing the size of the “prostitution problem”.  Prostitution is a service produced by sex workers and consumed by clients.  We know prostitution provides benefits for clients because they are willing to pay money for it, and we know the value of those benefits must be at least as large as the payment, otherwise clients would not agree to the price.  Therefore, when a “cost of prostitution” story says men are spending billions of dollars on sex workers, we can safely assume that sex workers must be producing billions of dollars of valuable sexual services for the economy.  (That kind of thinking may sound strange if you’re not used to it, but it’s the same reasoning economists use for every consumer product in the economy.  If people willingly buy it, it must be worth at least what they’re paying.)  The benefits don’t all go to the clients, however, because as long as sex workers are free to refuse services, they can bargain for a share of the benefits in the form of payment.  Since sex workers are assumed to be smart enough to make choices that improve their lives, we know they wouldn’t participate in commercial sex unless they received benefits that exceeded their costs.

The assumption that participants receive a net benefit allows us to take a shortcut when calculating the costs of prostitution to the economy:  We can omit the benefits that participants receive from prostitution as long as we balance the account by omitting the costs as well.  Or to put it the other way around, if a report fails to include the benefits of sex work to participants, then it should not include any of the costs to participants either.  If you find such unbalanced costs in a report, you can ignore them.  This leaves one major set of costs remaining:  The costs of prostitution that are borne by non-participants.  These are almost always some kind of government expense, for which the burden ultimately falls on taxpayers.  For example, if sex workers are more likely to receive financial assistance from government anti-poverty programs, then the additional costs of those programs fall on taxpayers, and they are genuine costs of prostitution.  Even for these legitimate costs, however, there are a few things to watch out for:

  • Only excess costs count.  If the average sex worker costs some program $5000, we can’t count it as a cost of prostitution without first subtracting the baseline per-person cost of non-sex-workers.  If that’s $3000, then the excess cost of prostitution is only $2000 per sex worker.
  • Co-factors matter.  If women tend to have higher average medical costs than men, then sex workers will have higher average medical costs than the general population simply because sex workers are more likely to be women.  You have to subtract out the excess cost of being women to get the true excess cost of being sex workers.
  • Causality matters.  If a study discovers that sex workers have disproportionately poor health, leading to higher medical costs, that doesn’t tell us if they have health problems because they are sex workers, or if they are sex workers because they have health problems.  If the latter, then their medical costs are not attributable to sex work.

Much of this can be sorted out with statistics and good data, but not everybody does the hard work.  For all these costs, my guess is that sex workers already pay more than enough taxes to cover the costs they impose on society, and they’d pay even more if sex work was decriminalized.  I doubt that sex workers are nearly as much of a burden on society as, say, ethanol producers, auto manufacturers, or Amtrak.

hero cops arrest dangerous womanThat brings me to the last category of government expenses, for which sex workers shouldn’t owe a frickin’ dime.  I’m talking about the cost of fighting prostitution, which can includes things like the costs of arresting and jailing sex workers as well as the cost of taking care of a sex worker’s children while she’s locked up.  If we were talking about crimes such as murder, the costs of catching criminals and isolating them from society would be part of the cost of their crimes, as would the cost of caring for their families while they are in prison.  With sex work, however, those costs only materialize if we actually decide to fight prostitution by treating it as a crime, but making that decision is the whole reason we are talking about the economic costs in the first place.  It doesn’t make sense to argue that we should fight prostitution because of costs that only arise because we are fighting prostitution.  Furthermore, although I said earlier that we can ignore costs of prostitution borne by sex workers, that doesn’t apply to the heavy non-financial costs paid by sex workers who are imprisoned or who lose their children after being arrested.  Nor does it apply to the violent costs borne by sex workers who are attacked or killed in situations which would be avoidable if they could operate in the open and depend on the police for protection.  Not only should these costs not be held against sex workers, but they are the basis of a strong argument that decriminalizing prostitution would reduce economic costs.

Finally, many readers of this blog are sex workers or are otherwise familiar with the sex trade.  This means you are in a good position to answer a very important question about any “cost of prostitution” analysis:  Do the descriptions of sex work match what you see?  Much of the commercial sex industry operates in hiding, which leads to bad information about what really happens when people trade sex for money.  Analyses that depend on false assumptions — that most prostitutes start as children or that street prostitution is the most common form — are likely to reach poor conclusions.  In particular, many of my points — the benefits of prostitution, the reasons to ignore costs borne by sex workers, the argument that law enforcement costs favor decriminalization — depend on the crucial assumption that sex workers have agency to chose the sex trade.  At a time when we are becoming more accepting of people’s choices in recreational drugs and (non-paying) sex partners, it would be a shame if we allowed sensationalized claims of sex trafficking to undermine the agency of sex workers and cast doubts on the benefits of sex work.

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Guest Columnist: Mike Siegel

Posted in Fiction, Guest Columns, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , on February 8, 2016| 1 Comment »

Mike Siegel has been a regular and faithful reader of this blog for at least five years, and has on numerous occasions assisted me with scientific or other issues.  See, he’s a professional astronomer and a blogger himself, and now he’s a fiction writer as well; last week, he self-published his first novel through Kindle Direct Publishing. The book is entitled The Water Lily Pond after the series of Monet paintings that inspired it.  He synopsizes it thusly: “Many decades in the future, medical science has made aging a thing of the past.  Painter Walter Winston, at age 128, finds himself dying from simply being exhausted from life.  He sets off on a journey to revisit the places he’s lived, trying to rediscover himself, his life and the people who made it worth living.  It’s science fiction, yes.  But it’s not really about science.  It’s about time and old age and regret and art…The two passages below take place after Walter’s wife has died. Having been alone for a long time and wanting to avoid complications, he occasionally hires an escort.  On at least one occasion, a university hosting his lecture hired an escort for him.  The first passage concerns the latter“:

The last time he’d been in a hotel room identical to this one he had not been alone. She was a pretty girl from Ecuador whom the University had arranged for him. He was a hundred years older than her. They had lain in bed after it was done — the school had generously paid for the entire night. He thought of David and Abishag in the Americo painting. They had sent her to warm him.

Her cigarette smoke made lazy curls on the ceiling as she talked to him. She was certainly the smartest girl he’d ever had – she spoke four languages and was earning her degree from UCLA in astronautics. She spoke of a future on the Earth-Moon run.

“Why do you do this, then?” he’d asked, shocked.

She stared at him for a moment then giggled.

“You’re so old-fashioned.”

“I’m so old!”

“It’s endearing. I think the oldest man I’d been with before you was … 90?  95? He wasn’t quite as prudent.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

She rolled over, her black hair spilling onto the white pillow like a Pollock painting, her hip making a steep curve beneath the sheets like a Reubens. It made him feel a lot younger than 125 to look at her and to touch her.

“I enjoy it. It’s that simple. The money’s great. I certainly wouldn’t do it for free.  But mainly I enjoy it. Not the act, per se. I enjoy the people.  I always get high-class clients.  Like famous artists,” she said, poking him in the belly.

He sank against the pillow, wondering if he was the only person on Earth old enough to see any stigma in her job.

“Do you remember everyone you’ve ever been with?” she asked. “After …”

“After all this time?” He grinned and nodded. “Sometimes it takes a while, but I do. Not that I’ve been with that many.

“It’s not just women I’ve been with that I remember. I can remember women I’ve wanted and never had. I can still remember a girl I passed on the street a century ago. She had the deepest eyes I’d ever seen. A short white skirt and a green blouse. She’s probably been dead half a century; certainly never knew my name or who I was. And yet I think about her. I can still see the fabric of the blouse clinging to her body.”

She leaned over and kissed him.  “You should have painted her.”

“I did.”

This next passage is from a bit later in the book and references the time Walter lived in the worst part of Harlem in the 1980’s as a struggling artist.

He had never hired a professional before Sarah was gone.  Even in his loneliest nights in Harlem, shortly after his marriage with Anna had collapsed, when he could hear the streetwalkers and their clients in the alleys and crack houses of the neighborhood; when he couldn’t walk to and from home without at least a couple of them asking if he wanted a date.  It had never really crossed his mind.

“They didn’t repel me,” he told Sarah once.  “I got to know some of them over time.   Most of them were nice enough and a couple even knew about my art.  I even drew inspiration from them for one or two paintings.”

“They were in the pentaptych,” said Sarah.

“One was.  A woman who doggedly worked a corner near me for almost a decade.  Put her kid through school on it.  But I just wasn’t interested in what they were offering.”

It was Chuck who talked him into it.  Chuck, who knew that the side of the industry Walter had seen in King’s Slate was the bad part of a much larger enterprise.

“You should come with me to Vegas,” he said one night at the lake, three years after Sarah had died.  There had been an awkward discussion over dinner about whether Walter should get “out there” or not. Now he and Chuck were on the dock, in the darkness.

“Or up to Toronto.  Or over to Paris.  Or Bucharest.  Or anywhere.  Any sophisticated city is going to have professionals – talented, beautiful.  Most places, you wouldn’t even be breaking the law anymore.”

Walter shifted uncomfortably in his deck chair.  The water lapped quietly under the dock.

“Look, I know how you were raised.  But at our age … do you really want to date?  Do you want to go through that?  Especially with two grandchildren and another on the way?  What are you going to do if you meet someone?  Move away?  Leave little Lucia all by herself?  This is a way to not be alone but not have complications.”

“I just can’t see myself doing that,” said Walter.  “Paying someone to pretend to be attracted to me?  It’s not like there’s a shortage of art fans or anything, if meaningless sex was what I wanted.”

“But a professional won’t stalk you.  She won’t want to get pregnant.  She won’t tell everyone about it.  And it’s not just sex.  Sometimes it’s not even sex.  I hired a woman in Moscow to basically go to the Bolshoi with me.”

“Can we just let it go?”

Chuck shrugged.  “As you wish.  But men our age have needs.  Yours will get the better of you at some point.  Less risk if it’s a professional than an amateur.”

In the end, Chuck was right.  He had been surprised that it wasn’t the sex itself that made him happy.  It was the touch of skin, the rustle of sheets, the play of light on a naked body.  It was the feeling, however faintly, of being back in those sepia and ash-colored days when he and Sarah or Juliette or Anna or Linda would lie in a warm bed and just enjoy not being alone.

“Intimacy,” said Chuck.  “Companionship.  Remember Abishag.”

It wasn’t often – a few times a year, maybe.  But it was enough to get through the previous four decades.

Mike writes, “I didn’t set out to reference sex work in my novel.  It just seemed like what the character would do, given his arc, and I saw no reason to shy away from it.  Sex work is a part of our world and will continue to be a part of our world long into the future. There’s no point in pretending it doesn’t exist.”  Mike is a great guy, an ally of sex workers and a friend; if you enjoyed these excerpts, you really ought to consider buying his book.  Pretty please?

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Guest Columnist: Justin Kardel

Posted in Guest Columns, tagged , , , , , , on January 11, 2016| 63 Comments »

Not long ago, a young man named Justin Kardel, who was totally unknown to me, approached me via Twitter and asked if I’d consider featuring an essay of his.  Now, my initial reaction was to decline; a lot of strangers ask me to publish their stuff, and if I did that I wouldn’t have room for much else.  But something in his quiet, respectful manner captured my attention, and when I read his essay I found it a well-written and thoughtful look at a topic which isn’t discussed often enough: rape in which the victim is male.

Just over two years ago, on October 31st, 2013, I was raped by a man I had recently started dating.  We had only gone on one other date and he was a perfect gentleman; he constantly complimented my looks and my style, we had great conversation and he seemed kind and considerate.  He even paid the check, which is quite the godsend for a starving graduate student.  So we decided to go out to a club for Halloween.  I remember being handed a lot of drinks but I don’t particularly remember him having many; however, I was paying more attention to the costumes, the beautiful young men and women in the club, and dancing.

1800 tequilaWhen last call came, we went to his place, where he continued to give me mixed drinks (constantly topping them off with 1800 tequila).  He started kissing me, and I felt somewhat uneasy about it but went along without saying anything; I was lit and not really able to voice my concerns.  Then he pulled out his penis and attempted to force me to perform oral sex on him.  I protested and refused, but he kept trying, pleading and cajoling me until I eventually acquiesced.  And then he raped me.  At first it seemed normal; I didn’t enjoy it, but they are all different and you never know what it will really be like with a new partner during the first one.  In my inebriated state, I thought the reason I didn’t enjoy it was because he was an incompetent lover; I was upset that he couldn’t satisfy me and I was angry that he went through with all this trouble without being able to seal the deal.  But the next day I knew it was much more than that, so I blocked his number and purposely attempted to forget his name and face.  After about a month I had largely succeeded, or so I thought; I had a sense that the incident might qualify as a sexual assault, but I convinced myself that it hadn’t affected me.  Furthermore, I’ve suffered from worse assaults, like the time I was stabbed by an acquaintance; in that case I didn’t go to the police or even tell anyone for years because I took the attack as a strong sign that I needed to leave that circle of friends.  Additionally, I didn’t want to waste my time and risk interaction with the police, nor did I really want to see him put in jail as I do not believe in the effectiveness of incarceration at preventing crime or reforming criminals.  I felt the same way about the sexual assault, only more so.

Anyway, I didn’t think much about the incident, at least not consciously, until I was dumped by my girlfriend recently; since I really loved her and thought we had a great relationship, I started reexamining my past lovers to see if I could get an idea of what I had been doing wrong.  When I did, my assailant shot to the front of my mind and I immediately recognized what I had denied for so long: I had been raped.  I was devastated, and didn’t know who to tell (if anyone); I pride myself on my independence and I felt he had taken away my sexual agency because I haven’t been attracted to men ever since the rape.  Also, I am a large, 6’5” male and should have been capable of warding off a man 7″ shorter and 60 pounds lighter than me; even given that, I was unable to stop him and became his accomplice during the rape.  That fact has been very hard to deal with; even  though I know the sentiment is retrograde, I cannot help but feel that I’m less worthy as a victim because I should have been able to resist.  Eventually I started talking to one of my most trustworthy, easy-to-talk-to and open-minded friends, and then came the tears.  I was finally able to accept it.  It. Wasn’t. My. Fault.

I was violated, but it didn’t diminish my value as a human being.  I may have been robbed of some of my sexuality, but we change as we age and grow and I don’t think I will be any less happy for that in the long run; to believe and act any differently would just give more power to his sexual violence.  It’s water under the bridge—the best thing to do is not to hang onto the past, especially when there is nothing you can do to erase it.  I forgave him, but only for my sake; I will never see or hear from him again and he will probably ever admit that he raped me.  But I don’t particularly care.  Prison wouldn’t solve anything, and the courts are loath to prosecute date rape cases and even less likely to prosecute homosexual rape.  I forgave him so I would not carry that grudge, the kind of grudge that can corrode one’s heart, mind and soul; I know too many who have, and their lives are diminished by it.

sad manBut even given all that, I wanted to write this article because of the dearth of conversation on the rape of males in America.  I hesitated for so long because of the stigma associated with it, but I think my story and those of thousands of other sexually-abused men must be told.  Much like other marginalized groups such as sex workers, the only way to get any change in this country starts with wide exposure.  It’s true that far fewer men report being raped than women; the CDC does not even report numbers for male rape, and men report sexual abuse at a rate only 58% that of women.  But this is still a massive number of people, and is surely hugely under-reported because the stigma against men claiming they were raped is even worse than it is for women; furthermore, it does not include the most widely known type of male rape:  prison rape.  Over 200,000 men are sexually assaulted in prison every year, and the popular response is another hoary old “don’t drop the soap” joke or a statement that it is justified by their conviction for a crime.  It’s sick how popular this sentiment is; rape rates in prison approach or even surpass those in sub-Saharan African war zones, yet few care because they think men who get raped are not “real men” and prisoners deserve that kind of treatment anyhow.  It’s disgusting, and it’s got to change.  I forgave my rapist so I could move on to do better things and live a fulfilling life.  But I will never forget him, and he will forever inform me of the extreme brutality and trauma of rape, and why it must be addressed honestly and effectively.  And for that I thank him.

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Guest Columnist: David Wraith

Posted in Biography, Guest Columns, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on December 14, 2015| 8 Comments »

David Wraith is a Saint Louis native, writer, filmmaker, activist and co-founder of Sex Positive St. Louis.  He’s a polyamorous, sado-masochistic exhibitionist who has spent much of his adult life advocating for women’s reproductive freedom, GLBT rights, and people living with HIV.  I met him when my tour took me to St. Louis; after my book reading he took me out to a coffee shop and we talked until they kicked us out.  Well just recently, I realized that he is on Twitter, so being the brazen hussy that I am, I immediately asked him for a guest essay.  And being the charming gentleman that he is, he agreed.

I’m going to say perhaps the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever said on the internet: sexual abuse made me the person that I am.  And I like who I am.  Aside from being better with money and less of a procrastinator, they’re aren’t whole lot of fundamental things I would change about me.

I am a fan of Dr. Drew Pinksy (Segues are for kids, folks.  Just watch my feet for a few paragraphs, okay?).  So, like I was saying, I’m a fan of Dr. Drew Pinksy, particularly his radio and TV show, Loveline.  While so many TV doctors come off like snake oil salesmen (Dr. Oz), or jerks (Dr. Phil), Dr. Drew always struck me as someone who really wanted to help people.  I felt like he was a great resource for the monogamous, vanilla world.  If he had one blind spot, in my opinion, it had to do with kink and polyamory.  Mainstream relationship professionals are often promoting monogamy and heteronormativity; that’s nothing new.  I once had a nice Twitter dust-up on the subject of polyamory with Steven Ward, the host of VH1’s Tough Love, that ended with me calling him a “well financed pimp.”  I never expect these guys (and they’re mostly straight, white guys, now that I think of it), to be very open to alternative relationship structures.  But for some reason, Dr. Drew’s bias against kinky and poly folk bothered me in ways that his contemporaries’ attitudes didn’t.  Case in point:  it seemed that without fail, anytime a Loveline caller described themselves as “very sexual” Dr. Drew would always follow up with, “So, you were sexually abused as a child.”  When the callers would protest that they weren’t, Dr. Drew would assure them that they were whether or not they remember or acknowledge such abuse.  This pissed me off.  Who was Dr. Drew to tell total strangers they had been sexually abused when they themselves said they hadn’t?  Surely, not everyone who is hypersexual is damaged or has been abused, right?

One year, Dr. Drew spoke at my school and I planned to ask him this very question.  I was a grad student and much older than the undergraduates Dr. Drew was pitching his lecture at, but I didn’t care.  He was there to talk about binge drinking on campus and hook-up culture, but I didn’t care.  I wanted answers and this was my chance.  I queued up to ask my question and just as one of the volunteers was about to bring me the mic, Dr. Drew announced that the question right before me would be the last of the evening as he had run out of time.  I called my girlfriend on the ride home to vent my frustration.  Here was a man with a national platform,  a doctor traveling the country, going on TV, going on the radio, spreading the idea that anyone who is hypersexual is a sex abuse survivor, and here I was, living proof that he was wrong.  I mean, I’m hypersexual and I was never abused!

“You weren’t?” My girlfriend asked.

She was referring to some things that had happened to me between the ages of 5 and 11.  There was an older boy who would masturbate in front of me and instruct me to masturbate in front of him.  There was an older girl who would expose herself to me and threaten me with violence if I didn’t expose myself to her.  In a feat of wisdom that I can only describe as David Wraithian, I decided these two would probably hit it off, so I introduced them.  They became a couple and pretty much any time the three of us would spend time together, they would act out sexually in front of me, including having sex in front of me on occasion.  In retrospect, I was the perfect cover.  A teenaged boy and a teenaged girl alone together in a bedroom would arouse their parent’s suspicion, but as long as there was an 11 year old in the room with them, it was assumed that nothing was going on…even when it was.

Fast forward to adulthood.  I had a very difficult time masturbating in front of my lovers until I was much older, and even when I was alone, developed a habit of masturbating with a pillow to cover my face, as if someone was watching me.  As a child I had a habit of exposing myself, which as an adult turned into the somewhat legally dangerous hobby of streaking (you haven’t lived until you run from the cops while simultaneously trying to put your clothes on).  Although I am firmly ensconced in a sex positive, polyamorous, orgiastic culture, the sight of people having sex in front of me is still something of a trigger.  Once, after watching a friend give another a blow job, my partner turned to me, only to see me covering my eyes with my hands like a little kid watching a horror movie.  It would probably take an amateur Freudian eleven seconds to diagnose my adult sexual proclivities and hang-ups as resulting from the abuse I got as a child.  It took me the better part of forty years.

So, damnit!  Here I was all this time thinking I was a living example that Dr. Drew’s theory that only child sex abuse survivors grow up to be hypersexual was wrong, and I was a child sex abuse survivor all along.  Now, don’t get it twisted; I personally don’t feel like I survived anything.  To me it’s just one of those things kids go through at the hands of other kids, like bullying.  It can be mild or it can be severe, and in my case, it was pretty mild; I think the fact that I am a “sex abuse survivor” is almost a technicality.  Like the that time in El Paso, Texas, right before I was questioned by the border patrol for having one foot on either side of the US/Mexico divide when I was “technically” in Mexico.  And who knows, perhaps it was the very “abuse” I “suffered” as a child that put me on the path to one day co-found an organization like Sex Positive St. Louis.  Perhaps a “healthier” childhood would have led to me being a general contractor like my dad, or a pharmaceutical sales rep, like my mother wanted.  Instead, I am a free-range, polyamorous man whore and published author of erotica who travels the US and Canada teaching workshops on sex and relationships.  Of course, I’m not trying to encourage childhood sexual abuse; the things that happened to me, minor as they were, I would not wish on my child if I had one.  I guess, if I’m trying to do anything other than describe my personal experience, it is to pull back the veil of fear and shame on the topic of childhood sexuality.  For better or for worse, those early experiences help make me who I am.  And I kinda like being me.

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Sorry, Charlie

Posted in Current Events, Guest Columns, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2015| 11 Comments »

I dazedly chose or hired the companionship of unsavory and insipid types. Regardless of their saltless reputations, I always led with condoms and honesty when it came to my condition.  –  Charlie Sheen

By now you’ve probably all heard that Charlie Sheen is HIV positive, and that in his Today show appearance he basically blamed it on sex workers.  He also claims to have “led with condoms” and denies any IV drug use.  Now, I’ve never seen Mr. Sheen professionally, but as it turns out I know someone who did in ’07.  This is her story, exactly as she told it to me yesterday; I have not changed a single word except to correct a few minor typos.  As you will see, it disagrees with two points of his denial of risky behavior; I have heard rumors of another, even riskier behavior, but unless someone is willing to write a firsthand account of that one I am not at liberty to mention it.  Normally, accounts like this one are outside my ethical bounds, but I’m not going to sit idly by while my sisters are blamed for something that they had nothing to do with.

“He’s a major player.  Don’t screw this up.”

That was the injunction issued to me by the booker of my agency in Los Angeles.  Curiosity piqued, I touched up my lipstick and ran down the stairs to get in my driver’s car.  The first words out of his mouth were, “Don’t you have anything more…revealing?”

Exasperated, I replied, “I can’t even sit down in this dress without starting a riot.  What do you want me to wear, a Band Aid?”  My driver informed me that this particular client was a known connoisseur of adult performers, and my chic little black dress was a bit too conservative for his liking.  I asked why he called our agency in the first place; we were a well respected escort service with a strict “no adult performers” policy.

“He’s used us before.  He’s got money to burn and he’ll take good care of you.  Just don’t be…yourself.”  My driver soared up the Sherman Oaks side of the Hollywood Hills.  We turned into the Mulholland Estates and the guard cheerfully waved us through the gate.  I groaned, since I never had much luck in this neighborhood.  Something always seemed to go wrong.  A couple of muscular gentleman came to the car and told my driver he couldn’t stay.  My driver clearly expected this, patted me on the head and told me to go make money.

Charlie Sheen July 19, 2007Heart sinking, I walked to the garage with the security guards.  They checked my purse for a weapon.  After I passed that, one of them asked me if I knew who I was going to be seeing.  I replied that this wasn’t my first high profile client and certainly wouldn’t be my last.  He looked at me and started laughing.  I batted my lashes and laughed back.  “Oh, he’ll like you.  I’ll walk you up.”  We started the long trek uphill to the house.  The door opened and I heard a man yelling on the phone.  The security guards told me to have fun, and walked out of the foyer.  I heard a thud, as if something was thrown at the wall, and my client descended down the staircase…and his smile dissolved into one big question mark.

“Hi, I’m Charlie.  Nice to meet you.”  He stepped back and said “I expected you to be a little more…endowed?”

“My agency has a model quality guarantee.  If you don’t like me, the cancellation fee is $150, and I’ll go.  No hard feelings.”

I put my hands on my hips and turned to leave.  “No wait.  Please don’t go.  I just didn’t expect someone so…conservative.  You’re really pretty, I just like porn girls better.”  I asked him if he was sure.  He gave me a bear hug and said “Of course I’m sure, gorgeous.  Let’s go upstairs.”

We walked upstairs into a small bedroom.  I could tell by the smell someone had been smoking some form of narcotic.  Porn was playing on one television,baseball on another.  The smell was getting to me.  He watched my nose twitch.  “It’s crack, and I only do a few hits a night.  I try to be a good boy when I’m working.”  He asked me if I partied.  I replied that it depended on what it was.  He flashed his trademark grin and told me he had literally anything I desired.  I politely asked if we could take care of business first.  He turned and unlocked a drawer that had an astonishing amount of cash in it.  The amount he gave me was basically enough to ensure I would be staying a while.  He bragged that two well known adult stars had seen him last night.  I knew one of them, and I asked why he hadn’t called them back tonight.  “Cause I pay them to disappear, sweetheart.  Now come over here and sit on my face.”

Things took a turn for the awkward a few minutes later when he requested bareback.  I explained as delicately as I could that my agency didn’t allow that, and I personally preferred to use condoms as well.  He took the news in stride, but it was clear the condoms were interfering with things.  We proceeded to engage in other forms of contact.  After he finished, it was clear he didn’t hold it against me.  I cleaned him up, cleaned myself up, and I asked him what his call time was.  “Early!” he laughed.

I asked him if he wanted me to leave, and he gripped my hand and said he really wanted me to stick around longer.  I said that was just fine, and asked if I could party with him.  He located my drug of choice on the table and asked if I smoked it,snorted it or shot it.  I asked for a line.  He said most girls he knew smoked it or shot it, and that his nose was so messed up that he had to smoke most of what he did.  He also told me he had overdosed when he had mainlined years ago, so he only had needles around if someone he called over liked doing something that way.  I asked him if he was scared of someone ODing in his bathroom.  He said he had enough money to hush people up if they did.

His cellphone rang.  “I’m sorry, sweetie.  I’ll be right back after I take this call.”  He went into the other room and I heard him in an argument with a very pissed off woman.  He returned and it was clear he was agitated.  “That woman is going to be the death of me.”  I looked at him quizzically.  “My girlfriend.  She’s jealous of EVERYTHING.  Even my kids.”  I told him I was sorry about the drama.  “This is why I like porn chicks.  They don’t give a shit and they don’t wanna marry you.  It’s just awesome sex and they’re off.”

By now, it was 2 AM.  We dropped some Ecstasy, and he just wanted to hug me.  And he would not shut up….it was irritating and endearing at the same time.  He spoke of his love for women, and how he needed women as much as he needed alcohol, but his 12 step program at least helped him control the alcohol.  That, and something called gabapentin.  He droned on about how “nice girls” were just glorified whores, so dealing with actual whores was a pleasure by comparison.  “The world is better off with girls like you.  You’re an honest fuck.  And you have a pretty pussy.  Get out of this business while you can.”

I’m not sure if he knew what all he was saying.  He was rich and famous and he had the luxury of not making sense.  Behind the bravado, I saw a man who seemed genuinely terrified of being alone, yet also terrified of leaving his house.  Although it was clear he was a volatile individual, he wasn’t necessarily the monster he has been made out to be.  He complied with the rules of my agency, and we had a nice time.  I do think at the time he considered himself indestructible.  As I was leaving, he asked me if I knew any girls I could send him.  He said all he needed was titties and a hole.  I half jokingly told him I wasn’t doing my agency’s job for him.  That made him laugh.  “You are a very smart girl.  Don’t ever change.”

I watched his descent into madness a couple years later, and it saddened me; that wasn’t the man I had seen in 2007.  I do think the shock of his diagnosis sent him into a free fall.  The first stage of grief is denial and I think he genuinely wanted to believe he was fine, and the people he kept company with would be fine as well.  Unfortunately, I don’t think he had any idea of what potentially exposing the women in adult industries to HIV could mean for their careers.  The current stigma against people in the sex industries means that if they contract HIV, they can’t do their jobs.  And if they get caught by police while doing their jobs, they could be arrested under California’s draconian criminal transmission laws.  A felony charge makes it really hard for a former sex worker or adult performer to find a straight job with insurance benefits.  I think it behooves Mr. Sheen to pay for the testing of the sex workers he saw from 2011 to 2014 and if they do test positive, to set up a trust contributing for their medications.

lambskin condomsWhich brings us to the million dollar question:  did Charlie Sheen maliciously expose dozens of sex workers to HIV?  I honestly don’t think so.  I doubt that he knew that the lambskin condoms he preferred can’t prevent HIV transmission.  I also think the antiviral medications he is taking have lowered the virus to an almost undetectable level.  As far as informing people of his status…I wouldn’t want to be a straight celeb saying they’re HIV positive for all the money in the world.  People will sell anything to a tabloid.  Although his allegedly not informing partners that he is HIV positive is wrong, if nobody so far has come up with HIV, how is this the public’s business?  Selling pictures of his medication to the highest bidder was wrong.  And if the person who did so had previously signed a nondisclosure agreement, it’s just as illegal as deliberately exposing someone to HIV.

As for the infamous open letter and the Today show interview…I don’t think writing it was his idea.  His PR team is shitting bricks right now and knows this is the only real defense he will have if he is named as a defendant in any potential lawsuit in the future.  He also has his children to think about.  He could afford to be honest and testify for Heidi Fleiss in 1996, because he wasn’t in the middle of two separate child custody cases.  Right now, he and his team are in damage control mode, so the spin doctors have to take advantage of the stigma against sex workers.  Otherwise their client would be forced to take responsibility for his own actions, which in Hollywood carries even more stigma than sex work does.

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