The Internet is somewhat like we imagine the old Wild West to have been -- untamed, unregulated and anything goes. Tempers flare fast, and entering a forum can feel like walking into a shootout. Domains are like land snatched up by speculators -- choose wisely, and you could make millions selling them off later. And many sites lie deserted and forgotton (Geocities, anyone?), ghost towns since Wordpress made it easy to build a beautiful online settlement. Even the elected sheriffs can be corrupt, as seen in how they censor online material or settle disputes. It serves you well to have one hand on your hip, ready to draw, and keep an eye out for trouble.
I'm hardly the first to compare the web to a frontier, but I've never read anything that mentions how the metaphor applies to one group of citizens as present on the "lawless Internet" as they were in the fabled Wild West: sex workers.
The period of the American Old West, often cited as beginning in the mid 19th century with the Gold Rush and ending in 1920 with the Mexican Civil War, was not an ideal one for women. Polite society in the established States demanded that women be well-behaved, devotedly clasping to the arm of their husbands. Even the sex workers had to fall into line, behaving (and dressing) impeccably well or risking their reputation and, potentially, their fortunes. Women of good and ill repute maintained a delicate balance between practicalities and appearances. The West, however, gave women the opportunity to be self-sufficient and resourceful. While still somewhat bound by the same restrictions as their more genteel sisters, the first pioneer women were more active and vocal in politics and local government. Every voice and every pair of hands was needed to run these towns smoothly. Single women could own land, for example, and women had the right to vote in these untamed territories long before they could in the rest of the country. And of course, the brothels, some of the first businesses established, prospered.
The Internet, meanwhile, is for porn, as we all know. When Usenet groups emerged, starting in the 1980s, they gave the average person the opportunity to send erotic images to others, with the anonymity making it a more comfortable option for many. Those groups paved the way to a giant extravaganza of smut. Since setting up an online storefront for content is relatively cheap and easy, millions of independent and corporate pornography sites have popped up since those early days, allowing the viewer to pick and choose what interests him or her that day from a variety of price points. We can thank early Internet porn for many innovations we use around the web today, from online payment options to streaming video.
As a sex worker myself, having worked both in real-life situations and online pornography, I have found the web to be incredibly conducive to setting up a business that I control. Like the prostitutes of the West, I can choose what I offer and for what price, and I can market myself in a way that appeals to me and will attract the clients I want to work with. I am able to manage my own site, produce my own content, and advertise my work in a multitude of ways -- and I'm free to commit as much or as little time and energy as I like into the process.
There is often an assumption that if you are a sexual performer online, you have to fulfill a certain expectation for how you look and act, and you have to provide content that is for a mainstream market. While sites that cater to those demographics indeed do very well, sites that specialize in alternative looks and sexual expressions have changed the way the mainstream makes their porn. SuicideGirls, for example, started off as just a place to see tattooed and pierced girls naked, something that was infrequent on the web -- but in 2004, Playboy started featuring a Suicide Girl of the Week, and they still do. PaddedKink was started by BBW porn star Kelly Shibari, who was annoyed at the lack of BBW hardcore kink content so she began to produce her own. The success of queer websites such as Crash Pad or No Fauxxx, which have been acknowledged at the mainstream AVN Awards, suggests that there is a market for content beyond the stereotyped consumer -- a heterosexual white middle class male. Many of these independent sites are created and produced by the women who star in them, changing the dynamic of the LA casting couch and putting power into the hands of the models themselves.
Of course, being a sex worker on the net is not merely about content creation. Social media, in particular, has shown that to be untrue! It's about connecting with the public, offering some sort of everyday look into your life. The more active you are on forums, the chattier you are on Twitter or your Facebook page, the more questions you answer on Formspring or flirty photos you upload to Instagram, the more popular you become. That instantly impacts your sales, and signal-boosts your online persona by increasing your Google ranking. More importantly, you can choose if you want to be yourself online, or if you want to play the part of your perceived persona to maintain some privacy. Both strategies work to attract different types of people. Personally, I prefer to be my queer, geeky, feminist self ... and my fans don't seem to object in the slightest!
Of course, there is corruption, and the lawlessness of the internet can work against sex workers online. This was made particularly clear through Google+'s NymWars or Facebook's real name policy, where people have been protesting the requirement of posting your full legal name, something that's quite threatening for sex workers. By being strongarmed into using your legal name or hiding and hoping you don't get caught (possibly losing your profile and thus a chunk of fans entirely), sex workers often feel like they're waiting for the other stiletto to drop.
There's also legal harassment to worry about. Cops used Craigslist and Backpage sites where sex workers advertised for free, to do prostitution busts that often targeted marginalized people. Using the web for your marketing and outreach can be a dangerous game, something that came to a head with Porn WikiLeaks last year when a medical database was potentially hacked and thousands of porn performers were outed with their full names, often including addresses and phone numbers. Protesting these actions led nowhere, with our online sheriffs saying there was little they could do to stop it. Of course, as I've discovered, wherever you find sex workers you find other outlaws, like hackers, who ultimately put a stop to the damage done by Porn WikiLeaks.
Perhaps, then, the Wild West of the internet is a better thing for sex workers than a "civilized" one, which will seek to reduce the agency of a population otherwise ostracized from society. I would rather have lawlessness and independence than be corralled into this century's idea of what a woman should behave like. I love being a sex worker, and I love how the internet has given me the freedom to set my own rules and my own standards. I couldn't agree more with the crossdressing, gun slinging Calamity Jane, who supposedly said, ""Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route."
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www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/world/europe/young-men-flock-to-spain-for-sex-with-trafficked-prostitutes.html?_r=1
Spain has ZERO regulation. NONE.
To claim that as an argument against legalized, regulated Nevada style prostitution is PURE dishonesty.
It's been legal in Nevada for how many decades...you'd think you could produce a few bad anecdotes about it...but you cannot...because it works.
So, you ignore it to find evidence that has little to do with your argument instead...
Regulating the "market" can get you "cleaner" prostitutes (medical tests) ...
Regulating the "market" can get you "taxes" paid on acts performed.
Regulating the "market" can inspect location of said services.
Regulating the "market" cannot prohibit the acts which are CURRENTLY ILLEGAL and the problem.
It is illegal to gang rape a young girl and threaten her family - regulating prostitution will ONLY raise the number of girls taken into these "brothels" ...
they might have to pay taxes - they might get medical tests -
but it will NOT protect them from the trafficking ...
why don't you understand that the SUPPLY angle and the marketing angle are not CONTROLLABLE !!
Sorry, but legalization of prostitution does nothing to make things better for women. Go to sleazy criminalized fetid urine-smelling prostitution districts in Amsterdam, Berlin or Hamburg, see syringes littering the sidewalks, shady armed thugs keeping watch over their "property", the women.
Here is a yesterday's NYT article on sex trafficking in Spain where prostitution is legal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/world/europe/young-men-flock-to-spain-for-sex-with-trafficked-prostitutes.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain and that 90% were trafficked sex slaves.
So, please, stop spreading this misguided meme that legalization will make prostitutes safer. Legalization only increases crime by providing the auspices and the front for illegal trafficking in women, children and hard drugs.
Better is the Swedish model which decriminalizes prostitution for the prostitute, treating them as victims and offering rehabilitation and education; and makes the act of buying or attempting to buy prostitute illegal. So far, prostitution has been reduced 60% and they are going for a prostitution-free country. Sweden promotes a healthy open sexuality which does not involve the purchase and enslavement of women or children.
For example, you left out the part where the Times article says: "Some politicians would like to see prostitution outlawed in Spain, though that does not seem imminent. Many women’s groups say that this would only force prostitution underground, making it even harder to help trafficked women." Which is exactly what similar groups in Sweden have been saying about the "Swedish Model".
Second, the Times article says "For now, prostitution is legal, though not regulated, in Spain. But pimping is illegal." Is prostitution really legal when pimping is outlawed? Management is also part of prostitution, not just labor. More importantly, there is no regulation. In those counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal, there is regulation and NO trafficking. The Times also mentions "lax laws" and "porous borders" as the reasons for increased trafficking, not legalization of prostitution.
Third, while you claim that "The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain and that 90% were trafficked sex slaves", you omitted the prior sentence: "There is little reliable data on the subject."
Too bad for you that Nicholas Kristof didn't pen the article.
The so-called women's groups in Spain against changing the law are in fact fronts for male groups that profit on prostitution. Also, how much worse can it get than 90% of prostitutes being trafficked? Obviously, they are not helping trafficked women now, changing the law could only help.
You are the one distorting the facts. And the pro
That's ONLY Spain ...
So, not legalizing PIMPING is the problem ? The reason pimping is prohibited is that some politicians had IQ the nr. stamped on the bottom of my Italian shoes and THOUGHT LIKE YOU...
they argued that legalizing prostitution but outlawing pimping would somehow keep the girls "safe" ... it turned out EXACTLY wrong ...
it DOES NOT WORK... period, end of story ... all over the world it DOES NOT work.
That is YOUR morality.
OR you are one of the feminists who acts like a union thug...trying to keep the "scabs" in line.
You can't sell your package deal when they are selling it a la carte...
she might become something ... like, maybe, a community volunteer if the cops bust her... or, a soup kitchen worker.... or inmate nr. 3911332 in the local jail ...
or just nothing ... nothing at all.
And I know she is a much better member of our society than the lawyers I briefly worked for after college, at the world's largest patent, trademark and copyright law firm. Example: Some of their huge corporate clients routinely stole the patents of garage store inventors. The poor schlubs would write cease and desist letters, and the lawyers would sit around laughing, because they knew the schlub didn't have the money to pursue 10 or 20 years of litigation.
You don't have to be a follower of Jesus (I'm not) to prefer the company of an honest sex worker to a whole lot of the deeply dishonest folks who make it into Who's Who.
and, if that's your level of dinner company I'll skip the invite
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Here was the gig: They'd find something they wanted to use by scanning the patent registry. They'd offer the owner some pittance for the rights. If the owner didn't accept, they'd use it anyway, knowing the owner didn't have the deep pockets needed to pursue years of litigation.
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abhorson: if that's your level of dinner company I'll skip the invite
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I understand. That's what the scribes and pharisees said, too.
Consider yourself exposed.
They'd rather have the issue than solve it.
That way...Kristoff can keep writing sanctimonious articles and they can keep shaming men for wanting sex.
What have you done, MisterMistake, trying to pose as a woman as part of your wholesale intellectual dishonesty.
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On HuffPo, it's more the life coaches and therapists than the politicians.
It's the general public you need to watch out for when it comes to STI risks. Most of them don't know their status or how to have safer sex (or even how to talk about it). When studies are done comparing sex workers who have access to safer sex supplies to the general public (also with that access), the sex workers have a much lower risk for disease. So, try again please?
The reality is a prostitute's average lifespan is 34 years. The reality is that a prostitute is 51 times more likely to be murdered on the job than liquor store clerks, the next most dangerous job. In reality prostitutes are targeted by serial killers, perverts and violent sickos. In reality, up to 90% of prostitutes were raped as children, are addicted to drugs and suffer from PTSD. In reality 14 is the average age when girls are prostituted in the USA, much younger in the Third World. The reality is that the chances of getting cancer go way up for women with more than 16 sex partners.
Go to the morgue in any city and the reality of prostitution will be lying on cold stainless steel: bodies of girls and young women strangled, slain, shot, stabbed by men who were buying them.
Prostitution perpetuates the meme that women's only value is as sexual objects, that women's bodies are to be bought and sold like commodities, like pork bellies or cocoa futures --- the existence of prostitutin and the misogyny behind it block our evolving into a loving, kind, sexually sane species where the energy of sex channels and lifts us into joy and higher
As I said elsewhere, this is in no way "empowerment" because it's the women who are controlling their own "trades". They're still leasing themselves as property to be used as a rental property is used and dumped in and then given back for someone else to clean up.
Since I work in a non-union environment, the company is free to dump me and give me back to the unemployed market.
You anti-porners are a piece of work. Every time you pounce on a feature of sex work that horrifies you, it turns out to be something that is true of many jobs in our society, jobs that you do not demonize or campaign agaiunst.
What is the difference between a masseuse and a sex worker? A few inches?
The question is how or why is one more demeaning or degrading than the other...
Can you explain that?
Now you can make a statement about the health aspects and the danger because those can be backed up by facts. But some people find being a nurse demeaning. That's just a matter of opinion.
Waitressing is demeaning or degrading depending on your vanity. But to put on your work shoes and to perform a hospitality service (no different than an old guy door greeter at Wal-Mart who will grab a cart for you) for a family of five for a decent wage is so very far from taking the father from that table and letting him unload in you in private and later feel ashamed.
And the difference between a licensed massage therapist is that one is medically therapeutic (akin to a physical therapist) and is not something that can be self-performed, and the other is letting someone unload in your hand when they could have done so just as easily in a toilet.
In each case, the sex worker is being used as a toilet. That is the difference.
And how much shame you project on them.
Words that fit with sex in our universe: play, love, joy, fun, laughter, bonding, ecstasy, kindness, tenderness, tantra, oneness, infinity.
Once you have made sex work and your world has sex workers, you have lost all the numinosity of human sexuality, all capacity for transcendent ecstasy. And you have reduced the beautiful generative force to just another crass capitalistic commercial commodity. No wonder this culture is so joyless. It turns Nature's way for bringing us physical joy into a commodity to be purchased with the coin of the realm. That which is free and wild becomes irrevocably contaminated when confined to the sad prison of commerce.
thank Someone she's not intimidated...