From 1984, this documentary features a variety of sex workers who plied their trade in Vancouver's West End.
Documentary: Hookers on Davie.
in Sex Work
Sex Work
Porn 101.
in Pornography, Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant interview.
From BitchMedia:
Recognize That Sex Work is Work: A Conversation with Melissa Gira Grant by Jamie J. Hagen
[…]
JAMIE HAGEN: In your book, you emphasize sex work is not about feelings, it’s about money. You recognize sex work as labor. This seems like an incredibly powerful shift in perspective that is outside of much of the current dialogue about sex workers.
MELISSA GIRA GRANT: I think that’s because most of the current dialogue about sex workers actually is not initiated by sex workers.
When people who talk about sex work have no grounding in experience, of course it’s going to go to those things where they believe that they have expertise. Some of those things might be their feelings about the existence of the sex industry.
I was just watching a very odd response go down on Facebook to the Belabored podcast I did yesterday. We spent 45 minutes talking about sex work as work, everything you just stated in your question, and it took about five seconds for some guy to jump in and say, “But what about the johns?” It’s a kind of derailing that I think happens in like every conversation about gender and sexuality pretty much ever!
It’s akin to “concern trolling.”
It is! It is like a concern trolling. “Your experience might be one thing, but what I’m concerned about is how I feel about it.” Unfortunately, that kind of derailing into the feelings of those people outside of sex work is the place where policy is made.
[…]
At one point in your book you address the fact that sex workers aren’t allowed the role of being a whole women by those who seek to save them. Within this framework, there isn’t much room for conversation about agency and empowerment for sex workers.
The whole woman thing comes from a confluence of narratives, whether that’s the media or even some of the feminist narratives around sex work. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at the religious right anti-trafficking projects. In some ways, those seem like a revival of the Promise Keepers and they talk a lot about restoration and mending the soul, this idea that the sex worker is like an injured person who can never be whole.
You find that on the left and on the right, secular and religious kind of tropes. So of course that’s going to pop up in the media. That’s how people imagine sex workers. If they’re not whole, then they don’t have voices and they need other people to speak for them because their voices and their stories are suspect. I think that’s what really lets the media off the hook. That’s why you see these tropes so persistently because it doesn’t even seem to occur to people that sex workers might have the capacity to dispute them.
In my academic work I look a lot at the question of women’s silence and agency. In the predominant discourse used today it seems you’re a sex worker (or prostitute) or you’ve been raped and therefore “victim” is your category.
And, well, it makes it very easy for the people on the outside to then create a roll for themselves right? So if there are people who are injured then they need a rescuer, they need a savior. You even see that in humanitarian work where on the one hand people might view themselves as coming in and empowering people who might need their help, but it’s still a very fraught relationship - power dynamics there are pretty intense.
The tropes around the injured woman who then needs our outside intervention to save her, they go far beyond sex work but they are one of the things I think in sex work that people least often question.
You can find links to her work and book, and read the rest of the interview, here.
More from the Duke student who performs in porn.
in Attitudes, Pornography, Sex Work
This story just won't quit. It appears that the USA has become fascinated with Lauren, so much so that she did an interview on CNN. Check it out, but keep in mind that her experiences and background are not necessarily representative of ALL the people who work in porn:
Freshman porn start speaks out.
in Attitudes, Gender, Pornography, Sex Work
This story has drawn considerable attention across the web, and has been quite polarizing. From XOJane:
I'm The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I'm Telling The Story In My Words. By Lauren A.
I am a porn star. I am a college freshman. You know nothing about me.
"But why would you do porn?"
People often ask me this question. They know I am a freshman at Duke University, and their shock and incredulity are apparent when the rumor they've heard whispered or read on a chat board turns out to be true.
However, the answer is actually quite simple. I couldn't afford $60,000 in tuition, my family has undergone significant financial burden, and I saw a way to graduate from my dream school free of debt, doing something I absolutely love. Because to be clear: My experience in porn has been nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling and empowering.
The next question is always: "But when you graduate, you won’t be able to get a job, will you? I mean, who would hire you?"
I simply shrug and say, “I wouldn’t want to work for someone who discriminates against sex workers.”
I am not ashamed of porn. On the contrary, doing pornography fulfills me. That said, I vehemently want to have my privacy respected -- and I ask that anyone who knows my real name respect the fact that I am only discussing this publicly because it was made a public matter when I was confronted by a fraternity member who chose to tell hundreds of other men in the Greek scene.
[…]
One of the facts Internet commenters have gotten very wrong is accusing me of participating in "rape fantasy porn." This is a horrifying accusation, but I absolutely understand where people are coming from. The site in question that I shot for is a rough sex website. That is how I perceived it at the time. I was not coerced or harmed in any way during the filming of the scene. Everything I did was consensual. I also stand by and defend the right of adult performers to engage in rough sex porn.
Everyone has their kinks and we should not shame anyone for enjoying something that is perfectly legal and consensual for all parties involved.
Of course, I do fully acknowledge that some women don't have such a positive experience in the industry. We need to listen to these women. And to do that we need to remove the stigma attached to their profession and treat it as a legitimate career that needs regulation and oversight. We need to give a voice to the women that are exploited and abused in the industry. Shaming and hurling names at them, the usual treatment we give sex workers, is not the way to achieve this.
For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. When I finish a scene, I know that I have done so and completed an honest day’s work. It is my artistic outlet: my love, my happiness, my home.
I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality. As a bisexual woman with many sexual quirks, I feel completely accepted. It is freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.
It is the exact opposite of the culture of slut-shaming and rape apology which I have experienced from certain dark corners of the Internet since being recognized on campus a few months ago.
Go read the rest here.
Winning bidder pays $42,000 for an hour-long cam session with dominatrix.
From Kinky.com:
The Art of the $42,000 Webcam Show
If webcams are the future of porn, they may just have had their moon landing. While the tech world hovers over the Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas, Maitresse Madeline, San Francisco-based domme and Kink.com porn director, has auctioned off a private hour-long webcam show for an astounding $42,000. Beat that, Bitcoin.
The bidding in the two-week long auction began in the hundreds of dollars, but quickly escalated to thousands — and then tens of thousands of dollars. The winner, who wishes to remain anonymous, will get a one-on-one webcam session with the femdom director.
[…]
A lot of people will think $42K is an incredible amount of money for an hour’s work — it puts you on par with Lady Gaga and Oprah in terms of earning power. What do you tell people who wonder how it can be worth it? Again, people are paying for something they don’t get in their normal life whether that’s a fetish that they are afraid to live out in real life or maybe their partner won’t give them what they desire and they look to cams to fulfill that missing part of their sexuality. People want to remain anonymous and they pay for anonymity. Some men are looking for financial domination and that’s what gets them off. Often it’s a chance to get to know your favorite performer. Whatever your reason is, it’s a custom made experience just for you in real time with no strings attached, whenever you want.
Read the rest here.
Retired sex worker can't get work.
From the Huffington Post:
Dear God, I Need a Job: The Struggle to Find Employment After Sex Work By Eric Barry, Comedian, writer and creator of the 'Full Disclosure' sex podcast and blog.
Right now I'm scared. I'm terrified. I have not had steady employment in over three years. I've burnt through my entire 401(k). I'm on food stamps. I've paid my last two months' rent on a credit card, and have no means to pay this month's.
For the life of me I can't seem to get a job. On average, I apply to about 10 a day. From copywriting gigs to my local grocery store, most inquiries go unanswered. For those jobs which I seem an impeccable match for, even garnering a form rejection letter feels like a win.
It hasn't always been like this. I used to work for Google. I used to work for Goodby, the most acclaimed ad agency in the world. I graduated from UC Berkeley in two and a half years.
At 23 years old, I was making $74,000 a year -- considerably more than my peers. But it never felt right. I wanted to think that my years of hard work and scholastic aptitude had led me to a place of both personal and monetary satisfaction, but the truth of the matter is that nearly every morning when my alarm went off, the first words out of my mouth were "fuck me."
[…]
You see, I was a sex worker when I was in college. I had sex with men for money. If I held back on my podcast -- if I was unwilling to express my own vulnerabilities, if I was scared or ashamed to reveal who I was -- what did it say about those who I was asking to do the same? Nearly every person I've interviewed who's been a sex worker is exceptionally intelligent, well-rounded, and ambitious. But they've all used fake names because they're terrified of what may happen should their personal identity ever be revealed. They're worried they may never find work if they leave the sex industry.
I wanted to change that. I decided to lose the pseudonym and come out publicly about being a straight male who was a gay escort. I wanted to show the world that sex workers can be educated, intelligent, well-adjusted people. People who went to Berkeley. People who worked at Google.
And now that information was out there, at one with the foreverness of the internet. And it was googleable. And that's why I think I was fired.
Go read the rest here.
Research: Life of a (UK) Call Girl.
in Sex Work
A couple of weeks ago, I posted some brilliant data from Jon Millward on porn actors and actresses (link here). He also conducted a fascinating study of escorts and call girls a couple of years ago. From his blog:
Life of a Call Girl: Fantasy vs. Reality
In the final weeks of 2011, I delved once more into the secretive world of the UK sex industry.
This time my focus wasn’t on men who pay for sex, but the women who supply it. So I reached out to hundreds of British escorts with one request: tell me about your life. And—on the condition that their words remain anonymous—they did.
[…]
A hundred questions about the escort way of life sprang to mind. How did they get into the business? Which are their favourite sex acts? Do they lie about their age, or to their friends and family about what they do? What is the craziest thing a client has requested? I wanted to strip fantasy from reality and find out what it’s really like to be a courtesan, an escort, a working girl, a prostitute…
Making Contact
There are roughly three kinds of ‘working girl’ in the UK. The first can be found on the street. She is the classic prostitute: a night-worker, selling sex to men who pass in cars and on foot. She has low prices and high risks. The next works in a parlour or brothel alongside other women and she does ‘incalls’—men visit her place of work and she provides them with a massage and a happy ending of one flavour or another. The last is the escort. She mostly does incalls but in her case the men flock to her apartment to indulge in pre-booked sessions of varying durations. The escort will either belong to an agency, which advertises her services, sends clients her way, and takes a cut of the money, or she’ll run everything herself—as an independent.
It was the independent UK escorts I decided I’d contact, for two reasons. My hunch was that I wouldn’t have much luck asking agencies to pass on my request to their catalogue of courtesans. I thought it would be better to bypass the middleman and reach out directly to the women I wanted to contact. The other reason was one of convenience. I knew that only a certain percentage of women I contacted would end up contributing to my research, so it was vital I get in touch with as many as possible—hundreds, in fact. I found three massive directories of independent UK escorts and set about harvesting their contact details. This is a good way of acquiring email addresses, but it isn’t strictly legal or respectable. In fact it’s tantamount to spamming, but I couldn’t think of any other option. I’d be as polite as possible in my email, make it clear that my intentions were strictly honourable, and hope for the best.
Go read the rest here.
And the resulting infographic (click to make larger):
Documentary: Meet the Fokkens.
in Sex Work
From the Huffington Post:
Meet The Fokkens: A Portrait Of 69-Year-Old Prostitute Twin Sisters Louise And Martine
By Sara C Nelson
It’s the oldest profession in the world, and this sexagenarian prostitute duo have apparently clocked up more than 50 years each between the sheets.
Identical twins Louise and Martine Fokken began their careers working for a pimp, but soon branched out to run their own brothel in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. They are also credited with setting up one of the first informal trade unions for prostitutes.
The 69-year-olds feature in Meet The Fokkens a documentary to be shown at New York City’s Film Forum on August 8. It is planned for general distribution thereafter.
Although Louise threw in the towel owing to arthritis two years ago, (“I couldn’t get one leg over the other,” she laments), Martine is still plying her trade.
As Louise explains in the film's official trailer: “She needs the money. You can’t live off a state pension.”
Additional clips feature one of the sisters gleefully exclaiming: “I can’t tell you how many tricks we’ve had – countless,” as the pair browse vibrators in a sex shop.
Another scene sees Martine applying lipstick while calling out to an unseen man: “I’m almost there, did you hear me?”
“Yes mistress”, comes the muffled reply, to which Martine nods, muttering “Good boy”.
Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands and the tale of these two sisters has promise of being a heart-warming, cheerful affair, in an industry with a less than savoury reputation.
The sisters are wholly candid about their profession, with Louise voicing her continued support to Martine: “You did the work, you’ve been a whore. You’ll never get rid of that name.
“They’ll always call you names, so be one.”
As a last tease, the trailer sees the pair hoisting their matching red dresses over their knees and dancing a jig outside their Amsterdam home with their faithful Chihuahua standing by.
"This is the story we wanted to tell," directors Gabriëlle Provaas and Rob Schröde said in a statement reported by ABC News.
In a statement on the film’s official website, Louise comes across as wistful for past times, reminiscing: "In the old days, the local copper would tap on the window if a girl was showing too much ankle, now the girls deal coke from their cubicles."
And the trailer:
Giving sex workers the support they need.
From the Guardian:
Sex workers need support – but not from the 'hands off my whore' brigade
Prostitutes need better allies than French men focused on their own sexual freedoms – but too often, feminists only make their lives harder.
By Selma James
The 343 French intellectual men who signed a statement – "Hands off my whore" – defending their right to buy sexual services has infuriated women and caused wide controversy. Not only does it tell us what they think of sex workers, but of women generally and particularly what they think they can get away with saying publicly at this moment in time.
I have just signed a feminist statement opposing France's attempt to criminalise clients. The proposed law would impose a €1,500 fine on those paying for sex, double for a second offence. My motive for opposing it is entirely different from that of these men – not men's sexual freedom but women's ability to make a living without being criminalised and deprived of safety and protection. Driven further underground, women would be at the mercy of both those clients who are violent and those police who are sexist, racist and corrupt and like nothing better than to persecute and take advantage of "bad girls". For this is the inevitable consequence of such laws. Sex workers are the first to suffer from any proposals that make it more difficult, and therefore more dangerous, to contact clients.
The fact is that sex workers have not been able to count on prominent feminists to support their long struggle for decriminalisation. Instead, establishment feminists have spearheaded attempts by governments to make it harder for women to work. Their stated aim is to abolish prostitution, not to abolish women's poverty. That is an old story and it is painful that it is now enhanced with feminist rhetoric: disguising its anti-woman content by proposing the criminalisation of men.
Read the rest here.
James Deen on being a male pornstar.
in Pornography, Sex Work
From Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com:
[...]
This isn’t the first time I’ve watched this man have sex and, if you’ve recently browsed online porn, chances are you’ve seen him before too. At 25, after just seven years in the game, he’s one of the most visible men in the industry. I think of him as a cold, brutish performer — but when he hears that I want to interview him, he comes right up with a warm smile on his face and juts out his hand to introduce himself. As I find when we go back to Kink’s headquarters to chat, he is thoughtful, self-effacing and polite. After a quick shower, he meets me in a conference room barefoot, wearing plaid pajamas and sipping from a bottle of apple juice. He looks more like a kid ready for a bedtime story than the man I watched hock a loogie on a bound, naked woman an hour ago. I notice that his eyes, which are usually upstaged by his aggressive performances, are such a delicate, piercing blue that it just might excuse his choice of pseudonym.
While periodically lifting his shirt to show me the fresh bug bite swelling on his chest, we talk about sex as art, Viagra, fake orgasms and why people should never try to have sex like a porn star.
[...]
The guys at the shoot were coming up to you and saying, “Oh man, you have the best job in the world,” which is something I’m sure you hear a lot. Is the job really as great as they think?
Mhmm, yeah, it is. Every now and then I’ll work with a girl who is doing this just for the money and doesn’t want to kiss, doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to do anything other than get her paycheck. But it’s so rare. For the most part, everybody that is in porn now really genuinely wants to do porn. Nowadays, girls will come out of high school and say, “I’m gonna be the next Jenna Jameson! I’m gonna be a sexual creature of desirability for the world and it’s gonna be amazing!” I think it’s awesome that’s happening. It’s very rare that I meet girls who are like, “I just need to get drunk. I’m just doing this because I have to.”
You have so many men, and women, making assumptions based on your movies about what normal or hot sex looks like. What does it feel like to be influencing the way that people have sex?
That’s way more responsibility than I want. We do stuff for the camera, we are having sex for the people at home, so not necessarily everything that we do feels good. I once did a magazine interview where they asked me for tips on how to have sex like a porn star and one of my biggest pieces of advice was, don’t. The key to sex is that you need to communicate with your partner about what they’re into and what they’re not into. If you’re trying to have sex like a porn star, you’re not — [a guy walks by carrying a giggling, limp girl in a bathrobe up the stairs]. I think somebody made someone come until they couldn’t walk. But, yeah, if you’re going to try to have sex like a porn star you need to make sure that the person you’re having sex with wants to be fucked like a porn star. I really hope I don’t have that responsibility of teaching people how to have sex.
Read the rest of the interview here.
The dark side of the porn industry.
in Pornography, Sex Work
From an insightful account of being a mainstream straight and gay gonzo porn director posted at AlterNet:
Why I Had to Stop Making Hardcore Porn By Sam Benjamin
[...]
But in due time, I came to learn that within the context of the heterosexual L.A. industry, while my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female “targets” were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.
[...]
What surprised me most though, was the fact that I found within myself a happy willingness to be violent, a willingness to degrade. Though my bosses may have ordered me to organize and record the scenes of degradation, I followed their orders, and not without pleasure. Something cowardly within me, an internal space, suffused with a weak kind of anger, felt satisfied when I saw a woman “take her punishment.” I clung to the sense of temporary empowerment I found through the bullying. Lust-colored aggression and the satisfaction of making “good money” guided me through scene after scene.
[...]
Gay porn, in fact, was so goddamn simple that it approached a type of Zen beauty. I mean, this was guys taking on guys, in every shape and form imaginable, for the most part in good humor and absent-minded lust. They may have stuck to roles of “tops” and “bottoms,” but in the dressing room, we all seemed equals, on the same team. Everyone laughed at me for being a straight guy shooting gay porn. Some tried to entice me to jump in front of the camera for kicks. But we all laughed about it. We all seemed like friends. The sadness and the degradation I had come to associate with my job, with videotaped sex for money, was suddenly absent.
[...]
Even so, I don’t regret my decision to work in porn. I regret how I acted within it, and wish that I had been driven more frequently by compassion than instinctive cruelty. But on its most basic level, pornography is neither evil nor noble. It is a sexual means to a solitary end, and for most, porn simply represents a harmless way to spend a half-hour: a bit of lust-inspired drivel that, done right, can serve a very practical purpose.
Moreover, within the world of heterosexual pornography, it’s clear that not every scene is degrading. Some are directed by women, others by alt-porn types who fancy a pink mohawk and maybe a bit of plot more so than your average everyday, run-of-the-mill gangbang; many films, happily, are simply produced by people who don’t seem propelled by anger. Some are just plain damn sexy.
At its worst, though, porn can represent with shocking clarity the inability of a modern society to empathize. We are living in an increasingly individualistic, over-privatized, fragmented society, and it's not going to get any better any time soon. Perhaps the character of our generation will be judged in how we react to the images that run before us on our screens: do we wish for the objects of our desire to be punished, humiliated? Or treated with respect? The answer is in our collective consciousness. It is up to us.
Read the rest of his account here.
More Stoya on porn.
in Attitudes, Pornography, Sex Work
From a Vice article on feminism and porn:
As entertainment, mainstream pornography is no more responsible for educating viewers about sexual health and etiquette than Lions Gate is responsible for reminding kids that it’s actually not OK to kill each other despite what they may have seen in The Hunger Games. It isn’t Michael Bay or Megan Fox’s job to mention in every interview that giant robots from outer space are fictional, nor is it the job of every pornographic performer to discuss the testing protocols we use or how consent is given before shooting. I do feel the need to discuss these sorts of things, and there are other performers like Jiz Lee, Danny Wylde, and Jessica Drake who seem to feel a similar need to highlight the context already available for adult films and provide further context.
But what about the wider reaching cultural effects of pornography? I can’t entirely discount the accusation that seeing a video in which I go from giving a blowjob directly to being pounded in the ass has inspired the occasional man to rudely shove his penis into his partner’s rectum without discussion or care. Whoever those guys are, they could probably use a refresher in the difference between TV and real life. In contrast to these butt-burgling-boogey-jerks are the messages I get every week saying that seeing my body or vagina portrayed as some kind of sex symbol made someone feel more comfortable about their own body. Also, the people who’ve said they didn’t realize that things like syphilis can still be transmitted even with a properly used condom and now see the benefit of regular testing and asking to see the tests of their partners in addition to barrier use.
As long as I continue to enjoy performing in pornography and the positive social effects seem to outweigh the negative ones I’m going to keep doing it, but let’s not pretend that performing in mainstream porn is any sort of liberating act for all womankind.
Read the rest here.
The reality of porn.
From the Scavenger:
What is ‘fake’ and ‘real’ in the sex industry?
Porn has hijacked our sexuality, according to anti-porn author Gail Dines. Her sentiment is not unlike that of other ‘raunch culture’ commentators – the sex industry is damaging because it represents ‘fake’ pleasures and ‘fake’ bodies. Both queer and feminist communities have produced porn/magazines/performances aiming to represent desires, bodies and acts that are ‘authentic’, ‘genuine’, ‘documentary’ and ‘real’. But is this line between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ so clear-cut? Zahra Stardust explores the issues.
by Zhara Stardust [bio in link at bottom]
As someone who works in the sex industry – in spaces that purport to be ‘real’ as well as spaces that are accused of as being ‘fake’ – it seems like there is no distinct line between the two. As someone who works with a body that is sometimes perceived as ‘real’ and other times read as ‘fake’ – it seems that the bodies which move across these spaces are equally fluid.
As someone whose pink bits have been airbrushed in magazines, but which have also been on explicit display; who performs both with and without make-up; whose ‘real’ name is my stage name, distinctions between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ don’t always make sense.
[…]
At the same time, websites that purport to depict ‘real’ or ‘redefined beauty’, often seem to be just as conventionalised as the mainstream genres they criticise. ‘Alternative’ nude modelling site Suicide Girls gives calculated instructions on their website about the kinds of photos, make-up and aesthetic sets they accept: ‘tasteful’, ‘picture perfect’ shoots with ‘a little bit of face powder and mascara and freshly dyed hair’, but specifically not ‘cheap wig[s]’, ‘top hats’, ‘stripper shoes’, ‘food’ or things that look ‘cheesy’, ‘gross’ or ‘creepy’.
Similarly, the ‘girl next door’ look of the Australian all-female explicit adult site Abby Winters represents an alternative to glamour photography, featuring make-up-less, ‘amateur’ adult models – but models are still required to cover up hair re-growth, remove piercings, and not have any scratches, marks or mosquito bites for the shoot in order to appear ‘healthy’.
Other sites I’ve shot for speak about the importance of models representing their ‘own’ sexuality, but then go on to qualify: “We might get you to tone down the eye make up a bit”, “Maybe don’t talk about politics”, “Lesbians don’t really use double-enders do they?” One company asked me repeatedly to stop wearing frills.
In doing so, these sites produce bodies of a particular class, size and appropriate femininity, which are marketed as ‘real’, but which are equally constructed, conventionalised and cultivated. This fear of replicating ‘cheesy’, ‘predictable’ mainstream porn means that depictions of ‘real’ sexuality are often similarly clichéd, albeit with a different set of aesthetics.
[…]
Sure, we may play with, embody and embrace hyper-femininity, but we are no less ‘authentic’, or political, or real, because our lip gloss is hot pink instead of ‘nude’. We don’t need to ‘tone-it-down’ to be any more queer, radical or ‘real’. Our bodies may look ‘unrealistic’ to you, but the labour of preparing for work gives erotic performers a sentient, working knowledge of gender performativity.
Much of the time, our work is far from glamorous. I return from work with smudged mascara, sticky lube, patchy fake tan, knotty hair, smelling like sweat and vaginal fluid – and the customers experience this up close and personal. My vagina certainly isn’t airbrushed when I get it out at buck’s parties, complete with shaving rash, discharge and blonde hair caught in my clit ring.
[…]
The irony is that you can never win – ‘appropriate femininity’ is unachievable. We are either too much or not enough. Our hyper-femininity is often so far beyond normative feminine ideals that it brings us social censure – our make-up is too thick, our heels are too high, our breasts are too large. As Rosalind Gill writes about women in media, our “bodies are evaluated, scrutinised and dissected” and are “always at risk of “failing.”
Read the rest here.
Vice: Boyfriends for Hire in Japan.
From Vice:
In Japan, it's not uncommon for successful women to pay attractive young men huge sums of money for a few cocktails and an hour of platonic companionship. VICE in conjunction with Schweppes sends correspondent Joel Cornell to Shibuya to explore this strange world and to find out if he can cut it as a professional boyfriend for hire.
Sex surrogacy.
Cheryl-Cohen-Greene
From AOL:
Sex Surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene, 68: I've Slept With Over 900 People
Cheryl Cohen Greene is a 68-year-old loving grandmother and cancer survivor who's been happily married for 33 years. In that time, she's slept with hundreds of other men in her conjugal bed, and transformed many of their lives.
Greene is a sex surrogate, treating patients with sexual difficulties through talk, touching and intercourse, for $300 per two-hour session. Greene's story has now reached hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the movie "The Sessions," about the treatments that she (played by Helen Hunt) provided journalist and poet Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), who was disabled by polio as a boy.
Paralyzed from the neck down and tethered to an iron lung, O'Brien sought Greene's services as a 38-year-old virgin who hoped to find some comfort in his own skin, and feel a little more deserving of love. Greene talks about her experiences with O'Brien, as well as several other of her patients, in her memoir An Intimate Life: Sex, Love, and My Journey as a Surrogate Partner, published in November.
Read the rest here.
And a video clip from CNN to go with the article:
Gotta say, I'm not so keen on the distinction between sex surrogacy ("serious work") and prostitution being made. Both are sex work, and both can meet a similar need for the clients. This just further stigmatizes prostitution as illegitimate and something to be looked down upon.
Stoya on the reality that isn't porn.
in Pornography, Sex Work
From her blog:
Pornography is entertainment. Pornography is a business. Pornography is not a substitute for sexual education. The scenarios in porn plots are not a guide to dating or picking up partners for casual sex.
I always figured that anyone old enough to be legally viewing pornography would be able to comprehend the difference between entertainment and real life. I forget that we don’t all understand that a movie like Forrest Gump is not the same as a History Channel documentary on the Vietnam War. I also forget that we don’t all understand that a History Channel documentary on the Vietnam War may not be entirely accurate. I forget that even though pornography is made to be entertaining and portray fantasies, there is a large void in practical sexual education that people sometimes attempt to fill with porn.
I want to believe that people use critical thinking skills. I want to believe that people see Brazzers/Manwin’s Get Rubber campaign and the safer sex/condom use speech at the beginning of Vivid’s DVDs. I want to believe that people watch the pre and post scene interviews included in Kink.com’s videos. I really want to believe that people don’t need to see these disclaimers and interviews to understand that what they are watching is done by tested, consenting professionals. Apparently, though, this comprehension is not always the case.
As adult performers, our job is to show up with a clean STI test and act/perform in an adult production to the director’s satisfaction. It isn’t our responsibility to take on the task of educating people about sexual technique or safer sex practices. Our job description does not include worrying about the people who can’t differentiate between what they see on a screen and what is acceptable behavior in real life, the same as it isn’t Bruce Willis’s job to go around reminding people that action movies are super cool but shooting actual people with real guns isn’t, or that calling 911 is a much better tactic than shooting someone full of adrenaline in the event of a heroin overdose. But some of us do…
There are adult performers and sex workers who talk about these things: When Nina Hartley recounts a recreational sexual encounter on her blog, she regularly mentions the use of condoms and gloves. Sometimes she mentions less standard practices, such as having a specific pair of boots for BDSM that don’t touch the ground outside so that they can be licked without concern for what they’ve walked through.Danny Wylde writes frankly about his experiences in sex work and openly discusses his thoughts and emotions. There are countless others who do frank interviews or keep blogs discussing topics relating to sex work, the adult industry, and sex-for-work vs. sex in personal lives. If someone actually wants to know about porn, there’s a wealth of information online from a variety of perspectives.
We just don’t get nearly the amount of traffic or visibility that a major news outlet gets. Our voices need to be louder, because we are talking.
A message to the Abolitionists.
Recommended reading from Tits and Sass:
What Antis Can Do To Help, Part One: Aiding Those Still in the Industry
I am a sex worker who hates the sex industry. As an anti-capitalist, I hate all industries. It’s not quite as if I’d prefer another system in place of capitalism. If I had to describe my ideology in positive terms, I’d call it fatalistic socialism, which I define as the belief that socialism would be really nice if we wouldn’t inevitably fuck it up. (Maybe I’m a Voluntary Human Extinctionist.) However, just because I have no solution to the current state of affairs and happen to be a misanthrope of the highest degree, doesn’t mean I can’t keep my hate-boner for capitalism in general and the sex industry in particular.
I’m not alone in my hatred of the sex industry, of course. Sex work abolitionist feminists* (see note below) — or as they are often known, the Antis — are right up there with so many religious zealots, conservatives, liberals, anarchists, and ecofeminists in the anti-sex industry brigade. They’re known as “Antis” because they’re also anti-porn, anti-prostitution, and anti-sex work in general (and typically anti-kink, anti-transgender, and even anti-penetrative sex as well.) A particularly perverse sort of second-wave radical feminists, Antis are a loose collection of mostly white, middle-class, able-bodied women from the Global North, the vast majority of who have never been in the sex industry. Still, they make it their mission to eradicate the industry by “ending demand” for ALL sexual services, so as to free ALL women from coercive male sexuality.
I find plenty of their theoretical points (if not their attendant practical solutions) agreeable to my own ideology. The sex industry is about satisfying male sexual desire at the expense of female sexual desire. Its continued existence is predicated on the economic and sexual exploitation of women, particularly queer women, trans women, poor women, disabled women, and women of color. But, just like I wouldn’t try to tear down capitalism and free all the “wage slaves” by burning down factories and leaving the workers jobless, I’m not going to destroy patriarchy and “save” myself and my fellow sex workers by scaring off—er, re-educating our sources of income. If sex work abolition succeeds, it will liberate millions of women (and men, third gender, and agender folks as well) right into homelessness. Further, in the interim, advocacy for abolition results in the kind of social marginalization and shitty public policies that exacerbate the discrimination and violence we as sex workers face on a daily basis.
Go read the rest here.
New research: Porn actresses.
in Pornography, Sex Work
In class, we discussed several of the myths about women who perform in porn. The following traits, among many others, have all been used to describe female porn performers:
- they suffer from chronic low self-esteem
- they are all victims of childhood sexual abuse
- they are drug addicts
- they are below average intelligence
- they are sex addicts/sluts
No research had directly examined these assertions until now.
The abstract from a new study of mainstream pornography actresses in Southern California, published in the Journal of Sex Research :
Pornography Actresses: An Assessment of the Damaged Goods Hypothesis.
The damaged goods hypothesis posits that female performers in the adult entertainment industry have higher rates of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), psychological problems, and drug use compared to the typical woman. The present study compared the self-reports of 177 porn actresses to a sample of women matched on age, ethnicity, and marital status. Comparisons were conducted on sexual behaviors and attitudes, self-esteem, quality of life, and drug use. Porn actresses were more likely to identify as bisexual, first had sex at an earlier age, had more sexual partners, were more concerned about contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), and enjoyed sex more than the matched sample, although there were no differences in incidence of CSA. In terms of psychological characteristics, porn actresses had higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, sexual satisfaction, and spirituality compared to the matched group. Last, female performers were more likely to have ever used 10 different types of drugs compared to the comparison group. A discriminant function analysis was able to correctly classify 83% of the participants concerning whether they were a porn actress or member of the matched sample. These findings did not provide support for the damaged goods hypothesis.
To read the full study click here (this is only available to UBC students!).
I am a sex worker.
in Sex Work
There's absolutely no doubt that sex work can be vile, cruel, and exploitative. Many women (and men) have ended up sex workers due to desperation, threats of violence, addiction, and lack of money, opportunity, and status. One needs to look no farther than the Downtown Eastside, as posted earlier this week. However, there are those who have chosen to pursue sex work of their own volition. And, despite all the stereotypes, they're much like everybody else. Historically, their voices have rarely been heard, but that's changing.
If the women in the DTES represent one end of the spectrum, women like these would represent the other end of that spectrum.