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Archive for the ‘sex work’ Category

Ahhhhh . . . it’s webwhore drama time!! I’ve been waiting for someone to call out Alexa:

Reality and Faux Ho Bloggers on Carnal Nation

Kat’s response to that piece

Now that people are publicly airing their suspicions that AlexaRPD is a fraud, I’ll tell you why I started (and continued) linking to her and how/why my irritation with her escalated:

*I’ll pretty much link to any sexy-type blog provided one or more of these conditions are met:

• I’m hit up at the right time (when I have time to check them out & add them)
• they’re already sending me traffic (& I notice it on one of those rare days I check my stats)
• their blogs are told from a personal perspective
• they look like someone my readers/traffic would be interested in

Alexa’s blog qualified on all of those counts. I think the only post I read all the way through was her pet bunny post, which moved me. It also did something very few bloggers have the time or ability to do: it told a whole, coherent story. So . . . sex blog, nicely presented, obviously HAS traffic (and will continue to attract traffic) equals good link exchange for me. BECAUSE PART OF WHY I BLOG IS TO MAKE MONEY/attract members to my site.

At first I tried reading parts of a few more posts — the sexy ones — and while they do not do it for me and struck me as exaggerated and full of shit, I didn’t feel outraged even though I sensed the person writing the posts was manufacturing most, if not all, of the content in her imagination. I have HATED reading mean-spirited accusations about bloggers I’ve loved: that they must actually be men, that they couldn’t really possibly be for REAL, blah blah blah. I didn’t want to be one of those people and frankly I didn’t have the time or interest to read enough of her blog to gather “evidence” on her. I exchanged links with her to get traffic to my site and recognized that her blog is the kind that will have many loyal followers. While I may privately harumph at someone who just can’t ever get enough of throat-fucking (her specialty, if I remember correctly), obviously there are many wankers who eat that up.

I actually experienced what now sounds like a disproportionately higher level of irritation over how much she sounded a lot like another(?) Alexa who had a blog called A New York Escorts Confessions (also charged with being fake). I exchanged links with her once upon a time, too, even though that missing apostrophe right in her title DROVE ME FUCKING BATSHIT. I was way more aghast at her idiotic unwillingness to acknowledge and CORRECT her mistake (claiming instead that she did it on purpose for aesthetic reasons) than I was at her concocting or sexing up posts, but again — TRAFFIC. Those of you who blog purely for fun and attention and sparkling conversations in comments (GAG) may not get it (and be sputtering, “but . . . but . . . *I* deserve those sparkling comments more than FAKEY ALEXA does!!” which is probably true), but if I were to not accept traffic (and even PAY for it with reciprocal links and/or affiliate payouts) from sources I didn’t totally love and/or respect we wouldn’t be able to make a living on our sites. Seriously, whatever wrongs AlexaRPD has committed are incredibly small fries compared to the really foul and depressing shit I’ve dealt with from other “colleagues” so it wasn’t particularly troubling to me or something I felt like I needed to get to the bottom of.

Perhaps I’d have felt differently if she were claiming to be a camgirl, though, rather than an escort and former stripper. On the other hand, probably not. There are lots of sites I link to for money even though I don’t LIKE the people who run them or their work is not my cup of tea or who disseminate wrong/stupid information or whatever. I know some of you may find this appalling, but I only feel the slightest twinges of guilt over that. Like, that guilt is miniscule compared to the irritation, say, of a wayward hair in my sock pulling down on the skin between two of my toes. It’s not a whore sellout thing, either: today I saw that some of our very liberal friends took money from the government to provide training to the US Border Patrol to do some very UNprogressive freedom-eroding shit. When I think of all the civilians/non-sex workers who compromise their ethics for money (sometimes without a second thought) I really have a hard time feeling like I need to be a bigger boycotter and censor and ethical tightrope walker. I do not need to be up on the high horse other people insist on riding, instead I’ll stay down here with the common folk, shoveling shit and making money.

AlexaRPD follows me on Twitter (perhaps will be amended after this post to followED) and I have followed her back not just for the traffic exchange, but because she is constantly reading online and posts lots of pertinent sex worker-y news links before anyone else does. Is that one of the many red flags that she has way too much time on her hands to really be doing all the work and school and travel she claims? Totally. Does it make me want to unfollow her? No. I want to read the links she posts and I want the traffic. Didn’t much give a fuck.

But I *started* to give a fuck. The first time I started giving a fuck was when she posted a “Sex Ed” entry attempting to school  people on transgender and made some really glaring mistakes like writing as though all transsexuals are MTF (male to female) and just take estrogen for hormone therapy. When a transman got pissed about this in the comments, Alexa’s response wasn’t “OMG — thanks for pointing out to me that my information is completely wrong as applies to FTM transsexuals!” Instead it was hostile. Like the no-apostrophe defense, but much worse. I started writing comments but didn’t post them, realizing as the debate raged on in the comments and Alexa deleted sensible feedback without ONCE apologizing or hastening to correct her mistakes that THIS IS A PERSON WHO NEVER ADMITS TO BEING WRONG even when she should be totally fucking embarrassed to pretend that she’s right. And there is absolutely no point in trying to communicate with her. It irritated me so much, though, that I kept the comments I wrote (but didn’t post) in a draft in my mailbox. Here they are:

I don’t know if anyone else pointed it out as far as factual errors go (and I could be wrong too) but I *think* it actually IS uncommon — extremely — for people to be born with “well-defined sets of both genitals present”. I’m not an expert and I don’t think anyone could be, particularly when all of this stuff  (terms, expectations, scientific research) is still evolving BUT I can totally understand why people would get defensive, pissed and call you out on things. Like mostly-defaulting to talking about MTF transpeople and then not getting it when someone pointed out that FTM people obviously have a whole different HRT (hormone replacement therapy) plan. So as far as specific things to correct? The line “This might include surgical alteration, but may also include the commencement of hormonal treatments (estrogen, largely).” I don’t know if you meant to and didn’t get to it, or what. There’s no way to leave that as is and make it sound inclusive of FTM people and that definitely is a pet peeve of mine, that transwomen are fetishized and sensationalized and much more visible in the media like they are THE ONLY transpeople, while transmen are this invisible population — again where the people born with pussies are secondary to the people born with penises whose trials and tribulations and experiences are what all our discussions are built around with the biological cunt-owners being footnotes and exceptions to the rule instead of rulemakers themselves.

Being more specific about HRT *is* really important, I think, and it wouldn’t take that much space to add “usually estrogen & testosterone blockers for MTF and testosterone and progestin for FTM”. It’s really important for people to understand you’re not just ADDING hormones, but trying to counteract the ones you’ve already got.

So let’s call that Strike One for Alexa, the whole “never admits when she’s wrong” problem. With a cherry on top of “pretends she’s a ’sex educator’ when she is not”.

Strike Two was/is that she’s a shameless content thief and on top of that brags about all of the traffic she gets. I wouldn’t resent this if she got all of that traffic from her bullshit stories because writing those does take time and they ARE valuable to her readers regardless of whether or not they are true. Okay, I would still resent that a wee bit. But what REALLY pisses me off? That she gets and retains a lot of traffic from posting stolen  content on her erotic buttholes erotic facials erotic this and that picpost blogs. All of those shiny, pretty tumblers she’s so proud of are built entirely on her “collection” of photos she’s not in and didn’t take AND DOESN’T EVEN CREDIT to the real sites, photographers, or models except every so often on accident when the URL stamp hasn’t been cut off.

My ears are burning up just typing this, it makes me so mad. I remember seeing one of my friend’s faces smiling pretty with a load of cum on it in one of the pics Alexa posted with absolutely no mention of my friend’s name or her site and it just brought it home even harder to me that this person who pretends to be a sex worker, who pretends to be a sex worker advocate, is one of those people who thinks she has a right to capitalize on our bodies and our work for her own gain, to just TAKE our work like it’s free and redistribute. She’s like the guys on Craigslist who post that they have hard drives for sale with 437 gigs of porn on them that they’ve spent five years “collecting” or this one guy who wrote to me asking for a free membership to my site in exchange for the “collection” of menstrual porn he’d taken painstakingly snagged from here and there, by hook and by crook. When I angrily said no, he was like, “but I spent all of this time LABELING everything and putting them into folders! MY COLLECTION IS REALLY VALUABLE!”

Listen, I know most everybody’s been there before, very excited about the world wide treasure trove of free porn and bulletin boards and we want to show it off to people, our great taste in porn (or “erotic art”) and our amazing discoveries, but most of us had someone take us and shake us and remind us of a little thing called fucking COPYRIGHT. I am still a lot looser than other people when it comes to blogging on that — I don’t think you need to ask everybody for permission and think it’s fine to post stuff that’s out there for free already as long as it’s just a couple of samples AND YOU PROVIDE CREDIT to the original artist or a link back to where you found it or even just say “I wish I knew where this came from so I could credit the creators and models”. A blog-sized photo or three is like a quote from a book and seems to me fair use. But when your entire blog is comprised solely of uncredited porn? You’re just a thief. I’m apt to be forgiving when it’s someone who doesn’t know any better, but this Alexa person DOES know better, I’m sure of it, if she knows how to parse the language of 2257 laws while deliberately ignoring copyright infringement.

I am somebody who thinks copyright and trademark laws go a bit too far to the point where they constitute culture theft; I don’t want it to sound like I think every Joe Schmoe who posts a handful of pics on his rinky dink blog of his fave porn star should be prosecuted and fined thousands of dollars, but when someone has the audacity to brag about all of her traffic that’s built on stolen uncredited content, then she’s just a Big Asshole. And on top of that to have posted a portfolio that she claimed was of herself but was really photos of Princess Blue Eyez? That takes the theft to a whole other level and proves she’s a fraud (unless she is/was the model for that site).

Strike Three: it’s a petty one. But it was the day she told me I didn’t “get” what Twitter is for because I defended those of us who don’t feel the need/don’t have time to respond to questions tweeted to us. She is one of those “you owe a response to people” types who clearly doesn’t HAVE A REAL FUCKING JOB consuming all of her time the way we real sex workers do, those of us who realize it’s not our obligation to interact with and respond to people for free. Those of us who actually DO set a price on our time. And just goes back to Strike Number One of never admitting she’s wrong, which in this version is “there’s only one right way to do things (in this case use Twitter) and that is MY way”.

It all added up to me developing a blistering rage whenever I saw her saying similar things to other people, lecturing and chastising people who actually DO know what they’re talking about, who actually DO work their asses off and do jobs where we’ve sacrificed our privacy and taken real risks to do our work, all from this person who refuses to admit she’s wrong when it matters, even about little things. This person who doesn’t have the first clue or morsel of respect for our work, co-opting our work for his or herself thinking she can leverage her bullshit and ill-won popularity into a book deal or maybe just doing it because it greases his or her borderline personality disorder.

I’ve been wanting to say all of this for awhile now, but honestly didn’t want to be the one to step up and call her out on it because a person who has this much time on her hands could be the kind of person who will fuck with you indefinitely. And she certainly won’t learn anything from it or admit she’s wrong about anything so I just figured . . . WHY BOTHER?

Because who really cares if she’s a fake? Not her readers, apparently, who love an invisible woman with stolen pictures who never has a tired, stinky, or headachy story to tell about sex and ALWAYS sleeps naked and might invite YOU to a gang bang! And at first I was content to not care, either, until it wasn’t just about amusing herself with hypersexed tales to make ad sales to escort sites.

But I do care now. WE care. Those of us who pour our guts out for real, who HAVE our faces plastered with cum and other substances all over the internet, who are trying to make ends meet, who insist our time and our sex work is valuable and we should be compensated for it and our time in general, who HAVE gone to the schools we say we have, who are in some cases real educators . . . we care when you steal from us and then have the balls to teach people “sex ed” and gender ed and sex work 101 and scold us.

We care when you insinuate yourself into our virtual midst, insert yourself into our conversations and you can see US and take from US and pretend to be one of US . . . while you hide behind your charade. It’s fucking gross to those of us who are bonafide and verified. Those of us who have real work to do, posing for and/or shooting the pictures you steal, being real advocates for sex workers, actually TEACHING (as opposed to claiming we’re educators in interviews where your credentials are never verified), talking to real clients and customers (as opposed to simply amusing ourselves engaging in hot chat with freeloaders and teenagers who like our blogs). Yes, there are other anonymous sex worker bloggers some of whom I *adore* without question. But the thing is THEY NEVER DID THIS BULLSHIT ALEXA IS DOING. The content theft (to the EXTENT she does it), the hypocritical hand-slapping, and the offensive posturing.

To paraphrase a friend’s complaint, it’s creepy that this person knows who we are, but we don’t know who s/he is . . . and that person KNOWS he has an advantage over us when he talks to us . . . knows that he’s tricking us into treating him like the person he isn’t, like he’s one of us (and by “us” I don’t mean all of us are the same or do the same jobs or have the same identities). Alexa is basically someone who has succeeded in manipulating people into giving him free dances/handjobs/shows/phone sex.

*****

Well then . . . that about does it.

I feel a little ass-y about posting this, but kind of justified because I really wanted to emphasize the thing that matters more, I think, than creating a fake cum-hungry fantasy persona: it’s the hypocrisy of claiming to be a sex worker advocate WHILE YOU STEAL FROM THEM. The hypocrisy of “educating” people on transgender while you delete educational comments and corrections FROM PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY ARE. You know . . . stuff like that is bigger and more fucked-up than playing virtual dress-up. And I did want to provide an explanation for deleting my link to her and turning off all that ill-gotten traffic, so there you have it.

Note: I will not think less of you if you’re one of my readers or members and you continue to enjoy her blog (with a grain of salt please?) and I’m not saying that EVERYTHING on her blog is wrong, stupid or patently false; I’ve agreed with many things she’s said, and there WAS that awesome pet rabbit, Hansel. I definitely want to remind you, though, that all those pictures she posts? There are real people in them and real photographers who made them, so stop thanking Alexa for providing you with them, instead insist that she credits those in the images she shares so you can support (I hope) the people who ACTUALLY MAKE visual art/porn/erotica, not just steal it.

Oh man! I almost forgot that one time she told me I really *must* start waxing my twat, that my lovers would thank me for it. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you probably know that I don’t take kindly to advice on pubic hair removal, even when coaxed with a wink and the promise of someone else appreciating it. Nothing against waxing, which I’m open to, just not so open to being patronized by someone who crows about her eversmooth grooming but has never shown a photo of her biscuit, if she actually has one.

Edited to add: just noticed a midnight post from Mistress Matisse on the subject.

Normally when you hear “camgirl” and “stroke” you think of masturbation. Unfortunately our online pal UndressJess experienced a different kind of stroke yesterday.

Some of us who follow her twitter account noticed a couple of really jumbled tweets from her, plus one saying she was on her way to the hospital. I finally got ahold of her on her cell phone this afternoon; she is in the hospital BECAUSE SHE HAD A STROKE.

Undress Jess

She was able to speak fairly coherently, though she stopped and apologized a couple of times because it’s hard for her to organize her thoughts. Apparently the main thing is that SHE CAN’T READ and is pretty worried wondering how she’ll be able to work on her site, camming, blogging, promoting herself, etc. when she totally can’t READ. It’s like weird instant dyslexia.

It’s really hard to imagine being so young, living alone and becoming disabled overnight. You never know how long (if ever) after a stroke you’ll regain the function(s) you lost, but if I heard her correctly the estimate is about a year for her to be able to read again. Apparently the only guess being made as to why this happened to her is from her birth control pills. Yes, fuckers, STROKE is one of the risks of being on hormonal birth control. So next time you hear a guy complain about using a fucking condom, pull out this little gem. Risk of stroke isn’t just a bunch of tiny words on a pill pack insert no one reads.

Rad Camgirl Undress Jess

Needless to say, she won’t be on cam or updating her site or doing daily shows the way she normally does so I hope her fans read this and try to be supportive. Her main site is UndressJess.com but she also has awesome booty-shaking vids on shakinit AND a clip site if you can only afford to purchase one or two videos. It’s hard to imagine what an extended hospital stay and disability can do to a single, independent camgirl/site owner financially.

Note: I’m not going to keep calling her while she’s in the hospital and if I do talk to her again anytime soon the conversations will no doubt be brief and about work stuff, so I can’t say that I’ll have updates for you or pass messages along to her, I just want people to be aware of her situation and do what they can to support her work online and be patient while she’s absent and struggling with what happened to her brain. If you have a blog, it would be great if you could repost this.

Check out katstories.tumblr.com – I just added her to my blog links. How she describes herself & blog:

My stage name is Kat and I’ve danced at around 30 clubs in the Portland area, a handful that have gone into oblivion forever, and a few in other places. This is where I weigh in and give my $1 worth (more polite than $.02) on anything in the media having to do with stripping and strip club culture. It’s an interesting time right now with no shortage of things to make fun of, what with teenagers and celebrities (Sigourney Weaver!?) dabbling in pole dancing and strippers winning Oscars. I also write personal anecdotes when I’m feeling inspired to give perfect strangers TMI and ensure that I’ll never date again.

I’m only letting myself read a few entries at a time, savoring every one. Anyone in Portland feels like our neighbors, so there’s insta-fondness there but if you check her out and happen to live far away I *think* you’ll still be hooked.

What I’ve read so far is raw and honest enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it disappears one of these days (the best and truest ones often do), so read up while you can!

Yesterday I catalogued our inventory of sex toys in a spreadsheet to try to keep track of which ones we have (and haven’t) shot with.

This is the Tantus Sport which I got from their closeout section in a clearance color; I’ve gotten a lot of spectacular (and low-priced silicone toys) from them. In fact, my favorites are ones they don’t make anymore.

We have over fifty sex toys, which is pretty awesome. Really a dream come true, I have to say. There have been others over the years we’ve thrown away because they were cheap/dangerous jelly or broke/got used-to-death.

Crazily, we have barely shot photos or videos with more than a handful of them. We use a lot of them during our live webcam shows so it seems like we get/have gotten a lot of use from them, but there aren’t actually a ton of pics or masturbation-with-toys videos on our sites. Pretty dumb, eh? Hence the spreadsheet.

The Tantus Goddess vibrating dildo (a gift from FurryGirl’s Sensual Vegan):

Lately I’ve been CRAVING new toys in categories we don’t have. Example: we don’t have any big “realistic” toys in our collection which seems like a SERIOUS oversight, especially considering how few of my close webwhore colleagues seem into those types of things and how TOTALLY into them I am (so it seems like a good niche for me to “fill”, hardy har har). Sure, I like the way our “non-representational” dildos FEEL, but I fucking love seeing chicks spreading themselves out with big fat fake pricks and I love the way realistic “dongs” look especially when there are good contrasting colors between the head and the shaft (hello, Black Thunder). I totally want more DONGS.

One of two Head O State Obama dildos we bought:

I can’t allow myself to purchase any more sex toys, though, until we’ve shot more with the ones we already have. Even though I totally want a pussy pump, more stainless steel, DEFINITELY more artistic stuff like carved wooden dildos, art glass, & unique molded silicone insertables. AND BIG DIRTY DICK-SHAPED DILDOS, like I already mentioned. Just can’t let myself get them. I’m not sure why we never got on the bus that has sex toy manufacturers constantly sending us unsolicited samples, but that’s just never happened to us, I’m sad to say.

I did get a couple of toys to review from the nice folks at Pleasure Me Now, but I stalled out after the glass dildo when I couldn’t bring myself to properly review the smart balls I was super excited about trying but was then unsuccessful at enjoying. Not that they asked me to only write positive reviews — they didn’t — but I felt like I hadn’t given those GIGANTIC FUCKING BALLS a fair shake and kept procrastinating on setting aside time to really give them a good trial. Sometimes my anal retentiveness is an obstacle to getting freebies.

One of the problems with our sex toy collection (and pretty much everything we buy to wear or use in photo shoots) is the constant struggle to decide between buying A LOT of cheap and semi-generic things on our limited budget or buying A FEW unique and really marvelous things . . . and not being able to buy anything else for months. Usually I wind up buying more for less rather than investing a bunch of money in a very-few expensive and spectacular items. We buy most of our clothes second-hand or on sale and same goes for the toys, so I rarely spend more than $40 on a single toy. Which is why I have zero “realistic” dildos, since all the good ones are in the $60-$90 range (and are made of questionable, possibly-hazardous and hard-to-clean materials making the investment even LESS sound since Delia and I might not be able to share them or get very many miles out of them or they’ll stain if we get lipstick on them, etc.). It doesn’t really make sense, since even with these frugal choices designed to give us (and our members) more variety I’m not even using all of the stuff AND I *still* use certain things OVER and OVER again (like my Hitachi Magic Wand).

It’s the whole dilemma of “do I buy five crappy Frederick’s of Hollywood corsets or one REAL corset?” And then the ultimate challenge of making use of everything, which is where I actually fall down on the job(s). But who wouldn’t after exhausting all those brain cells on making these tough shopping decisions? Most members don’t give a fuck anyway as long as you’re regularly posting something new and hot — the mileage you can get on one slimline vibe, a little hard work and a cheap pair of pantyhose is pretty remarkable, but in terms of standing out in a crowd with your promo materials and really presenting something SPECIAL that continues to be personally exciting sometimes you want things that are fancy, different, stylish, etc. Well, almost all the time I want those things. And never quite succeed in getting them. Which leaves me with something average which is tiresome.

Even more tiresome? All of this is leading into yet another blog entry about shopping for sexy stuff which I’ll try to post soon but I had no idea I was going to spend an hour writing THIS one.

An amazing MUST-READ piece about Tyra Banks media-raping young, too-smart-for-tv porn starlet, Sasha Grey:

Barely Legal Whores Get Gang-Fucked.

I used to have no beef with Tyra. Before we actually WATCHED her shows. I still think some people get crazy-mean criticizing her, but if they do, this is a perfect example of why. Her double standards and bullshit exploitation of young women is a gross freak show. You can’t help wanting to knock her off her high horse. Some of the things I have seen and read about her doing to young women are despicable, mostly because she sees no problem with having malnourished girls get hypothermic modeling in pools of cold water or in violating codes by forcing inexperienced model-wannabes to live more-to-a-room with fewer beds than are allowed by hotel regulations or with promising contracts and money and work that never come through or just plain exploiting these young women’s bodies, inexperience, stupidity, etc. BUT she somehow thinks porn is SO BAD while she’s some kind of a fucking mother-hen angel rescuer.

Tyra’s shows ARE porn. That article illustrates how manipulative, degrading, deceptive, brainwashing, irrational, insulting, and totally FUCKED UP mainstream media and moral standards are and how SHADY the game is of pointing the finger at the skin trade when the skin is the whole reason people are watching your charade. The hypocrisy is grotesque. They lie to guests, twist their words, misrepresent them, costume them in a misleading manner to try to prove their bullshit points and “seduce” audiences with their bullshit and subject people like Sasha who are smarter than Tyra to what amounts to an emotional stoning. That whole scene reminds me of the time a bible-based cult ganged up on me to try to convince me I was possessed by demons, going to hell, my mind was playing crafty tricks on me, etc. Seriously.

But I’m not here to JUDGE you, Tyra. I’m just here to ask you to CONSIDER fucking off and dying. YOU are a pimp, Tyra. YOU.

PS – starving yourself and wearing high heeled shoes that don’t fit and falling off runways and crap are probably more unhealthy and more unnatural than buttfucking.

PPS – seduced by money? Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!

PPPS – after watching/reading that I can say I’m a now a Sasha Grey fan (VOD or DVD – yes, I’m pimping, too).

I love casinos.

It’s pretty rare that we go to them (and we have LOTS of nice ones on reservations in Western Washington where the tribes actually make decent money off of them instead of simply being exploited by outside corporations which is what happens in most states) and the amount of money I spend is trifling, but I still love walking around in them and being absorbed by the noises and orderly rows of tables and machines.

A few nights ago I needed to get out of the house so I went with Delia to her 12-step meeting. Meaning I went along for the ride, dropped her off, and headed to the casino by myself. Delia doesn’t like wandering around aimlessly in casinos the way I do so I really got to enjoy spending an hour there with my free Sprite, completely overwhelmed and unsure what to do with myself (but in a good way). Eventually I made a $7 donation to the tribe via penny and nickel slots after I figured out how to get and use their club card.

I allowed myself to be completely unhurried and take as much time as I needed to make and execute the simplest of decisions, like whether or not I should remove my club card from the lanyard so that it wouldn’t be dangling across the screen or tying me up by the neck to the machine. Seriously. I spent ten minutes trying to figure that out and get the card OFF the clip. I am not very bright or coordinated, especially when there’s a lot of distractions around so it’s a huge relief sometimes to be completely alone with nobody (I know) watching and just allow myself to sink into being massively stupid, completely enveloped in the casino atmosphere where you’re allowed to publicly do nothing but throw money away while you sit on a stool and look at little pictures of monkeys and fruit and BARBARBAR spinning around. For hours. I suppose that’s pathetic, but it relaxes me to feel no pressure. To not have to try to be smart. To be hidden between the slot machines that are all taller than I am.

I love casinos enough that I would throw much more money away in them if I could afford to. Enough that I can envision myself having a serious problem, especially if I ever learned to confidently play cards which is one of those perfect-for-Trixie ways of being around other people, in a completely structured semi-social exchange where the object isn’t to chat, but to play and to win. Everybody has a clearly defined role. There are RULES. I like that.

But I don’t have money to throw away so after I (ever so slowly) spent my seven dollars I wandered around looking at the steakhouse menu and the cafe menu and the people and the machines and the gift shop. And while I looked at the two pound steak special it occurred to me that it would be very convenient if someone offered me money for sexual favors. That I would DO IT without hesitating, return to consume my blowjob-earned steak, and spend the rest of it on slots.

On the Golden Girls, Blanche referred to buying things with her body as “using nature’s credit card”. I wonder: what is the percentage of women who 1) want things and 2) immediately scan the room for men who can provide the means for procuring the things that they want. I imagine it’s pretty high. It seems perfectly natural. And of that number, how many would use “nature’s credit card” to seal the deal?

Of course I wouldn’t do that at the casino. Probably not. Unless I did become addicted to gambling.

When the thought first (naturally) crossed my mind it seemed totally logical and if it would’ve only taken 20 seconds for an opportunity to present itself then YES, I would have done it. But after a minute reality set in and I realized I wouldn’t have time to do that before Delia’s meeting was over. I don’t know enough about the casino to know what the risks are. I have no desire to be publicly humiliated there or never allowed to return. I’m not sure what safety precautions to take. And the whole thing would be so much messier and uncomfortable in real life than in my imagination. Plus the guy would probably offer way less money than would be worth it. Plus I really didn’t feel like talking to anybody.

But I didn’t look “hot” so I’d have probably performed, for example, a low-priced handjob with my tits out for groping if I knew it was safe and the guy didn’t want a big long conversation. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to ever know for sure that something is safe. And I hate the idea of someone following me around, eyeballing me before they make an approach, or worse, following me around afterward when I’m trying to enjoy the money I earned.

It’s much better to be a lone stranger in the casino that the security guys suspect is autistic rather than a prostitute. I didn’t feel like smiling at anybody or talking. I veered away from a chunky black guy earlier (before my whore light bulb dinged outside the steakhouse) who seemed to be pursuing me; in hindsight he might have been a perfect mark for that handjob exchange. But at the time I just wanted to sit alone on a stool at a slot machine without being hemmed in by people on both sides.

At the printing company where I used to work there was an autistic guy working in the art department. He scanned logos and cleaned up the artwork. I briefly worked there too on the night shift. Sometimes our boss would look at me working, obsessively sharpening the edges of black, shaving off pixels that shouldn’t have been there, and would complain with a laugh that I worked exactly like Bill (the autistic guy). I took it as a compliment even though she didn’t mean it that way. Even though she liked Bill better than she liked me, what she meant is that it had been revealed to her that I wasn’t so fucking smart; I was actually slow and retarded with no clue how normal people do things.

Everybody liked Bill. So did I, and when someone got in his way when he was headed somewhere or tried to stop him and engage him in conversation and he’d pointedly stare straight past them above their heads and try to GET AROUND THEM, to steamroll straight past them, I totally understood what he felt like. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but very few people respect how we want to go directly from point A to point B without someone interfering with our straight line. GET OUT OF MY WAY.

I think it’s that desire to connect the dots (going from *not* having something I want to procuring it) in a very direct way that makes turning a trick in a casino to get money for a steak and more time at the slots seem perfectly logical and also anathema to me. It’s not a moral or ethical issue to me at all. It’s not natural to me to think about it in those terms. The notion of NOT doing it because it’s “wrong” is complete nonsense to me. There are plenty of reasons not to do it, but that’s not one of them.

Anyway, I had a good time by myself at the casino. I used to hate public smoking, but now that it’s illegal (except on reservations) it’s been so long that I actually sort of welcomed the stench and that whole Vegas smell. I was dizzy by the time I left.

I’m struggling under the weight of a lot of things right now. Nothing that should be debilitating, but the end result is that I’ve been acting almost completely disabled. Money problems, health problems, overwhelming-to-do-list problems, incompetency problems . . . you know, life.

The struggle on my mind right now is trying to figure out how much energy to expend on conservative friends and family who have issues with my work and/or with my partner being a transwoman. Not that they know that word. And I should be patient because how many people DO? It’s not THEIR fault, right? And with me being in the kind of relationship where I even USE the term “my partner”. My girlfriend. My not-a-man not-a-husband not-a-boyfriend.

My mom has been struggling with how to tell HER mom (my grandma) and her born-again-Christian-asshole brother (my uncle) so I haven’t even seen my grandma in way over a year.

God, it makes me tired even trying to blog about this bullshit.

Now one of my step-brothers, the one I WANT to be in touch with a little, is coming out with his family for a visit next month. My mom visited them in Pennsylvania last year before the election and came back so disturbed by his wacko right-wingerism that she doesn’t really even want to see them again (AND didn’t even want to get into the basics of telling him anything about my controversial-to-them “lifestyle”).

Delia’s family in the Midwest still doesn’t know about her transition. We had a plan for telling them that we cooked up with her therapist who said that ideally you shouldn’t break the news in a letter, but face to face. We tried to get them to come out here last year so Delia would meet them at the airport presenting as a male (a concept that now seems totally ludicrous, uncomfortable and weird to me), she’d sit down with them and tell them all about it, the next day she’d present as a woman, and we’d all go see the therapist so they could learn about transgender. A nice idea, but there’s no way to lure them out here when the REST of Delia’s family is in the Midwest and her dad can’t take time off work; it just makes more sense for us to visit them there.

So Delia’s parents offered to buy us tickets to come out for a visit, like, RIGHT NOW. It would work out perfectly for the whole coming-out-face-to-face (except we wouldn’t be able to take them to our counselor) BUT Delia already changed her name so in order for them to buy a ticket she could actually get on a plane with, she’d need them to know ahead of time her real femme name (or we’d have to buy the tickets ourselves which we can’t afford to do right now). So after some soul-searching and discussion she decided to write a letter which she’s still working on.

As the word “transition” implies, it’s a process. And part of that process is . . . all of this bullshit of informing, educating, explaining, confronting, and dealing with loved ones and not-so-loved ones.

It made me feel sad when my mom said she doesn’t know if she wants to see my brother / can’t handle his fucked-up views. And I know it makes HER sad, too, but I feel like it will only be a few hours and it would be wrong to shut him out completely. I wouldn’t say this about my other stepbrothers or about my ex-stepdad, but this brother? I would. So I wrote him and his wife an email about “my lifestyle” so they wouldn’t be hit with surprises and wouldn’t ask about my job in person if they aren’t comfortable hearing me talk about what it really is (and told them, in short form, that I make adult websites). And the wheels are turning and they’re paying lip service to not judging other people, but copping to being “REALLY conservative”. And expressing concern over their seven year old daughter. He doesn’t want her to have to “learn too much about life” at this tender age. Like, what aspect of life does he feel he needs to shelter her from or that I’m going to so-inappropriately expose her to?

As usual I can’t help comparing my apparently depraved lifestyle with other people in our family and in Delia’s family. In both of our families there are those who have HUGE problems with my job, yet think nothing of letting the children be around people in the family who’ve actually sexually molested other family members. Nobody objects to the lifestyle of the family members who worked for the chemical company that made Napalm and Agent Orange and other killers and cancer-causers. When I had a husband who worked for Boeing, it never bothered anybody in the slightest (including me) that a family member worked for a company that makes machines of war. Their job is something to be proud of, but MY job is a big, scary, society-eating disease. Excuse me, but as much as you try to fallaciously connect porn depicting consensual sex and non, I DIDN’T DO THIS TO KIDS. Not even close. My brother doesn’t have a problem with his kids being around one of his other brothers who has stolen cars and served in Iraq and laughs with glee at videos of US soldiers beating and kicking the shit out of Iraqis. But oh, GOD!! WHAT will we tell the children about Trixie and her tranny girlfriend or that she has a job making grown-ups feel pleasure?

I know it’s hard, but it’s not THAT hard. Especially given the truly fucked up things that people are perfectly willing to ignore, live with and even brag about. He’s a soldier! He’s a chemical engineer! He works for the military industrial complex!! So easy to boast about. And even those other people who have actually HURT people — kids — get the benefit of the doubt: He deserves a second chance. But how many people boast about “my daughter, the pornographer!”? Actually, my mom does and my dad did. In small amounts, but still. They are extra ballsy and good. And I guess if all these little things are hard, I still have that to be extra specially grateful for and don’t know what I’d do without it.

*****

It would be easier in the short run to just say we’re going to be busy. Too busy to see my step-brother and his family. Too busy to fly out to the Midwest. Too busy to communicate on any deeper level with old friends than filling out those email quizzes about what our favorite colors and drinks are and coming up with a different reason than the real one for the last thing that made us cry.

I could do that (and have and still will to some extent), but sometimes you have to TRY. Because they’re family or because you really need a better reason than fear and exhaustion to sever ties with them. No, you have to try your hardest to be patient with their ignorance and fears and confusion (thankfully people have been patient with MINE). You have an obligation to make yourself fucking vulnerable to being told that what you do — whether it’s selling pictures of your beaver on the internet or it’s defying the status quo of letting your genitals define your gender or it’s being in a non-straight relationship — that you’re destroying the moral fibre of the country, tearing families apart, degrading humanity, and damaging our sensitive youngsters and oldsters who shouldn’t be EXPOSED to our depravity and perversion in their fragile mental and physical states!

You have to be gentle with them while they insult you and beg for your protection. Oh but mom is just too old to understand . . . oh god, I just don’t want to upset Grandma Seriously? These women have televisions and they’ve all HAD SEX. When I’m in my eighties I hope people don’t think I’m too stupid to understand new shit or that I can’t handle knowing that some women charge men money to get their dicks hard. I think they can handle it, and if they can’t? OH WELL. I wish someone would protect OUR feelings for a change. Like maybe not insulting the girl on the television for having “too masculine of a jaw” right when you’re sitting next to my trans girlfriend
who might feel self-conscious enough as it is about her OWN masculine jaw. Like maybe not saying that I’m going to warp your seven year old when YOU are the one warping her with your stupid, bigoted views.

I know I’m being a baby to complain about it because so many people have had it so much worse, but I’m *sick* of coming out to people and trying to hold their hands through the process when I just want to scream at them. It feels like such a gigantic waste of time and energy for me, personally, when I don’t even LIKE socializing with people. But I know it’s not healthy to take the easy way out and be isolated. I know that talking to people makes a difference, not just to us, but in teaching tolerance and understanding on a broader level.

*****

Basically I just feel bogged down. Getting together with family is expensive enough, emotionally & financially, and communicating with old friends that you aren’t sure you have anything in common with anymore takes enough of a toll, that having to pay all these extra costs is really draining. It’s like walking through a field of land mines every time you connect with someone who doesn’t know who you are and what you’re doing lately. Are they going to freak out or pat me on the back and laugh? Should I brace myself for them to say something inadvertently hurtful or let myself trust them to be wiser than that?

Once I started writing this blog entry I realized that the most important thing we can do when it comes to friends and family right now is to cultivate our relationships with people who FUCKING GET IT. Our porn friends, our trans friends, our not-so-straight friends. I’m not very socially energetic but there’s no way I can cope with some people’s bullshit without having the comfort of other people’s understanding and similarities. And I can’t help sort of resenting the amount of energy I’m putting into the one camp when I could be pouring it into the other. OR WORK.

Jesus, I can’t afford this bullshit. Including my own — all I want to do is sleep and read and eat and listen to music. I feel sort of guilty and wretched and oh-so fucking tired.

A couple of new blog links for you:

Cum 2 Oasis Blog

I just added Oasis’ blog to my links and wanted to point her out to you. If you’re interested in knowing all of the groundbreakers in internet porn — people who had amateur sex sites before there were role models for such things — read her blog because Oasis is one of a small handful of them.

She’s one of those legendary people in *my* circle of do-it-yourself porn people, and has a hands-on, hardcore approach of swinging, fucking fans, flashing, gang bangs, interracial and party girl antics.

Another new addition to my blogroll:

Born Whore

I don’t know much about her (yet) except that she’s doing sex work in Australia. I was introduced to her recently through tweets linking to this post she made — It’s You I’m Afraid Of — that made me cry because so many parts of it rang so true for me, especially since I’ve been trying for the past few months to reconnect with family and friends and acquaintances from high school and college, some of them cops, many of them religious, loads of them Republicans, and a few others “liberal” (yes, in quotation marks).

“Folks want to be supportive but sometimes they don’t get it and that’s OK. I don’t expect people to know everything—I’m still learning too! But you should know that when you don’t get it, it can really sting or, I’ll be honest, irritate the shit out of me.

So it’s you that I sometimes protect myself from. It’s you who I will avoid or go silent with because I just don’t want to deal with how disappointed I feel. It’s you that I write for and to. It’s you that I want on my side. You are the ones who’s judgments, stereotypes, awkward silences and ill-informed questions I watch out for. It’s you I’m afraid of.”

Call me superficial, but coming home with much-blonder hair meant so much to me – it boosted my mood and ego a billion points. Our hair-chick ratted and teased it to be tall on top because she has a Rock of Love fetish, so to take advantage of it we did a slutty faux-schoolgirl shoot and I was too in love with myself to stop there, so I snagged some webcam shots:

Just the day before this I went to the mall and wandered around by myself while Delia got a laser treatment. I was in my usual comfortable-slob mode wearing a pair of old black sweats that were falling down (the drawstring broke a long time ago so I try to hold it together by wadding the waist up in front and whipping a ponytail-holder around that wad to cinch it up) so it looked like I had shit in my drawers, nerdy silver tennis shoes, and an old-lady baby-blue polar fleece ladies jacket from LL Bean that was a Christmas present from Delia’s mom a few years ago. I looked so old and so tired and so washed out and I felt that way, too. Like I should apologize for looking so shitty.

I had that quintessential “she’s given up on herself” look. Theoretically I HATE that criticism and don’t care what I look like which is part of why I became a webwhore in the first place; since I rarely feel motivated to dress up and be seen, the thought of being paid to do it and have a visual record of the times I did appealed to me. I’d be off the hook and could always point to those pictures as proof that I CAN look good if I WANT to and have already DONE that. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Why do it EVERY DAY? Of course, there’s a slight flaw in my logic since we broadcast spycams and most people paying to see them would like me to look sexy on them all of the time, or at least more often than I do, but whatever. I walked around the mall looking from a respectful distance at clothes and makeup and other ways to improve my appearance, feeling like I wasn’t worthy or capable of asking to touch anything expensive and beautiful enough to make a significant change.

The point is that I looked blah and yucky and didn’t feel good about it at all. No, that’s not the point. The POINT is in the contrast between how I felt that day and the next, when I came home with my hair really blonde and stood in front of the mirror and drew outside of the lines of my lips and filled them in with thick, gooey gloss and frosty highlights and brushed on dark eyeshadow and put on fake lashes.

I felt like magic. Like this is why people want to look like porn stars. Because (sometimes?) it feels a lot better than looking like muted, sloppy shit. And it doesn’t matter if I just applied a boundary of fakeness between the plain foundation of myself and what people see, because it felt best when I was the only one looking at myself there in the bathroom mirror or taking self-absorbed pictures of myself.

Why am I hiding the plain truth under all of this bullshit self-criticism and analysis? All I’m trying to say is that looking in the mirror and seeing yourself looking like a hot fucking slut feels VASTLY SUPERIOR to slouching around feeling like an unattractive slob. It’s inconvenient, but true. No matter how much I wish my protestations that looking good is a waste of my time and money were true, THEY AREN’T.

It’s fucking biology that we want people to want to fuck us on sight, that we want people to be jealous of us, that we want people’s eyes to light up when they see us, that we want to advertise our fantastic genes (or that we want to look better than our average ones). If you’re a woman (who isn’t still shattered by one or more people hurting you because you looked like hot sex and they took it from you) some part of you wants people to look at you with desire and appreciation. Even when it annoys me to be gawked at, it charges my fucking battery. It’s absolutely electric.

You want to look so good that you can control a man into paying for dinner just to get a whiff of your hair and stare at your cleavage, that you can render him insensible to paying for everything you need to keep looking so good — to maintain your value and keep commanding higher and higher prices — shoes that make your feet arch and sparkly jewelry accentuating all your graceful, slender parts and tight pants and shiny hair and fat, pouting lips and pampering spa treatments performed by undemanding female hands that MIGHT just render you pliant enough to be amenable to saying “thank you” with your soft body. It’s an expensive art and time-consuming work to always look like a shiny, animated toy cocksucker and I’ve never mastered it or even kidded myself that I could compete on that level.

The older I get, the rarer and more exciting it is when I get a taste of what it feels like to BE hot sex. Normally I am the one LOOKING at one of the shiny girls, simply appreciating how they glitter from head to toe, putting so much time and money into tanning, waxing, accessorizing, and accentuating every single morsel of their bodies. Hoping that someone admires and respects it enough to make it worth their while, constantly forgetting that there are intrinsic rewards to looking like honey come to life and taking soft female form and maybe that is enough for them.

My head and body have been so fucked up and bloated and distorted off and on for so many years that now, getting it back on track, I’m at an age where I don’t take it for granted anymore that tomorrow I could be riding some strange boy’s cock and having him looking up at me in complete amazement and disbelief, moaning about how he can’t believe he’s really fucking me. That might never happen again, which is fine, but it would still be nice to know that it’s POSSIBLE even if I don’t want to act on it (it actually feels especially powerful knowing I probably won’t). How many years do I have left where I’ll be ABLE to turn heads in public? You don’t have to be a great beauty to make that happen. Do I really want to waste those opportunities playing the invisible slob?

It’s disgusting to admit, but when I pass a mirrored column in a mall I want to make myself wet looking at myself. When I walk by a shiny window of a restaurant I want to see my own reflection on top of people who are WATCHING me and not be able to resist smiling, knowing that they are delighted and mesmerized by what they see. ANY woman can manage if she has time and the desire to advertise herself using resources like bleached hair and juicy lip stains and clothes that highlight your best bounce, wiggle or stride. Resources she can extract from men. It’s the OTHER circle of life. It might be a totally fucked up stereotype of gender roles, something progressive men and women want to move away from (or better, switch up for fun — I do fantasize about being a sugar mama to young women and sometimes men), but sometimes I can’t help celebrating it and wanting to WIN at it and enjoy the cheap/expensive thrill of it.

Attempting it often feels awkward and unnatural and hardly-worth-it, but when it works the rewards feed some primal need in me that are so close to my core I can’t dismiss them as fake or stupid or unhealthy. There is no pretending we can evolve past this.

Note: originally this entry included more reflection and deeper insight on where my confli
cted feelings about making myself up to look “sexy” (or at least presentable) in public (and in general) might have come from but it turned into a total downer so maybe I’ll save that for another time. I feel like I should apologize for my undying fascination with mulling over these matters and warn you that they don’t end here and I can’t unwaveringly commit to any one perspective on them.

I’m already totally embarrassed by this post even though the whole point of it is not to be.

GROSS.