Whatever mutations social media undergoes in my lifetime, I will always associate it with porn.

Let’s start at the beginning. From 2007 to 2011, I was an independent contractor in a Bay Area BDSM house; imagine a kinky version of Miss Mona’s in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. For me — a scruffy young punk with a very dirty mind — it was kind of like a femme finishing school.

My fellow pro-dommes (and pro-subs, and pro-switches) inspired in me a newfound gusto for all the things I had never liked about being a girl during my adolescence. And while I’ll admit that the context of performance and the reward of cold hard cash were my first motivations in constructing a feminine persona of grace and charm, I eventually amplified my sexual id through the gleaming sound system of this new persona.

I called her Tina Horn (after fictional teenage temptress Audrey Horn of Twin Peaks, and soul survivor Tina Turner). Sex work permitted me to invent a fantasy character I could embody, and it was thrilling. I became well known for my intelligence and my healthy ass, and I was very successful.

The house had a simple website, and some presence on an online forum for sex work. With a couple of fetish gear pictures and a few hundred seductive words, I advertised time with Tina Horn to the world. I emailed with a few of my clients to arrange appointments, but mostly we booked over the phone.

It never would have occurred to me in a million years to give Tina Horn a Facebook page, or even to keep a blog. Rather, I created an ironclad persona that dematerialized and rematerialized at the discretion of my clients. This was part of the sustainability of this work. Intimacy with the Real Me was not on the menu.

Including fallibility. Many tools of the sex trade that I learned in that house have stuck with me for life. One that really stands out? “Mistresses don’t get sick.”

The house had a rule. If your coworker was ill, and you had to cancel her appointments for her, you never told her client the true reason. We made excuses: the house had accidentally double booked her, or, “We’re so sorry, but unfortunately she has unexpected, important business to attend to.”

Our boss had decided — around the time she started the house in the mid-nineties — that it was important to maintain the mystique of the Mistresses. Our clients didn’t need to know we were fallible. (Or that we were grossly snotty.)

Let’s Dismantle The False Dichotomy Between Porn And Erotica

This made complete emotional sense to me. Tina Horn did not exist outside of the walls of the house. I was safe to explore dangerous zones because it all happened within a very structured and heavily boundary-ed system.

The original “Tina Horn” was like a robot. You put a coin in her slot, so to speak, and she powered up to perform a custom dance for you. She was clever, she was naked, and she tied you up. You could spank her and she would squeal with delight. She would totally kiss other robots. She cared about your problems and she had a penetrating gaze that looked deep into your soul. When you left the house satisfied and several pounds lighter, Tina Horn powered down. Which meant that I could eat a sandwich, giggle with the other girls, count my money, do my paperwork, change into my bike shorts, and leave the house.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.

After a few years of working in this house, I started performing in porn. Filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston and Madison Young hired me for video projects just like my clients had hired me for private BDSM services. I kept the name Tina Horn. But the way I related to Shine and Madison was not the way I related to my clients — the camera was now the proxy for the client.

One of the defining characteristics of the queer porn genre is the behind-the-scenes performer interviews. The directors who were hiring me expected me to answer tons of questions about my personal sexuality on camera. In fact, it often felt that those documentary interviews about gender, desire, identity, and community were as much, if not more, the actual point of the films, rather than the hardcore sex.

This was around 2010, and people were starting to get really serious about Twitter. I thought Twitter was fucking stupid. It felt like a short-form promotional tool that I didn’t think I needed.

Please remind me to put “hermetically sealed humiliating seduction revenge scenes” on my list of services #JessicaJones

???@tinahornsass

It seemed “social” in the worst kind of way — a distillation of fair weather friendships designed as a vehicle for narcissism. Then some porn friends tricked me into joining it by creating an account for my ass. They shared the password with one another. The first tweets of @TinaHornsAss were collective jokes. My friends knew I would use the tool once there was an ironic distance.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.
Click To Tweet

How could anything I said ever be truly serious, when it was couched within the raunchy concept of tweets emerging from my butt hole? And they were right. Eventually, I took over the account and started tweeting in earnest. Now that I understand the essential role that Twitter plays in being a public figure — now that I’m a journalist, writer, media-maker, and modern prankster — @TinaHornsAss is still the account I use.

And the irony remains that even after almost five years, Twitter and I still don’t really jive. It still feels like an unpaid obligation. I can’t ever seem to find my voice. I struggle to balance ethics and mediate my own love of attention. I agonize over 140 characters: concision is not exactly my forte.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me. In a room, I feed off the sexual energy of another person. Without that nervous system interaction, I grow exhausted and burn out quickly. Twitter makes me feel that way, too. It doesn’t give me anything I want. Sometimes my followers and I interact, but at this moment I have 7,781 followers, and I interact with maybe 50 of them — mostly colleagues — and occasionally fans. Unlike a client in the BDSM house, I can’t look them up and down and read them. I don’t know how to be Tina Horn to them.

Like sometimes you gotta drink that much whiskey and wear that much leather and frown that hard to be a fucking woman in this world

???@tinahornsass

In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkov reminds us that the point of all Internet activity is to be social. In my concept of her, Tina Horn doesn’t socialize. Or rather, she does in controlled environments. When I socialize with another queer porn performer, I do so as The Real Me. But when @TinaHornsAss talks to, say, @AndreShakti, we are interacting with the knowledge that our fans can voyeur, and that this interaction is good for business. But that doesn’t give me the social satisfaction of human connection — it makes me feel like I’m putting on a promotional show. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is good for business, or that it’s meant to satisfy anything other than my ego.

But I learned to use Twitter. I learned to give out the information I wanted people to know. I basically tweeted any time I felt “on” as Tina Horn — when I was shooting a scene, or attending an event “as” Tina.

An artist friend teased me that I only tweeted when I was in public at porn events. I looked at her and blinked. “That’s the only time Tina Horn exists!”

Nobody else seemed to think this was reasonable. They were tweeting their impulses, their dark emotions, their vitriol, when they were going to sleep. The closest intimacy I felt comfortable sharing was how I liked my coffee.

But Twitter wanted more from me. Twitter wanted to know as soon I was set up at my desk in the morning. It wanted to know what I was eating. It wanted my funny observations, my insight. It wanted quotes from what I was reading. It definitely wanted my vacations.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me.
Click To Tweet

Everything became potential fodder to contribute to the public character development of Tina Horn. I felt I wasn’t permitted to be The Real Me — even during my most cherished private moments, like while reading a book or masturbating or working out. Those un-Tina Horn moments needed to contribute to the Tina Horn brand, to keep me relevant, to keep people wanting to work with me and hire me.

 

I tried to teach myself to get pleasure from it. Like the occasional dopamine rush of seeing my work retweeted by someone I admire. Once I posted a dream I had about Samuel Delaney, and he responded with a story about Tim Curry. That felt magical, like a real connection with a distant icon.

Trying to find pleasure in social media kind of felt like trying to develop a taste for cigarettes even though they made me nauseous. As we all know, cigarettes make you cool and help you relate to others. And some people really take to them. But there’s probably a reason they make me nauseous. I’m not built for cigarettes, and I’m not suited to Twitter, and I don’t really understand why I should condition myself to need something that feels bad for me.

I am aware that my aversion may simply be a defense mechanism. It is possible that I have convinced myself that if Tina Horn doesn’t have an inner life, I am protected from the horrible things society tells me will happen to me because I’m a whore. That my father will be disappointed in me, that I will be shut out of the jobs I want, that I will lose my ability to have intimate orgasms, that I was just doing it for the attention.

literallyme

???@tinahornsass

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

And yet I tweet on, because I still believe in the potential, and because I am afraid of becoming obsolete. But I long for the time when I was allowed my simple private moments; when I could count my $20 bills, put on my street clothes, and just go home.

Warning: graphic sexual assault content

I picked up on something in his text messages and emails — they were demanding, bossy, and paternalistic. This was a client who had been attempting to contact me since October, but I decided to ignore him. The client kept contacting me. He was persistent. I’m a sex worker, and as such, I confront decisions regarding safety and sanity and money on a fairly frequent basis. The client’s vibe was just too weird, even for me, a veteran in the field of absurdity, social outcasts, and patriarchs desperately reaching for the touch of a young girl. Unsure how to placate his aggressive energy, I finally told him that I had left the business.

But he found my advertisements online. “Everywhere,” he wrote to me in a text message three months later. “It’s clear that you’ve returned to the industry.” In the lull of the Christmas season, clients were feeling broke and weighing familial obligations — with the holiday season’s moralism, I was left with an empty schedule and a hungry wallet. I agreed to meet with him.

The man was very old. How old, I couldn’t tell. He had crow’s feet in his eyes and a potbelly that threatened to pop the buttons of the Ralph Lauren polo that lurched over his waistline. Fine white tufts receded into his hairline; dandruff coated the shoulders of his black blazer.

He wrapped his arms around my waist on the suede sofa in front of the TV and offered me a glass of wine; he ran his fingers covetously between the small slice of space between my stockings and my naked upper thigh. As I drew closer to him, I smelled something rancid. His musky underarms combined with the smell of feet, urine, cum, a day of hard work at the office, and god knows what else.

In a feeble, but valiant attempt to hold back my disgust, I traced the surface of his crinkled khakis. He took my small hand in his, kneading it like the soft limb of a Raggedy Anne doll, and explained to me that he was a dominant. That I should call him sir. But that before we began, he would like to know what my limits were. I told him I was extremely open, but for now the most important thing for him to know was that I needed him to use a condom when we had sex.

“Well, as we explore the world of BDSM together, we’ll see what your limits really are and if I can convince you otherwise.” A chill went down my spine, but I left the hotel room that day in one piece, with several hundred dollars extra in my pocket.

On St. Patrick’s Day, he contacted me again. I remembered how unpleasant he had been. I had just spent an obscene amount on advertising, and in my unrealistic state of financial mania, I agreed to meet with him. I had survived once. I had survived a lot. I had seen a lot. No one had fucked with me yet. “You can handle this,” I told myself.

He sent me a text message with his room number, and when I arrived, I rapped my cold knuckle against the door cautiously. He led me back to the suede couch where he had sat on my face months prior and we chatted, I’m not sure what about. I asked him vague questions about his business trip and how he had been. I giggled at the right times and smiled at others, trying to hold eye contact without collapsing like a house of cards. He said he had been to Tokyo and London. He said none of that mattered now, that this was his last stop, and that he had been looking forward to seeing me for months. He was so happy to see me. I couldn’t say the same.

I swallowed hard, clinked my glass to his, and said, “Well, cheers to that,” and opened my painted lips like a broken toy doll. It was the only thing I could think of to say. I held my breath to avoid inhaling too much of the scent that my memory had done such a good job of suppressing until now. He pushed the hair out of my face and informed me that we were going to the bedroom. I tried to push away my nausea. I thought about the money at the other end of this, grabbed his hand, and with put-on girlish excitement, skipped to the bedroom, his sloth-like body in tow.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

I quietly complied. Wordlessly I unbuckled the straps of my favorite sandals, shimmied out of my skirt, and took off my sweater. I paused when I got to my bra and panties. Staring like a hungry wolf, he sat opposite me, wet circles of sweat swelling beneath the armpits of his dress shirt. My eyes met his, his pupils dilated, his hairy arm snaked across the firm mattress, and with two stubby fingers he pushed my sternum backwards into the gilded Egyptian cotton.

As he fastened restraints onto my ankles and wrists, I inhaled deeply and meditated on all the possible violence that could occur at this moment. I made some jokes and made him laugh because I knew the show wasn’t anywhere near being over yet. He brought out a huge Hitachi magic wand and buzzed its circular surface up and down my pelvic bone, where he seemed to think my clit was located. I managed some soft whimpers and feigned arousal. “Oh, he’s getting excited now,” my client said, stroking the bulge buried in his gray boxer briefs.

Fair enough. Hopefully that meant we’d be done soon. I arched my back into the mattress and opened up my legs, scanning down my naked body to the bedside table, where I’d conveniently placed several condoms in varying sizes. He started humping me, holding my knees into my chest. I got breathy, hoping to eschew any opportunity to prolong the session. He thrust into me with all his force. His pinky-sized dick slid up and down the lips of my tragically wet pussy. With increasing aggression, he throttled my pelvic region, finally sliding his uncovered penis inside me.

I placed my feet on his soft chest and, with all the force I could muster, kicked him backwards. He stumbled back a few steps before falling to the ground. “That is not okay,” I said, breaking with my script. “This cannot happen without a condom.” I spoke as if I was scolding a small child.

“This is not a joke. It’s my safety. There are condoms right there. If you would like to have sex with me, you need to wear one. I have absolutely no problem leaving.”

He looked at me, and then down at the floor, saying nothing. He looked back at me and kissed me. Pulling on the canvas restraints that held my ankles to my wrists, he flipped me over onto my stomach. I tumbled onto a heap of butt plugs that he had bought just for the occasion. Then I felt him on top of me. The long, yellowing nails of his hobbit fingers gripped my waistline, pulling me closer to his body, dragging my back into his sweating, hog-like body in hollow claps of slapping flesh. I felt something in my asshole. Maybe a finger or a butt plug. Something — I just wasn’t sure what.

Then I realized he was inside me. I realized he was anally raping me. I lay there looking at my nail polish, red like cherries in the spring on the white sheets. I stared beyond the ends of my long lashes and felt my nose crunch into the down pillow. I wondered if I was right — was he really inside me? Was this really happening? How could he be doing this when literally seconds prior, I had specified that under no circumstances was he to enter me without a condom?

I knew that if I wanted to, I could kick from behind. I knew I could get him on his back and even probably choke him if necessary. I had been taking kickboxing and self-defense classes and knew that the right calculated slither from beneath him could foil the violent desire of his pinky-sized, but all-powerful, penis. Completely clearheaded, I envisioned the exact movement of my limbs that would render him powerless. I knew I could push him off the bed, choke him, and throw a fairly decent punch.

But if I resisted, I mused, what would happen? If I was going to get him off me, it might mean injuring him. What would happen to me, a young girl working in an illegal trade, if I hurt this man? Scratches or marks were courtroom collateral that could be held against me. If I fought, I would be leaving without compensation. If I fought, he could retaliate and rape again, or worse. If I fought and ran into the streets, soaked by green beer, I could be followed by civilians seeking to save me from sex-trafficking, or worse, vigilante justice seekers looking to avenge my John for his injuries.

If I fought, I could be arrested. New York state laws explicitly exclude prostitution from rape protection laws. I didn’t think today was a day I would lose my life, and had I been at real risk of being murdered, I thought to myself, the situation and the risks incurred by my potential resistance would carry a far different weight.

I remembered the expressions on the faces of the doormen as I entered. Everyone knows what it means when a beautiful young girl in a trench coat and red lips walks into an upscale hotel room for exactly one hour and then leaves. I remembered the silence of the middle-aged tourists in the elevator, how they had looked at me, the ambient tension brought to the surface by a whore’s presence.

I had no choice but to summon my most convincing performance of clueless high-school girl and as I emitted the perfectly crafted moans of fake pleasure, I prayed to whatever god does or does not exist that my client would cum quickly and that all of this would soon be over. It was only a few seconds before I felt his hot cum inside me. After his final gurgle of exhausted ecstasy, he rolled over beside me. The liquid trailed the inside of my ass, and slowly drizzled down my perineum.

Without pause I hopped off the bed and flew as quickly and gracefully as possible into the bathroom to wash myself off. “Wow, that felt great,” he exhaled into the comforter. I wondered if he was aware that he had just raped me. “I love fucking girls in the ass. It’s almost the same as the other way; it’s just a little bit tighter. I don’t have the right size dick that’s ideal for ass fucking, but I sure do love it.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah that felt really good,” I half yelled from the marble bathroom. I looked at my naked body in the mirror. What the fuck was happening? I didn’t have time to think about it. I only had time to make sure I came out of this alive. “Sweetie, can you bring me a hot towel, while you’re at it?” he called.

“Sure thing!” I pushed away his moldy bag of toiletries and turned the hot water on. I took a deep breath, putting the fluffy hand towel under the lukewarm water.

“Here you go,” I said, sweeping off the remaining cum from his crotch with the white linen. I smiled because I felt like I had no choice. I giggled girlishly when he asked me to lie down and snuggle. I looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. We still had 40 minutes left of session. I sighed and laid my head on his heaving body because I felt like that was what I had to do. I didn’t have anything to say and I wasn’t in a position to make pleasantries. I waited for him to speak. He pinched my nipples and told me about his wife. I tried to keep breathing.

He went off about how he likes to take girls to Atlantic City for long weekends. He told me he liked playing with me, and he would write a review of my services; he would take me out to dinner. “That sounds nice,” I said, sweetly, smiling and batting my eyelashes as if it was possible to speak to god through the performance of beauty and perceived feminine purity.

I have never felt so powerless as I did within this moment. I cannot explain to you how it feels to have all of your human rights and physical and emotional strength eclipsed by the existence of bureaucratic structures, which quite literally do not recognize your personhood. At some level, I’m not upset that this happened. I’m not fazed by the fact that sex workers get raped, and that this time, I was one of them. I know this happens. At some level, I expected it to happen to me at some point. For me as a sex worker, the prospect of rape is a fairly mundane factor in the extremely dangerous and illicit work I do.

I enter every room ready to be killed. I meet new clients and I imagine what they can do to me and how I am going to escape. I look at everything they do. I watch their grip on glasses of wine and the way their eyes flicker from my body to the bed. I think about every word they send me in text messages and emails. I look at the speed of their wrists when they unsnap my suspenders or unzip the flies on their pants. I listen to the tone they use when they answer the door and when they suggest that we “get more comfortable.”

I reach for their dicks when they are halfway inside me to make sure that they haven’t slipped the condom off. I do this even with my regulars who I see on a weekly basis. I do this with clients who have told me their whole life stories, who I know everything about, clients who I actually enjoy seeing. I want to trust them, but the sad reality is that, due to the systems in place, I can’t afford to relax into the illusion of trust and safety.

Sex workers are soldiers. We never, ever get to turn off. If you don’t understand this, then you are fundamentally misunderstanding what makes sex work “work” rather than play. Period.

I most certainly don’t show up to work thinking that I’m about to have a great time. I’m providing a service at my own risk. No one even has to say that to me for me to know it’s true that women get raped every second of every day, and that even those who aren’t sex workers have trouble achieving justice. From day one, women are told that there are good girls and bad girls, and bad girls have it coming to them. The parameters of our existence as femme-identified people and women are strictly policed with ambient threats of persistent violence

Though I am emotionally equipped for the plausibility and total likelihood that I will be raped or even murdered at work, there is no amount of conviction, physical strength, or intuitive savvy that can protect me as a person who leads a criminalized existence.

Because I am a sex worker, even though I am a fairly privileged sex worker, I do not have the basic rights that all human beings should. Yes, assault is assault and rape is rape, and the stakes are high for every single person who encounters abuse and assault. We can acknowledge that all women experience these things, but it’s simply not true that sex workers have the same experience with sexual violence that other women do.

The part of me that walks away from this rape scenario knowing that it was a matter of time is, yes, deeply fucked up. My stone-faced blasé-ness in the face of this violence is an internalized victim blaming. But more than that, it’s the result of systemic injustice that is applied to all victims of sexual violence, and especially to violence against sex workers.

I know too many women who have been hurt. There’s a serial killer who targets sex workers in Long Island, there’s a serial rapist who calls girls to his house in New Jersey to then rape them. I’ve heard stories of police actually laughing in the face of workers who report violence on the job. I’ve been to vigils full of crying women and trans people and LGBTQ providers, many of whom are acquaintances or friends of mine. This happens, and it happens fairly frequently. I see the stories in my email inbox, hear about it from my loved ones; I see it on the news. I know that it happens, but more importantly I know that, in the majority of cases, no one gives a fuck.

Why? Because we’re whores. Because everybody knows we had it coming. Because we could have chosen a less dangerous profession like a retail job or a waitress position in lieu of sex work. Because a whore is a woman who has plummeted from her celestial virgin state to the rock bottom, to the sewers of despicable human existence. A whore’s life is meaningless. She and the pain she carries are irrelevant, save for the moment when her soft lips cradle your hardening dick. These ideas are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they need to change.

Serial rapists and murderers often target sex workers, with full knowledge that those workers are the most vulnerable due to their lack of protection under the law, before moving on to target other women. It’s almost impossible to get real statistics on the subject of sexual violence against workers due to the criminal nature of our work, but estimates say that those in the sex trade have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. There are numerous examples of murderers and rapists who target sex workers — but what’s troubling is that, more often than not, we don’t take this violence seriously when it is recounted by those who experience it first hand. What’s troubling is that we know this information and have known it for quite some time, yet the powers at large begrudgingly refuse to acknowledge that it is necessary for serious change to occur.

I don’t feel like I can afford to be silent. As a person with privilege, I worry about the hundreds and thousands of sex workers who will be murdered and raped in the remainder of 2016, and I know that we are very, very far from achieving justice — even if decriminalization happens, that does not compensate for the fact that I will be living with this for a long time.

I will be thinking about all the women I don’t know who will be meeting with this man. I will be wondering about all the other women he says he has met with and wondering if they were also raped. I will be wondering if he has killed anyone before. Even as I write this I wonder what the consequences are of speaking out — what happens when my mother googles my name and finds this? What happens if my rapist finds this? What happens if the police see this? What happens when I want to apply for some normal ass job and this article pops up? What happens when x y z?

I don’t have any answers or brilliant ideas. I can’t sit here and allow myself to get tangled in a web of criminal paranoia while other, less privileged members of my community get abused, threatened, killed, raped, and jailed. What I can do, however, is seek healing in telling you my story, and hope that within it, you see some refraction of humanity’s struggles and joys that are worth fighting for. I can hope that you will understand that I am a person whose pain is real, and that there are millions of others just like me, and that this will encourage you to re-examine your ideas about sex work and join us in the fight for our rights.

It’s been nearly two months now since the “adult content” ban went into effect on Tumblr, but a handful of key things have not changed.

On December 17, 2018, Tumblr officially outlawed all content considered to be pornography in order to comply with the SESTA/FOSTA laws—laws that are allegedly supposed to combat human trafficking, but instead just make life exponentially more difficult and dangerous for sex workers.

According to a former employee, Tumblr’s new policy was influenced by the fact it had such a massive child pornography problem that Apple removed the Tumblr app from its stores, but the machinations were were already in motion months earlier due to the fact that Verizon—the parent company that owns Tumblr—couldn’t sell ads next to all that porn.

The first thing that any Tumblr user will tell you about the result of this ban is either that there are just as many porn bots on the social media platform as ever or that there are just as many Nazis. All the porn bot creators had to do was change the language their bots used and/or tag posts with “sfw” (safe for work) to avoid the wrath of the wildly ineffective, thrown-together auto-flagging program. Meanwhile, the average Tumblr user has had to put up with posts getting flagged when they have absolutely zero sexual content, but apparently have something in them that looks like a “female-presenting nipple” to a poorly-constructed algorithm.

Many users vowed to leave Tumblr when the ban was announced, and many did. Sex workers and body positivity blogs in particular have been affected. I myself have been on Tumblr since 2012 and credit the communities there for my education in everything from white privilege to non-binary genders to fat positivity. That last issue is of special interest to me as a woman who has gone from being thin or at least “not fat” in 2012 to being solidly fat today in 2019.

Like many people, I gained weight in my 20s due to a natural change in metabolism that happens to the vast majority of humans. Today, at 210 pounds and (almost) 5’5”, I’m a size 16, which is actually the average U.S. pant size for cis women. However, I am “obese” according to my BMI and my hanging belly and double chin would have me labeled as such by any of the mainstream news networks who love to panic about the so-called “obesity epidemic” in America.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to be a fat woman in this country, and increasingly in many other countries around the world. Over the years I’ve experienced a stark difference in the way I’m treated by loved ones and strangers alike, not to mention by myself. Confronting the hateful voice in my head—placed there by a profoundly fat-phobic society—has been one of the greatest challenges of my 20s.

My biggest support in this battle against self-hatred has been other fat women. If it wasn’t for Tumblr, I don’t know where I would have found such a strong community around loving and accepting the body you have, at any size. Part of learning that acceptance has been viewing fat, naked bodies.

Even before the “adult content” ban, I didn’t see much nudity on my Tumblr dashboard, pornographic or not. But most of what I saw was people sharing their naked bodies in a celebratory manner. Whether they were dim, blurry selfies or professional photo shoots, Tumblr users exposed me to naked trans bodies, naked bodies of color, naked non-binary bodies, and naked fat bodies. Sometimes all at once. All were wonderful, and all worked to support those marginalized people who were left out of magazines, ads, and even mainstream pornography.

“Look, these bodies exist too, and they’re beautiful,” said every naked nipple, no matter the gender of the person they were attached to. For me, the fat bodies were a wonderful comfort, and I hoped to some day gain the courage to display my own fat naked body, unashamed, to help other women like myself learn to love and accept themselves.

Now I can’t. And since December 17, 2018, I don’t see naked fat bodies anymore. Ever. Tumblr was the only place I saw them before that date. Where else can I find them? I certainly tried Googling “fat naked bodies” for this article, and you can imagine what I found. Pornography featuring fat women is nearly always fetishized, which is not what I’m looking for. And I don’t want to have to wade through any kind of porn site in order to see a body like mine. I miss being able to see those bodies casually, unexpectedly, on Tumblr, as though it were as normal as a video of a cat batting things off of a counter.

And it’s not just full nudity. Due to the terrible quality of Tumblr’s nipple-detecting program, any photo containing something that looks round and fleshy tends to get flagged. I don’t even see fat bodies in bras and panties anymore. It doesn’t help that many of the body-positive blogs that posted these photos left Tumblr out of protest or because they knew their blogs wouldn’t be able to function anymore.

I reached out to three fellow fat women who had fat-positive Tumblr pages or used a Tumblr blog to promote their sex work to find out how they’re doing and/or where they are now.

Satine La Belle

Satine La Belle, a sex worker who uses multiple social media platforms to sell nude photos of herself for income, has been the most affected. She abandoned her Tumblr account once the “adult content” ban went into effect because she felt like it would be a waste of time to continue, especially with how overzealous the nudity-detecting program is.

“I felt like there was no point in having another platform where I would have to risk my hard work if there was anything sexual, whether that was a nipple or just sex positive sentiments,” she said.

Nearly all of Satine La Belle’s content on Tumblr was flagged before the ban even officially went into effect, including some of the content she used for her livelihood.

“I released a nude that is normally only for purchase on Tumblr before the change for my fans. It was flagged right away and I notified Tumblr about being able to have titties out until the 17th. It was then no longer flagged for a little bit.”

Predictably, the ban has had an impact on La Belle’s ability to make money as a sex worker, and she’s had difficulty making that up on other platforms.

“It has gone alright for me, but I have found it much more difficult to find clients on Twitter then I had on Tumblr. I think it is because Tumblr was a great safe space for nudity, nude art, porn, etc. Since it was more normalized there it was easy to find clients who knew what they wanted and were ready to pay.”

Satine La Belle is on Twitter, Instagram, and DeviantArt. You can also send her some money on her Ko-fi account.

Bec Mae Scully

Bec Mae Scully is the owner of the body-positive Tumblr blog Chubby Bunnies, which was hit so hard by the ban that the entire blog is now hidden behind a content warning. Attempting to go directly to the blog lands you on a page that says “This Tumblr may contain sensitive media,” then directs you to your dashboard where you can view it on the right-hand sidebar. If you don’t have a Tumblr account, you can’t view it at all.

Chubby Bunnies boasts a couple hundred thousand followers and has been a very active account for 10 years. Since the ban went into effect, Tumblring just hasn’t been the same for Scully.

“The ban has affected my interaction with followers a great deal,” she told me. “With close to a couple of hundred thousand followers who would usually be interactive daily with submissions, likes and reblogs have now disappeared.”

The lack of interaction has saddened Scully, but it also interferes with her ability to help the people that Chubby Bunnies is reaching out to.

“As silly as it might sound to some, Tumblr in a lot of ways saved my life,” said Scully. “At least 6 beautiful souls have said that because of the blog it helped them not end their life.”

Interaction with followers isn’t the only part of Scully’s blog that was disrupted by the ban.

“I didn’t make any money off the blog, but had recently been trying to put things in place so I could make a business out of it. When the ban came through it’s put it all on hold.”

Not only that, but the ban almost utterly wiped her blog out.

“At first 99.99% [of Chubby Bunnies’ content] had been removed. Then some of the content came back, and most of it is flagged, including my profile picture which was a caricature of me with mermaid hair covering my ‘female-presenting nipples’ that they seem to have such a problem with.”

The “adult content” ban is supposed to have exceptions for artistic expression and content used to make a political statement. Unfortunately, their flagging software has been wildly unsuccessful in make these distinctions. Users have to appeal every individual post flagged in order to get actual human eyes on the post. When your flagged posts number in the thousands, it creates a problem.

Chubby Bunnies is a Tumblr-exclusive blog, but Bec Mae Scully has many beautiful photos on her Instagram account if you’re lucky enough to be friends with her.

Amisha Treat

Even a Tumblr blog that focuses on fat positivity without showing a lot of skin, like Fat Girls Doing Things, has been affected by the “adult content” ban.

“The ban has mostly been just annoying for me, there isn’t a lot of ‘adult content’ on the blog so in that regard I haven’t had a ton to deal with,” says Amisha Treat, owner of FGDT. (Fat Girls Doing Things.)  “It has however reduced the amount of interaction and submissions happening, which is very disappointing, but I get why that is happening.”

Treat also talked about her constant efforts to block porn bots and blogs, which often target body positive blogs to steal images.

“It has done nothing to reduce the number of porn blogs that follow,” Treat told me. “In fact, it has made it harder to identify which ones are [porn bots] because their icon and posts are blocked so I can’t always confirm if I should block or not.”

Although the FGDT community is still largely intact, Treat is concerned that things will get worse. Unfortunately, there are no social media platforms out there that are quite like Tumblr.

“I have had to spend time trying to find another platform in case the ban continues as is, which is proving to be very difficult in terms of finding a site that allows easy interaction and submission availability.”

Fat Girls doing things also has a Facebook page, an Instagram, and a Twitter account.

In spite of widespread dissatisfaction with the “adult content” ban, Tumblr has given no indication that they plan to change the policy, and the flagging program has not improved. I myself have had two posts recently flagged — one classical nude painting and one that contained no nudity at all. I appealed both successfully.

Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change until the reason for the ban, the SESTA/FOSTA laws, are changed or repealed. Sex workers are leading the efforts to make this happen, but due to massive and widespread whorephobia in the U.S. and abroad, few are listening despite the fact that the laws have already been credited for the assault and murder of multiple full-service sex workers.

I’m lucky the ban’s effect on me has been comparatively mild. But I think about all the young women out there who are or are becoming fat who won’t have the same community support and access to unfiltered, unfetishized images of naked fat bodies. Eating disorders and the self-hatred and depression caused by our society’s intense fat-phobia have killed many and will kill many more. The hindering of a formerly indispensable tool in the fight against the stigma and hatred of fatness is nothing short of a tragedy.

In the mid ‘90s, when I was a baby stripper, I rode the 22 Fillmore to Market Street Cinema in San Francisco, a filthy nude strip club where I danced three or four times per week. One time, a man sat next to me. My heavy gig bag was on the floor, between my feet. It overflowed with zebra print spandex booty shorts, red gingham bikinis, glitter, purple hairspray that smelled like bubblegum and Hello Kitty everything.

The man’s legs pressed against me, so I inched closer to the window to scoot away from him. He looked down my shirt, put his arm around my shoulders. He sniffed my neck. I looked ahead, frozen. We sat like that for what felt like ten minutes, but was probably sixty seconds. The bus lurched ahead, up and down the steep hills from Hayes Valley towards Market Street. At the next stop, I got up, moved to another seat where I sat alone and watched the wet fog darken the city.

A couple stops later, the man walked towards the front of the bus. When he reached where I was sitting, he punched my head. His fist knocked me hard, near my eye with enough force to slam my face against the window with a loud crack. Then the man stepped off the bus. I rubbed my forehead to check for blood. But there was just a knot.

Around me, passengers were engrossed in their quiet passenger activities: women with lots of shopping bags flipped through paperback novels, young men nodded off to whatever beats blew through their headphones. A man used a rolled-up newspaper as a pillow and dozed. Girls wrapped their fuzzy scarves tighter around their necks. No one responded to the man who punched my head.

“That guy hit me,” I said to the driver. I figured he didn’t hear me. “That man. The guy who just got off the bus?” I said. As if my further explanation would elicit a different response. The driver said to the air in front of him, “Did you want to get off here?” I said, “No”. Or maybe I said nothing. Maybe I went back to my seat for the rest of the ride to Market Street. Maybe I just stood there, stunned and ashamed, like I had spoken out of turn. Like I was making a fuss over nothing. I remember heat. My face and neck burning red.

I never told anyone about the man who punched me on the 22 until now. This is the quiet violence sex workers face every day because of gender discrimination, stigma and whorephobia. It’s easier if we stay silent and pretend it’s not happening. But it’s also easier for us. Because if we speak out about violence against sex workers, we will be blamed for living a “risky” lifestyle. We will be fingered the Whore.

When a sex worker is attacked or raped, she is told she chose a job that puts her “at risk.” She is thought to have low self-worth, daddy issues or vague emotional damage. It’s assumed she has been abused, forced, or trafficked, even though she has one of the only jobs in America where women make more than men and always have. Sex workers earn as much as the average attorney with no formal training, credentials, or education.

How dare a woman hold a vocation where she has agency over her own body? How dare she have the audacity to perform high femme sexuality for decent, motherfucking money? When a sex worker is punched in the head, pretend it never happened so she can blame herself accordingly for existing in the first place.

It’s a crime to be a sex worker in America, to be a woman of color, to flaunt our curves, to show our nipples, to utilize our bodies and sexuality in a way that supports our lives while simultaneously being denied financial access to resources. It’s illegal to thrive in a primarily high femme workforce.

Take a look:

When every manager in every strip club commands me to take off my clothes in his office so he can see my body. When he pats my ass, laughs, tells me, “You’re a good lookin’ woman.” When that same manager tells a gorgeous black stripper he already has “enough black girls,” even though she used to work there a year ago, even though she traveled hundreds of miles to work there now. When a strip club manager watches me dance naked on a cold stage alone, turns to another man and asks loudly enough for all of us to hear in a bored, tired voice, “Should I hire her?”

When a table of six men and women watch intently while we dance topless on stage. When they point, whisper and don’t tip—not even one dollar. When that stripper walks off stage after her set and tells them we survive on tips and that it’s rude to not tip when they are sitting that close to the stage.

When the middle-aged white man in their group complains to my manager and I can hear him say he has never been told to tip and would not be back because how dare I. When I am already locked in an embrace with another joyful, tipsy customer who is saying he loves me, and that I am gorgeous, and he tips me, and this helps for about ten minutes because fuck that other customer.

I never told anyone about the man who punched me on the 22 until now. This is the quiet violence sex workers face every day because of gender discrimination, stigma and whorephobia.
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When every twofer Tuesday, a customer slides his fingers underneath my second layer G-string. When I say no. When I grab his hand. When I flash him my best tight smile that contains an additional warning. When I move his hand to my hips. When he grins and says, “Don’t worry.” When I say, “We’re on camera.” When I move his hand. Again.

When a man stands in the doorway of a private room and doesn’t let me leave. When his arms are up, blocking me, his palms on the edges of the door frame. When a black stripper hears me scream and appears behind him, grabs him by his t-shirt, pulls him off of me and he runs. When she says nothing, just locks eyes with me, pivots, and slowly walks away. When I realize she’s walking slowly because she is very pregnant.

When a man slips GHB in our drinks and three women go to the ER, but one is an immigrant and too scared to go to the authorities and all three women have kids under twelve years old. When security gives no fucks. When a customer asks me if I am fifty years old. When a man asks me to leave with him for two hundred dollars and gets angry and confused when I decline his offer. When he pontificates about God and Jesus and his wife. When he tells me about his fancy room at the Ritz Carlton and shows me pictures of his boats. When I finally say, “You’re just used to getting what you want” and I walk away.

When a close friend tells me in a low, distraught voice about another trans woman sex worker who was stalked by an ex-boyfriend and his accomplice, dragged out of her apartment by her hair and shoved into a van to be murdered. When she tells me that the girl’s neighbor heard screams and wrote down the license plate of the van and the cops pulled the ex-boyfriend over and he went to jail. When she tells me about court and having to testify and how she lives in constant terror. When a pretty famous male writer says to a room full of students, “Everyone loves a whorehouse” and no one flinches except for me.

When I bite my lip until it bleeds. When I clench my teeth until I have lock jaw. When the migraines kick in and I am at the strip club working and I keep dancing because: rent.

When woke-as-fuck friends make flippant, derogatory remarks about sex workers when we have been lamenting violence against women of color and LGTBQ communities for decades. When people I trust and love exclude sex workers from their feminist agenda at an event that is supposed to support marginalized communities. When I send a photo from the marquis across the street on Sunset Boulevard outside of said event that flashes in yellow block letters, “Girls Girls Girls” and watch it ten times because I need a reminder that I exist.

On June 2, when I marched for sex worker rights after SESTA/FOFSTA legislation further criminalized sex workers and feminists, queers, and liberals mostly didn’t show. When bystanders looked at us with obvious disgust on their faces. When more legislation passed that digitally erases sex workers us from the internet—a place where we screen clients and always have. This is violence against sex workers. When my friend’s Instagram accounts are seized by the FBI. When we are shadow-banned, deleted, erased, incarcerated. Gone.

Want To Know Why Tumblr Is Cracking Down On Sex? Look To FOSTA/SESTA

When a man tells me, he could never love me because I am a hooker, just like his mother.  

When this happens, I get back up. When this kind of violence happens, I listen to sex workers talk about cleaning houses, being homeless, being hungry, being attacked, being out of their meds, being broke, being raped. When this happens, I lend them my car or money. When this happens, we go to IHOP for sausage and pancakes. When this happens, I send emails and cry because I’m calling out powerful people who are in a position to help and friends who are silently standing by, pretending sex workers are not being murdered and erased and I tell them they have made a grave error. When this happens, I get scared. But after this happens, I get back up.

On April 11, 2018,  Trump signed the SESTA/FOFSTA bill designed to appeal to evangelical anti-sex worker conservatives with a thin promise to end child trafficking but really, it was intended to attack sex workers from thriving in a digital marketplace. Backpage and other adult-content hosting sites were shut down by an overwhelming majority, ruling in favor of “third party liability” which holds websites and social media responsible for child trafficking and other illegal activities.

When a pretty famous male writer says to a room full of students, “Everyone loves a whorehouse” and no one flinches except for me.
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The effect this has on sex workers is monumental and devastating. Sex workers have always been sagacious about using the internet as a survival tool to encrypt our identities and screen clients. But criminalization, stigma, and whorephobia continues to cockblock. Monday, December 17, 2018 — the International day to end violence against sex workers — Tumblr decided to ban all adult content, erasing our identities from the mediascape, rendering us invisible. But we will not be erased.

When whorephobia happens, sex workers become homeless because they lack resources, family, and opportunities to find work. They are notoriously vulnerable to violence, rape, discrimination and murder, particularly women of color, disabled and trans sex workers. This year 70% of sex worker deaths were POC and trans. Banishment from the internet makes our livelihood more dangerous. Extreme criminalization and femme erasure on a massive scale makes our lives much more difficult and scary. Evangelical stigma surrounding sex and sex workers must be crushed with the highest stiletto. When SESTA passed, we met secretly.

When I send a photo from the marquis across the street that flashes in yellow block letters, “Girls Girls Girls” and watch it ten times because I need a reminder that I exist.
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On Monday, we gather at the women’s center and hear the names of the sex workers who died in 2018—three times more than last year, prior to the passing of SESTA. Votives glow as the names are called along with the places where they lived. Our hands are linked. We are building momentum. I’m not the baby stripper I used to be—I’ve been sharpening my red rhinestone claws and I’ve been raising my voice. I’ve got pink Hello Kitty pepper spray for the next person who tries to punch me in the head. And when decriminalization happens—and it will happen—our glittering femme workforce will not merely survive, we will rise.

Last week both Tumblr and Facebook announced changes to their terms of service, severely limiting sexual expression. Tumblr opted to remove adult content, while Facebook amended their policy on sexual solicitation to effectively ban talking about sex at all on their platform. As a queer person and a porn producer/performer, it has been a scary week.

But what’s behind it? Is it Apple’s removal of the Tumblr app from their store, is it payment processors again? Yes, in part, but this isn’t the whole picture.

I’ve been in this line of work three years and have seen platforms cave into demands to remove sexual content from payment processors, but this feels different to me. Facebook already didn’t allow sex workers on its platform, and I don’t believe Tumblr is beholden to PP’s the same way sites like Patreon are, because they aren’t charging their user base the same way.

So why clamp down now, and why did the announcements come so close together? To my eyes the answer lies in the twin-headed anti-sex demon that is SESTA/FOSTA.

These recently passed laws effectively poke holes in section 230, a 1996 addition to the Communications Decency Act, which states:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

For example, if someone decides to tweet a libelous rant about me, I can’t sue Twitter for allowing it on their platform. But under SESTA/FOSTA, sites are responsible for any sex work advertisements hosted on their sites servers, whether they know the content is there or not. To be clear, states can now sue tech companies who have content related to sex work on their websites.

Tumblr opted to tackle the problem of possible sex work advertisements by using an algorithm to flag any adult content. The problem is their algorithm is about as ineffective at spotting porn as my dear old Nan, who still thinks I work in photography, despite me telling her several times what I do for a living.

I’ve seen examples of it flagging anything vaguely human shaped, as well as various examples of people tinkering with images to prevent the algorithm from spotting the lewd nature of them. Here’s an example of it being defeated by an owl wearing a hat. They claim the algorithm will improve with time, but I can’t see it ever being good at its job.

This law was sold as a way to combat trafficking — which absolutely needs to happen — but lawmakers willingly ignored concerns from sex workers. Because those involved don’t believe consensual sex work exists, they opted to class any form of full service sex work as sex trafficking.

To the people behind this bill, the friends of mine who had other job prospects but went into sex work to better control their hours and make more money doing something they love, are no different than someone who has been trafficked into slavery. These same friends of mine are now all at risk because of this law because they can no longer use these sites to screen potential clients and keep themselves safe.

This law was sold as a way to combat trafficking, which absolutely does need to happen, but lawmakers willingly ignored concerns from sex workers.
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These laws aren’t even effective at keeping trafficking from happening. Freedom Network USA, an anti-trafficking organization expressed these concerns at the time the bills were being proposed:

Responsible website administrators can, and do, provide important data and information to support criminal investigations. Reforming [Section 230] to include the threat of civil litigation could deter responsible website administrators from trying to identify and report trafficking. It is important to note that responsible website administration can make trafficking more visible—which can lead to increased identification. There are many cases of victims being identified online—and little doubt that without this platform, they would have not been identified. Internet sites provide a digital footprint that law enforcement can use to investigate trafficking into the sex trade, and to locate trafficking victims. When websites are shut down, the sex trade is pushed underground and sex trafficking victims are forced into even more dangerous circumstances.

Evidence from the months since SESTA/FOSTA passed back this up. Law enforcement are struggling to find victims of trafficking online since Backpage shut down. If they can’t see the victims, they can’t find them. I really cannot begin to describe how monumentally ineffective at helping trafficking victims, and absurdly dangerous to consensual sex workers this law is.

SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law in April, and though it was reported that it would begin being enforced in January 2019, it looks like that’s already gotten underway. On October the 1st a lawsuit was filed against Facebook by a Jane Doe in Texas. It states that back in 2012, when she was 15, a Facebook friend messaged her with a way to make money as a model.

When she met with him he abused and trafficked her. It should go without saying that what happened to this person is awful, and she absolutely deserves justice against her abuser. Under SESTA/FOSTA however, Facebook may be charged with Negligence, Gross Negligence, and breaking Texas laws related to benefitting from trafficking.

So it makes sense that getting slapped with this lawsuit would make Facebook sit up and take notice. They know how terrible algorithms are at picking up sexual content, so they updated their sexual solicitation policy to effectively ban talking about kinks, fetishes, boobs, butts, anything that might get you laid from using their platform. How this will affect their new dating site venture I have no idea.

The Tumblr side of things is a bit murkier, but it’s hard for me to imagine Verizon wanting to risk similar lawsuits given that they’ve had a lot of troubles with administrating Tumblr. So it’s just a lot cleaner and easier for them to remove adult content to make sure they get rid of any sex work related advertising, and hope Tumblr recovers from the mass exodus that is sure to occur.

So how does this affect you, the presumably non sex worker? The Tumblr and Facebook bans are just the start. As SESTA/FOSTA becomes more entrenched and more tech companies fall in line, I predict we will see other platforms begin to clamp down on any content related to sex for fear of being sued. It’s easier for them to ban all sex-related content than to try to screen for trafficking accurately.

Do you watch porn? Do you like to discuss sex on the internet? Do you use the internet to get laid? Those days are short-lived unless we fight to repeal this. And because most companies have operations in the USA, this will affect people all over the world. I live in the UK and this has already affected me, and this is without the version of the bill that the UK government wants to pass.

As SESTA/FOSTA becomes more entrenched and more tech companies fall in line, I predict we will see other platforms begin to clamp down on any content related to sex for fear of being sued.
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A lot of queer communities connect online, and because our existence is seen, to some, as inherently sexual, we can expect policies that limit sexual expression to hit queer people much harder. It’s difficult to realize certain things about yourself as a queer person without the internet, and sex education for gay, lesbian, and trans people is severely lacking without the internet. I really fear for the younger generations of queer people growing up in a world where talking about sex online gets you banned.

Are tubesites like Pornhub the answer? I can tell you as a creator that their platform is extremely bad. Any porn you watch on there without a verified tick is very likely stolen from creators such as myself and reuploaded (please stop using Tubesites). Also there’s no guarantee they won’t be affected by SESTA/FOSTA too, given that they make money off these videos, and they can’t prove people in them aren’t being trafficked, because they don’t verify many of their uploaders.

We need people to see this bill for what it is, a U.S. government-sponsored censorship law with far-reaching effects on the entire internet. It passed with bipartisan support; damn near every representative and senator voted positively on it.

We need to let them know loudly that this law is not only unfit for purpose, it’s incredibly dangerous. Stand up for sexual expression online, because if you don’t you might soon lose it for good. 

“Sexual violence isn’t about sex; it’s about power.” This phrase has been repeated again and again and again and has recently resurfaced in conversations, public and private, throughout rape culture’s arguable year of reckoning.

This statement is at once a reassurance and a protest: the aim of sexual violence (including harassment and assault) is not the act of sex itself, but the power one asserts through the act. But the more we pass this phrase around, the more we establish a false binary wherein there is such a thing as sex untouched by power dynamics, a “pure” sex that is safe from the threat of power.

What’s insidious about this phrase is that it assumes we have stable and agreed upon definitions of fraught terms like “sex” and “power.” The phrase ushers us past the physicality of sex and violence all together in favor of an abstraction.

Power remains diffuse in this formulation, only showing its “true colors” in the faces of the bad people who abuse it and the institutions (the fast food industry, Hollywood, academia, the District Attorney’s office…) that enable it. The conventional wisdom demurs: sexual mores may change, but the quest for power is forever and there will always be bad people. That’s just the way it is.

Admittedly, the phrase can be employed in good faith—to say rape is “about power” is to make the necessary claim that institutional power facilitates and perpetuates abuse. Those with power—even and especially those who make their dime critiquing power—will close ranks to protect their hierarchical kin. But we don’t need to avoid talking about sex if we want to understand power. Instead, we can ask how power is part of sexual asymmetries and the demands of intimacy.

Sex disappears in this binary. The framework implies an unrigorous sex-positivity wherein sex is inherently good, as opposed to power, which is inherently abusive or predatory, the corrupting agent that ruins an otherwise consensual sexual experience.

The conventional wisdom demurs: sexual mores may change, but the quest for power is forever and there will always be bad people.
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As Charlotte Shane points out in her evaluation of recent publications and films on rape culture, consent is only a binding agreement insofar as the power differential between participants is even-keeled.

“Properly introduce consent to a potential date rapist, and you’ll be rewarded with a sexually law-abiding citizen,” explains Shane about this logic. The consent framework and the sex/power line go hand and hand, both concealing the need to think about sex at all, let alone ask when sex is ever unburdened by power differentials.

As if straight sex is ever free from the curse of its coercive history. As if queer sex can ever be enjoyed without the knowledge that someone wants to, and perhaps could, punish you for it. Making room to think about sex, as Shane acknowledges, means “admitting that the capacity for rape is determined by man-made conditions rather than some inborn evil.”

Sex isn’t necessarily the chaotic good to power’s lawful evil at all. In fact, Emily Yoffe argues in her essay, “Understanding Harvey,” that when we assume sexual violence is only a question of power, we refuse to look at darkness in sexual desire. That is, abusers don’t do it merely because they can get away with it, but rather, because they have a particular desire that power gives them the ability to fulfill. Power is the means by which that desire can be satisfied. If abuse is not about sex, then desire drops out of the equation, and the exercise of power is the only thing to be reproved.

As if straight sex is ever free from the curse of its coercive history. As if queer sex can ever be enjoyed without the knowledge that someone wants to, and perhaps could, punish you for it.
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But even in Yoffe’s more careful examination of the sex/power framework, she still works from the premise that power only ever belongs to those who abuse it, not to those who are victimized by it. Too often, this assumption is behind the sex/power framework.  

To say “it’s not about sex, it’s about power,” is to fetishize power and proffer it as the abusive kind of power that only exists when it is stolen, and therefore only ever belongs to the few.

A variation of “it’s not about sex” can be found in two articles from the early days of #metoo: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay, “The Problem Isn’t Sex, It’s Work” and Rebecca Traister’s similarly titled, if qualified, essay, “This moment isn’t (just) about sex. It’s about work.”

Sarah Leonard has also employed the phrase “The fact is that sexual harassment is more about power than sex” to argue that, under capitalism, sexual harassment is inevitable, given the imbalance of power between boss and worker.

Examining sex and power in terms of work is an excellent way of getting at what we mean when we say “power,” even though it still sounds an awful lot like “it’s not personal, it’s business,” and even if we’re still not saying “class.”

In the workplace, sexual harassment is a specific form of exploitation because what it does to the body cannot be collected for profit; there is only the abuser’s pleasure in cruelty.

Sexual violence targets the most vulnerable across lines of race, class, gender, immigration status, ability, and age, as well as workers in particular conditions of precarity, such as undocumented workers, those in the gig economy, and sex workers. It is a means of claiming ownership of the worker’s body beyond what they can produce as labor.

Our body is our first and most visceral relationship, even more immediate than anything else the boss steals (like time or wages). Sexual violence in the workplace, too, is a kind of theft. Work steals so much of our body from us: our posture, our eyesight, sometimes our fingers or limbs. But unions have yet to win tickers in the workplace that count “X days without unwanted touching” or worker’s compensation for therapy necessitated by incessant humiliation.

Sexual violence in the workplace is a violation which proves that the worker’s body is not only exploitable in every way, but also that workers do not have the right to consent to any of the conditions in which they work. To say that this reckoning is “about work” does not give us a framework to understand sex’s particular relation to power and labor. That is, it doesn’t account for the specificity of sexual violence, what makes it, as Law and Order reminds us, “especially heinous.”

Reluctance to talk about sex when we talk about sexual violence also makes it easier to leave sex workers out of the story of workplace harassment. Sex workers have a 45-75% risk of physical violence, contrary to ill-informed claims that sex workers can’t experience rape or that rape is merely “theft of services”.

Our body is our first and most visceral relationship, even more immediate than anything else the boss steals (like time or wages).
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In this collective moment of reckoning, something like solidarity has been shaping up: a rally for International Whore’s Day against SESTA/FOSTA, the quickly organized week of protests against Kavanaugh, a hexing, and more to come. There is power in solidarity. But the binary nature of the sex/power framework doesn’t allow for a definition of power which encompasses the ability of the victimized to fight back and demand transformative justice.

Between people, power is the ability to make change or to stop change through work over time. It is also the ability to either obfuscate or clarify the forces that enact it. The danger of the “it’s about work” phrase is that it has the ability to distract our attention from sex and the structures with which it may be difficult to personally identify with.

If we admit that sexual violence is about sex, that sex is always entangled with power that enables and perpetuates abuse, there might also be less hand-wringing over cases that trouble our perceptions of who commits sexual violence: a Holocaust survivor who made startlingly accurate films about psychosexual horror, say, or a queer, allegedly feminist professor.

For those who have been exploited and hurt—what is their power? Is it a comfort to be told that a physical act of violation was actually about power? Will it heal bodily injury, or prevent those with PTSD from dissociating during consensual sex? Will it return our time? There are so many explanations for why people engage in bad behavior. How many of them are satisfying? Who really wants, as Yoffe proposes, to “understand” Harvey?

What if instead of—yet again—examining the psyche of damaged men (that Yoffe begins with the nineteenth-century Austrian psychologist Kraft-Ebbing suggests that this fascination was not born in “our” era of prestige television and true crime podcasts), we spoke to the vulnerable ones about their own darkness?

What if we were to consider to their relationship to power?

There is a reason why we encounter this framework in thinkpieces but rarely in testimony. In the stories I’ve heard and read and told and wrote since the early days of #metoo, we observe our own bodies as though floating above, find bruises that change color but never fade; we trace and retrace our footsteps and still don’t know how we ended up face down.

Sometimes, talking about it feels compulsive, as we detail our trauma to anyone who will listen, like the Ancient Mariner interrupting a straight wedding or the vengeful ghost of It Happened To Me. Other times, the hurt is compartmentalized, the dazzling feats we accomplish make it unclear if we push ourselves in spite of our hurt or because of it.

For those who have been exploited and hurt—what is their power?
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And yet, not every incident of sexual violence has the effect of trauma. Sometimes, the offense is mundane, a waste of time, as Melissa Gira Grant has written. “Our conflict is not over sex,” she stresses, “or with men in particular or in general, but over power.” I agree that sexual violence is a theft of power, but our conflict over who possesses power does extend into the sexual.

Sexual violence is very much about sex—it is a particular way of hurting someone where they will stay hurt, since their wounds are discouraged from being publicly bandaged.

Acknowledging that it is about sex allows us to treat our wounds and to tell stories of healing, as #metoo founder Tarana Burke urges us to do. It allows us to admit that even if it wasn’t personal to them it was personal to us, and most of all, it allows us to feel like we can move forward without relying on individualistic conceptions of strength and empowerment.

The phrase obscures the uncomfortable truth that “sex” and “power” are not incommensurate terms. By ignoring this truth, we make it harder to create a world in which sex doesn’t hurt and power isn’t exploitative. Instead, power can be the means by which we refuse, or by which we work together to negotiate what we want.

Aubrey — better known as “Sugar” — sat at a picnic table behind her house in Reno, sipping at a plastic bottle of root beer with one hand and taking a drag from a cigarette out of her other.

“I always wore the eight and half inch clear stilettos — not only because they match everything but because they’re the hardest to hit with,” she said. Her blue eyes rang with sadness as she recounted the past 16 years of life wending her way in and out of the legal brothels of Nevada. The smile had been wiped from her face.

“I felt like I didn’t have a choice,” Aubrey explained. “I was forced and then I stayed because I was scared to do anything else.”

Brothels are legal in all Nevadan counties with populations of 700,000 or less; this excludes Washoe and Clark counties — which include Reno and Vegas — who will vote on a brothel ban this November. Nevada is the only state in the country to allow any semblance of legal prostitution, a distinction they’ve had since 1971 when the state law sanctioned licensed brothels; right now there are 21 legal brothels scattered across seven counties in the state.

Lyon county commissioners voted last June to place a nonbinding question on the November ballot to outlaw brothels and they also agreed to abide by what the public decides this November.

The de-legalization of brothels is giving workers a long overdue platform to surface the larger more complicated issues behind their lives as sex workers, like the ongoing battle against physically and psychologically abusive brothel owners. The potential brothel ban is exceedingly divisive among Nevada residents. Supporters of the ban say that illegal sex trafficking rises in jurisdictions that legalize brothels, while opponents of the ban worry about its effects on the economy and the sex workers’ already precarious “legitimacy.”

The Nevada brothel industry profits are approximately $35-50 million annually, according to a 2012 report done by University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

I spoke with a handful of women who’ve worked in the Nevada brothels for years; many women enjoy making their own schedule, “being an intimate therapist,” and knowing that — when done right — legal brothels are safer than working on the street. “When done right” is at the crux of the problem.

These women believe that the ownership of these brothels — which is often exploitative at best and sexually abusive at worst — must fundamentally change, with safety and legal recourse for workers centered in any dialogue around the brothels.

Aubrey, a woman in her mid thirties, has been working in the industry since she was 13 years old. Her boyfriend at the time brought her home to his father, who began pimping her out around Reno illegally. When she turned 18, he began selling her to legal brothels, keeping the 50% profit she earned for herself. Her once boyfriend’s father — who’d been operating as her illegal pimp — then got her pregnant. Their daughter is now 11; Aubrey says he kidnapped her seven months ago.

She hadn’t been in contact with him for nearly ten years when he texted her out of the blue and asked where she was; she told him she was waiting outside a movie theater in Reno, not realizing he was also living nearby in the city.

She say she was standing outside the theater in downtown Reno when he pulled up, dragged his daughter into his car, and absconded with their child.

“I think they took Tiara to Mexico—that’s what I think,” Aubrey says.

Aubrey’s youngest daughter — who she had with her current boyfriend of ten years — has just started 3rd grade. “I told her no one should be able to touch you, but I realized I wasn’t even following my own guidelines,” Aubrey told me, a tear rolling down her cheek. “The more I think about it the more I realized I should always have control over my body and I didn’t know that.”

She says she has PTSD from her experiences as a sex worker and struggles to go into any public spaces without overwhelming anxiety taking over her body. She says she feels like she has a sign on her face that says “whore” and fears she might see a client anywhere she goes with her family.

Finally, four months ago Aubrey quit.

“I was with one of my regular clients and he was bending me over as I was looking at a mirror and I said, I’m done, I can’t do it! I wanted to throw up. He asked if he could finish and I said, “no. Leave, goodbye.’”

Despite her history of abuse, Aubrey is against the brothel ban and believes that decriminalizing sex work would be a good first step in protecting sex workers against exploitation. But under the men who have historically managed the brothels, she says, they shouldn’t be legal due to the sanctioned and rampant abuse the women face.

The ownership of these brothels must fundamentally change, with safety and legal recourse for workers centered in any dialogue around sex work.
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Marvin — her old boss at The Old Bridge Ranch — treated Aubrey with respect; she says he cared for the women he employed. When Aubrey eventually moved to The Bunny Ranch however — owned by the infamous late Dennis Hof — she says she grew to feel suicidal, like she didn’t own her body. Hof was found dead on Tuesday morning just two days after celebrating his 72nd birthday.

Dennis Hof owned one-third of the state’s brothels and is the best-selling author of his autobiography “The Art of The Pimp”, as well as the star of HBO’s reality show “Cathouse,” Hof had also just won the Republican primary for the state Legislature in June. Bizarrely — despite his being dead — according to Nevada law, if the deceased candidate wins an election, the office is considered vacated and must be filled by the board of county commissioners with a person of the same political party.

Vastly more disturbing than these political machinations however are the lengthy and sickening sexual assault accusations by former brothel workers on at least four occasions since 2005, including an allegation made in early September of this year.

Jennifer O’Kane — a slender woman with blue eyes and dark hair — worked in Dennis’s brothels for a few months before quitting to start her own. She says she was raped by Hof while working for one of his brothels, and now is dealing with PTSD, depression, and anxiety from her experience. I struggled to hear her on the phone as she cried throughout the entirety of our interview.

“This is slavery at its finest,” Jennifer told me. “I have nothing against prostitutes, although I’m retired now. My opinion on the brothels? I opened a brothel myself to help these girls know that they didn’t have to have sex with the owner.”

Meanwhile, Olivia, a tall red head with a mysterious demeanor explains to me that due to the stigma surrounding sex work — despite its legality — she kept her occupation from her parents. She had worked in the Nevada brothels for four years, but recently quit to become a security guard at a club in Reno.

“I’m for it and against it you know? It’s our choice, but our safety is never their priority. Especially when you are working for the Hof houses.”

Diana Foxx—a bank security worker turned sex worker—is now retired and living in Florida. She explained that her life working at the Bunny Ranch for Dennis Hof also pushed her to the brink of suicide, due to his sexual assault of her. She now does what she can to prevent other women from joining the sex work industry through advocacy work with different anti-human trafficking groups throughout Florida.

“In my mind it didn’t feel like assault because he was my pimp, and he didn’t think so either,” she said. Diana explains that to an average person, legal brothels might seem like an “empowering career choice,” but that in reality, you’re simply helping perverted men push their agendas and make a lot of money. She says that for years she prayed every night for Hof’s demise. “Please let this pimp die Lord!,” she begged. “Let him die.”

Awaken — a local faith-based non-profit organization that provides awareness about trafficking, and helps provide housing and restoration for sex trafficking victims — is one of the main forces behind this bill being on the ballot. They’re also staunchly for the brothel ban.

Jason Guinasso has been a lawyer for Awaken for eight years now and has been helping the organization foster an “educational outreach program” this past summer throughout the Clark and Washoe counties. Guinasso says he’s been traveling around different neighborhoods explaining to locals that the banning of brothels perpetuates a dangerous cycle of violence.

“Illegal trafficking is higher where legal prostitution is,” he told me. “We have commoditized females. We have said to the public that it’s OK to buy and sell women for men. We did a study on Backpage and Nevada had the highest postings in the country. Legalized brothels also impact and increase other crimes against women — domestic abuse, rape, domestic violence ending in death.”

Contrary to Guinasso’s narrative however, Pike Long, deputy director of St. James Infirmary — a peer-based health and safety clinic for sex workers in San Francisco — says that in the wake of of Bcakpage being shuttered this past April, there has been a spike in street-based sex work and screening clients has become more difficult.

“The very bill that was supposed to stop trafficking has quite literally given formerly irrelevant traffickers new life,” Long told the SF Chronicle.

All of the women I had the privilege of speaking with agreed that if managed correctly, legal brothels could be a good thing for the right person. They reminded me that the many laws and protocols that exist for safety in the workplace across the U.S. have not been instituted for sex workers to begin with and even the laws that do exist are ignored or overlooked.

For many Nevadan sex workers it’s not the ban on brothels that’s of the utmost importance. It’s the men running them and the huge power differential — in both the local communities and governments — between those in management and those that are employed as workers. And leveling that playing field requires much more than a ban.

Violet* is at home with her daughter and boyfriend when she hears a knock at the door. She opens it to find five police officers and a social worker. “They went through our laundry, our bag of adult toys, all of our cupboards,” she tells me over the phone. “They said that my mom called and told them that I am a prostitute and that I am subjecting my daughter to it.”

Violet does work in the sex industry, but she isn’t a prostitute; she is a cam girl. And, though this work may be highly stigmatized, it is legal. So, she was shocked when the judge granted Violet’s mother full custody of her daughter. She says, “It blows my mind that you can lose a child like this. I haven’t been charged with anything. I’ve never been arrested.”

Violet’s story stands out to me because, as an online sex worker who is also a mother, this is my worst fear. I started doing a mix of phone sex, cam modeling, and clip production when I was going through a divorce. Online sex work offered a flexible schedule that allowed me to take care of my kids. Divorce, as it turns out, is time consuming and expensive. Sex work was a good fit for the circumstances. It was also a good fit in many other ways that I didn’t anticipate: The work, while challenging, can be interesting, rewarding, and meaningful. But beginning a sex work career while in the midst of a divorce made me particularly attuned to, and afraid of, custody issues such as Violet’s.

This fear is not unfounded. Sex workers who are mothers often find themselves in the middle of such battles, even if they’re engaging in perfectly legal behavior. Juniper Fitzgerald, a former erotic dancer, and author of How Mamas Love Their Babies, understands this all too well, having faced her own custody battle related to sex work. “Not a day goes by that I don’t hear of a sex working mother crowdsourcing funds for a custody lawyer. It’s heartbreaking,” she said.

Your Guide To Surviving In Society As A Wannabe Sex Worker
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The fact that sex workers who engage in legal work face these challenges points to something important regarding attitudes toward sex work: Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work. Mothers who engage in sex work are perceived to lack the judgement and boundaries needed to be good parents. This stigma is injected into our legal system. While the law may not forbid stripping or cam work, judges have a lot of discretion, and if doing stigmatized work leads them to believe that we have poor judgment, they can slap us with consequences that, for mothers, can feel worse than being arrested.

Fitzgerald notes that she has it easier than most in her position. “I have a great deal of privilege as a white woman with a PhD,” she said. However, “Even given those privileges, the court wanted detailed explanation of my work and a good faith testament that I was no longer engaged in sex work.” This becomes an even bigger problem for those who do not carry such privilege. suprihmbé, an online sex worker and artist, observes, “As a Black woman who has run into many problems with the law, I avoid the court.” And in the case of prostitution, Bella Robinson, executive director of COYOTE, a sex workers’ rights organization, remarks in a phone conversation, “You are more likely to go to jail for prostitution than you are for drugs.”

Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work.
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And yet, despite the fact that society portrays motherhood as incongruent with sex work — scrutinizing our judgement and credibility — sex working mothers continue to parent our kids in a way that is not only appropriate, but radical in its power to destabilize these narratives and destigmatize our work for future generations. In other words, sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, as these front lines begin in our own homes. Because we occupy professions that are highly stigmatized, sex working mothers are pushed to parent with a thoughtfulness and a courage that undermines the perceptions of unfit motherhood that society wants to insist upon.

For myself and the other mothers I spoke with, this begins with figuring out how to talk to our kids in an age appropriate way about both sexuality and sex work. But more than this, we also have to talk to them about the stigma we — and, they, by extension — face. This is never simple. suprihmbé notes that while she is not secretive about what she does, her son is only 5 and she hasn’t yet decided how much she will tell him. Part of her worry is that other parents aren’t having the same conversations with their children about the nuances of sex work. She says, “Probably once he’s a little older we will discuss it more, but I don’t know how in depth I want to be? Because I’m a single mom, and I don’t want him running off at the mouth to other kids’ moms and dealing with their bigotry.”

Fitzgerald describes the way in which she has talked to her 4-year-old daughter about sex work. “I have told her many times that I used to dance naked for a job. My former work is very normalized in our household.” Porn performer Lotus Lain hasn’t yet told her children what she does for work, but is laying the groundwork for these conversations. “My kid is still elementary age, but they have a healthy view of sex, they know what sex is,” she says. “They’re not judgmental at all. I’ve talked to them about different types of sexuality and gender and they’ve completely understood without challenging the concepts.” She hopes this will set them up to be understanding when they’re old enough to learn more.“I know that once they’re high school age they will be able to fully understand the type of sex work I have done and why.”

Why We Must Protect Sex Workers At All Costs During The #MeToo Era
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Yin Q, a dominatrix, writer, and educator, says that she is also preparing her kids to understand sex work as they grow older. “My kids are too young to understand sex work at this point,” she said, “but I raise them to be accepting of different sexual lifestyles and orientations and am already very careful not to slut shame.” Yin Q has also written and produced a series based on her career called Mercy Mistress, and her kids have seen some of the footage of the main character, a femme domme, in fetish gear. “They’ve asked me what she does, and I answered that she helps people face their darkness. ‘So she’s a superhero?’ they said. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘Sex workers are superheroes.’”

This conversation seems to capture what many sex worker mothers are doing in their parenting. Because I have older children, I was able to have very direct conversations with them about my work, and this became more urgent when I started doing sex work writing and local activism. When I explained to my pre-teen what phone sex is and why people call phone sex lines, he responded with, “So you are like an online therapist but you talk to people mostly about sex.” I laughed, because it is closer to the truth of what this kind of sex work looks like than what most people realize. I was proud to have raised a kid who could see past the sensationalism of the sex in sex work (unlike most adults) and see the bigger picture. But for this to happen, a foundation had to be laid: a sex positive foundation which included a respect for personal autonomy and for women, including those who have made choices that fall outside of cultural norms.

Sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, because these front lines begin in our own homes.
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Indeed, Ramona Flour, an art model and sex worker whose mother also worked in the industry, exemplifies this, tweeting, “I have been advocating for sex workers my whole life because my my mother has been a sex worker my whole life.” On the phone, she expands, “The thing I want people to understand is that there are a lot of single mothers [in sex work], mothers who are struggling to take care of their children.” Of her own mother she says, “I am thankful, above everything else, that she was so selfless and provided for me and took care of me. She used sex work to take care of her kid and that is so commendable.”

While the image that we have of sex work activists is that of the most public and most visible sex workers — those who march on the streets and stand at the forefront of political action — sex working mothers are also engaged in a radical activism at home. They are teaching their children to see sex workers through their own lens, and not through the filter of shame and stigma. This is important political work. “We need more representations of sex workers that are authentic, complex, and generous,” says Yin Q. “Culture change happens before policy change.”

*Name has been changed to protect privacy since this custody case is still open.

People care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

flickr/Phil Roeder

For years, I have been writing on Twitter about the impact of legislation on sex workers, which is to say, on my community. Sometimes people pay attention, sometimes strangers write to me about it, sometimes I get threats and name-calling.

But never have I faced on the internet the kind of vitriol or the kind of frighteningly zealous support as I have since I told a family story online last week about Bernie Sanders behaving less-than-perfectly-progressive toward my mother some time in the early ’80s:

My whole life, my mother has told this story: she went to a democratic socialists’ convention when I was about a year and a half old where they had promised there would be childcare. She showed up, with me. They said,

???@MissLoreleiLee

Sorry, we didn't get the money we thought we'd get, so we cut the childcare." So she was like, okay, taking my kid to these talks then. She went to hear the keynote speaker. We were in the back of the room. I was playing with a toy and making some toddler noises.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The keynote speaker stopped what he was saying and said, "could someone tell that child to be quiet.

???@MissLoreleiLee

My mother has never been a patient woman. She lost it. She stood up and started to shout. "How dare you," she said. "How dare you pretend to support families and working women when the first thing you cut during a budgeting failure is childcare.

???@MissLoreleiLee

She definitely said it with more swearing.

???@MissLoreleiLee

Folks, that keynote speaker she stood up and swore at was Bernie Sanders.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The response to the tweet was overwhelming. As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

Sanders, along with 96 other Senators, passed H.R. 1865, also known as FOSTA-SESTA (or just SESTA) on March 21. On April 11, Trump signed the bill into law. SESTA removes protections in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create new civil and criminal liability for “anyone who owns, manages, or operates” a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law does not clarify what this means. Is warning other sex workers about dangerous clients (as workers have done online for many years) facilitating prostitution? What about sharing safety and health information with sex working people? How many harm-reduction tactics are now against federal law? How will the owners, managers, and operators of social media and other communications websites respond to this, and what impact will that have on already-marginalized people?

The Legislation That Would Harm Sex Workers—In The Name Of Their Own Protection

For months before this law passed, my friends and I wrote to reporters, we tweeted and posted to Instagram and called our representatives and made as much noise as we could. It seemed obvious that this legislation would be devastating to the safety of our loved ones, and had the potential to cut all of us off from each other by making us a liability to websites that facilitate the everyday online forms of communication everyone has come to rely on. When the bill passed the Senate, our predictions came immediately true.

Websites that sex workers relied on to screen clients shut down. Google Play and Microsoft changed their terms of service. Skype and Microsoft Office have banned “offensive language” and “inappropriate content,” to go into effect on May 1. Google Drive began to delete sex workers’ content and lock out users. Sex workers started an alternative social media site called “Switter,” to ensure we would have a place to communicate with each other if we were summarily kicked off of social media. This week, Switter was kicked off of its content delivery network.

There has been other impact as well: reports of an increase in sex workers working outdoors, and stories about friends who have gone missing or harmed themselves. A friend had her bank account frozen. Another friend said that though she’d had plans to leave the adult industry, the hostility of the current climate had convinced her she would not be able to do any other kind of work. This impact is widespread and has hit folks whose work was criminalized as well as those doing legal forms of sex work such as stripping and working in adult film.

Since the law passed, my friends and I have been holding meetings, gathering donations for sex worker emergency funds, sharing information with each other as quickly and as widely as we can. All of us are frightened. All of us are angry. I’ve posted continuously about this impact on social media. I’ve criticized celebrities and politicians who supported these policies. Yes, to all of you writing to me, I’m angry at Kamala Harris too.

But my mom never yelled at Kamala Harris, as far as I know.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders. It has always been a story about my mother. It’s a story about her standing up to authority, as she frequently has done, when she believed that what they were doing was wrong. Prior to his presidential bid, Sanders was incidental to the story’s telling. It is a family story. When he began to campaign in 2016, the funny part of the story became the fact that the politician mom once yelled at was now famous. Incidentally, most of us supported Sanders in the primaries. I even gave an interview in 2016 in which I said that I believed his policies would be better for sex workers than the policies of the other candidates. In my house, we had no trouble reconciling someone’s once less-than-perfect behavior with a larger question of who might implement the best overall policies.

I did not fact-check the story before I posted it. I’ve criticized many politicians on my social media, and I’ve shared many personal stories. I have never before had something I posted retweeted thousands of times and then reported as news. Perhaps I should have been more savvy. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that I should have known how the internet can take hold of something and make it symbolic of one hundred other things. That I should have foreseen, with the recent attention paid to Stormy Daniels, the temptation for online publications to write anything with a headline referencing a “porn star” and a political figure. I did not foresee these things.

Among the hundreds of messages I received were:

“Better disrespect your mom than grab her pussy”

“she raised a porn star so she probably deserved it”

“Porn actresses are just whores with contracts”

“Couldn’t they use that whore who took down Al Franken again?”

“I think you’re a Russian bot middle aged white women trump supporter go home to Moscow traitor”

“Why do white women have to lie?”

“HAHA that’s right, you better fucking hide you liar.”

“You scared?”

Strip Club Raids And Closures Are Weapons Of Gentrification

There were some people who seemed to have spent hours researching the details of my tweets — in order to “debunk” them. They wanted “the truth.” I did some googling with the scant additional information I have about the incident. My family members disagree about the exact details of time and place, and I couldn’t determine with certainty whether the story was true or not. My family believes that it is. I did not, initially, question its truth. In part because I grew up with it, but also because the details about Sanders himself seem utterly banal. That a man might have told a woman to keep her child quiet while he talks seemed to me utterly unsurprising. The only part of the story that I find remarkable is that the woman stood up and shouted rather than leave the room. But my mother has always been that kind of remarkable.

The internet commenters who were the most vicious seemed to believe that I had been paid to write these tweets, that they were part of a calculated political “smear.” They seemed to believe (perhaps accurately) that this kind of anecdote holds more political power than any kind of substantive analysis ever could. I will tell you, I did not post this story with the intention of doing even minimal harm to Sanders, or with the hubris that I might be capable of doing such harm. Despite my rage at the impact of H.R. 1865 on my community, I do not wish harm on anyone who voted for it. What I wish for them is only knowledge.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders.

I wrote that story down because I am inspired by my mother. Because I know her to be a woman who has never once kept her mouth shut. Whether or not this story is true about Bernie Sanders, I know it is a true story about my mother. Whether she shouted at Bernie Sanders at a democratic socialists convention (“I think it was actually a democratic socialists conference,” she texted me) or at (as another family member remembers it) a rally about a housing bill, or at some other less-famous, equally-imperfect politician at some other kind of early ‘80s leftist political event, the most important part of the story is not where she was or even who she said it to. The most important part is that she refused to cower. That she has always refused to live quietly.

Of course, I want it to be a story about Sanders. I want to know that my fierce and rageful and impolite mother stood up in a crowded room and shouted at one of the 97 people who would, 35 years later, vote to harm her daughter. I want this even though it is petty to want it, even though it does nothing to change the circumstances in which we now live.

On April 18, Sanders wrote:

Cardi B is right. If we are really going to make America great we need to strengthen Social Security so that seniors are able to retire with the dignity they deserve. https://t.co/B8cOkoOdLc

???@SenSanders

I do not disagree with this statement. Former stripper and current genius Cardi B has said many true things. However, what Sanders is doing with this tweet is a move that is as old as sex work. Anyone who has been a sex worker has seen this behavior a million times before. Powerful people are happy to associate with sex workers when they think we are just “edgy” enough to gain them something by association, and quick to distance themselves when confronted by the systemic stigma in our actual lives.

Bernie Sanders praising Cardi B after voting for SESTA is every ex I’ve had who brought me to a few parties, but wouldn’t let me even be seen in the vicinity of their parents or their boss. Every sex worker I know has exes like this.

Once You Have Made Pornography

At marches and demonstrations, my friends and I have spent so much time shouting. We’ve spent so much time writing letters, calling legislative staff, talking to journalists, showing up at administrative and legislative hearings. We’ve spent so much time being unheard by anyone, from any political party. Equally vehement in the messages I’ve received in the last 48 hours are ones from folks who think my story demonstrates some allegiance to Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Apparently there is a thing called donut twitter and something else called rose twitter, and the 2016 democratic primary is still alive on the internet as though all of this were about gaining and losing points in some ongoing adversarial sport.

Sex work, however, is not a partisan issue. Sex workers are equally hated by the right and the left. Conservatives and liberals and socialists alike have supported policies that have led to the deaths of sex workers. Nonetheless, sex workers hold beliefs across the political spectrum. We continue to vote for people who are demonstrably flawed. We vote for people who we know do not like us. We vote for people who are imperfect, and then we call them on the phone, we show up at their rallies and at their offices and demand that they become the representatives that we need them to be.

We know that they are flawed and we believe, still, that one day they will hear us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/strip-club-raids-and-closures-are-weapons-of-gentrification-9a0c6e1032f9/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 21:03:28 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2617 Read more]]> By Reese Piper

This is not about worker safety and public welfare. This is about paving the way for politicians and the elite to gentrify cities.

T he year was 1995. Deity Delgado was about to take the stage at the Blue Angel Cabaret — an underground strip joint tucked away in a basement in Tribeca. The club was packed to the brim. Sweating from the heat of the room, she sauntered on the small platform to dance for a buzzing crowd.

Worn down from the midtown gentlemen’s clubs, Delgado started working at the Blue Angel to express herself more freely and comfortably while still earning a living. There, she performed cabaret and lap dances in a communal room in the back which she remembers as safe, fun, and lucrative. She was making an average of $600 a night.

She appreciated the diverse hiring practices not commonly found in upscale clubs in Manhattan. The stripper-owned club hired queer, punk, tattooed people of all shapes and sizes and colors. “I could show up to work without shaving my legs,” Delgado said. “Many of the upscale clubs are set on one look, but at the Blue Angel you worked with what you had.”

Located off Walker Street, the Blue Angel was weaved into the fabric of early ‘90s Manhattan — a place where queers, sex workers, artists, minorities, and outcasts once lived, worked, and thrived.

The club, however, became one of the 170 clubs targeted by Mayor Giuliani’s iron fist against the commercial sex trade. Two years after the club opened, he signed into law a new zoning ordinance that prevented adult businesses from operating within residential areas and near each other (as well as schools, places of worship, and cemeteries).

In response, police amped up surveillance of the sex industry, eventually stamping an eviction notice on the Blue Angel’s door due to the club’s illegal mixture of alcohol, lap dances, and nudity. Delgado mournfully had to say goodbye to her beloved club.

Gentrification is often seen as an organic process that cities undergo. Jeremiah Moss, the author of the book and blog Vanishing New York — a detailed analysis of how New York City lost its soul to corporations — says, “Gentrification was originally defined as the process by which working-class neighborhoods are changed into middle-class neighborhoods by the middle-class who buy homes there.”

Moss explains, however, “Now we’re dealing with something much larger and more destructive — what I refer to as hyper gentrification which is not an organic process. It’s the government stepping in with policies and zoning to remake the city for the upper classes. In order to that, outlaws have to be removed, including sexual outlaws. So adult businesses have to go.”

“The hyper-gentrified city must be safe, friendly, and welcoming for tourist families and major corporations,” Moss says.

Shutting down adult businesses was on the top of Mayor Giuliani’s list throughout his terms. Giuliani claimed strip clubs, peep shows, and x-rated video stores were “corrosive institutions” that contaminated neighborhoods and prevented “legitimate businesses” from prospering.

The relentless spreading of disgust with and fear of adult businesses was fueled by the real-estate recession in the early ‘90s. Prior to that, corporations like Disney with a vested interest in attracting family-friendly tourists had little interest in devoting capital to parts of the city lined with street workers, x-rated stores, and strip clubs. The low-socioeconomic and “sleazy” stigma attached to sex work (of which stripping is a form) stood in stark contrast to Mickey and Goofy. But the market collapse opened a window for investors to turn a keen eye to urban real estate and its possibilities for profit.

Lower property values provided real-estate developers an opportunity to attract newcomers with visions of a “cleaner city.” Jayne Swift is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota who examines how gentrification played a role in the closing of the Lusty Lady, the only worker-owned unionized peepshow, in Seattle and San Francisco. She explains that visible sex work can stand in the way of developers trying to attract certain groups of people with an upscale image. “Sex work is seen as lower class and dirty in the imaginary,” she says.

Twenty years after the Blue Angel closed, I stood in the basement of a corporate-chain strip club in Midtown with three other dancers, each awaiting the verdict on whether we would get hired. I had just auditioned in front of three unimpressed male managers, feeling self-conscious about the small layer of fat on my slim 5’2” frame.

After working in one of the few Times Square clubs that took 70% of my earnings in the private rooms, I was desperate to get hired elsewhere. The house mom came back. “The managers said okay…but they want you to lose weight.” I sighed a breath of relief. I had a job and that’s all that mattered. Afterward, though, I realized the other two dancers didn’t get hired, one older than me and the other more tatted. My heart sank. How many people did they turn away a day?

The low-socioeconomic and ‘sleazy’ stigma attached to sex work stood in stark contrast to Mickey and Goofy.

I have never known Delgado’s New York — a sex industry booming among artists, minorities, queers, and working-class people. I have only known $12 beers, $2,000+ monthly studio apartments, and pricey artisan cafes. My experiences dancing in New York were dampened by rigid hiring practices, poor security, and steep commissions.

I was lucky that day. My blonde hair, white skin, and youth got me through the door, but unless I’d glam up and slim down my employment was precarious. And after a year of doing exactly that, I was worn down to the point of quitting.

Instead, I left for New Orleans and found an accepting, accessible, and much friendlier and safer work environment. Not quite the Blue Angel, but I felt at home dancing in the creative city of grit and soul.

But then, two weeks before I was due to fly into New Orleans to work my second Carnival season, I heard the news that four strip clubs were raided along Bourbon Street. Sickened, I researched more and discovered the City Planning Commission was pushing a strip club cap and limit per block-face, essentially de-clustering strip clubs along Bourbon Street. A week later, four more were raided.

I Ain’t Saying She’s A Gold Digger: Sex Work, Money, And Upward Mobility

On the surface, these crackdowns were stoked by a city’s 2016 investigation into clubs’ harmful effects on strippers and the community. But the reality is, just like New York 20 years ago, corporations and developers have a stake in eradicating the industry from tourist areas. The devastation of Katrina provided an opportunity for developers to lure white millennials and upper-class families to the city with lush condos and pedestrian walkways, as locals have bitterly watched as houses remain in despair, potholes unfixed. The officials at the cruise ship port of New Orleans have been trying to capitalize on this makeover and charm Disney with promises of a clean family-friendly destination.

As cities turn their backs on residents to attract the elite,“sex workers are not part of the economic vision,” Swift explains.

Even though the targeted elite frequently patronize strip clubs, our visible presence must be sanitized and contained. “Sex workers are part of a city that is more open and less policed. But when a city is being forcibly hyper-gentrified by city and state governments, they have to be surveilled and controlled,” Moss says.

After the raids, I lamented to a friend, “It feels like they’re trying to clean up Bourbon Street.” She chuckled, “People don’t go to Bourbon Street for family fun.”

But that’s what people once thought of Times Square and Downtown Manhattan.

Stripping is protected by the First Amendment, but city councils have the power to curtail the industry through zoning if they can provide evidence of “secondary effects” that outweigh the right to self-expression.

The secondary effects doctrine is used to rob cities of strip clubs or push them out to the margins in gentrifying cities. And it doesn’t take much. Cities rely on slapdash reporting that claim clubs decrease property value, heighten crime, and more recently contribute to human trafficking. At best, these claims paint a picture of correlation rather than causation; at worst, they convince the public that strippers inflict harm on the community (and themselves).

This doesn’t just reshape the city, but changes who can be a stripper. Swift explains, “As cities try to limit the size and scope of the industry, they contribute to its monopolization.” Stringent regulations and club closures allow corporate strip clubs with big lawyers to prosper. And since strippers face fewer options for work, clubs get choosier, which looks like capping people of color and shutting the door on the tattooed and bigger-bodies workers.

The Insidious Planning That Goes Into Gentrification

Like the Blue Angel, three clubs that welcomed diversity in New Orleans shuttered during this round of police crackdowns. As cities gentrify, so do our clubs.

“Were there protests against the zoning ordinance?” I asked Delgado.

“We didn’t really have a voice,” she responded.

On February 4, 2018, though, something changed. The silenced stormed the political conversation and demanded a voice. Hundreds of workers took the streets in New Orleans to march for our jobs. We chanted “No new Bourbon Street” and “Bourbon Street, not Sesame Street.” I cried as allies joined — hopeful that maybe, for the first time, people will see that sex workers make valuable contributions to the city’s economy and culture.

“The protest in New Orleans was a break of tradition. For the first time there was a collective voice of dancers saying ‘No’ to being shuffled around by the city and targeted by police,” Swift says.

The protest reminded the city officials that there is a human cost to a sanitized city. And they heard — because on March 22nd they voted 4–3 against capping strip clubs. It was a landmark decision for the rights of strippers, but it’s not over. The secondary effects doctrine is alive and well, still threatening New Orleans, and more recently, Reno and the Bronx.

As long strippers are feared and devalued members of society, our bodies will be seen as a deterrent in gentrifying cities. In order to mitigate our threat, officials and police will regulate, criminalize, and dispose of us without a care.