TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘sex work’ Category

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.

I wish I had more time and brain power to consume other people’s blogs because when I do, I come across provocative and revealing entries like these two about class:

Keeping San Francisco Safe From Prostitutes?
Melissa wrote this back when SF voters had the chance to decriminalize prostitution. They didn’t, of course, and her post explains a lot of reasons why even a supposedly-progressive, liberal, educated population is ignorant and afraid of sex workers running amok:

“The biggest opposition to Prop K isn’t anti-prostitution feminist groups. It’s ‘neighborhood associations.’ Unlike even the most socially conservative feminists, they never say, I don’t want sex workers to be raped. They say, I don’t want to see sex workers. Don’t want to see them on their front steps. Don’t want to see their clients or ‘pimps’. Don’t want to see condoms, or syringes. In short: don’t want to see poverty, don’t want to see poor people. . . . What K opponents will never say in public, is that it’s not prostitutes that are hard to live next to — it’s poverty.“

On a more personal note, Amber Rhea posted an extremely intimate entry yesterday sharing her memories of class-consciousness developing in childhood and young adulthood and reflections on all of that jazz (like how attending private school probably saved her life).

“My mom was a bartender until I was 7 or 8 years old. When I’d go spend the night at friends’ houses, I’d take my toiletries in a purple Crown Royal bag (we always had tons of them around the house). We also had a lot of extra beer/liquor T-shirts that I used as nightshirts . . . . it wasn’t until I was in my teens that it dawned on me why [my friends'] parents might think it’s weird for a 7-year-old to carry a Crown Royal bag and sleep in a Finlandia T-shirt.”

Without going into a lot of detail (just because I don’t have time to write that book right now), I can’t overemphasize how much my socioeconomic background shaped my identity and values. More than being female. More than being white. Even though both of those things are a big huge intrinsic part of it, the money stuff and place my family occupied (pretty low down) in the hierarchy colors the way I see and respond to pretty much everything, I think, and in such insidious ways that I’m constantly chipping away at my lack of awareness at how deep it goes and how far back and how much it continues to effect my options and choices today.

Sometimes I feel like discussions about race and gender are just big polarizing distractions to keep us from addressing the BIGGER, all-encompassing issue of class. They’re not, but sometimes I feel that way (and I know some other people do, too).

*****

A related note: right now I resent the way blame is laid for the recession. Instead of saying that banks ass-raped tons of people who probably COULD have made their mortgage payments if not for the usury/deception/inflated interest rates and doubled/trebled payments, every comment seems designed to tell us that banks simply LENT MONEY TO POOR PEOPLE. Like, THAT was the big mistake. As though those borrowers could never have made FAIR payments on mortgages with FAIR terms. As though people wouldn’t have felt the need to take out second and third mortgages to be able to pay credit cards with ludicrous, unjustifiably-high, ass-raping interest rates.

The mainstream discussion about it and language referring to sub-prime mortgages, etc. is all backwards; it *pretends* to call the lending institutions and big mucky-mucks greedy while using language that continues to make it sound like the banks’ problems were making bad bets on bad people, when really they fucked vulnerable people dry, butt-ramming them straight into the ground. Let’s just bleed these people dry. When you make financially troubled people pay exorbitantly high interest rates and double their minimum payments, etc. what the fuck do you THINK will happen? Unless they win the lottery, they’ll never be able to keep up or dig themselves out of the deep grave the lenders dug for them.

I’m not making these comments as someone who thinks she has all the answers or understands the complexity of all of it or is well-read on the subject. I’m making them as an average joe butt plumber based on her own experiences with banks and mainstream exposure to superficial news with a little bit of deeper reading here and there. My intention isn’t to spark a big-ass discussion about it, just web-log some stuff. The above paragraphs are only a small chunk of reflection, not a complete or coherent argument. I won’t publish comments from people assuming I’m claiming to be an expert or assuming that because I haven’t written this or that or included another bit or piece, that I must not agree with this or that bit or piece, nor will I publish comments demonstrating a lack of comprehension regarding what I already wrote. HATE that.

For the record, my interest isn’t really in “punishing” rich people (even when they DO *deserve* to be hung from the highest tree) or placing limits on how much money people can make, it’s on making fair regulations and restrictions on how deeply people can be abused. It’s on little things that would change a lot. LIKE NOT LETTING CREDIT CARD COMPANIES MAKE YOUR PAYMENT DUE ON A WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY, THEN CHARGING YOU A LATE FEE AND RAISING YOUR INTEREST RATE BECAUSE YOU FAILED TO PAY ON TIME WHEN YOUR PAYMENT ARRIVES ON THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY FOLLOWING THE DAY THEY DEMANDED YOUR PAYMENT, BUT CAN’T EVEN RECEIVE IT/WON’T EVEN PROCESS IT. It’s a pretty fucking simple matter — we have the technology at this point to automatically reject a date that is a holiday or weekend and chose either an earlier or a later date, or to have a FAIR regulation that doesn’t even ALLOW lending institutions to punish you for not delivering a payment on a day when delivery of said payment IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Seriously. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about things like this. Everyone. All day. Until something happens.

Just one example. I know *some* people are talking about it some of the time, but it’s not on headline news, etc. every five seconds the way Chris Brown is. Instead everyone just ignores and skirts around these tangible, obvious bits of fuckery. It just keeps adding up, but I don’t hear anything except “bail out”. If anyone has links to proposed regulations tightening this shit up, I’d love to read it because as it is right now I’m too busy bitching about it to look the shit up (I know! I’m an ass!). I know awhile back congress was talking about putting an end to the credit card companies burying high interest rate balances under the lower interest rate balances, but I don’t know whatever became of that/if they are in fact now forced to automatically apply payments to the balances with the highest interest rates first.

Why am I still sitting here blogging about this? Seriously, all I was going to do was post two links. Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh . . . hate myself for not keeping up with the news on this stuff better.

Just a quick entry to say we’re busy getting ready to be gone for a few days trying to shoot something specific. Outside. And it’s WINTER. But that’s when it needs to be shot. Mostly we’re just trying to get ready (much more complicated than you might imagine unless you’ve done our kind of work and the same way we do it) and it’s been snowing (again).

I anticipate having cold fingers, legs, buttocks, etc. a lot on Thursday and Friday. And then we’re going to celebrate a late Christmas/early Valentine’s day/Friday the 13th dinner with my mom. I’m looking forward to it, but also dreading certain things and am practicing stress management techniques while I’m not actively working.

Yesterday we went shopping for additional costuming for aforementioned shoot and after hours of sifting through second-hand clothing my nasal passages, throat and head already felt invaded by that weird, unsettling thrift-store smell that makes you feel like you’re coming down with some old-lady sickness. Then we went to the drugstore where a lady was coughing. AND COUGHING. And hacking.

I’m not the type who’s EASILY grossed out by random germs, sneezing or coughing people in public, but my mucous membranes were already feeling vulnerable after searching through three thrift stores and this woman was really projecting her spittle. She made half-assed attempts to cover her mouth with her hand by holding it up six inches from her face and coughing TOWARDS it, not into it, and then she walked around briskly touching every single thing in the store with that hand. On top of that there’s something unsettling about this woman; I’ve seen her around town before and she’s like a fascinating fifty-seven year old dolly with long, youthful dark-blonde hair in waves worn in a loose asymmetrical ponytail. Her face is powdered porcelain with spots of rouge on her cheeks. Her lips and eyes are lined and her features are girlish except for the wrinkles around her mouth. Nothing about her says middle-aged, which is probably what she is; instead she’s a duality of eleven-year old girl and seventy-nine year old woman. I’d totally follow her around the store to stare if she didn’t give off such an aura of contagion.

When we got to the checkstand she got in line behind us and it suddenly started pouring down snow outside. The cashier kept interrupting our transaction to answer the phone and I felt totally hemmed in by winter, like she wasn’t going to give up until she infected us with post-nasal slush.

Because I DO NOT want to get sick right when we’ve got time and money invested in shooting, I came home and started swilling down emergen-c until I was totally high (see this tweet followed by this). I rarely get colds (I think I’ve averaged maybe one cold or flu every other year, if that, in the past fifteen years) but I’m still paranoid enough to often feel like I’m coming down with one.

So. The goal today is to get a million things done, not get sick, stay calm, and leave as early as possible tomorrow so we can arrive at our destination safely while there’s still daylight so we can plot our shooting locations for Thursday and Friday.

I won’t be checking email while we’re gone, we have webcam shows and chat scheduled when we get back (on Sunday and Monday), and I’ve only responded to maybe 3% of my email over the past year, so . . . yeah — if you want to talk to me any time soon you’ll probably need to be a member who shows up to one of those live cam events next week. Wish us a productive trip!

*****

Speaking of my limits, two seconds before I hit “publish” on this post, I got a comment on my last blog entry from a guy who has a problem. Here’s the comment:

I hope someday that you will reply to my comments. Forever seeking your feedback, Furry Freak Bro, aka4JerryGarcia, Merry Pranksters, etc.

He might be a nice guy (if memory serves he acts normal during camshows), but he is one persistently demanding motherfucker who cannot take a hint. Facebook, twitter, email, blog comments — they all say basically the same thing: Hi there – respond to me PLEASE; I await your response. Please write back to me. If you commented back it would make my day. Your fan, xoxo blah blah blah
WHAT. THE. FUCK!?!?!

First of all, you’ve said nothing to me that warrants a response. Second, if you’re a fan of mine you’ll see that I don’t engage in a lot of idle chit-chat, particularly the hi/good morning/waving/hugging/emoticons variety and if you have any reading comprehension you can see that I’m KIND OF overwhelmed, constantly talk about not having the time or energy for email, trying to keep my hours at the computer limited to a healthy number and use that time productively, etc. How long would it take if I said “hi” or “good morning” or “YES! I fucking SEE you!!” to every single person I encountered online? I would have no fucking life and no time to respond to people who actually put a lot of thought and effort into writing to me.

So I blocked him on Twitter so I wouldn’t be bombarded by his pleas for attention, but now he has the balls to make that comment on a blog entry that essentially says I’ve been feeling like shit and have barely had the energy to drag myself out of bed and now that I’m feeling better it will take awhile to catch up on everything. But listen; even if I were all caught up and had ample time on my hands, the last thing I would feel like doing is encouraging these incessant, self-absorbed, petulant guilt-trips seeking acknowledgment.

I really try to not be mean and to consider that even wonderful people have blind spots, bad habits, etc. Before I ream someone’s ass I sometimes try to imagine the person might be borderline retarded or otherwise lack the skills or comprehension to function at a higher level; maybe all they know is that the internet is a friendly place where you can look at pretty girls and get them to say ‘hi’ to you. And seriously? There are a lot of pretty girls online who make that their sole job/function in life; collecting myspace friends, saying ‘hi’ and ‘hugs’ to everyone, making a name for themselves that way. BUT I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE GIRLS. Get it?

Honestly I try to just ignore this person and others like him (ex. No one’s responded to my messages — I guess no one loves me) because I don’t have the time or mental capacity myself to discover a nice way to tell them to STOP ACTING LIKE CREEPY STALKERS (when they’re not really even BEING particularly creepy or stalkerish, just obnoxious) and understand that from my perspective I just feel bombarded by people who want think they deserve to have me interrupt my life to instant message them. I don’t care if it’s only two letters. H. I. Obviously it won’t stop there. Next it will be “what’s up? Do you like me? How’s the weather?”

You wanted my feedback? You’ve got it, fucker. Try to see things from other people’s perspectives. I don’t *expect* people to waste their personal time empathizing with me or reading my long-ass blog posts, but if you send me hundreds of messages asking ME to waste my time on YOU, especially by begging for warm fucking fuzzies in the comments on a post where I admitted I felt like I was losing my fucking mind, you’ve got another thing coming.

An appropriate comment from him would have been, “wow — I’m so sorry I’ve been sending you guilt-riddled whiny-posts on virtually every social networking site where you appear asking you to respond to NOTHING when you obviously have a lot of other things going on. What was I thinking?” Or, “man, I know what mental illness is like because I am compelled to pester women online; now we finally have something in common we can talk about if you ever have time; ’til then I totally un
derstand if you don’t want respond to me. I mean, sheesh — if you did that to everyone your whole twitter feed would be, @wanker hi!, @dipshit hi! @asshat I see you there, bugging me! Boy, that would be silly! I’m so sorry for thinking only of myself.”

If you’re a true fan of mine it should be obvious that my JOB is not to sit around sending individuals empty messages of bullshit for free to verify to you that you exist. Find another way to add meaning and affirmation to your life because your current method is insulting and dehumanizing; I’m not a fucking robot or video game where you press buttons on your keyboards and I do a little puppet dance or a doll with a string on her back that you pull to get her to say one of eight pre-determined messages. I like you! Thanks for being my fan! You’re number one! Good morning, sunshine!

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarf!! Seriously, I do not want to insult everyone who sends me thoughtful messages, shares themselves with me, wants me to know they appreciate what I do, etc. What I’m complaining about is a very particular brand of bullshit that fuels the empty “interaction” passing for “socialization” online. It’s gross. A total waste of time. Say hi once or twice to me this way if you want, but don’t incessantly needle me to respond. I was going to say, “don’t needle me to reciprocate” but if reciprocity is what you want, THIS IS IT. Complete and utter selfishness. My little wants and desires trumping yours. I would send virtually the same message every day: Send me ten dollars, please? Hi it’s me, Trixie — still awaiting your dollars. I found you again! When WILL you join my site? It’s Friday. Write back with the dollars. Even five would be nice. Say good morning to a good girl with seven dollars? Hello. Do you get these? If so respond with fifteen dollars. Your friend online, needing your dollars. Actually, that would make a billion times better sense than what he’s doing, but it would still be way too boring and time-consuming for me to enjoy. I don’t want to do data entry, I want to do MY. WORK.

And tweet about picking my nose and pooping. These witticisms don’t grow on trees, so don’t interrupt me! I’m trying to fucking THINK.

I started taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old. My teacher, Joan, didn’t believe in using metronomes and always had long, fancy nails even though pianists aren’t supposed to. At some point during the first year of lessons, she told me that music is really all about MATH.

No math = no music. A huge revelation for me as a kid. It’s a big truth that’s never left me. At first my feelings about it were a little conflicted; it was sort of stressful (”I’m so bad at fractions!”), but realizing that math is the foundation of music (or at least one doorway into building and understanding it) never sucked the romance or beauty out of it. It never made it dry to me. It can be invisible enough that you don’t actually NEED to know it or think about it for it to be in there. That lesson primed me to notice as years went by that math and science are built into nature and art and our insides. That the basics of them are intuitive, like rhythm, but the more you know about the math and science of something, the better your music or art or appreciation of those things can be.

Knowing that art is really science has been a solace to me — art isn’t reserved only for a few people who are divinely inspired. It can be orderly: accessed and created systematically. With simple formulas. With a wide variety of tools mixed with individual perspective, personality and tastes to make it seem unique and magical, disguising the numbers in the craft of it.

*****

I shot a set of pictures of Delia wearing some hot Hello Kitty shorts on Friday night and the photos are all jacked up. I’m a long way from understanding the science of photography; I *like* numbers, but they don’t stick in my head very well so even though I’ve read about how cameras work and how OUR camera works I still don’t have it committed to memory or know how to manipulate light and settings quickly to achieve what I want. I have to just walk around and fiddle with things until I mostly-accidentally happen onto something lovely. Most of the good pictures I take are the product of luck and shooting A LOT without fully comprehending what I’m doing. I recognize what looks good and beautiful and erotic to me (or at least halfway decent) and what looks bad to me and have a few basic practices for making the former (especially in the “halfway decent” category) and avoiding the latter, but my technical skills are pretty basic.

All of the pics looked dark to me so I bumped the ISO up to 1000 or 2500, I forget now (hence the graininess) and the speed down to 25 or 30 — they still looked dark for some reason; I was letting the camera auto-focus (selecting the area to focus on myself with these little movable box thingies; I forget what Nikon calls that function but it didn’t seem to be working well on this particular night) and adjust the aperture itself until I decided to do a closeup and switched everything to manual (because it balks when we ask it to autofocus macros); suddenly everything was WAY TOO BRIGHT and I had to change the shutter speed. The only thing I can think of is that the camera wasn’t doing a good job of automatically adjusting the aperture and when I switched to manual and adjusted it myself then everything changed. It sucked because we wanted these pics to be bright.

The older I get, the more I see that MOST working artists — writers, photographers, graphic designers, sculptors, painters, musicians, etc. — are just people who’ve chosen to do that kind of work. That the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of us is the amount of time they put into their art and confidence they have in devoting themselves to it without worrying whether or not a jury of peers think they deserve to make money on it. Very few artists are people who actually possess something innate that the rest of us don’t have; most of it is taking the time to learn and apply information that’s available to everyone (or anyone with the resources to do a little research) and then investing money in the right tools and lots of time in practicing. Sometimes I think the most successful artists are the ones who are actually LESS gifted and too stupid/overconfident to recognize that there are other people (usually making zero dollars on their art) who are WAY more talented. Maybe the only way to be a successful “artist” is to NOT be great — to not complicate shit with too much vision, originality, or diverse techniques and just work from simple formulas to make things that are easily recognizable and accessible to the masses. See also Adaptation. If your work brings other people pleasure does it really NEED to be super duper excellent?

The older I get, the happier I am with shooting for mediocrity. Even mediocrity requires a lot of hard work (for me, at least). Mediocrity is attainable without being a given; you can stand out and make a decent living in a field simply by being one of the relative few to 1) choose that field, 2) commit to it for a number of years, and 3) make yourself known. All the better if you’re willing to take emotional and financial risks and make sacrifices for your work/”art”. The happier you are with mediocrity the wider your success. I’ve slowly shifted my focus of “pride” away from “talent” and pinned it on “work”; you can’t be proud of having good taste or being born with certain attributes making you better suited than most to doing one job or another. Those are only things you can be THANKFUL for. The things you can actually be PROUD of are hard work, dedication and defying convention to choose happiness. To call yourself an artist as soon as you choose to be one — to make it your job — rather than waiting until you imagine other people think you are good enough to deserve that label. Those are the people I admire more and more, the ones who are brave & devoted enough to create some form of art (even if it’s just fair to middlin’) and are savvy enough to make it a business.

I used to think having to work hard at something or take a lot of time to make something acceptable was something to be ashamed and embarrassed of. If it wasn’t easy it meant I wasn’t good at it. Now I realize that’s total bullshit (even if I still FEEL that way sometimes). The strategic choices and commitments you make to invest work in things that make you happy, better, more skilled, or even just capable of seeing you should make a different choice (I’ve always believed that quitting is something to be proud of; that whole “quitters never win” line is such a crock of shit). The time you spend allowing yourself to suck ass — IMMERSING yourself in sucking ass and slowly filling in the void of your ignorance with knowledge — just so you can become mediocre at something you love and then keep working to try to improve upon that. Beyond mediocrity there are so few people who are actually able to recognize the difference between mediocrity and greatness, there’s no reason to beat yourself up if you’re not capable of becoming that elite.

Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” ROCKS. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and I don’t love any one thing enough to give up all the other stuff. So I really have to be satisfied with mediocrity, slow progress, and making balanced choices to devoting little bits of time here and there to different things I love. Like making flash cards to learn photography stuff. You’re never too old for flash cards. I’m not, anyway.

I am mediocre at so many things, and have managed to balance (with great mediocrity) such a gigantic shitload of different kinds of work that I deserve to be quite proud of myself and my extrao
rdinary mediocrity. I feel so blessed to be in a position to dabble so widely. Lucky lucky lucky, and proud of myself for creating a notable percentage that luck by my choices. For recognizing my luck and exploiting it to the best of my limited ability.

Some of us are able to do our work just because we’re lucky enough to have the resources to buy tools, to live in an environment filled with inspiration and/or to be close to people who make beautiful subjects and do most of the art/work for you.

*****

I love arranging forkfuls of food. Ones where I have the perfect ratio of one thing to the other(s). Mashed potatoes to gravy to meat. Raisins to flakes. Heavens to Betsy. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the formula just has to be right. Everything pleasingly arranged in relation to each other. I will never be a good cook because I don’t want to practice how to be; that’s Delia’s thing. It’s my job just to love eating, every day, tasting and swallowing over and over and saying thank you, honey.. And to figure out how to arrange camera settings like food on a fork, adjusting hole-sizes, timing mechanisms, and digitally tweaking things in perfect relation to the kind of light shining on my girlfriend.

Before I post a bunch of frivolous softcore-in-the-Seattle-snow pics today, I want to at least mention that today’s an important one: The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

When the economy is in the shitter (the direction it’s headed right now) people are MORE judgmental and resentful about how much other people are paid and for what kind of work; that’s a recipe for even more violence against sex workers. Lots of perpetrators of violence against sex workers explain that their crimes are justified because they shouldn’t have to pay for sex — the woman (or sometimes man) and the work s/he’s charging him for are not worthy of payment and/or should be punished for thinking she is. Check out this guy who said a prostitute put her head in his plastic bag by mistake when he wanted his $100 back. For trying to kill her he’ll only get a few months in the slammer.

It’s not going too far to say that beating, raping, exploiting, infecting, killing, stealing from sex workers and/or refusing to abide by their boundaries is covertly state-sanctioned — the government says sex workers don’t have the right to charge money for their services in most places. Not only do they not have the right to charge money, they are CRIMINALS if they do so. In some places in the United States you can be arrested simply for carrying too many condoms — it’s intent to sell access to your body (which you have no right to do, and if you intend to flout the law in this way you deserve to expose yourself to disease and pregnancy)! You can be charged with a crime in many places just for advising other sex workers ABOUT sex work. The government might not have a bounty on sex workers and we all might SAY that killing them is going too far, but it’s a pretty fucking mixed message.

While most of my own work as a webwhore is legal (I say “most” because some of it could easily fall under the nebulous definition of “obscenity” – that and a couple of other things I can think of could land me in prison if the Department of Justice or other unsavory elements chose to target me) and I feel fairly safe doing this work (not just safe for a whore, but even safer relative to women with straight jobs), there are still more than enough people who resent me and women like me for making our livings this way. People who spew hatred and threaten violence that all falls under the category of, “BITCH! YOU DO NOT DESERVE MONEY FOR WHAT YOU DO & YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED FOR EVEN SUGGESTING ANYONE PAY YOU FOR THIS!! I will *take* by force what you deny me for free.” I’m willing to bet these messages will only increase and intensify in the months and years to come as people get poorer, hungrier, and angrier.

There’s a march in DC going on right now. FurryGirl is there and taking pictures like this one:

The demand on the banner to “STOP SHAMING US TO DEATH” is powerful, especially in conjunction with the message that “ONLY RIGHTS CAN STOP THE WRONGS”. Violence against sex workers is made too easy because of wrongheaded laws that make some people’s versions of “immorality” criminal. It’s broader than the moral or religious issues, though: it’s about class and gender — specifically denying women (1) ownership of their bodies and (2) the right to charge people to access it (3) within boundaries each woman defines for herself.

Connect the dots in the bigger picture to shaky/compromised abortion rights, our continued unwillingness to recognize parenthood as real work worthy of payment, and our refusal to protect natural resources like WATER (where ownership by one entity should be really fucking hard to claim) from unsustainable corporate exploitation compared to our insistence upon denying individual women opportunities to profit from their own individual bodies (where self-ownership should be pretty fucking OBVIOUS/undeniable, especially when you consider how much money male pro-athletes make abusing their bodies for our entertainment and no laws deny them the RIGHT to exploit their bodies in those damaging ways***) — it seems pretty obvious that denying rights to sex workers is part of a bigger agenda to deny women opportunities to profit from work that is mostly performed by women because we are at a natural biological ADVANTAGE to perform it. Basically? It’s about making sure women are only punished for their gender rather than economically rewarded for it.

It will be a cold day in hell when someone goes violently vigilante on the asses of Wall Street executives and all the corporate fat cats and bankers getting bailed out for fucking us over financially; there are always loopholes to guarantee their “right” to be multi-fucking millionaires at our expense, but there are sure to be plenty of whores killed by men who get the message loud and clear from our government(s) (and all of us who tell them we LIKE our laws just like this) that there IS no loophole for a woman who thinks she’s entitled to earning a few bucks for a blowjob. God forbid we put a cap on the exorbitant amount of ill-gotten money men “make”; instead let’s keep making sure the whores don’t get out of pocket thinking their dirty pussies are worth a thin fucking dime.

Discriminatory laws against sex work and women’s work in general don’t just encourage and facilitate physical violence, some people would say those laws and their applications are themselves acts of violence — when you make it next-to-impossible for someone to work, when you take away her income, when you stigmatize someone by slapping a criminal record or a special stripper/whore license on her that will limit her job opportunities in the future, when you eat up her time in court and behind bars, when you make her pay fines, when you make her vulnerable to blackmail by thieves and rapists both in and out of uniform, that can at LEAST be called a hostile and dangerous violence-breeding atmosphere. Whether or not you believe Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death was a suicide, you have to recognize that she (and possibly other women connected to her case) would not be dead now if women had the right to do sex work. Who needs the Green River Killer to cleanse the country of garbage as long as we have the government to ruin and destroy the lives of sex workers? And when I say “government”, I don’t mean that the rest of us have clean hands. Voters are the ones who had an opportunity in San Francisco last month to decriminalize prostitution and guess what? THEY DIDN’T. We’re not talking about old laws no one enforces anymore, we’re talking about active BULLSHIT that just keeps on trucking.

Yes, it’s impossible for me to calmly deliver a moderate, easy-to-understand argument about sex worker rights and reducing violence perpetrated against sex workers. I’m sorry for that. I feel guilty for not doing more for sex workers as a group — for not being more of an activist, for not staying better informed, for not being a more coherent educator. As with any minority suffering discrimination and persecution, it’s a challenge to have time to earn a living in that discriminatory atmosphere AND be an agent of change. That’s why discrimination and marginalization WORK SO WELL; when people are underprivileged and denied rights granted to others, they 1) lack the resources to effectively fight for change, and 2) can’t be completely honest or open about their own stories without fear of reprisals and punishment. It’s true that I feel relatively safe as a webwhore, but I said RELATIVELY safe, not just-plain-SAFE. I realize I am VERY lucky, but still vulnerable.

I hate that my blog entries on this subject wind up preaching to the choir and are probably ignored or misunderstood by everyone else, but seriously — this whore needs to spend the rest of the day trying to make money rather than blowing off steam just to hear her head rattle. With the poor economy and my own situation of having gone deeply into credit card debt to finance our business, I do have a heightened awareness of how my own safety and standing in society is threatened even more by the fact that I’m a sex worker and therefore considered disposable and fair game for scapegoating, at the very least. I know from my OWN feelings of jealousy towards people who are economically privileged and resentment towards those protected enough by their gender and class to get away with huge scams that are considered legit ways to fuck people for money that we all can become very, ummmm, mean-spirited when the chips are down.

I wish I could wrap this up with a big Christmas bow that would change the world for sex workers or at least make people WANT to see that happen, but I’m at a loss for how to do that so I will simply say THANK YOU to the people who are out their lobbying for change on behalf of me and other sex workers today.

***there are definitely class (and race) issues at work that allow mostly poor men of color to beat each other senseless in boxing rings and suffer tons of injuries in other pro sports with regulations that do very little to protect them; by bringing this up I’m not saying boxing or other sports should be illegal or even necessarily more heavily regulated — I only mention it as an interesting comparison to sex work. It illustrates the irrationally contradictory double standards when it comes to women’s bodies versus men’s bodies and what kind of work they can put them to for how much money.

If you follow my twitter you know I went to Seattle for FootNight on Thursday thanks to AmberLily giving me a heads-up about the event and encouraging me to apply with her to be a “foot model”. It was a good opportunity to get out of my nerdy hermit bubble and enjoy having my feet fondled (something I’ve always enjoyed).

It was also a good excuse for me to get a pedicure: an expense and investment of time I rarely can justify since I don’t specialize in foot fetish porn (though we do try to include at least a few shots of my feet in most of my galleries).

99.99% of the sexually stimulating work I’ve done has been on the internet or over the phone, starting out with private shows on iFriends in 2000. Even though I enjoy private shows and phone, I have almost no time to do one-on-one stuff anymore (especially since the camworld is so much different from when I started) but I *miss* it, so attending FootNight was a way to get back to that a little bit while also experiencing something new in a safe environment with an emphasis on something I love: feet.

The rules were very clear for the event (no nudity, foot worship only, no direct sexual contact, no leaving the party with customers and coming back in, etc.) and all of the women were dressed to attend a nice cocktail party or fine art fetish shoot: black turtleneck dresses, shiny black corsets, etc. In my estimation, I was the only one dressed in a way that said, “it’s all for sale, boys! I’m a total hussy!” with my blouse buttons bursting, my skirt way too short and my boobs bouncing all over the place. I was also the most nervous person there, I think, next to many of the guests with my knees practically knocking trying to walk up and down the stairs in my unimpressively practical (but still challenging for me) heels and very unsophisticated sweat stains accumulating under my arms. The truth is that I don’t have any classy party garb that’s also sexy/leg-baring that I can still fit into.

Besides, I didn’t want to go to great lengths to “fit in”; I figured it was better to stand out looking like a tramp than try to blend in. On top of that I love upskirts and panties and have much more of that kind of thing than feet on my site so I was excited by the idea of having men on the ground below me able to see right up my skirt to my hot pink and black panties. Even if it wasn’t THEIR thing, it’s MY thing; I don’t get out much and planned to milk the tease for all it was worth.

I don’t actually think I have great feet; the only thing I have going for me is that they’re exceptionally small, but at the party there were A LOT of women with small feet. Maybe not quite as small as mine, but there were plenty of size five and six chicks there. All that small-foot competition gave me yet another reason to be glad I had a corner on the market for the super-slutty look.

So WAS there a market for it? Not so much, I don’t think, but wearing something less conspicuously trashy wouldn’t have made a difference. There were a couple of guys who expressed quite a bit of appreciation for the upskirt action, but as far as I know I didn’t have guys waiting in line to spend time with me and my feet at $20 for ten minutes. I kept busy and had fun, but probably only gained one new die-hard fan for the future.

The first guy to give me money wasn’t even there because he liked feet. He was there on a mission with a bottle of Scotch to try to get back into Lady Lydia’s good graces. He told me he’d been rude to her on the phone so she’d stopped talking to him and all he could hope for is that she would accept his gift, if not his apology.

In the process of relating this to me, he reached into his pocket with defeated contrition, pulled out a twenty and assured me that he KNEW the ONLY reason we ladies were there was to make money. “I know it’s all business and I don’t want to waste your time.” I told him that if he was going to pay me, we should at least retreat to a more private area (ie a different couch farther from the door) so I could make sure to give him the time that he paid for even if he didn’t care about my feet or really anything besides Lady Lydia. He and I also agreed that our move and the open exchange of money for time would serve as a model early in the evening for the other guys to take similar steps to secure special attention from the “models”.

After forty dollars worth of talking he felt compelled to resume his tortured quest to adequately humble himself to Lady Lydia. Even though it was the first face-to-face transaction I’d made like that, it felt very familiar . . . very natural to the point where I’m sure I’m forgetting a whole lifetime of doing exactly that: being the whore that men pay just to listen. Of course there’ve been a few other times I’ve gotten money from men face-to-face for certain things, but the circumstances were less formal and the terms not at all clearcut. No, I don’t think I ever blogged about them even though they’d make interesting reading. Much of my limited experience with photographers felt exactly like sex work too, even though they took great pains not to call it that — not to even call it porn — and they didn’t pay me with money; all factors that made it MORE compromising and awkward than work that’s commonly labeled as sex work.

Anyway, Lydia’s guy probably only wanted to spend twenty dollars on me out of obligation because I’d practically forced him to tell me his story simply by introducing myself, but my timer’s battery wore out making it difficult for me to keep accurate time. I’m still not sure if my unreliable timer worked in my favor or against me; on the one hand I wound up giving people more time than they paid for before I realized the timer had no intention of beeping. On the other, they sometimes paid for more since I would discover this too late for them to turn down the next ten minutes since they were already in progress. We were advised by the party organizers to keep a discreet eye on the time but my timer was NOT discreet AT ALL; I pulled that fucker out at the beginning of every session and beeped in ten or eleven minutes in a very obvious way, nerdily assuring them this would help me NOT be distracted from the fun we could have by worrying about the time while they raised their eyebrows and mumbled that I certainly was . . . prepared. If it had actually worked and sounded an alarm at the end of those minutes, I’m sure it would have annoyed a great many people so maybe it was all for the best.
/>I felt busy the whole time I was there, but didn’t really make enough for the trip to be worth what I put into it between the pedicure, ferry, gas, and time that I could have spent doing more lucrative things (like finishing the years-overdue redesign on my site and Delia’s and this blog and . . .). Still, it was worth it to me because it was FUN, super-erotic (I’ll elaborate on in another post) and a reminder of how good it feels to connect with customers individually.

It was also worth it to have BigD snap his suspenders at me, “work” with AmberLily to doubleteam a guy with our feet (again, I’ll elaborate in another entry), and to meet Lydia (I only realized when I got home that she’s the one Ron has told me so much about with so much admiration), Reyja (a fellow Emma Steel), and Mistress Matisse. We women didn’t have much time to stand around chatting with each other, but after so many years of reading Matisse’s blog and communicating online even the little bit we have via email and blog comments it felt to me like we were cousins at a reunion. You know how there are people that feel like they’re in your life — that you’re related to in some way — even though you only see each other face-to-face a couple times in your life and rarely interact? That’s what it was like being in the same room with Matisse: totally uncommon but still irrationally familiar. In fact, that’s what being with customers face-to-face is like. There wasn’t anything weird or new about it that I didn’t recognize as the same as a million other interactions I’ve had and kinds of work I’ve done which is probably what made it so hard for me to accept that I couldn’t just climb on top of a couple of these guys and fuck them dry for a few dollars more. Not that any of them asked for that (everything was very above-board, no-pressure, polite, and legal), I’m just saying it’s hard for me to accept the stigmas, restrictions, and separateness attached to sex work and all the little subtleties built into some of them so that they can avoid being labeled as such.

FOR MEMBERS:

These pics of me wearing shiny thigh-high boots are from a new set of photos I’m posting for my members soon:

*****

OF “MEMBERS”:

My mom, sister and nephew spent a couple of nights with us so I haven’t gotten much work done the past few days, but here are a few posts you might have missed with examples of my masturbation fodder. For those of you who are curious about what I get off on when I have a couple minutes to pursue such things, lately I head to Rude for the homemade masturbation videos guys upload there themselves (I know the ads are annoying, but I’m a member so I don’t have to see them):

*Self-Shot Toy Jerk
*Silicone Jack-Off Buddy
*Wash and Wank

EXPOSED MEMBERS:
As you can tell by the number of videos regular guys post online for free featuring themselves jacking off — sometimes in the most humiliating of ways — a lot of men are not only exhibitionists, but get off on the idea of being forced or coerced into exposing themselves in embarrassing ways, being laughed at, having their penises inspected, and being ordered to masturbate for onlookers. There’s even a porn niche called “CFNM” (clothed female nude male) featuring men at the mercy of women who make them do these things for their entertainment.

CFNM is one of my favorite types of fetish scenarios because it revolves around the fantasy of women making men perform “against their will” with the balance of power being tipped in women’s favor (pretty unusual in porn). I also love role plays with a lot of build-up, which most CFNM scenes have. There’s a new site called CFNM Secret which is a fun attempt by one of the big corporate porn giants to exploit this market. I personally prefer Pure CFNM because they seem to “get it” more, but maybe CFNM Secret will appeal to a broader audience. I’m not so much into scenes where the chicks suck and fuck the guys, and I prefer for the men to look psychologically TORMENTED and completely aghast at being unable to control their own sexual response, but pretty much any CFNM scene turns me on way more than generic porn unless it’s the bachelorette party scenario where they go wild for male strippers (yawn).

I understand why guys enjoy fantasizing about being male strippers, but as someone who’s been to events where they’ve been hired, even when those dudes are outnumbered and getting paid they still act like they’re in charge of us and what happens, and that pisses me off. I will never forget the fucker who came to a bachelorette party and overstayed his welcome for HOURS lecturing us on NAFTA while most of the girls tolerated and even encouraged it while I drunkenly got in his face telling him he was WAY out of line, to shut the fuck up and to leave. Fifteen years later, the memory of it STILL makes me mad. The only time I’ve seen a male stripper behave properly (submit to women and entertain them, rather than himself) was a black guy with a circus penis (down to his knee, NO JOKE) at a house party with mostly black women. He kept his mouth shut and performed without acting like he needed to intimidate us. He was eager to please and seemed to genuinely get off on being in a submissive position without demanding extra attention. We got to USE him and he seemed to know that was what he was there for.

As I write this I am fully aware that I would freak out if I saw a guy writing about female sex workers this way; I know I have a double standard on this (men who are hired to entertain women should KEEP THEIR YAPS SHUT), but there’s still a double standard in the Americas with men doing most of the talking and controlling and women doing most of the submitting and listening. I can’t help it that role plays reversing that power imbalance are a turn-on to me both sexually and emotionally. It’s like therapy; I get a big charge out of it.

Here’s a great post from Mia:

WHY I DID PORN, AND WHY I’M GLAD I DON’T ANYMORE

And no, I don’t think it’s great JUST because I’m profiled in such a warm, fuzzy way in it; it’s great because she tells you about a lot of the behind-the-scenes unsexy stuff that get in the way of indie porn being fun. Billing stuff, legal stuff, branding stuff, asshole stuff, relationship stuff, gender stuff, multi-tasking stuff, etc.