November’s topic at the Red Umbrella Diaries is “Bad Behavior”…and this month, we have some amazing performers scheduled for the November 4 performance at Happy Ending Salon – including Joanna Angel (who will be autographing DVD’s prior to the performance!). And for those of you playing along at home, the blog carnival this month has some good stuff – plus some links to good writing about some of the bad behavior that’s been going on in the sex worker blogging world!
“The final reader is much more entertaining and current than those previous. He slips in a reference to Prince, which I find in hindsight insidiously sexually repressive. He makes a joke about supporting the autonomy of sex workers through his tips. But he would never want his daughter to become one.
I do not laugh nor do I clap as others do. I do not chuckle even. My profession is such that I get paid very handsomely for my clients to, on occasion, degrade me in fantasy. On the job I do not kiss on the lips, I do not do greek, I do not ever take dick without a condom. It is only in the company of career poets that my boundaries are rendered irrelevant, where I am violated with out appropriate lubricant or protection.”
-from Poets, whores and the thin line between, by Anna Saini
“The Eastern European woman jogs over to a dilapidated utility closet and begins to take out various objects. “Zis one? Or zis one?” she takes out two shiny rubber masks and lays them next to each other. The man puts down his cigar and walks across the room. One mask has an attached blindfold, while the other has holes for the eyes, nose and mouth. “Come over here” she commands the King and he bows his head at her as she begins to stretch the mask. His cigar is smoldering in the ashtray and he walks out of the room momentarily, exiting in pants, returning casually, carefully in a red latex dress, dagger sharp black stilettos. With his black mask now comfortably snug, he picks up his cigar from the ashtray in one swift motion. He greets the women as nonchalantly as if he had been wearing the dress all day.”
“Bohannan founded his own teen sex education site, “Caitlain’s Corner”, after getting banned from the forums on both Student.com (where he was apparently known as “Agent 69″) and Scarleteen.com (where he went by “Caitlain” and was known for being a creepy pervert.) “Alexa” wrote in an entry on RealPrincessDiaries.com (which has all since been deleted) in December 2009 or January 2010 that “she” did, in fact maintain Caitlain’s Corner. The site was listed on the blogroll under, “Learn How to Fuck”– which is his idea of an age-appropriate way to title a sexuality resource for (as “Caitlain’s” Myspace page refers to “her” target audience) “pre-teens, adolescents and young adults.”
“But I do take exception when someone creates false credentials in order to dupe the gullible. I worked hard to get a doctorate in sex education and many of my colleagues, whether they have academic credentials or not, have dedicated years of their lives to learn about sexuality in order to provide good information. I feel a lot of anger when someone pretends to have done the work in order to make it seem as if they know what they’re talking about.
It also upsets me when people misrepresent sexwork. Usually, people make it seem as if it’s much a much worse career than it might be, especially when they want to ban it. But it’s also problematic when people glorify it because it creates a misrepresentation of the challenges and difficulties that sexworkers face. In turn, this romanticizes the profession and makes it more likely that people will decide to try it out without knowing how to protect themselves. Plus, sexworkers have always struggled with people who talk about them without listening to them. The motto “not about us without us” fits here- if you’re not a sexworker, don’t spout off about what it’s like. Listen to sexworkers and be an ally without speaking for other people. They can speak for themselves.”
-from The Downfall of Alexa Di Carlo by Charlie Glickman
