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The Sex Blog Of Record
Tuesday, January 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
From Radical Graffiti:
Bathroom wall graffiti, somewhere in California, says “Sex work is real work, unlike being a landlord.”
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Thursday, April 8th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
I’m late to this party, but better late than never. In my defense, the article I missed in late March when it came out is on a site I don’t read about a show on a streaming service I don’t subscribe to. Only it’s much more than that! A dominatrix explains why documentaries about sex work never get it right is media criticism about depictions of sex work, by our own Mistress Matisse, who in her varying roles (sex worker, blogger, porn model, activist, columnist, Twitterer) has about fifty mentions in the back pages of ErosBlog. It would be unfair to describe her article as a rant; it’s too controlled, as befits somebody who hits people for a living and makes them like it. But it is… shall I say “pointed”?
A single mother of color, quitting her minimum-wage job and choosing instead to support herself by making porn videos of herself at home, while her children sleep in the next room? That is simply an intolerable idea to people whose wealth depends on obedient low-wage workers…
You may laugh at the notion that patriarchal capitalism is that worried about people having alternatives to low-wage service jobs – but patriarchal capitalism has no fucking sense of humor. Women profiting from their own bodies is both a social and economic threat to the system, so it must be punished.
Did I say media criticism? Well, yeah, that too. But as I read her, Matisse’s main point is a trenchant social criticism. “We” (our society and the media that voices for it) can’t talk about sex work with honesty and kindness because sex work threatens too many comfortable hypocrisies. A just society would have nothing to fear from sex work, nor any need to horribilize sex workers.
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Sunday, March 28th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
This pattern of urban debris tells a story. I’m not sure what that story is, but there’s gotta be one:
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Sunday, March 11th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
My friend Dr. Faustus called my attention to podcaster and essayist Dave Booda, whose article Why Sex Workers Should Replace Dating Coaches struck me as very much the sort of thing I like to highlight here at ErosBlog:
Going food shopping hungry can be a bad idea. When we’re hungry we make poor decisions about what to buy because we’re preoccupied trying to satisfy our urgent needs.
This is also true of dating, it’s hard to be calm and collected when you haven’t gotten laid in a while. I have a lot of love for the men who hire dating coaches, so what I’m about to say is said with a massive amount of compassion and understanding.
Most of the men who seek out dating coaches are desperate as fuck.
Many of these men are at the end of their rope, feel completely helpless and are excruciatingly lonely. Now imagine that guy trying to have relationships with women from that place. It’s a massive hurdle to overcome.
It’s also a catch twenty-two, because that desperation is precisely what’s stopping him from getting his needs met. “Relax and act cool” is an easy thing to say when you have an abundant love life, but it’s ridiculous advice for a man who hasn’t gotten laid in a year. The best male dating coaches can do is help that guy “fake it ’til you make it” but that process is slow and frustrating, not to mention it trains him to repress things like authenticity and honesty.
Now imagine that instead of finding a man to help him he goes to a quality sex worker. She can help meet his physical and emotional needs on day one, so now when he goes out into the world he feels nourished and fed versus starving and desperate.
I am middle-aged and old-fashioned; a lot of my mental baggage around sex work was formed decades ago in a society that could not discuss sex work without spitting. So I’m perhaps too aware how much freight is carried by the word “quality” in Dave Booda’s phrase “quality sex worker.” (His essay goes on to address this.) It’s far too easy for me to summon mental images and stereotypes of sex workers who would not — to put it mildly — outperform dating coaches by any metric. These tired attitudes of mine are balanced, fortunately, by my whole Twitter feed that’s full of bright, funny, compassionate, skillful, sexy, and talented sex workers. And I think the man has a real point: for many a desperate young person, these professionals would offer better value than a dating coach could ever hope to.
Thursday, November 12th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
So there’s this essay by Christopher Zeischegg aka Danny Wylde. It’s titled On The Moral Imperative To Commodify Our Sexual Suffering and I think there’s some stuff in there I disagree with. I have to say “I think” because it’s a dense essay with a lot of nuance, some of which may be getting past me. What’s more, I haven’t been where Zeischegg has been or done what he’s done. What I have done is worked (in my pasty-faced keyboarding way) in the same porn industry as him, and experienced (right along with him) certain changes in the porn business:
You’ve heard of the website PornHub.com? It’s owned by an international corporation called MindGeek. They used to be called Manwin, when they were developing a strategy to make free-mostly-pirated-porn sites the new normal. Employees were paid to rip DVDs and upload pirated content faster than any porn studio could send out their DMCA notices. MindGeek single-handedly caused the collapse of the pay-for-porn model of business. Kind of like how Napster killed the music industry. Except Napster did its damage and then disappeared. MindGeek went on to buy out every financially gutted porn studio until it resembled a production/distribution monopoly. MindGeek is Brazzers. MindGeek is Elegant Angel. MindGeek is Men.com. MindGeek is PornHub. You get the point.
Zeischegg, who no longer performs in porn after “all the ED drugs had caught up with” him, got a full time job filming and producing the stuff. He became bored, and in describing his boredom, he invokes one of the fears that animates me:
I could say with some certainty — after staring at several hundred hours of content in the absence of arousal — that porn had become boring.
There was flesh and it was fucked. Everyone over the age of 12 could list the ways in which a cock could fill a hole. Pornography was the equivalent of pop music — culturally omnipotent and void of all significance. It was visual mediocrity compounded by such widespread financial collapse that there might never again exist the capitalist incentive for novelty or spectacle.
“…that there might never again exist the capitalist incentive for novelty or spectacle.”
Sit with that thought. Allow it to fill you. Taste it, smell it. Try not to cry. If you love porn, novelty, and spectacle (and I love all three!) it’s pretty depressing, and there’s a lot of evidence loose in the world of 2015 that it might be true.
Zeischegg writes of suffering a severe depression “which may have never waned.” I want to think his depression is talking in the above quote. I want to think that porn as an art form will survive the loss of its status as an industry, and that once the MindGeek monoculture is as forgotten as Myspace, pornographic novelty and spectacle will flourish again, in a dynamic commercial ecosystem of small but creative businesses.
I want to think that. But I haven’t seen all that Zeischegg has seen.
As for the rest of his essay? He’s totally not done. He goes on to discuss in-person sexwork and the pressure it’s under as a business in a world where the decline of sexual shame is putting downward pressure on prices. Example sentence: “There’s Grindr. What’s the incentive to pay a young hustler for a blowjob?” He finishes up with an extended parable (or so I choose to read it) carrying his commodification notions to a logical conclusion that features a proposed partnership with a necromancer for the production of snuff films.
As far as I am concerned, he may have his fun with his necromancer. Or don’t call it fun: call it rather his Swiftian condemnation of the quest for novelty in extreme libertinage, if you choose to read him that way. It’s about the decline of sexual shame where I think we differ. He seems (and I freely admit to the possibility of misunderstanding) to think the decline of sexual shame is a bad thing. He’s regretful that, through writing and advocacy, he “did [his] part to normalize a profession that should have remained in the shadows.” He’s downright derisive about young women willing to make porn for low compensation as a (his scare quotes) “political act”. I can’t tell how much of this is a considered philosophy, versus sour grapes or just sourness in general. But I would argue that making porn and doing in-person sexwork are professions that have benefited from, and will benefit further from, the decline of sexual shame. It’s true that the premium wages they used to command will never come back, except perhaps for narrow specialists; but that’s no bad thing. The high wages were in part compensation for the social condemnation that came with the job. As the condemnation wanes — and it’s still got a long way to go! — it’s only logical that the wages will decline too.
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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Whatever you may think of the ethics, morality, or aesthetics of sex work, the prohibitionist approach doesn’t work any better in the context of sex than it does in the context of booze, guns, or drugs. Prohibition of sex work puts sex workers at risk, even when criminal sanctions are aimed at the clients rather than the providers. And that, according to Margaret Corvid, is Why It’s OK To Pay For Sex:
This essay isn’t about how nice my sex work clients usually are, how sex work can be therapeutic, or how we sex workers often work with disabled clients. It isn’t about the etiquette or morality of paying for sex, and it doesn’t offer advice to prospective clients or their loved ones.
These things are sometimes important and vital to this discussion, but the biggest reason that paying for sex is okay has nothing to do with convincing anyone that it’s a virtuous, liberatory, or feminist act.
Paying for sex is okay because if you’re for shaming and arresting our clients — owing to the fact that you think sex work is, for lack of a better word, gross — you’re for putting sex worker lives at risk in the name of a misguided moralism.
…
White feminism — tone policing, All-Lives-Matter spouting, pumpkin-spice-drinking white feminism –thinks it knows what’s best for everyone who isn’t itself, including sex workers, and it’s happy for the police to help it press its points home, no matter how many of our lives it destroys in the process.
Intersectional feminism, however, tries to have a different relationship with police. We’ll critique them, but we don’t turn to police as a tool to transform our racist and sexist society. Intersectional feminism demands that it’s okay to sell sex and to pay for it, because no other approach serves the human rights of sex workers and the reduction of risk and harm in our work.
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Thursday, May 9th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
From My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl Named Monique:
My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.
She deserves a Mother of the Year Award.
Saturday, June 4th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Mistress Matisse has written an excellent short essay on why prostitution is not inherently wrong. It’s hard to argue with her points on women’s ownership of their own bodies, and it’s puzzling to me that self-described feminists, who are all about body self-ownership when it comes to the reproductive side of sex, can’t understand the same point when it’s applied to sex for money-and-pleasure.
My favorite paragraph:
That, to me, is the part of being a sex worker that’s most apt to be damaging: the pressure, the name-calling, the marginalization and isolation she may encounter. If she internalizes those beliefs – and for many women it’s hard not to – she will start to hate herself, and with self-hatred comes a host of other self-destructive behaviors. But I think it’s not the sex with men that’s damaging these women, it’s being told they’re bad, dirty sluts. And I think it’s unfortunate when the people calling them that think of themselves as feminists. That’s not any brand of feminism I want to be a part of.
And just for the record, I would pay good money to be there watching in person while someone tells Mistress Matisse to her face that she’s a bad, dirty slut.
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