Coming Out Kinky

Back in college when I was uber-involved in the queer student group, we used to have educational meetings around National Coming Out Day. One of the things we talked about what the Cass Identity Model of coming out, which described several stages in the process of coming out as gay.

The initial few stages are things like "identity confusion" and "identity tolerance," but what I'm interested in for this post is the second-to-last one, "Identity pride." Cass describes a phase when a gay person feels like they have to tell everybody about their newly realized orientation, where they divide the world into gay and straight people and mostly only feel comfortable with the other gay ones, where they might be a gay activist, where they surround themselves completely with the gay community. This is the last phase before "identity synthesis" in which one's sexual orientation is understood as just one of many aspect of self.

I think I’ve been in that uber-gay phase, except with kink. It’s really a similar process, I think, to come out as kinky as it is to come out as gay. They’re both marginalized sexualities which have potential legal and life-altering consequences. You can lose your job or your children for being kinky. You can be jailed for assault, even if it was consensual. It definitely can have social consequences. You can end up in therapy to “fix” your kinkiness. Parents don’t necessarily want to know about it.*

I’ve been practically cloistered in the kink community for the last year and a half. I work at a kinky sex shop. I live with kinky roommates. My boyfriend is kinky. My friends are kinky. I go to kinky parties and classes. My vacations are at kinky retreats. It’s been a little ridiculously consistent.

I think I’m starting to get over that stage of my coming out process. I did need it. I needed to learn about what I like and to feel okay with it. I needed to explore and I needed help in giving myself permission for that. I needed to meet people with whom I could play in this way and with whom I could talk about my kinks. I’m extremely thankful for the relationships that I’ve made in the kinky community, especially with my boyfriend and my roommates and coworkers.

But I’m ready for a little more variety. I have so many interests. I’m passionate about gender politics. I’m interested in spirituality. I’d like to do yoga, and I’m interested in health. I care about the environment. I love to write, and to read just about everything. I love to learn and study and be intellectual. I like to perform. These are all things I’ve neglected to one degree or another for the last year and a half.

Just sayin’ it’s time to branch out a little, and maybe write about it here!

*There are nuances to this argument and it’s an aside to my main point. There are of course differences between the social and legal impacts of kink and queer sexuality. But there are also lots of similarities.

A Call to Men

This pretty much speaks for itself. One observation: the audience is almost entirely women because this talk was at the TEDWomen conference. I think this is a vitally, vitally important message, but I do wonder how it's going to get to actual men when gender is so consistently considered only a women's issue.

I don't have a solution for this. I don't know how to get men to pay attention to this stuff because their privilege does allow them to ignore it. It just seems so important to involve them, not just to end violence against women but to free men, as he says, from their own versions of the Man Box.

Tony Porter's website, A Call to Men is very much worth checking out.

How Cool is This?

Via Figleaf (who I seem to be unable to stop referencing), a group of scientists has suggested that a month-long abstinence campaign might drastically reduce new HIV infections to the point of having a tangible impact on the global epidemic. Meaning: if we could convince everyone in the world to stop having sex for one month, we could make huge headway in the fight against AIDs.

Now, it might seem like I'm someone who wouldn't embrace abstinence, even for a month. I wouldn't like it, I admit, although I've had significantly longer periods of abstinence than than in recent years when I just didn't feel emotionally available to connect with people in that way. I need breaks, too.

I think this is a brilliant idea, though. The basis for their suggestion is the fact that most HIV transmissions happen within the first month or so of the original person being infected. The risk of passing it along drastically reduces after that point. Therefore, if we could get everyone to stop having sex for just a month (or, as Figleaf says, to even just use barriers/condoms for what sex they do have during that month) then we'd be past that highly infectious window for everyone with the virus.

The only problem I see with this is getting all the governments and activists and people who can make such a campaign happen on board in an organized way. This sounds like it'd have to be a massive advertising campaign, with advance notice and a planned month and all kinds of logistical nightmares. But it's better than anything I've seen so far, and all those things are details that a group with enough good organizers could probably pull it off.

Anybody else think this is a good or a terrible idea? I'm curious to hear the reactions.

Why Isn't Rape Ever Funny?

Because chances are, you're telling your hi-larious rape joke to somebody who has been raped. And that re-victimizes them. It actively causes harm. And that's not okay.

Also, when you joke about rape, you create a culture in which rapists - who live and walk among us - know that their actions most likely won't see any kind of consequence. They have their desires affirmed. They get to actually talk about what they do, so long as they put it as a joke. And then people laugh. And they feel safe. And then they go rape people. And that's not okay, either.

This is not about being Politically Correct. Triggering someone's traumatic response to what is generally agreed is the most traumatic experience you can have has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with being a decent person who doesn't want to hurt people.

So just don't. And don't laugh along when someone else does. It's like a tiny, tiny thing you can do to fight rape. So let's all do it.

Being Invested

When I moved to New York City, I imagined I would work as a canvasser for a little while as I searched for and found another job. I didn't think I wanted to do it in the winter; I didn't want it to be my actual job here. It was a great situation because I could transfer from San Francisco without having an income-less period, but I didn't want it for more than that.

Then, of course, I arrived here and things changed.

For my first week or two of canvassing in New York, my average raised was terrible, I was completely exhausted every day after work, and I had no energy to even look for other jobs. I dreaded dragging myself out of bed every morning to trudge in. Things were going in a bad direction.

Of course, being the savvy individual that I am, I realized that this was no way to go about my life. In San Francisco, I really enjoyed canvassing. I did quite well at it. I liked my coworkers a lot. The nature of the beast had not actually changed, so I knew that the job itself was not in fact my problem. It was, of course, all about my attitude.

As soon as I made the decision to actually invest in my job, to treat it as what it is - the main portion of my life and what I spend my time on - things got so much better.

We had a meeting that week, the day I made this decision in fact, about the national plan of our company. I'm a field manager of the canvass, basically the bottom rung of the leadership of the company, but my boss made an effort to clue us into the vision of what we're doing and what it means for our activism and politics in general in this country.

It's pretty awesome to be a part of something that's empowering much larger numbers of citizens to actually get involved in what's happening in the government. I like canvassing for political groups because the way I see it, it's the only thing combating the fact that money talks and corporations by far have the most of that to throw around. Sure, a twenty dollar donation to a PAC isn't that powerful, but if we can get thousands of people to make those then we suddenly have some leverage.

The right tends to be so well organized through their churches. It's been a consistent problem of progressive politics that we're so concerned with being revolutionary that we can't organize behind a single goal. Canvassing may have a hope to bring us together in large enough numbers to start fighting effectively against the f*ing Christian Coalition. That is pretty neat.

Bearing that in mind as I work has not only improved my morale by leaps and bounds, but it also makes me a better worker. I personally raised around $2300 this week, which is pretty fucking cool. It just goes to show that how happy I am really has the most to do with how much I'm committed to what I do.

When I pour all my personal energy into a goal, it doesn't feel bad when I have less of it at the end of the day. It feels like I'm connected to something, like that expenditure was a gift. That's what I want to feel in all the work I do, forever. It's good to be figuring out how to do that.

Stripping and "Hating" and Dating Men

When I first started stripping, I heard from lots of my coworkers and a few of my friends in the industry that the job would make me hate men. They said that when you do sex work, you see the worst in men and so it is inevitable that you start to dislike them at least a little. I didn't write this off entirely, as of course they had experience at that point and I didn't, but I hoped that it would be different for me.

I was, I rationalized, doing sex work for different reasons than most of them. I didn't need the money, I just kind of wanted to see what it was like to dance naked and get paid for it. I figured this privilege would protect me from making some of the compromises they might have had to, would protect me from a changing opinion of men. I knew the industry would definitely alter me, as everything in life does, but I figured my compassion could hold up to it in that regard.

Well, my compassion is certainly still there. I feel sorry for men much more than I hate them. But things have definitely changed in my feelings towards them.

I've been thinking about my recent heterosexual trend, wondering why my attention has been so much more on men than on women. It hasn't been for lack of physical attraction to women; it's just that when I meet a nicer (and attractive) man, my focus zooms in on him immediately. He stands out to me. This hasn't been happening much with women.

It occurred to me that I've got a little reaction formation going on when it comes to men. (Wikipedia: In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defensive process in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.) In this case, I'm very uncomfortable with and somewhat dislike men, so I've been dating them.

So I certainly don't hate men, but I do hate a lot of the things a lot of them do. I don't much like being objectified without my permission. (Accepting money for it is giving permission.) I don't like it when they assume I'm sexually available or feelingless based on my orientation or relationship style or job. I feel almost paranoid about being imposed upon by them, pushed into ways of being or thinking of myself that I don't like, and it affects me from day to day.

So I'm very defended against them. In order to protect myself, I have to be paying attention to the men around me at all times. I'm expending an enormous amount of energy and attention on making sure I don't interact with men in ways that will hurt me. I'm super up front about my job, orientation, and relationship style so that I can immediately avoid the men who objectify them. Putting up barriers like that takes a good amount of effort and so I'm always very aware of men.

What this means is that when I do find a guy who's nice to me, who doesn't do those things I hate, I've already been paying oodles of attention to him in order to find that out. It seems notable, remarkable, that he's not going to be sexist towards me. I appreciate him a lot. I date him, if he's available. There you go. I'm not as afraid of women, and so this happens less often.

(As a side note: I don't claim this is a rational reaction to anything. These are feelings and my attempt to understand them.)

Now, back to stripping. Stripping didn't force me somehow to have these feelings towards men. It's not even that men act much differently at a strip club than they do in general. In fact it's just the opposite, and that's the problem. Stripping commodifies the sexist interactions that exist every day, everywhere. It puts a monetary value on them and so it makes them very, very obvious.

As a stripper, I have to trade somewhat in misogyny, to play off it and manipulate it so that I can get lap dances and tips and avoid groping and slurs. It's something I simultaneously like and hate about the job. I've learned oodles about gender roles, particularly about what's dysfunctional in masculinity. I like learning. However, this knowledge makes it hard to move comfortably in a world that's so full of sexism. I'm just so aware all the time. I can't really sit back and accept it, learn to ignore it, bite the harness and move on like women have been doing for centuries. I'm psychologically fighting it out most of the time.

I'd like to try to shift my focus a little. It's probably unnecessary and certainly draining to be so defended all the time. I'd like to learn, in my day to day activities if not my scholarship and activism, to brush off sexist men. I don't want to let them inside my head, let them affect me, which is something I do have control over even when I can't change their behavior. It'd be nice, even, to spend more time with women and live more in a sisterhood community where I can feel safe. Focus on safety, on whom I am comfortable with rather than on whom I'm not.

I suppose it's a lesson for me as an activist. I want to keep working to change the things in the world that strike me as unfair and wrong, the things that make me angry and hurt me. I need also, though, to focus on healing from that anger and hurt. It's just as important.

Canvassing vs. Stripping

To those of you who also work in the sex industry (and some savvy folks who don't), it may not come as a surprise that working as a canvasser is similar in many ways to working as a stripper. That might sound like a stretch, but aside from having to wear a slightly different uniform, a lot of the things I'm doing in my new job as a canvasser to overturn Prop 8 are similar to what I did as a stripper.

I spend all day being cheerful, nice, and attempting to get people to give me money. I have to walk up to strangers, charm them, and get them to like me. I need to be completely comfortable with rejection because more people will walk by me on the street or refuse to open their screen doors than will donate $70 a month. I need to convince people to part with their money in ways they weren't expecting.

One of my immediate supervisors (not the hiring boss) just remarked to me that she's noticed our company doesn't hire unattractive people. The office is pretty diverse in terms of race and sexuality, but nearly everyone is aged 18-27 and is at the very least pretty or cute. This is partly because of who they hire and partly because you have to make a certain amount to stay on staff. Prettier people make more money.

That prettiness principle demonstrates the job's similarity to stripping. It's slightly exploitative, it commodifies people's looks, and it lends itself to a particular staff demographic.

My point here is that stripping is a lot like any other service or public relations job. Yes, it commodifies and sometimes exploits people, but so does canvassing or waiting tables or selling just about anything. It's all labor, stripping just involves less clothing.

That is all.

Crossroads

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about where I'm going with my life and how I want to get there.

I've had a pretty good idea of what I want to do for a long time. I really want to be involved in sex education. I think that's a way for me to be a teacher, which really appeals to me, and help people, which is really important to me, and be an activist, which I think everyone should do. Sure, not everybody can be an activist about everything, but I think we can all make a contribution, however small, to some world progress we think is important. It's more a question of caring about the world and the beings in it and letting that affect your behavior than organizing rallies.

That said, I'm having a moment of hesitation about my life plan now that I've got my undergrad degree in hand and the possibilities of what I could be doing are wide open. I could live anywhere, I could work at almost anything. I could get my masters (in human sexuality) or not. I could live for the whole year with my best friend or not. I could travel. I could settle down. It's so endless.

I'm not operating under the illusion that I need to know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. I'm just at a point where I can really, truly decide what I want to do now and the myriad choices are a little more overwhelming than I expected. It's kind of cool, but also kind of scary.

Money

A disorganized and possibly rambling continuation of my thoughts on my privileged stupidity when it comes to money: how did I get this way?

I try to be fairly open about the fact that I come from a very privileged family. For starters: I'm white, started out as Catholic, and my family has a lot of money. My dad is an executive for start-up biotech companies, which means he does very well financially. My mother works very part time and doesn't make much; she could afford to make that choice. Both of my parents are college educated. They both came from upper-middle-class white families. My background is a continuation of theirs.

We did not talk about money in my family when I was growing up. Apparently, it's partly because my father really hates to. I think it's a combination of his being proud of how much he makes and wanting to spend it on his wife and children (quite the patriarchal sentiment, that) and feeling awkward about being richer than most people and living in luxury. Not ridiculous luxury, but luxury nonetheless. There's a nice big dose of white, wealthy guilt in my family and the way it manifests itself is that we DO NOT talk about money.

My dad hands his credit card to waiters at restaurants before they bring him the check, and he just signs it. My mother doesn't check the price tags of things we buy at the grocery store or jeans at the mall. I don't know how much money my dad makes in a year, or in a month, or in a week, or in an hour. I don't know how much our mortgage costs. I don't know how much our food costs. Off the top of my head, I don't even know how much this computer cost.

Maybe sharing all of this is just rubbing the privilege in people's faces, and I shouldn't. I guess my point, though, is that things really shouldn't be this way. One of the things about privilege is that it allows you not to be aware of things like money or race or gender or sexuality.

If you're white, that's supposedly the default race and most white people don't even have to think about their race until they're confronted with a minority person who's bringing it up. I think white people who give in to this option of ignorance are socially irresponsible. I think financially privileged people who give in to the option of ignorance about money are socially irresponsible.

I hate that my parents didn't talk about money just because we didn't have to talk about it. Just because we didn't need to discuss what we couldn't afford or what we needed to miss out on due to lack of funds doesn't mean we shouldn't have been talking about what we could afford and how special that was. It's something I needed to be aware of.

Yes, I heard from time to time that we were lucky people and that we shouldn't take it for granted, but the taking for granted was happening on a daily basis and that's a much stronger message.

I probably won't ever be truly poor. I won't know what that's like. I don't want to let that stop me from feeling empathy for people who are poor or from appreciating what I have. I don't want to let it spoil me, which it seems in part to have done. I don't want it to keep me from being a good, responsible person. I don't want it to stop me from helping people.

So I've got to figure this shit out.

Rallies

As an activist and progressive type and queer and everything else, I keep a deep dark secret. It stays inside of me and only my very closest friends know the truth. I put on a good face and pretend it's not true, but inside I feel the conflict to my core. The reality is this:

I hate rallies.

I know. As someone who wants to toss the Man around a little, who wants change and all sorts of other good things, I'm supposed to be all about large groups standing in the freezing cold and inspirational speeches and chanting and signs. I should love picket lines and dramatic displays and chaining myself to things. I should feel the energy, the burn, the drive, the power of the people!

I don't.

I really think that rallies are most often purely for the benefit of the people holding them. I rarely see any kind of change as a result of a rally. If anything, a successful rally is more often a sign that a change is about to happen. The success of a rally, its high attendance and large effect on public opinion, doesn't make the change, it just shows that it's imminent. A rally won't have high attendance or an effect on public opinion unless people are already leaning towards supporting its cause.

I do know that rallies are an important tool in a campaign. They can show that an idea has the support of lots and lots of people. There is power in numbers. I just get annoyed because too many times rallies are held in substitute for other kinds of activism. It's like "there's a war in Iraq that we disagree with, let's march on city hall and say we don't want unnecessary deaths," but that doesn't actually change the fact that we're at war.

If you've got a big goal, you've got to come at it from lots of directions and protesting isn't enough. We're still in Iraq after years and years of protests; it took a concerted effort from politicians working in countless ways to even get someone in power who wants to consider getting us out. You know, there were legislative actions, and lobbying actions, and opinion polls and public service announcements and whatever else. The rallies were relatively insignificant.

I do go to rallies when they're about a cause I support, but I always feel vaguely annoyed and fatalistically amused at the enthusiasm I see there. Yes, I do sometimes get caught up in the spirit, but mostly I'm just standing at the sides trying not to laugh and cry at the same time.

So this is it, me coming out of the closet as a rally skeptic. Shame, shame, and all of that, but eh, I'll be active in other ways, thank you.

Rough Week

There's been so much going on this week that I can't even begin to talk about it coherently. My social interactions have turned awkward once more, and I've got so much work to do that I feel panicky and nauseous whenever I think about it too much. I've got a knot in my left shoulder the size and texture of a baseball. You can actually see it when you look at me straight on; my left shoulder at my neck is slightly higher than my right one.

For the last few weeks I've been letting things pile up and not working efficiently. I didn't want to deal with the stress of it all, and I couldn't even think of it except as a giant cloud looming darkly over me. I finally wrote a to do list and I've been taking my ADD meds, which both have helped. It's still a lot of work, and there legitimately isn't enough time in the week to finish it.

I'm also just feeling really shitty about letting it get backed up like this. I haven't been attending to some of the responsibilities that are actually important to me, like leading the sexual health club or working hard enough on my thesis. I feel really disappointed in myself. I feel like I'm incapable of living up to my own ideas of what I want to accomplish. It's an awful sensation.

I'm also feeling lonely again. That's the part that just makes me feel stupid. Even confessing the details properly makes me feel like an idiot.

I've been having this friendship with a boy, S, who I met in person for the second time and spent week with over winter break in San Francisco. He's the one I was talking about going on a road trip with. I really like him, and we connected powerfully very quickly. That's extremely unusual for me; I'm slow to trust and open up. It helped that he'd been really great when I'd talked to him online about a crisis I had in the fall.

Anyway, after I came back to New York, I let myself rely on him a lot as a person to talk to. Sure, it was online, but it helped a lot. I didn't feel as much at loose ends, like I had all these emotional needs that weren't being met. I was able to go out and have sex with other people without worrying about my baggage coming along. I felt a lot happier.

Recently, though, he's started having sex with a lot of different women, which takes up about eight tons of his time. It's also really emotionally consuming, which I totally get. I'm happy for him, and I'm really glad that he's poly. It's another thing we relate on.

He also, though, has stopped really talking to me. These days, he doesn't even usually ask how I am in conversation, and he's so happy and busy that I don't know how to bring up the fact that I'm as stressed as a horse at a glue factory. I don't feel like I can demand his attention when we only spent a week together and I'm so far away.

The result of all of the above is that I feel really stressed out and pretty disgusted with myself. I also feel terribly alone, like not only can't I deal with my life right now, there's no one to help me. I really just want to be cuddled and soothed, but I have no idea how to make that happen. I can't just turn on the trust and comfort with the next random person that comes along.

So that's been my week. I'm hoping it gets better soon.

Quick but Excellent Link on Masculinity

Really, really good post on masculinity and what it would take to create a more egalitarian gender structure. I really like Hugo Schwyzer's blog; he says some really wonderful things about masculinity and parenting. Here's an excerpt from the post:

The feminist project is, in the end, about men too. Women’s liberation can’t be dependent upon men, of course; women don’t need men’s blessing in order to become autonomous agents, freed at last from the chains of custom and the bonds of biology. (Sorry, I’m tired, and the prose gets purple when I’m underslept.) But the benefits of feminism are undeniable for men: a chance to be full and complete human beings, capable of courage and tenderness in equal measure; a chance to be loved for who they are rather than what they can perform. That’s precious stuff indeed. But men raised on the noxious elixir of traditional manhood will find it difficult to adapt quickly to this new paradigm, even when the old model has proved so unsatisfactory. What’s needed is a continued cultural revolution, aimed at redefining what it means to be male, aimed at liberating boys and young men from the masculine straitjacket.

Read it. The whole thing. It's spot on.

Time for Activism

I don't mean that in the "What time is it? Time for activism!" way. I mean it in the "I don't have time for my life and I'm trying to figure out how to be an activist and also a person" kind of way.

I recently got sucked into the student segment of a state budget campaign. The irony is, of course, that I'm not working in the state where I vote, but I am supporting a cause I think is important. I'm blogging for the campaign and it's all fairly time consuming.

I've also got all my usual queer activism and I'm the president of the sexuality club I just founded at my school. I've been involved in our college's diversity task force (although I skipped the last meeting) and I get invited (read: pressured) to help with various feminist clubs and progressive groups. I write my column for the school paper.

Then there's my online presence, which I very much value and want to spend time on. I really like reading and writing blogs, I like the community here, and I want to keep up with it. It's pretty fulfilling for me, and my mind is boggled by people who seem to be able to have a huge online presence and do the rest of their lives, too.

Then there's school. I've got an independent study project that I could probably contentedly work on to the exclusion of all else. If I'm going to do it well, I'm going to need to devote a lot of time. I've just had a serious rethinking of how I'm structuring my thesis, so I've got lots of catch-up to do. There are also all my other classes, in which I am behind as usual.

Then there's work. I'm only dancing once a week right now, but I'd very much like to be doing more. I could use the money and frankly the exercise, but I just don't have the time or energy.

Oh yeah, and I want to have a social life. I want to spend some time with my friends. Having sex is pretty important to me, too. I'm not such a fun person when I'm not getting it. It improves my outlook on life and my mood. I want to have time for that, too.

I was thinking about it, and there are plenty of people who seem to do work and school and blogging, but I wonder if they're doing as much in terms of activism. Don't think I'm minimizing how much work it all is without the added activisming (yes, that is a word now, because I said so). I know firsthand that it's a lot of work. I'm just starting to fold and get burnt out. That's clearly the last thing I need.

Graduation is so close, and that's part of the problem. I'm fantasizing about working and writing and being an activist without having to do school. I actually had a dream about it the other week, about summer and being finished. I'll have a degree. I can just live. It's just a question of getting there.

Links Because I Read Too Many Blogs Not to Share

About Time I Take a Stand
Jem writes another great response to the whole BDSM kerfluffle (yes, that's how I spell that word) going on in the blog universe. It seems like she has a nicely balanced perspective, and I appreciate her respect.

Speech on Innovation in Sex Education
Heather Corinna of Scarleteen includes the full text of her inspiring speech on sex ed and innovation. I think she's an amazing person, and while the speech is long it's well worth reading. She talks about how she got to where she is as a sex educator, reaching tens of thousands of people each day.

Feminism vs. Real Life

Courtney at Feministing wrote about the ways her feminist ideals differ from her actual life, and invited others to do the same. I think this is a really good exercise in self-awareness, so I'm going to try to answer her.

1. I'm incredibly self conscious about how I dress and what I look like at all times. I know that there's no need for me to always be sexy or attractive, but I can't help the running commentary in my head that compares my own appearance to other women's in a very competitive, distinctly un-feminist way. I try, but it sneaks in. (I do dress however the hell I want, but I'm very aware of when I look different from how I'm "supposed to.")

2. I have and often give into the urge to take care of people much more than I let them do so for me.

3. I make all kinds of assumptions about people based on their gender (and race and apparent sexuality) which may have nothing to do with reality. Things like men are going to be less progressive or women will be more sexually shy or black people won't want anything to do with me because I'm white or queer people won't be misogynistic. I try to be aware that I'm doing this and at least not act on my assumptions, but I know I have them.

4. I enjoy blatantly misogynistic pop culture: movies, tv shows, music, etc. Sometimes it's as a cultural critic and sometimes it's just because it's got a catchy beat or a satisfying good vs. evil plot line. I like James Bond.

5. I buy lots of products whose production I know nothing about, including beauty products, clothing, and random toys. I do try to be conscientious most of the time, but other times I just go with convenience. I'm more of a thoughtless consumer than I feel I should be.

6. On a very basic level, I take advantage of gender roles by getting guys to pay to see me naked. Most of them wouldn't do it (or at least wouldn't spend as much as they do) if the male sexual role didn't prevent them from having intimacy outside sexual situations or from finding real sexual satisfaction in their unpaid interactions. (This is a complicated issue which I'd like to talk about more in depth but haven't gathered together the time and thoughts yet.)

Links Because I Read Too Many Blogs not to Share

I've been keeping up with my feed reader, so I've found some very interesting posts I'd like to share with you. I know I haven't been good about blogging this week. Too much school and an on the fly trip to NYC will do that to a person.

My Sexual Manifesto
Essin' Em shares her sex commandments, all of which I agree with heartily. I, too, have noticed that almost all the sex I've been having has been good. It's a wonderful change and without a doubt due to my better ability to communicate about what I want and ask how to please my partner, even after a brief acquaintance.

What Women Want and the Myth of the Psychic Lesbians
Greta Christina writes a spot-on post about how lesbians don't actually automatically know how to please every other woman because they've got the same kind of genitals. We're all different!

Is Sex Work Queer?
Jane at good girls don't asks if sex work is queer and grapples quite well, I think, with the question. I think that sex work CAN be queer, and that it's most exciting when it is.

I Need Another Word for Vagina
Found this via synthetic pubes. The title seems fairly self-explanatory.

Six Ways to be an Ally
Great post by Silvia on how to be an ally to women of color if you aren't one. I struggle a lot with how to deal with my own privilege, and I think this is a good, thought-provoking post on doing just that. Fires me up even more to do what I can to dismantle privilege in general.

National Freedom to Marry Day

Why would you ever want to tear someone's family apart? Why?


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Sex Work and Privilege

There have been a couple of interesting and definitely provocative posts on sex work in the blogosphere in the last week. What else is new, right? This time, though, I'm joining the discussion.

Renegade Evolution does a good job of answering some of buggle's assertions about "special" sex workers, but she leaves out what I think is the most important point.

What we need here is a discussion of privilege.

Those who enter into any industry with lots of privilege are going to be safer, healthier, and less likely to take risks that lead them to brutal experiences. (By privilege, I mean having a penis, white skin, no disabilities, heterosexuality, good health, a supportive family, good education, and/or an already-healthy pocketbook, to name a few.)

If people with the above privileges do experience brutality, they're also more likely to be able to access support systems to help them escape it and recover from it.

People with less privilege have fewer options for making and keeping money. In general, our system puts these people at a disadvantage, systematically and through no fault of their own. If someone desperately needs money, they'll do desperate things to get it. In any line of work, underprivileged folks are more likely to be taken advantage of and harmed.

This definitely applies to sex work, probably even more than many other industries because of the stigma surrounding it.

I would never, ever want to ignore the speech of people who've been brutalized at the hands of prostitution. They need everyone's help and compassion. I also don't want to discredit the people who do have a choice in what they do with their bodies and their decisions to take money for sex.

We absolutely need to talk about the systems of privilege and hardship that cause women (and men, let's not forget they do sex work too) to unwillingly enter an industry where they're raped and abused. The fact that privilege protects people from all kinds of pain (in all aspects of life) and yet leaves others to be trampled is deeply fucked up.

I think, however, that this is a larger issue of helping under-privileged people and not simply getting rid of sex work. Prostituted women and men are just one group of under-privileged people who need help and need a voice.

Sexuality Feminism

I’ve been struggling, like many feminists interested in sexuality, with the issue of self-identification. I am clearly neither an anti-porn feminist nor a sex-positive feminist. I very much enjoy porn, but I think its trends and messages are extremely problematic. I'd much rather see a new, different kind of pornography as an alternative to what we've already got.

In the past, I’ve identified most closely with sex-positive feminism. When I was growing up, I was socially attacked and ostracized for being a woman who was openly interested in sex. This hurt me. When I encountered sex-positive feminism, it was like a light shone down from the sky. There were other people who thought that sex was important, that women could be sexual, that I was really an okay person even though I had a sex drive.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with a total lassiez-faire attitude towards porn. I think it’s important to recognize the systematic misogyny in porn. I don’t want to ban porn at all, but we can’t do any better for sexuality if we don’t recognize its problems. That “pornified” misogyny is part of what creates the idea that women can’t be sexual unless they’re whores (in other words unless their sex is in service of men). I can see that, and think it’s important.

Therefore, I am coining a new term for myself. I am a sexuality feminist. I believe that sexuality is central to gender inequality. I think that addressing sexual inequality is a very crucial step towards decreasing overall gender inequality. I make sexual equality the main focus of my activism.

This term could, in fact, apply to both the anti-porn and the sex-positive feminists. It says nothing about whether you’re in favor of mainstream porn or not. Maybe it could even let us work together sometimes.

It doesn’t mean we have to give the word “pornography” a new meaning in order for the average person to understand what we mean when we define ourselves. It doesn’t suggest that those who oppose us are “sex-negative” or anti-sex. Rather than putting us in opposition to something, it gives us a realm in which to work, rebel, agitate, create, define, and live.

Who knows, maybe it could catch on. I'm claiming it here and now: I’m a sexuality feminist.

Note: This is an excerpt from my in-progress honor's thesis on porn and feminism.

Public Identity: To Come Out or Not?

I'm at a big crossroads right now.

Given how much I've been talking about it, you probably know that I'm writing an honors thesis on porn for my Women's Studies bachelor degree. It's going to be fifty pages and the culmination of a year's worth of research, as well as many years of thinking about sex, porn, and feminism.

There are so many ideas floating around out there about porn and so much conflict, especially within feminism, over what kinds of visual or cultural representations of sex are okay. I'm making a real effort to absorb and integrate all this information and if I can do it right, I'm hoping my paper will present a moderated view of all the venom on the issue. I really want to make a contribution to this debate.

I face a very serious dilemma, though. I don't think it would be ethical of me not to include the fact that I'm a sex worker, specifically a stripper, in my paper. It colors my opinions on the whole topic and gives the reader some (however inaccurate) idea of where I'm coming from. I don't believe in objectivity or removing oneself from one's academic work. There is always bias and I think the only way to counter it is to admit it and try to be as transparent about it as possible.

However, if I admit to the academic community at large that I'm a stripper, I face the very serious probability of stigma and rejection. Although attitudes towards sex workers are better than they used to be, I know that I'll face some discrimination because of my work. If I try to get a job outside the realm of sexuality and it's public knowledge that I've been a sex worker, it could severely hurt my chances. It also makes it less likely that my academic work will be taken seriously.

There is the possibility that I could use a pseudonym, at least for now. I'm getting to a point where I need a public persona (beyond a blog name of papercutsandplastic) to do my work. I could make up a name, protect my given name for a while in case I change my mind about what I want to do and who I want to know about it.

The good thing about being in the closet is that I can come out at any time. I can always change my mind. I don't have that option if I out myself now.

On the other hand, it really is me doing this writing and doing this work. I don't want to encourage the idea that it's a fake person or an assumed personality. Whatever name I use, it's backed up by a real person. I have a history, I've had education, I have feelings.

I think one huge drawback of the common porn and sex work practice of using pseudonyms is that it makes it easier to pretend or assume that we're not real people. It's making our objectification that much simpler. Nena Cherry (one real and stereotypical porn name) is obviously not a real name, so she's obviously not a real person. It's bullshit, but I think the attitude is there in porn consumers.

I could really use some advice about this, actually, from someone who's had to make the decision her/himself. I don't think people who haven't experienced the Pink Ghetto of sex-related work are equipped to help me decide. It's a special kind of stigma, and one that I could use support to navigate.

*Edit* I just looked and realized this was my 100th post. Woo! I don't think that means anything, but it makes me feel accomplished. :-D