Hello overshare, goodbye secrecy
I dreamt that I met an animated version of Ilyka Damen last night. It was a delightful dream, although I’m sure no substitute for really meeting her.
I have felt inhibited about posting because I am in a more-than-usual self-centered headspace the last several days. To be exact, I can’t stop thinking about how I may do a professional kink session this coming Friday night, day after tomorrow.
I have felt like I missed sessioning for a while now. For a long time after I quit, I did not miss it at all. And I definitely do not miss doing it for a living. What has been bothering me lately is that I just don’t know whether the way that I am is ever going to fit any definition of “healthy” when it comes to sex and love stuff. And before anyone (yes I am pretending people read this blog!) thinks that is a call for sympathy or support or free counseling or a call to the mental health professionals in my area - I’m just saying that I do not know if the lack of peace I feel around my sex stuff is because *I* think there’s something wrong with my whorish nature, or because I know it is disturbing to other people.
The thing is, no one outside of me is or really has been a jerk to me about it. Even people who have the reputation of being supposedly anti-whores. I could count on less than one hand the number of times that anyone has put me down/judged me/hurt my feelings around the fact that I accepted money for having kinky sexual encounters with people I wasn’t dating. And the only two I can think of off hand were people who are really close to me, who other things than “whores suck!” was really going on with them.
Point being - I turn 40 years old this coming Sunday. In every area except the sex area, I am the happiest and most comfortable with myself that I have ever been. Most confident too, and I don’t even have the perfect ass anymore that I really used to have as a younger person. But being as it is that sex is such a driving force in my life and always has been - I have, for whatever else is going on with me and the choices I make, a genuinely high sex drive - it is no small source of frustration and actually grief that I am not presenting getting laid.
I know that sex is not impossible to have. I know I could have some kind of sex with some kind of people right now. I don’t feel sadness about thinking no one wants to bang me. Or even that no one wants to date me. I don’t think it’s true that no one wants to date me. I don’t mean like, hey I am so delicious people are lining up and they are just not good enough for me. I mean that it is not self-pity type of grief that I feel. The issue is simply that I am all fucked out, for want of a better term, when it comes to hooking up with people I don’t have a genuine connection with.
Now, we don’t have to be in a monogamous relationship or married or whatever, but I mean I am just not able to get it up anymore really for people I don’t genuinely have a spark with. Physically and otherwise. I have tried it, so I’m not just theorizing here. The last person I had sex with was a nineteen year old guy who is so physically beautiful naked that I STILL want to fuck him even though it was not an electrifying chemistry that we had in the sack, and so was ultimately off-putting. I mean bless his heart, he is still relatively unexperienced (especially next to a 40 year old whore, people, come on), and he was great and everything as far as being sweet and competent. Just, no spark.
So. There is and seemingly always has been a condition under which I can get genuinely excited with someone I am not having the spark with. And that condition is when I mess around with someone in the BDSM sense and they are good at it by my definitions and they pay me.
I feel like that sounds so pathological. And I dread making any kind of justifications or excuses or cases for why it’s just a free-spirited woo-hoo no-judgement! type of thing. I judge the hell out of everything and often times everyone. I cannot cast aspersions on people who judge me, as all it means is that we are birds of a feather! I judge. And I don’t fear judgements anymore like I used to.
What I do sometimes fear is freaking people out. Being misunderstood. Being taken as uncaring when in fact no matter what I do with my own sex stuff, I never stop caring or thinking about how it may or may not fit into bigger pictures of responsibility.
I don’t think that I owe it to the world to not-do kinky prostitution because it hurts anybody else. I don’t mean that it for sure is harmless, or is divorced from a context of a culture that is so infatuated with dominance and submission that it is practically all anybody does with each other, in every context, political social personal whatever. I am not a person who is on the yay-kink! bandwagon. I am on the yay-for-not-bullshitting-ourselves wagon. Sometimes things are harmful or selfish or fucked up or have broader consequences, and sometimes I am a person who will do them anyway.
I personally will not believe that the BDSM stuff is ever divorced from a larger context of misogyny, racism, classism, and all other kinds of oppression until such time as a generation gets to grow up free of the dominance-and-submission-are-sexy brainwashing we are all currently soaking in from birth.
That said, holy christ do I miss being touched, and feeling turned on, and being able to do the things that really make me crazed without having to explain to someone who’s not really into it that it makes me hot so is it okay for us to do it even if it’s not their thing? Straight guys and even many gay women are, god love ‘em, so agreeable, it’s not like it’s hard to get people to do stuff. It’s just…it doesn’t really get my motor running if it’s not something that is *their* thing also. I just end up feeling clownish.
I don’t think it’s okay or not okay - I think it’s confusing for me personally, mainly - that I am also turned on by getting money for doing things I long to do for free anyway. I am not into humiliation at all, I am not into being treated recklessly or harshly in any way. I have very specific tastes, and I am like the soup nazi from that Seinfeld episode when it comes to who I’ll mess around with on the kink front and who I won’t. I’m just saying, I am not turned on by feeling degraded. I know some people talk about that being a turn on for them, and - surprise! - I as much as anyone have opinions and judgements about that stuff. Which I dont’ want to hurt anyone’s feelings about, either, it’s just…
I’m trying to be clear about my own situation. I may be meeting with someone on Friday night and just the thought of it has me super distracted. I can’t wait to take my friend to dinner and to throw some money in directions I didn’t have it to throw before the chunk of change I will make Friday if I do it. And again, it’s just that thing of getting a handfull of money for what feels to me like nothing at all - for not doing any work at all - that is a high. And the reason it feels like it’s for nothing at all is because, especially now that I don’t do it to support myself, I am literally only doing things that I feel like doing.
To me, that is not about the joys in sex work or about proof that sometimes it is empowerful! To me it is about some freakish (as in unusual, not necessarily ”bad”) tendency in me to enjoy something that is not enjoyable for most people. That would scare and/or upset most people. I don’t think it’s other people’s job to make me feel okay about doing something that alarms them, or that they would never do. I think it’s my job to figure out really what I want and to be responsible for how I feel about it.
It’s why it wasn’t that traumatic - unpleasant but not shattering - when the two people who are close to me went off on me about the badness of doing kinky sex for a living, back when I was doing that. It’s like, how they feel about it doesn’t form some giant arm that then holds me back from doing what I want to do regardless, so aside from the fact that I don’t like fighting with people, let alone people I love, it just wasn’t that upsetting. The things they were really bothered about were pretty legitimate, and both admitted to them later. So - what’s to be upset about with that?
And if people that close to me can’t faze me, then surely I am not that fragile when it comes to everybody else in the world.
Still, I have only been in the blogosphere as a person who used to be in the kinky sex industry and is not ashamed of it or apologetic about it but who is also very openly angered and grossed out by the sex industry as a whole. I am a whore who loves everyone basically (I was going to say who loves other whores and then I was like, no I have to include women in general not just whores, for accuracy, and then I was like, nah, I pretty much love everyone until something happens that kills it for me), and as such I am not down with yelling at other whores just for being whores.
At the same time, I am not up for pretending like what makes someone mad at me (or anyone else) is whorishness when/if in fact it is something else, like being a general jackass. Or an apologist/rationalizer/liar about what’s ugly and soul-killing in any kind of exploitation, including sexual.
On that front, I have been reluctant to talk about this on this blog. I basically don’t want to have people who trusted me up to this point all of a sudden think that I am becoming a Stepford Wife around the sex industry now, simply because I’m seriously considering marginal participation in it again. It is a loyalty thing, not a morality thing, for me. And also it is a point of some seriousness to me that people be allowed to have different opinions about my compulsion to whore again without fearing that I will stop liking or loving them.
I am not saying “hey whore-haters, come on down, you are welcome here!” I’m saying that I cannot pretend this is not a painful and volatile and scary topic for people on all sides, and for all kinds of reasons. And, as I wish for people to not stop talking to me because of the feelings I have and choices I may be making, I want for people to trust that I will not stop talking to them just because they are not on the same page as me about it. It is easy enough to have community with people who cheerlead every opinion and choice I make. I don’t want to be separated from people just because that is not who we are to each other, is all I’m trying to say.
Well, the first sentence of this post is so not like the others, but I have to leave work now so I’m letting it stand.
February 21, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Joan, this is perhaps the most nuanced treatment of a woman’s relationship to sex work that I have seen. I’ve known women who have done sex work and are okay with it or love it, and those who hated it and were exploited by it. I’ve read and heard accounts by women who defend it but burned out fast and wouldn’t do it again. I’ve read and heard accounts of women who hated it but defend women earning a paycheck however they have to. Sometimes the accounts seem simplified to polemics, especially the more positive ones.
What you set forth above has more complexity than anything I’ve seen. Perhaps I read it that way because the comment resolves for me a tension. I’ve read your book, and I took it at face value. Then when I started reading your comments in the blogosphere, there seems to be a lot of tension between the book and how you felt about your career in sex work. The comment above makes it clear to me that both are absolutely honest, if perhaps incomplete.
Your willingness to really wrestle with how you feel about this is something that, speaking for myself, I think is both admirable and useful. Thank you for doing it.
February 21, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Well, Thomas, bless your heart and thanks for the kinds words. Also, thanks for reading my book!
Some things that feel worth noting to me - I did a fair amount of selling out in writing that book. No one wanted to publish a book on the exact same subject in the exact same voice with the same sense of humor and candor and whatnot but that had more negativity in it about kink and kinky sex work. Too much of a downer, was how one publisher put it in the rejection note. I wanted to get published because I had fantasies about what that could mean, and because I am a vain writer and I want to be read! I left things out that I had written, that presented a more realistic picture of what that life was like, because it made for less depressing reading.
It is still weird to me to read reviews of the book that claim I was basically the delightfully kinky version of the Happy Hooker. I mean, yes I left out some of the grosser experiences I had emotionally, but I thought I was writing about being a pervert who just had no fucking clue how to get her needs met, and stumbled into something that I thought would work for a while. And did work on some levels, at some times. But since I never had it in my head and never wrote that “my experience flies in the face of conventional thinking about the sex industry!!!1″, it baffles me that some people still read that into what I wrote. (Not saying you, but others.)
I have to say, I’m not sure that I am right about this opinion but it is indeed my opinion that - especially now - I am not a part of the sex industry. This is not what the sex industry looks like - horny person who has a “regular” job she loves and so just does things that turn her on, on the weekends, and hey people will pay for it so what the hell! Here comes some real disposable income!
Even back when I depended on the income for rent and food, I was mostly self-centered about who I saw. It was for a short time a magical feeling - I am making a living having orgasms, what kind of craziness is this!! - but part of why I fucking failed at it ultimately is that you can’t really make a living wage doing only things you want to do in the sex industry. You just can’t. Doing mostly what you want to do is not the same thing. Having many experiences you enjoy is not the same thing. If you ever have to do something that you would not be doing because of your own desire, in order to make money that you need, then you are by definition not making a living wage doing only things you want to do.
I don’t think it’s honest or useful to downplay that reality, and I think it does get downplayed because of a very understandable fear that people will be like, “aha! fucking TOLD you so, the sex industry is harmful!” So it is - or was for me - a legitimate urge to want to say no, mostly I love my job, and I have bad days like anyone, just like you do at your job, no different.
That last part is both true and not true. No means of exchanging services or labor for money will ever be 100% fantastic all the time. Much of it, for many people, sucks ass way more than it should. But to me, if we are (and I certainly am) going to critique labor and capitalism on grounds of what it does to people to be equated with money - or actually placed beneath it, when even being on equal footing in importance with money would be obscene - then I am also going to talk about the specifics of what the sex industry is, and means, and requires, and reinforces.
I’m not going to quit my day job and live in the woods just because capitalism seems inherently evil to me. It is not a logical leap to assume people have to go get jobs as fry cooks when they’d rather be stripping, just because the sex industry depends on equating women with sex and sex with a buyable commodity that a certain class of people are guaranteed a right to, regardless of the consequences for another class of people. Strippers are not my problem. Guys who think strippers are a different race of people, and a race they have a right to use in various ways so long as they have a certain amount of cash - they are my problem. That mindset is my problem. What creates it is my problem.
This comment is probably longer than the original post…
What you said about both things being true and incomplete - I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean in the book, I just failed to say some other things I also meant - is something that just feels unavoidable to me. I mean I do cherish the idea of integrity, of being able to live without contradictions or hypocrisies, that is something I sort of idealize. I don’t know if it’s laziness or resignation or lack of courage or bad character, but it just is not something I have ever had a solid hold on. It seems hypocritical to me that I should resent men’s general entitlement to buy sex while taking money for sexual experiences. It is hypocritical of me to have such a negative reaction to many writers who identify as “sex positive” when at various times I have mouthed some of the same things they do that so irritate me. When it suited me.
Meanwhile, unless I am making an assault on one person or another’s position on it, most people really could not be less interested in what I have to say about the sex industry, in or out of it. Most people want to go about their lives, want you to be kind to them, want you to be on their side if someone else is hurting them and they need some help, and…that’s pretty much it. Have kids, feed them, play with them, go to work, go to school, worry about the future and the present and whatever else. Most people are just not on 24 hour Joan Kelly Watch for whether I am living an integrous life outside of how it directly effects them.
So, while I genuinely appreciate your kind words about this post (I do often have anxiety after I blurt things out here and elsewhere), I felt like I had to mention that this part: “nuanced treatment of a woman’s relationship to sex work” - is a misplaced compliment. I’m not meaning to say “hey thanks and YOU ARE WRONG!” I mean that I think it is only a subtle difference - what the sex industry is like versus what I am getting to do - if you have never been the person doing even one thing a month that you didn’t want to do in your sex job. Once you have been on that end or way south of it, there is nothing recognizable about a person doing what I am probably going to be doing tomorrow night versus what I used to do versus what is involved in the majority of sex for money encounters.
February 21, 2008 at 6:55 pm
What you said about both things being true and incomplete - I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean in the book, I just failed to say some other things I also meant
When I read the book, I wondered if you had to leave out the bad parts to get it published, but I decided that I ought to take your account at face value. Having read what you have to say, it’s sad that the publishing industry cannot or will not deal with nuance; wouldn’t let you give a complete picture of what it was like to be a bottom for money full-time.
I’ve seen the website of a woman who advertises as a pro sub, and the lengths she goes to to make clear what she won’t do sort of stand out; it’s sort of obvious that she’s had a ton of clients who don’t respect her limits and don’t think she should have limits if they’re paying. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to play with people who come to the scene with that sense of entitlement (though it’s not exclusive to pro scenes, either; don’t get me started on het male exclusive tops with entitlement issues).
I think for a lot of people, and for a lot of us kinky people, our sexuality is so much a part of who we are that even small doses of doing things we don’t want to do take a huge toll. And we live in a world where men feel entitled to and want to bribe or force women to do things they hate. That kind of a world is a patriarchy.
BTW, your description of the famous West Coast pro-domme was priceless. Far enough away to avoid calling her out to the casual reader, but dead-on enough to be instantly recognizable to people who know what’s up.
February 22, 2008 at 2:25 am
You rule and are linked ( or will be)
February 23, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Thanks, BA.
Thomas - thanks for your comment.
“though it’s not exclusive to pro scenes, either; don’t get me started on het male exclusive tops with entitlement issues”
Okay so I should say in the header of this blog that I am obsessive about addressing things that poke at me even if they seem irrelevant to most everyone else. I say that because I don’t want you to feel like I’m picking on your comments - I am glad to feel engaged on this blog and on this particular post, and happy to have a visitor who is as conversational as you are Thomas.
One thing I am trying to get better at is discussing issues I have around the kink stuff versus just getting mad about them and bitching. So in the spirit of that - some things for me about that quote of yours above.
I think heterosexual men who top get scapegoated a certain amount in the kink world, and I will say that it is not a parallel at ALL but just an analogy of dynamics, that it is similar to the way white people during the 1950’s and 60’s in the U.S. liked to say that “the south” is where racism is, where all the terrible injustice is. Meanwhile it was everywhere (a particular quote I heard on the radio the other day was Malcolm X saying basically “don’t talk about ‘the south’ - if you’re ’south’ of the Canadian border, you’re south!” in reference to that idea that the south was worse than everywhere else) (I fucking love Malcolm X for that and an infinite amount of other things).
I am certainly not a cheerleader for heterosexual men, especially white men (who most of my partners and/or clients have been on the kink front), who are into kink, and I do not think that it is so much overstated, those entitlement issues you refer to, as it is mistakenly differentiated from everybody else who does kink and is not a heterosexual white dude.
I have heard a lot from people who identify as queer and who are kinky, that “queer kink” is somehow more respectful or more honorable or ideas of that nature than hetero male dominant female submissive kink. And I have been around and known queer kinky people who are self-reverential about how they do kink, and/or who are just being kinky without all the we’re-cooler-about-it-than-the-hets part. And I just feel like - what gets revered often is this idea of “old school values” or rituals or protocol or whatever, and I want to know: how is hierarchy in those systems somehow not-hierarchy? Or am I missing what the main critique is about patriarchy - the critique being that hierarchies are by nature problematic and injurious?
And if someone wants to argue that there can be super empowerful freedom-enhancing and/or equality reinforcing hierarchies, I need to know two things: what the hell are you talking about, and what, then, *is* the problem with patriarchy if it’s not the hierarchy part? Is it just that men are at the top of the heap instead of women, or instead of it being open to both? Or is it that it’s men who don’t personally turn you on? Or men who are not as likable in how they operate from the top of that heap? Or who don’t affect a pretense of “spirituality” in how they practice their kink? I am not being sarcastic or snide, I really have these questions, based on what my experiences are with everybody in kink.
My experience of kinky heterosexual white men is that percentage-wise, they are far more likely to NOT feel entitled to dominate me, to feel like they owe it to me to prove that they are safe and considerate and respectful of me as a person, and to be uncomfortable with the idea of “really hurting” me. And, to not need to define me as one thing or another - to not have the romanticized fixations on ideas of a “real” sub or “real dom” or “true nature” of anybody. Again, not a defense of this group, because there are some white het kinky men who I have viciously vengeful feelings towards because of their actions. And it does have its own flavor, the ugly version of white hetero male top, versus people who top and are not white het men.
What I am wrestling with is more the idea that everybody else gets a pass. Or that somehow, there is something about *white heterosexual male dominant kinkyness* that engenders lameness, but with everyone else it’s just individual assholery. “Yeah there’s always jerks in every group but we police ourselves really well,” is something I have heard more than once from queer kinksters. And I say, good for you, but I am not convinced that with one group it is *the nature of that group’s orientation* that breeds lameness but for everyone else is it completely divorced from everything except individual creepiness.
In other words - I personally find critiques of hetero-supremacy to be relevant and meaningful. And it’s because of the way power gets used and distorted and created and horded that heterosexuality in a patriarchal culture is built for inequality. Well, queer or not, we all grew up in a patriarchal culture, because that’s what’s brewing the world over right now and for centuries. So how come only one strand of sexuality gets examined, and basically about doubles in its perceived lameness once it crosses over to more costumed dominance/submission expressions? How come overt and celebrated enactments of power differentials become somehow outside the discussion of enactments of power differentials when queer people are doing it in leathers?
It is often hard for me to discuss stuff like this with other kinky people because they seem to feel like I’m anti-kinky people, or that I “over-analyze” and that it’s a buzz kill. And they want to know why I don’t just fuck off entirely from the kink stuff if I have so many issues with it.
But to me that’s like asking a woman who is heterosexual why she doesn’t just either go celibate or will herself to be gay if she has so many complaints about what heterosexuality looks like and what it does in its current configurations. This is how I am wired. Like everyone in every kind of orientation, I navigate the good the bad and the ugly. I just feel alienated by the ways kink gets talked about by many kinksters, because to me if you are not talking about the above issues, then you are protecting their right to continue unchecked, and then I am wondering why, and then I am even more creeped out than I was by just the original problems. (”You” is the proverbial you, not you Thomas.)
So, that’s my two cents for today. Thanks again for your comments.
February 24, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Joan, I really meant the word “exclusive” to do a shitload of work in that sentence.
With that in mind, so much of what you say is well-taken. I basically gave up at another feminist BDSM space because the bloggers, while they would say out of one side of their mouths that they were bothered by gendered supremacy themes and such, rejected any attempt to talk about a principled view of hierarchies within BDSM.
The question of how BDSM hierarchies play out vis a vis patriarchy is one that I take seriously. I end up being in favor of hierarchies that are temporary and artificial, scene to scene. I’m a skeptic of attempts at 24/7 (which pisses off a lot of kinky people, including some folks I call friends). So when I said that I’m skeptical of het male exclusive tops, I’m not picking on het dudes who top. I’m picking on het dudes who only top, and only top women.
I’m also still a bit raw; a close friend who was attempting a 24/7 contract slave relationship with a het male exclusive top was just in court getting her restraining order; it ended in a domestic violence incident with her face black and blue from acts totally outside the negotiated limits, and I have a lot of anger right now.
February 25, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Damn, Thomas. That is horrifying and angering whether your friend is into kink or not. I hope things get better for her and I understand being raw on the topic.
I was going to say something else (on the 24/7 stuff) but I am now super uncomfortable doing it in this space. You certainly don’t have to if you’re done talking about all this, period, but if you’re not and you want to continue, you are welcome to email me at joank6000 at aol dot com.
May 7, 2008 at 1:04 am
OMG Joan! You have written some things here that I completely understand. For me, casual sex has become unpaid labor. It’s super hard to be turned on by almost any man at this point. I chose prostitution (unlike many others I had the privilege to “choose”
but I still think the whole business is just another sad symptom of gaping unfairness between men and women. But hey, the money was hard to beat, so sometimes I feel bored and contemplate going back to it because I’ve become lazy about doing “honest” work 8-10 hours a day. I came to your blog from a comment you made at Feministe, enjoying it so far…