In my dreams, I share my writing and the writing of my beloved wh0res to an audience of my mom, my partner, my friends, & all my boyfriends (ahem, clients lol). I WANT YOU THERE! RSVP here to this event brought to you by
@NotHustlingPod
&
@workinggirlspub
!
My female students just told me that they were having housing issues because in the state of PA 6 women can’t legally live together because that is considered a brothel. They had to do complicated lease aggrements & have been trained to deal with police in case of enquiry.
I get asked often in interviews if I think crypto will solve sex workers’ banking issues. I’m no tech or finance expert but let me reframe the question. Do I think libertarian silicone valley dude-bro can create tech that will fix systematic discrimination? No.
A client told me that his wife, who can’t have sex anymore bc of health reasons, is the best person he knows. He will never divorce her/doesn’t want to, but can’t imagine never having sex again.
Seeing a sex worker in this case is so reasonable/ethical. That we criminalize this
I’m in
@RollingStone
today, talking about the impact of shadowbanning on the sex work community, and why Twitter giving a verified account to a fictional sex worker seems like a slap on the face to our community. Thanks
@ejdickson
.
No one should feel like the only options are to divorce the best person they know, or to live without sexual pleasure. There are straightforward solutions to this problem.
There is a reason that sex workers use pseudonyms and it’s to protect their safety. If you find out that someone you know is a sex worker and you tell everyone about it like it’s a piece of juicy gossip, you are putting their lives, families, and safety at risk.
it’s weird to me that the parallel between sex worker rights & abortion rights is not taken more seriously by mainstream feminists. both are issues of bodily autonomy & who gets to decide what we do with our bodies. SWers will fight for abortion, i’d like to see some reciprocity.
“These celebrity users never have to face the stigma that we do, they can just profit off of platforms we have built, without enduring any of the backlash that we have to endure.” I’m in
@RollingStone
talking about SW stigma & celebrities on OnlyFans.
As a sex worker, I’m just trying to make pretty things and give people the space they need to have affirming and fun sexual experiences. I really don’t think it should be such a battle.
An important thing I learned as a sex worker that I wish I could share w civilian women: A good body is one that can give and receive pleasure, not one that looks a particular way. And relatedly, all kinds of bodies are desirable.
I pay my therapist for her undivided attention to talk about things that matter to me. We have an asymmetrical relationship. I pay her for this asymmetry without dehumanizing her. I don’t know what is so special about sex that makes this impossible to imagine when we talk about
I'm tired of the pro sex work crowd pretending this attitude is just as a result of stigma.
It's really isn't.
In order to override someone's consent by paying them, a level of dehumanisation has to happen.
There's no way to sanitise that.
Just a reminder that no one cares if workers use their bodies as a mode of labor. They only care when sex workers do because we are caught up in puritanical values that sees sex as icky. TBH my body hurt more when I sat in a chair at an office job 8h a day than it does now.
I don't know, this critique may be true of swingers, but most of the poly people I know are not rich (by not rich, I mean queer & poor), and for them, part of the appeal of poly is that it widens their support network in a country that would let them die.
Why do men hit up sex workers for time and attention but say they don’t want to pay because they are looking for a genuine connection?
First, you can have a genuine connection with a sex worker - we are people.
Second, the least likely route to that connection is devaluing us.
To all the sex workers (out or not) who feel alienated from their families during the holiday season, who have to lie about who they are or be half a person for the comfort of others, I see you. Sending love and solidarity. ❤️
Seeing story after story of teachers being fired after their Onlyfans accounts are discovered. There is an easy solution to this problem if you don’t want teachers slinging nudes: PAY THEM MORE.
I’ve been a teacher and it is more than a FT job. Teachers aren’t on OF for funsies.
If you’re a sex worker with supportive parents, what has that looked like? What have they done to show you love and support?
Or if you’re not, what do you wish they would do or say?
I’m writing an article about how parents can support their adult sex working kids.
Someone recently asked me how I would describe the value of sex work and after some thought, this is where I landed: In a capitalist hellscape intent on seeing us all work ourselves to the bone, prioritizing pleasure & connection for its own sake is a form of radical resistance.
I got kicked off a site that offers platonic intimacy services bc I offer non-platonic intimacy services elsewhere. I didn’t break their TOS and was prepared to offer platonic services. Remember that next time you tell SWers to do something else w our lives. We aren’t allowed to.
I don't understand the position that there will be no sex work after the revolution. How will abolishing capitalism magicly meet everyone's sexual needs? Balance out mismatched libido & desires? Make everyone less lonely? And who will make all the porn? Pardon my ignorance.
Sometimes it feels like clients imagine that we just live in hotel rooms in full makeup and lingerie waiting for them. Their attitude reminds me of kids who are surprised when they hear that their teachers don’t live at school and have families and lives outside of the classroom.
A woman tweeted that she wished women on twitter wouldn’t put nude pics up b/c it makes her uncomfortable that her fiancé sees them. I am incapable of understanding this POV. If simply seeing a naked body on social media somehow undermines the relationship, they have big problems
If I ever hosted another podcast, I think I would interview sex workers of all kinds with one rule, we don’t talk about sex work at all. On the table: hobbies, dreams, parenting, relationships, art, politics, friendship. Not on the table: work.
Who would listen?
I want all sex workers to be able to exit if/when they want, and I want possibilities to not be foreclosed bc of our history. That being said, it seems like a lot of SWers want to legitimize the work by claiming it’s in service of some other goal. Some of us are just wh*res.
In the wake of AVN, where everyone I met was shadowbanned, I feel like starting a shadowbanned sex worker follow train.
If the algorithms wont let us get outside our own circle, we can at least try to make that circle bigger.
Like and retweet, and follow everyone who does.
@jcreed
@RachLWhitehurst
@aIimercieca
@chrisconsiders
I haven’t looked into the law. They have reported discriminatory leasing practices, though, meaning that even if it isn’t true, it still shapes the experience of young women trying to access housing. This by itself is a problem.
The only care work that pays a livable wage is sex work. It occurred to me that the reason for this not that we as a culture value sex workers, but rather that we value men’s needs and desires above those of babies, children, the elderly, pregnant people, those with disabilities.
Happy International Sex Workers Rights Day. Sending out love to all the SWers who have filled my life with friendship, support, love, and beauty 💗💗💗
Now go tip your favorite sex worker!
I feel like a lot of anti sex work rhetoric (when it comes from men) hinges on resentment toward women’s economic independence. But relatedly, on overblown estimations of what the average sex worker is making.
I’m checking out at Trader Joe’s & my 7yo autistic son is covering his ears as he does every time we are in a loud public place & the cashier says, “Do you want me to turn the register beeps off?” Then does it, just like that & he takes his hands off his ears. Accommodations can
suddenly everyone is talking about digital security like they are sex workers when they were ignoring what we had to say about it since before fosta/sesta passed. 🤔
Every time I hear non sex workers say this I am immediately annoyed by how little work they think goes into sex work. I do not suggest that anyone leave their full time job to start an Onlyfans, not post March 2020.
I’ve had two female professors confide in me that they have fantasies of leaving academia & starting an onlyfans instead for more money, better work-life balance, & less exploitation—& I don’t know y’all, the way they framed it made a lot more sense than the joke should.
Talking to teenage boys about sex work. A story.
My friend's son told her the other day that when he turns 18 he's going to a strip club. She told him that was fine, but he better tip the dancers. (Good advice!)
I told my son about this convo tonight (they are both 17).
I tend to not weigh in on Twitter drama but I feel like this needs to be said. You may not like or agree w every SWer, you may hate the way they run their business/present themselves to the world, but mobilizing the community to bully them & fuck w their business is violent.
I’ve been thinking so much about sex work (particularly in-person full-service work) as “the oldest profession,” and how interesting it is that it will also be the profession that survives AI. The oldest, and also the most irreplaceable. A robot could not do what we do.
@phdandpups
I decided to leave my PhD in my therapist's office, 4 years into it. He said, "You know Jessie, you don't have to play this game, you can just walk away from the table." So I did just that & I have no regrets. It takes some time to redefine yourself outside academia but worth it.
Being an out sex working parent, a thread:
Today when I was having lunch with my adult child we started talking about sex education and I told him that I once had a 19 year old call my phone sex line to talk to me about a sexual attraction he felt for a male friend.
Remember the time that sx workers in Pittsburgh said that facial recognition software in the hands of cops is dangerous and will harm marginalized folks? And then a major university platformed a company that sells this software for cops anyway? Y’all should listen to sx workers.
Because the accusations are spiraling out of control & completely detached from reality, I will do this once.
- I am not a sex slave.
- No one who books me would confuse me with a minor—I’m 45.
- I have never cheated on my husband.
- I am not a homewrecker.
- I do not advocate
Hey mainstream media: Onlyfans is a job.
People “turn to Onlyfans” to make money the way they turn to Uber or Grubhub, or whatever the fuck else they turn to to make money.
This cultural obsession with Onlyfans is exhausting.
I was talking to one of my clients yesterday about being as visible/out as I am as a sex worker and what kind of impact that has had on my life. 9 years in I have some thoughts on this.
A short 🧵.
I was at the car wash vacuuming out my car & a guy came up to me & asked for 4 quarters and said he would venmo me $1. I gave him 4 quarters & told him not to worry about it. Then he shows back up and hands me this, and thanks me for being nice when I didn’t have to be. 😲💖
I really hate seeing sex workers policing other sex workers. We all have different constraints, comfort levels, histories, needs, and pressures. If we don’t understand why another worker does what they do, maybe we should just trust that they are doing what they need to for them.
Thinking about Stormy Daniels and the kind of power women have when they let go of the shame society heaps on them, stop bowing to expectations of respectability, and speak truth to power.
At this point I’ve done most forms of independent sex work and in my opinion, camming is the hardest hustle. I’m in awe of my camming friends that can make it work.
Often people outside of SW who want to be supportive of sex workers will make arguments about why men shouldn’t control women’s bodies. Two things: not all sex workers are women & the most intense anti-sex work rhetoric comes from women.
This got me thinking that as much as people want to shame parents for working in the sex industry (and out parents for not being more secretive about it), we sure do teach our kids more about sex, bodily autonomy, and consent than most parents.
@jcreed
@RachLWhitehurst
@aIimercieca
@chrisconsiders
My students said that there could be sorority houses as long as they were university run or on campus. The problem for them was when they tried to move off campus together. 🤷🏻♀️
Someone recently said to me that the problem that he sees with sex work is that it discourages women from creative or artistic work and instead rewards them for pandering to male desire. I have several thoughts about this.
I don’t have time to explain what is happening with sex workers to each individual person on Twitter. I need to do my other work! But what I did do was put together resources so that you can use educate yourselves. And it’s important, you should do so!
You wanna look at pretty naked people? Cool, we all do. Go to the places where they get paid to be pretty and naked and give the enough money that it’s worth it. It’s simple, really.
I’m not a trained therapist, and sometimes I feel like I should be in order to do this job without harm to myself or others. The emotional weight that gets dropped on sex workers’ shoulders can really be staggering sometimes.
I'm giving a talk at a university tomorrow and they asked if they can pay me with an Amazon gift card. This university is behaving like an instagram dude who doesn't want anyone to know he's buying my services.
I gave a talk on sex work today to a college class that got to pass down anonymous questions and some of them were so unbelievably SWERFy. At dinner w my daughter afterward I showed her the questions. She said some of them can be boiled down to, “Do you hate yourself?”
“Sex workers show demonstrable, concrete results. Their currency is the currency of human happiness.”
This week, I talk about the way that sex workers fill gaps in care for disabled adults by providing touch and intimacy to those who are crying out for it.
Buy a s*x worker dinner tonight, chances are they are really fucking depressed by the news right now.
If I'm the one you want to buy dinner for:
Venmo @/jessiesage
If this is what happened that would be one thing, but it’s not. He didn’t pay her for a sexual transaction, he dangled a career opportunity in front of her, coerced her into sex, and then payed her money after the fact to be quiet about it in order to influence an election.
There are sex workers who interact w me differently here than on my profile with a lower follower count. I notice that & all I have to say about it is this: We should be nice to each other regardless of whether we think there is something in it for us, because kindness matters.
My friend recently asked if being a SWer changes my relationship to sex outside of work. I told her that w the exception of my partner, I have very little motivation to seek out sexual experiences. She asked if that’s sad.
Being a sex working mother carries w it stigma, fear of state violence, and careful negotiation of how you talk abt your work w your kids & your kids to the world. I interviewed my adult son about what it was like to be the kid of a SWing mom
@WeAreTryst
This made him ask how strippers get paid and I told him about stage fees and he was flabbergasted. He was like, "Wait, they have to pay to go to work?"
And yes, yes they do. Also this is something they don't teach in school so I'm passing this message along to anyone reading.
My neighbor outed me as a SWer to all my other neighbors and I found out about it twice from people concerned and then she found out I was told about it and now she wants to talk to me. The last thing I want to do is explain to her why this is so upsetting. How’s your day going?
“I’m not romanticizing the sex industry, I know it has risks; I’m just not going to romanticize economic deprivation in the name of being a “good girl,” either. So do sex workers feel pleasure at work? Yeah. Bc you know what feels amazing? Surviving capitalism.”
@adriennemaree
To all the potential clients who are afraid of screening:
Let me put this in perspective for you. You are asking us to not only trust you enough to be alone with you, but to also be intimate with you. What we are asking for in return is that you tell us who you are.
"Sex work isn’t something you just dabble in, it is a job that will change you, one that you can’t just do to make ends meet during a pandemic, and then pack away in a box and forget about when the economy rebounds."
I wrote about the work of sex work.
From a more theoretical framework, I often think about what Foucault says in the History of Sexuality. That obsession is the flip side of repression. In a world where I don’t have to repress many desires, I also don’t spent very much time thinking about them.
And independent of the shadowbanning issue (which is big), I also want to know why I can't apply to have my Twitter account verified, but a fictional character can. Clearly
@twitter
is verifying accounts, but only ones of companies with money, like
@netflix
.
“Sex workers are not commodities like marijuana, or alcohol, and cannot be regulated and controlled in the way that substances or objects are. Sex workers are people, we are service providers, and — whether you know it or not — we are already an integral part of your community.”
Seems significant that just as I’m writing the chapter of my book on sex work and money I came home from a short tour and paid off the last of my credit card debt. I have been working on this for years—8.5 years to be exact. You are looking at someone with ZERO credit card debt.
Anyone who has worked in the porn industry for, say, 5 minutes or longer can tell you that desire is vast and varied and that there is an audience for all kinds of bodies. But I don’t expect a teenager to know that.
Update!
Since this
@ESTBLSHMNT
article has been published, Violet,* who I opened the piece with, has won her custody battle. The judge said that her sex work doesn’t impact her ability to parent her child. This is a success for all sex worker mamas 💝
I've had an odd thing happen several times where clients who have never booked an escort before read this article I wrote and then unknowingly found my escort brand and follow all my rules in booking me not knowing that I was the one who wrote them.
I feel like every single time I read a tweet that says, “No one is talking about this aspect of what sex work is like,” I can think of hundreds of tweets and dozens of articles saying those very things. We are always talking, writing, educating. Too bad people don’t listen.
One of the hard things about sex work is developing deep, multi-year intimate relationships w clients but to have to pretend those bonds don’t exist as you watch them go through major life challenges and health scares. As an escort whose clientele skews older, I’m feeling this.