A revealing and sincere
account of how your sense of self and what you project can affect your
bottom line as a sex worker.
One of the
reasons that I love stripping is because it is such a true little
replica of real life. Whatever you need to learn about life,
you can probably learn it in the strip club. It took me a few
years of dancing to figure out why those certain women always
sold the whole nights worth of champagne rooms. You know what
it turned out they had that I didn’t? A sense of entitlement.
This is why young women from richer backgrounds will almost always
start out making more as a stripper than young women who grew
up with less: they grew up knowing they were entitled to it all.
Typically the headlines
about sex work are negative (examples). Here is one from a Toronto
queer based newspaper that puts a different spin on things – how
and why gays can be allies within the sex workers’ rights movement.
At various
points in the sexual liberation movement sex workers were seen
as natural allies to queers, folks who were also fighting against
moralizing conservatives who tried to tell them what they were
and weren't allowed to do with their bodies. But while homos
have made huge gains in the last few decades sex workers have
been left out in the cold.
Blogger Jody
Paterson wrote a piece questioning why our government seems to
have money for the sex workers only after they’re dead? It
is a question I asked myself when I heard the verdict and read how
much money was spent in the investigation and trial (as well as how
long it took for law enforcement to take the missing women seriously).
While Pickton
was on trial this summer and media were feasting on the sad stories
of his victims, two of the three non-profits that help Vancouver’s
survival sex workers nearly went under due to a lack of funding.
During the
10 years it took us to decide whether we should even worry about
scores of missing women on our streets, and on through three
years of investigations and court proceedings, countless women
working B.C.’s rough streets continued to be beaten, raped
and killed.
With all due
respect to the families of Pickton’s victims, what has
been gained? One man is behind bars for the rest of his life,
but virtually nothing has changed for hundreds - maybe thousands
- of survival sex workers in B.C. And the best our attorney general
can come up with is a plan to retry the same guy.
Current discourse
about sex focuses on the issue of trafficking. It is the issue
of the day. Some argue that all prostitution should be considered
trafficking
because no one in their right mind would chose sex work. Others
argue
that it is a favoured option for many women and that there is a
difference between doing something against your will and doing
it because of
economic choice. I came across nicely written account of the
latter.
Although abolitionists
insist trafficking and prostitution are the same, the experiences
of those in prostitution suggest they are not. Yes, they are
linked and, yes, girls and women are tricked, forced and sold
into prostitution, just as they are trafficked into domestic
work and marriage. But women don’t get into prostitution
only via trafficking. They often get into it to earn a living.
To get a sex worker rights perspective and some really excellent coverage
on the Eliot Spitzer affair, please go to Bound,
Not Gagged - a blog by and for sex workers.
And to get some interesting commentary from a hip-hop perspective check
out Jay Smooth's
Ill Doctrine video blog entry on The Music Biz and The Moral High
Ground.
