quizzical pussy

I’m going to make this really, really clear, just for the record: There’s nothing clever about violating a sex worker’s anonymity. Ever. This isn’t something that’s done for great justice; it’s not a public service, and it doesn’t accomplish anything productive.

Very simply, if I try to fuck with any sex worker’s real life, family, and/or identity, it’s my pathological attempt to punish that person, usually for the crime of representing sex or a related transgression (to me). That, or it’s a childish vendetta against someone who pissed me off in a more concrete way.

In short, there are no non-personal reasons for this phenomenon. I’ll go so far as to say that all anti-sex “crusades” are deeply personal. They’re never really for the social fabric, or for the children. They’re for one (or more) waylaid pervert’s thwarted kink and guilt-soaked lust.

One of the reasons it sucks doing sex work is because you get negative respect. You know why you can’t tell people when you get a job in orgasm assistance? Because it will very often irrevocably damage the way they see and interact with you. It will jeopardize your future career in other industries. It will inevitably break your poor mother’s heart (because if there’s one thing your mom should care about more than the gory details of your sex life, it’s what the neighbors would think about the method you’ve chosen of not being homeless). Even when you’ve got a shitty, thankless job as a fast food worker or in retail, you’re still liable to hear platitudes like “Well at least it’s honest work”. I’m pretty sure honest work is code for “not sex work” in a lot of cases.

So– because I’m clearly missing something here– why isn’t sex work honest? What’s dishonest about it? It isn’t always legal, and I’ll be the first to admit that the illegal forms of sex work especially abound with coercion, abuse, and outright slavery. But the legal, consensual kind? Even the illegal, consensual kind? The I’ll-provide-a-sexual-service-and-you-pay-me-and-we’ll-all-go-home-happy kind? Seems honest to me.

It seemed honest to me when I witnessed it working in the porn industry, it felt honest to me when I was a phone sex operator, and it seems extra super honest to me when I’m watching the obviously unfiltered, unsanitized look at legalized prostitution: HBO’s Cathouse. God, I can’t help loving that show.

Society (the one I’m entrenched in, but also pretty much all of them from where I’m sitting) has serious issues with sex. In fact, if Society were a person I would advise it to seek immediate, five-times-a-week counseling. But we don’t have to buy into all that baggage to the point where it makes us thwarted, guilty waylaid perverts, do we? Especially when there are so many wonderful, rewarding ways to stick to the straight and narrow path of perversion. It feels so good to embrace what Society “knows” is wrong, like slipping into a warm bath of anti-psychotics.

Fucking is older than Society, older than economics, older than humanity. Sex existed long before the first primate wiggled the first thumb, and then proceeded to stick it in an orifice.

Do you think it’s maybe time we relaxed about sex a little?

Because hysteria over sex workers, or gay people, or any normal, healthy aspect of human sexuality is really just an extension of freaking the fuck out about sex. There’s a tendency to deny sex workers personhood, making them either receptacles of our disgust or avatars–even deities– of sexuality. Sometimes both. But, much like Zaphod Beeblebrox, they’re just these guys, you know?

As long as we imbue their jobs with all this emotional, existential and philosophical weight, is it any wonder they want to remain anonymous? Let’s all treat sex work like the honest work it is, and then maybe sex workers will want to disclose their real names. Until then, we deserve to take all the puns and belabored alliteration they want to give us, and like it.

(image source)