Impolite thoughts about sex, religion, politics and culture.
Even Jack Chick would have to admit that this is pretty adorable. Well, okay — Maybe not Jack. But anyone else would. This girl rocks out to Black Sabbath pretty amazingly. I can’t wait to see what she’s up to at 17 or so, when she has her own grrrrl-oriented techno-punk-metal band. The band is pretty cool, too.
As is true of a lot of people in the sex-positive community, I’ve been thinking a lot about Deborah Jean Palfrey’s death this past week. I didn’t know her personally, and never met her in person, so I can’t speak of her death in terms of personal tragedy or grief. But grief and anger are what I’m feeling, because Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s fate could have been written onto the lives of so many women and men. And the anger comes from the fact that it has, and it will be.
The real tragedy of her death, from where I’m standing, is not anything extraordinary about her story, but how common and familiar it is, to the point of being cliché. If the story of Deborah Jean Palfrey had been laid out in a novel or play or screenplay, I would be angry at having my time wasted by a writer who was unable or unwilling to rise above cheap hackery that was old and worn out in the days of the Victorian penny dreadfuls. But Palfrey was a real person, and it makes me sick and angry to think how often the lives of people who should live peaceful, untroubled lives are forced into old patterns.
I highly recommend that you check out the interview with Carol Queen that we’ve just put up at Sex in the Public Square. Carol is one of the most fascinating, intellectually alive people I’ve ever known, and although this interview was done in 2005, it’s an excellent look at her ideas and her history and if you haven’t read her already, it gives you a sense of her voice. Props to Sabrina Chapadjiev, who conducted the interview and published it originally in her ‘zine Cliterati. Below is a short excerpt from the interview to whet your appetite:
There are the good kinds of masochism and the bad kinds. The good kinds involve getting tied up in a barely-lit dungeon while someone torments the hell out of you with floggers, needles, or Wartenburg wheels. The bad kind includes reading anti-porn blogs and watching fundie preachers on TV out of some misbegotten urge to “inform yourself.” Or, apparently, going to see the new movie, 10,000 B.C. While I have engaged in the first two, I will not be engaging in the third, especially since Adam Lipscomb has already done so and blogged about the experience in painful detail. The poor lad sounds traumatized.
It’s no wonder it’s so hard to get a rational discussion going about sex workers. Even for genuinely interested, well-meaning people, it’s hard to get any solid information. Before you can even start talking about solutions to the problems that sex workers face, you have to first have to correct the ideas of what sex workers are. Any conversation in the mainstream media about sex workers starts out with icons forged from sensationalism and half-truths, as we’ve seen from the coverage of the Spitzer scandal lately. The images of trafficked junkies who need to be rescued or decadent young women who have had their souls twisted by their lives of deception sell papers and television time better than a nuanced picture full of shades of gray does.
I wrote earlier about Sex Work Awareness, the new activist group founded by members of $pread, SWANK, and PONY to address this very sort of issue in the public consciousness. They’ve just launched a new blog called Sex Work 101 devoted to answering the questions that most people have when they’re just starting to look past the surface. Audacia Ray writes that the idea of Sex Work 101 occurred to her at this year’s Women Action and Media conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Continue reading ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex Work….’
I think I have a crush on Miss Victoria X. It’s true that I don’t patronize pro-dommes, partly because of a budget that, in a particularly profitable month, might allow me to purchase the privilege of a scornfully lifted eyebrow from one as she passes me in midtown Manhattan on the way to beat the hell out of some corporate lackey at the Plaza. However, were I in the market, I think that Miss Victoria X would be on my list.
I found Miss Victoria via another tip from Sarah Jenny. Miss Victoria’s heart, it seems, has been melted by the plight of the poor employees at Bear Stearns, and she’s providing a special offer to employees, ex-employees, and soon-to-be-exes: if you buy a session with Miss Victoria, she’ll give a discount equal to the price of one share of Bear Stearns stock. When she first made her offer, BS stock was at two dollars, which wouldn’t buy you a latté at Starbucks; the discount has risen with the price of the stock, and now stands at $10.85. Miss Victoria, in her utter benevolence, has already come up with several potential scenarios for her clients:
-domestic service training (useful in preparing for future job as a janitor at Goldman Sachs)
-spanking combined with verbal chastising (”Caused!” -whack- “Sub-prime!” -whack- “Crisis!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Naughty!” -whack whack whack-)
-78 cane strokes (number chosen to represent the difference between Bear Stearns’ $80 per share book value and the actual current share price of $2)
-interrogation roleplay (I am Coughlin Stoia and you are Bear Stearns. Helpful in preparing for upcoming deposition)
-master/slave roleplay (I am JP Morgan and you are Bear Stearns. Now I own you)
Potential clients will be asked to arrive with $300 cash. The discount will be given in ten one-dollar bills, three quarters, one nickel, and four pennies. The client will receive them one at a time, and will thank Miss Victoria for her generosity after each.
This is great marketing, yes, but it’s also great satire. After looking over Miss Victoria’s blog as a whole, it got an immediate spot on my blogroll and on my daily feed. She has a really wry, sharp sense of humor about sex work and it never takes the snark into the smug self-satisfaction that characterizes a lot of blogs.
Sarah Jenny Bleviss brought this Editors’ Note in the New York Times to our attention, in which the paper admits to serious reporting errors in its coverage of sex workers. An entire two-thirds of the original article has been deleted from the article, which supposedly profiled three “high class call girls” in New York. It turns out, though, that two of the women were sex workers but not prostitutes:
Christians are a pain in the ass. Truly. I love seeing the roles flipped in this short videocast below. It’s from the 2002-2003 Australian satire show “The Chaser Non-Stop News Network.” Kudos to the Pink Tiger Institute. I fully support their work.
The last couple of weeks have brought more news coverage and public discussion of sex work than you usually get in a year. When Eliot Spitzer got nailed because of his hot dates with “Kristen,” the press swarmed onto the story like flies on shit. The beauty of a scandal like the Spitzer story is that it lets the media have the best of both worlds: they can use the sex to sell product as enthusiastically as Joe Francis having a fire sale, but at the same time, they get to stake the moral high ground by pointing an accusing finger at both the client and the sex worker. If Eliot Spitzer’s sin was the hypocrisy of hiring call girls after building a career for himself by putting their fellow sex workers in jail, it was little more than an insignificant blemish compared to the behavior of the press. A good chunk of the editors and writers at the New York Times should just get over their pretensions of respectability and hop on a plane for California, where they can become honest, hardworking pornographers.
As is typical of American discussions of sex, the Kristen/Spitzer scandal didn’t turn into an opportunity to talk about the realities of sex work, or the ways that our private desires diverge from our public declarations, or anything resembling a forthright discussion of sexuality. It was just another opportunity to obsess about sex as if it were a particularly ugly scab that just won’t stop itching. Nothing demonstrates that better than Audacia Ray’s recent post about her interview with MSNBC. The first question the interviewer asked her, point-blank, was: “Have you been a whore?” The supposedly more genteel, public-radio intellectual Brian Lehrer wasn’t much better in his treatment of Dacia when he interviewed her on the radio. The entire show had a leering tone to it, as if he too couldn’t wait to get the juicy details. And Renegade Evolution got pretty much the same treatment when the media showed up on her doorstep:
Continue reading ‘Sex Work Awareness: A New Voice in the Media Wilderness’
In the last 24 hours, there’s been a lot of discussion about Eliot Spitzer, trying to divine his motivations for visiting high-priced call girls and to look into whatever future he has politically. The feminist blogs are filled with speculation about what the hell his wife was doing standing behind him at the press conference and a lot of very predictable moral outrage over Spitzer’s “complicity” in the oppression of women by hiring a prostitute. In all the madness, there’s little talk of the woman who Spitzer hired. Below is a press release from four sex workers’ rights organizations asking the question that seems to get skipped over in all the chaos.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts
Shakti Ziller, Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), swank@riseup.net 877-877-2004 x 2
Audacia Ray, 718.554.1714
Sarah Bleviss, Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, http://www.desireealliance.org/
WHAT ABOUT KRISTEN?
New York Sex Worker Organizations Respond to Spitzer Scandal
New York, NY - In the last few days, Governor Eliot Spitzer has publicly admitted to being associated with an escort agency and is considering resignation. As sex worker advocates, we are concerned about the representation and fate of “Kristen” and sex workers who are being thrust into the spotlight because of the investigation into the Governor. We also share the widespread concern for Governor Spitzer’s family.
