sex-work

Mistress Matisse on Losing Your Virginity on Camera: "The Right to" is Not the Same as "A Good Idea"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Fri, 2011-01-28 01:21

Respected and respectable BDSM, porn, and sex-work authority Mistress Matisse worries she'll get shit for her column in The Stranger about Nikki Blue's recent "innocence sacrificing" video from Kink.com. I'd be surprised if she gets too much -- it's a very professional and well-though-out opinion not about marketing or audience or producers, which was where I took issue. Instead it's about the work. Which I'm not really qualified to opine about but Matisse categorically is. Here's the way she says it in her column

Critics were quick to assure us they supported Blue's choice to do the show; it was just the promotional language they deplored. I cannot say the same. If Ms. Blue were a friend of mine, I'd say, "Don't do this." True, Nicki Blue didn't just fall off the turnip truck—she's modeled nude and performed solo in webcam shows. She says having her first vaginal intercourse live on camera is her fantasy, and obviously she has the right to choose that.

But has the right is not the same as a good idea. An inexperienced woman getting into Big Porn to "explore her sexuality"? That's a seriously bad idea. Porn is a business. It doesn't exist to create a safe place for models to fulfill their fantasies; it exists to create entertainment for paying customers and to make money.

Source: The Stranger

And here's how she expanded on the idea on her blog.

[Y]ou should not do porn, or any kind of sex work, to explore your sexuality. A happy and emotionally-healthy sex worker is someone with the tools and the desire to facilitate other people exploring their sexuality. As you go along in sex work, you’ll learn what particular types of sexuality you most enjoy participating in, and gravitate towards the appropriate setting for that. But getting into corporate porn to "explore your sexuality" is rather like joining the military to explore your issues with aggression and formalized hierarchies. You certainly will get an education, but it’s unlikely to be a smooth and enjoyable process.

Virgins aspiring to sex work, think it like this: Actors rehearse, athletes train, and musicians practice. If you want your sexuality to enrich the lives of other people, and you want to be happy doing so, learn your skills in private. Then go forth and make the world a sexier place.

Source: Mistress Matisse's Journal

As it happens I do know someone who joined the military to explore his aggression and to get a taste of formal hierarchies. Turns out you can't just walk away from some things once you've been in long enough (maybe 5 weeks) to figure out you're not that into it after all. And, it turns out, that when something important to you doesn't go well you can wind up considerably more vulnerable than you might have anticipated. So I think that part of Matisses' opinion is great. Same, though, for her point about it just not being irresponsible not only to yourself but to your colleagues or customers to try providing a service while just assuming that if you enjoy it they will too. Considering the relatively low consequences of the alternative of actual assessing your abilities beforehand that's not a good idea either.

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Managing Sex Work: On the Job Moonlighting

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Fri, 2009-12-04 10:14

The author of Ask a Manager answers an unfamiliar question with grace and aplomb

[Question] “My co-worker is a very open person and tells me to cover for her every time she has to leave the office. Our boss and manager are not here half the time so when they are not, my co-worker leaves either early and/or takes a really long lunch. At the beginning, the excuse for leaving early was because of a date. But she later told me that she’s actually sleeping with people for money. She comes back all proud, telling me how much money she made in an hour.”

[Answer] I’d just be straightforward with her and tell her: “I don’t care what you do in your personal life, but while you’re off making money, you’re leaving me to pick up the slack here. You’re putting me in a bad position, because you’re asking me to cover for you and you’re leaving me with more work.”

Read the quote in context here.

The comment threads are pretty interesting too, some judgmental, some libertarian, some addressing it as a law and order question, others as a straight-up work problem.

A woman from New Zealand takes a similar approach to the Manager

Here in New Zealand it’s not an illegal activity and I would deal with it as suggested above. However if it was an illegal activity, say dealing drugs, then I would be informing management immediately.

The last comment at the moment (dated Nov. 30th) is from the author of the original question clarifying some of the assumptions in comments.

Well I wrote this email in an effort to guide me in the right direction, but really it is easier said than done. I totally agree that prostitution is illegal and she shouldn’t be doing that, but in reality it is a victimless crime. I can not call the cops on her because I just don’t have the heart to do that.

She is really a very good person and is an excellent mother. Most of the people who post comments here assume that since she is selling her body she must be a bad mother. She is not giving that example to her kids. For her kids she works only in the office. Her kids are her priority. Although, I do not agree with her spending habits she provides the best she can for her kids.

Kind of takes away some of the cartoonish shorthand in standard debates about sex work. She’s clearly not “trafficked,” and it would be very difficult to construct her as a victim, a thrall, or dehumanized. But she’s leaving her day-job co-workers holding the bag and pulling her freight plus abusing her responsibilities to her employer.

And yet more evidence that single, blanket characterizations of sex workers, or single, blanket policies for dealing with sex work, would be inadequate to its complexity.

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Lavonia's Bonfire of Vanities

Posted by Kochanie | Tags:

Fri, 2008-08-01 01:01

Image: Cafe Risque courtesy of Online Athens

The city of Lavonia, Georgia decided that $997,000 was not too great a price to pay to stage its own Bonfire of the Vanities. Using the subterfuge of an unnamed third-party, the city officials succeeded in purchasing the Cafe Risque, a local strip club which the council has tried to shut down since it opened in 2001.

According to the City Council, Jerry Sullivan, the deceased owner of Cafe Risque, had obtained their approval for a family-style restaurant. However, once the establishment opened, it was advertised as Cafe Risque and seven years of legal proceedings by the town could not put the club out of business. When the owners of Cafe Risque announced their intention to sell the property, it was no secret that the owners refused to sell the property back to the city. Fearing that the weaknesses in the zoning ordinances would allow another adult business to operate in the same location, the city officials decided to buy the land and building through the guise of a third party. When the first transaction was completed, the city immediately purchased the property from the third party.

By that night, Lavonia’s council members were having a victory party at the cafe, burning the business’ signs in a parking lot bonfire. On Wednesday, Fesperman and city officials giddily began gutting the building

“We all took turns daring each other (to slide down the strippers’ poles),” Fesperman said. “But nobody would actually go through with it.”

You can read the entire article in OnLine Athens here

While the residents of Lavonia are celebrating the demise of Cafe Risque, here are some facts to consider.

The population of Lavonia is less than 2,000.

For 2003 Lavonia’s crime statistics, according to city-data.com, were: 1 murder, 4 rapes, 4 robberies, 23 assaults.

With a population of less than 2,000, Lavonia has a small tax base to support its annual expenditures of $1.8 million (based on the 2004 budget).

The financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2002, which are the most recent statements available online on the city’s website, indicate that Lavonia held $1.9 million in cash and certificates of deposit in the fund established for its water treatment operation. The water treatment facility had been financed through the issuance of long-term bonds totaling $4.1 million. According to City Manager Gary Fesperman, the $997,000 used to purchase the Cafe Risque came from the city’s reserve fund which was slated to pay off those 1997 bonds used to build that water treatment plant.

The investors who hold the debt securities issued by Lavonia and the bond rating agencies will not be as jubilant as its citizens when they learn that $1.0 million of the liquid funds set aside for retirement of those obligations had been used to invest in an illiquid asset, i.e., real estate, during one of the worst markets in over a decade. While I do not know the specifics of Lavonia’s debt covenants, I hope that this city will be able to meet its obligations to investors and creditors. But in the event that Lavonia defaults on its scheduled debt repayments, I would not be surprised if the city’s use of those funds earmarked for the retirement of the long-term debt could be construed as fiscal mismanagement.

After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town’s bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?

Seems a shame, doesn’t it?

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The Scarlet Letter and the Law

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Sat, 2008-06-21 09:21

[Quick hi to everyone from the 5th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy, hosted by Amber Rhea. —fl]

So. Back in the late 1970s in my home town a woman I knew vaguely as a customer at one of the bars I worked at wound up having what by all accounts including hers began as consensual sex with a bunch of firefighters at the nearby university-area fire station. After she’d had sex with fourteen, though, she wanted to stop. Instead the two or three remaining firefighters forced her to continue till they’d had “their turns.”

A lot of area locals were surprised, and even angry, when she had the gall to charge those last firefighters with rape and the others with helping them hold her down. After all she was Teh Bhig Slut for having sex with any of them so what difference did a few more make? Just because she didn’t want to anymore? People were even more surprised when prosecutors brought charges in the case.

That was the first time I heard the phrase “no means no” used in a feminist context and even in 1978 or 1979 I only had to hear it that once go get it. There was an even bigger lesson though, and it was one people had a harder time learning: rights, rules, and respect don’t evaporate when someone has Teh Sex, even if you don’t approve of the way she or he chooses to do it.

I mention this because Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors highlights a problem with the criminalization of sex work with the following quote from a New York Times

Jodi Michelle Link, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in sex and vice crimes, said prosecuting Mr. Elms for his connection to The Erotic Review could be difficult for free speech reasons. She also said that the prostitutes who said they had been asked by Mr. Elms for sexual favors would have trouble making a criminal case against him because they could simply choose not to participate on his site.

...

Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said.

Read the quote, and Bartow’s commentary in context here.

Sound familiar? Mr. Elm seems to have been getting away with straight up sexual harassment of both the hostile-workplace and quid pro quo varieties. But because everyone including the D.A. seem maximally titillated by the prostitution angle the reality of what happened to that sex worker goes by the wayside. Because, after all, how can a prostitute ever be sexually harassed? It’s her job to be harassed, her whole job is quid pro quo. So big whup, right?

But that’s the same mentality that led people to imagine that a woman who’s said yes to 14 men gives up any right to say no to the 15th, 16th, or 17th. It’s the same mentality that lets an asshole judge (Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni, to be exact) say gang-raping a prostitute is just “theft of services” and dismiss all other charges.

In the real world, however, sex workers (trafficked and non-trafficked) get put over the barrel like that all the time. And not to put too fine a point on it but it’s the “being over the barrel” part, not the “being a sex worker” that makes prostitutes unreliable witnesses. If your job is already illegal how much can you afford to disclose before (at least in the witness’s internal deliberations) you put yourself in legal jeopardy?

If the businesses or service providors Elms’s site reviewed were legal, don’t you think victims of harassment and extortion (let along what sounds like kidnapping and use firearm-aggravated criminal sexual assault) would have been taken more seriously? Of course!

I wouldn’t expect a vice-squad prosecutor to understand the nuances, nor to be able to untangle the chain of employment, nor to press the definition of “workplace” for the civil offense of sexual harassment.** but I bet a halfway competent employment-rights attorney could make hay out of this guy Elms.

The problem is that, once again, people get distracted and/or titillated by the “sex” part of “sex work” and therefore miss a lot of opportunities to really land hard on abusers.

[** That’s not a knock on District Attorney Link, by the way. I wouldn’t expect a prosecutor assigned to homicide cases to untangle securities fraud either. —fl]

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