sex work

5 Ways to Support Sex Workers

Kate Sloan

Have you heard? Sex workers’ rights are being eroded more and more every day, and they were pretty scant already in most places. The shitty laws known as SESTA/FOSTA – ostensibly designed to prevent sex trafficking – have only succeeded in fucking with sex workers’ lives and livelihoods (in addition to jeopardizing the free internet for everyone else). This cannot stand.

Here are 5 things you can do right now to help sex workers. They need help more than ever.

Donate to organizations that fight for sex workers’ rights.

Red Light Legal, SWOP Behind Bars, and the St. James Infirmary are three of the most popular ones I’ve been hearing about. They are doing important, difficult work, and they need money (as well as, in many cases, volunteers) in order to keep doing that work. If you’ve got enough extra cash that you can afford to donate to causes you believe in, consider picking one of these.

Contact your political reps to demand action on sex workers’ rights.

Communicate clearly to your representatives that you are against SESTA/FOSTA and pro-decriminalization. (If you need some help understanding why decriminalization is preferable to “the Nordic model” and legalization/regulation of sex work, Google ought to set you straight.) If enough people kick up a fuss, they’re likelier to listen, and to actually do something about it.

Speak out against whorephobia.

When you hear someone talking shit about sex workers – even if they think they’re being hilarious, which they often do – push back! It might seem small, but popular perceptions take a long time to shift, and one-on-one persuasion can be a big part of that. Let your shitty bro know that it’s not okay with you when he mouths off about escorts and strippers. Share facts about sex workers’ struggles and the massive positive impact they can have and have had on the world, and maybe even on you personally.

Boost sex workers’ voices on social media.

A lot of non-sex-industry people are afraid to do this, at least on their main accounts, because on some level they’re embarrassed or ashamed to be publicly affiliated with sex work. But SWs need allyship and support now more than ever. You don’t have to retweet porn onto your vanilla coworkers’ timelines (!), but don’t be afraid to retweet and share stuff about decriminalization and SESTA/FOSTA. You never know who could see it and potentially get on-board with the mission.

Book sessions with sex workers!

The “sex trafficking” laws are making this harder than ever, by eliminating many of the boards where sex workers used to be able to advertise their services, like the Craigslist personals section and Backpage. Twitter and Switter still have lots of SWs (though Twitter is getting shittier and shittier about adult content), so take a look there. If there’s a SW you’ve been wanting to see for a while, now is a great time to do it – they’re probably struggling under these laws. And if you don’t actually want a sex worker’s services but want to support them anyway, consider just… giving them money! That’s definitely an option.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Escort Echelons: What is the “Whorearchy”?

Kate Sloan

I think I first encountered the term “whorearchy” in a podcast hosted by Tina Horn. She’s done sex work in various forms and is thus, I would assume, intimately familiar with the ways people in that community can turn against each other, judge each other, and speak ill of each other. Porn performer Belle Knox says the whorearchy is the name given to the phenomenon in which “sex work segregates itself along perceived social and legal lines.” It is – like so many systems of (de)valuation and “respectability” in marginalized communities – a form of infighting, of internalized oppression, of people keeping each other down when they might instead lift each other up.

Though I’ve done very few forms of sex work, sparingly and sporadically, I have seen this dynamic in action. In sugar baby communities, for example, there’s often tons of hostility aimed at escorts and escort agencies, the implication being that sugar-dating is somehow classier than full-service sex work because it’s not directly transactional, even though… in most cases, it is. There are also phone-sex operators who disdain in-person sex work, escorts who think camming isn’t real sex work, and pro dommes who think their lack of genital contact with clients makes them better than service providers who do have sex with johns, just to name a few examples.

These squabbles remind me of the internalized misogyny displayed in, for instance, bookish brunettes claiming busty blondes are stupid and setting feminism back, or TERFy second-wave feminists insisting third-wavers are betraying the cause by embracing promiscuity and trans rights. This type of infighting mostly just encourages marginalized people to police each other’s behavior rather than banding together to take on their oppressors.

It’s worth noting, of course, that different types of sex work do come with different levels of risk, difficulty, and stigma. Street-based sex workers are particularly vulnerable to violence, for example, and racialized and/or disabled escorts face discrimination and mistreatment that white and/or able-bodied ones don’t. Acknowledging and understanding these differences is part of intersectionality: the feminist idea, coined by black feminist theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, that oppressed people (in this case, sex workers) all have different experiences based on their identities and the systems of oppression they face. However, someone having a different experience than you in the world doesn’t mean they have to be your adversary.

In fact, it’s been wonderful to see sex workers from various different areas of the field band together to fight against SESTA/FOSTA, the “anti-sex trafficking” laws that have seriously eroded sex workers’ rights, freedoms, and livelihoods. I’ve seen escorts and camgirls chatting online about the problems they face, pornographers boosting phone-sex operators’ tweets about their struggles, online findommes telling their audiences to donate to Red Light Legal. There have been stunning incidences of solidarity, because, as is so often the case, marginalized individuals are stronger together than splintered.

A while ago, an escort friend of mine asked if I wanted to come to a sex workers’ play party she was organizing. I was surprised: “I’m not really a sex worker,” I stammered, “I just, like, do cam shows and sell nudes and make amateur porn and sometimes sell my panties and I was a sugar baby once…” I was so used to having my sex work experiences diminished, or to feeling like I had to preemptively diminish them myself, because what I do isn’t “real” sex work. But here’s the thing: it is, even though it’s different from other types. I’ve seen more and more recognition in my online communities over the past few years that the whorearchy doesn’t serve anyone it comprises. Sex workers’ problems have gotten worse and the community is suffering more than it has for a long time (and it’s suffered a lot) – but sometimes it seems the internal landscape of the group is shifting for the better, even if only a little.

My friend smiled. “That totally counts! You should come!” I smiled, too.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Should You Be Able to Rate & Review Sexual Partners?

Kate Sloan
I wrote this in high school but lots of it still rings true…

In 2013, a new app called Lulu was released which allowed female users to anonymously rate and review their male acquaintances, including friends, exes, and past hookups. The men were rated on a 10-point scale, for criteria like humor, manners, ambition, and willingness to commit.

There was immediately a media panic about it, with outlets referring to Lulu as “Sex Yelp” and speculating on what it portended about human relationships in the 21st century. Dating-app giant Badoo later acquired Lulu and shut down the ratings component of the app, but the question remained: is rating and reviewing sexual partners useful? And perhaps even more pressingly: is it ethical?

I’m sorry about the cissexism. We were young and shitty.

I thought about this again years later when a friend and I devised a rating scheme for penises we had known, featuring criteria like “hygiene,” “soft skin,” “taste of cum,” “testicular perkiness,” and so on. It seemed harmless to me at the time, a hilarious joke perpetrated while tipsy, but upon reviewing it in the light of day, I realized how objectifying it was. What I’d originally conceptualized as a tool for discussing sexploits with friends (“The dick I sucked last night was an 86 out of 100, can you believe?!”) now seemed like a process as cruel and dismissive as swiping through Hot or Not or scoring selfie-submitters on the “Am I Ugly?” subreddit. How could I call myself sex-positive and body-positive if I was literally assigning numerical scores to people’s anatomy? I couldn’t.

There are some cases where rating sexual partners seems fine, or even prudent. Sometimes clients offer public feedback about sex workers they’ve seen (check out USASexGuide for more on that), which can inform prospective johns’ decisions and drive clientele to service providers. There are also always backchannels where women and other marginalized people exchange notes on their dates and hookups with others in their community, warning friends away from abusers and boundary-crossers. These discussions are crucial for keeping people safe who would otherwise have trouble staying safe, because of the unfortunate ways our dating culture and sex work laws are set up. I don’t begrudge anyone for sharing info about “bad dates” and reading other people’s info of the same sort; sometimes these behaviors are the only recourse you have.

But rating people’s bodies and sexual skills is a different thing entirely. Sex is deeply personal, and sometimes embarrassing, and a lot of people have a lot of hangups about it; the same things can be said about our fallible human bodies. It seems unjustifiably cruel to rate people on these criteria in a venue as public as an app or a website, unless they’ve specifically solicited that feedback, like people do on “rate me” forums. (I often wonder if these people are suffering from low self-esteem, or discovering a sublimated objectification/humiliation kink, or both.) In a culture as sex-negative and body-critical as ours, you hardly need say anything at all to fuel someone’s deepest fears and insecurities. Even the most seemingly innocuous criticism can set off a spiral of self-hatred in those of us who are susceptible to this sort of thing, which is most of us.

So I can no longer justify rating and objectifying people (or penises) in the ways I used to. Eradicating sexual shame and encouraging self-love are two of my key goals, professionally and personally, and critiquing bodies and sexualities runs counter to these objectives. This is true not only for other people but for myself: the more you cast a critical eye on how other people look and what they’re doing in bed, the more you’ll tend to judge yourself in those areas as well, perhaps without even meaning to. These mental habits are dangerous, and insidious, and must be actively fought against to be extinguished.

Tell your best friend about last night’s mediocre hookup over drinks, if you like; write in your journal about genitalia that confounded you, if you must. But sharing these judgments online doesn’t really serve anyone, in my view, and it may even contribute to society-wide shame cycles. If you want to create a better world for humans who have sex, one of the best ways to start is to view everyone’s body and sexuality with the same compassion you’d hope they would extend to you.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all words and opinions are my own.

8 Pieces of Useful Wisdom From Sex Workers

Kate Sloan

Each time I’ve dabbled in forms of sex work, like putting on cam shows and selling my used underwear, one of the best things about these endeavors has been connecting with other people doing similar work. I can’t think of a group more passionate, open-hearted, and resourceful than sex workers. They provide crucial services to people who need and want them, despite frequently encountering crushing stigma and legal roadblocks like SESTA/FOSTA. (See the last point on this list for more on that.)

So I’m delighted that I’ve partnered with Escorts & Babes – Sydney Escorts to put together this list of some of the major lessons I’ve learned from genius sex workers in my social spheres. Anyone who says you don’t need skills or smarts to do sex work is fooling themselves.

Trust is hot. Sex and kink, in my experience, just seem to get better and hotter the more trust there is between the participants. I imagine it must be hard to establish this trust as quickly and thoroughly as you would need to in a sex work context, which makes it all the more impressive that so many service providers do it on a regular basis. Their work invites me to look at my own sex life and ask: Where could I be more trusting, and how might that improve my experiences? And, inversely, where am I being too trusting, and how can I solve that?

Dirty talk is magic. After all the many, many hours I’ve spent having phone sex and being erotically hypnotized, I’ve come to think of dirty talk (and related sexual oration) as a form of literal magic: like casting a spell in the Hogwarts universe, you say some kind of incantation and it has real, observable effects in the body and brain of the person you’re talking to. Sex workers tend to wield this power better than anyone I know; it’s often a sharpened and well-loved tool in their toolbox, and part and parcel of what keeps their clients coming back. Hearing these stories makes me want to step up my own dirty-talk skills!

Disabled people can be (and often are) sexual too! I can’t believe there are still so many people who don’t understand this, but there you go… While it sucks that our ableist world too often tries to paint disabled people as unsexy and unsexual, I know some who’ve sought sex workers’ services and found them immensely healing and helpful. Obviously it sucks that this route is financially inaccessible for many, and that ableism continues to exist, but I’m glad some disabled folks have the option to pursue sexual touch on their own terms by hiring a sex worker. (Did you know there’s even been a recent push in Australia to get sexual services for disabled folks covered by national disability insurance? I hope the Aussie government comes around on this eventually; it could be a big life-changer for many disabled folks, as well as Australian sex workers, like those at Escorts & Babes – www.escortsandbabes.com.au.)

When it comes to kink, more communication is better. I admire the thorough negotiations many sex workers (especially pro dommes) insist on doing before sessions, and I think every sexually active person could benefit from adopting similar practices in their own sex lives. No partner can give you the mind-blowing sex you’ve been dreaming of if they don’t know what gets you hot. Share your likes and your limits – it can only make things better!

Kink can be startlingly intimate. Granted, just like vanilla sex, kink can feel awkwardly distanced, deliciously connective, or anywhere in between. But I find that intimacy and kink tend to go hand-in-hand moreso for me, and I can access depths of connection through kink that I didn’t even know existed back when I thought I was vanilla. I’ve heard from sex worker friends and acquaintances, over and over, that a large part of what their clients are seeking isn’t just sexual gratification but some sense of emotional communion with another human being. That’s what kink feels like to me, when it’s at its best.

Asking for consent isn’t hard. It’s sex workers’ job to ensure their clients have a good time, so of course they would tend to prioritize consent highly in their transactions. We all should take a leaf out of their book, and weave consent check-ins into the tapestry of our sexual encounters. This doesn’t have to be as unsexy as some people insist – as Lo points out here, there are tons of super hot turns of phrase you can use to make sure your paramour is into what’s happening and wants it to continue. You truly have no excuse.

Knowing what you want is half the battle. This is a major lesson I’ve taken from kink and repeatedly applied to my own life: you can’t progress toward the objects of your desires until you’ve identified what those desires are. Sounds simple, but it’s often deceptively difficult to figure out what your heart is actually calling out for. This type of soul-searching is worth doing, and is one of the initial steps on the path to enduring happiness.

SESTA/FOSTA is killing people and must be stopped. This is the most important item on this list, so listen up. If you don’t know, SESTA/FOSTA are “anti-trafficking bills,” signed into law in early 2018, that have actually taken aim at sex workers by raiding and shutting down escort listing sites (yes, this is why Craigslist’s personal ads got slashed) and getting tons of adult content banned from various platforms. It will come for us all eventually – and has already started to – but it mainly impacts sex workers, especially those who live and/or work in the USA. You can help by raising awareness about these laws in your networks, donating to sex work advocacy organizations like Red Light Legal and SWOP Behind Bars, contacting your political reps to demand they take action, and supporting sex workers directly by hiring them, buying their content, and giving them money.

 

What wisdom have you picked up from sex workers in all their industrious brilliance?

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at Escorts & Babes – Sunshine Coast Escorts. As always, all writing and opinions (except, of course, in quoted tweets) are my own.

10 Things I Could Do If I Hired a Male Escort

Kate Sloan

I thought a lot about male escorts when I was younger, because the thought of sex with men worried me and I wanted someone to shepherd me through it non-judgmentally. I wanted to be taught tricks and strategies, and to thereby embolden me for future (non-transactional) sexual encounters with men. When young male virgins write to me now to ask for advice on building sexual confidence and “getting into the game,” I’m being very serious when I suggest they see a sex worker – because I strongly considered taking this route myself.

However, I ultimately decided not to, because 1) I didn’t have enough money, 2) I was scared, and 3) I fell in love with a man who was just as patient and kind about my sexual inexperience as I had hoped an escort would be. BUT. Even still today, I think about hiring sex workers every once in a while, as an indulgence if some extra dough ever fell into my lap. Being demisexual, however, I don’t think I would employ them for sex – and some escort agencies explicitly say that their workers don’t even offer sex. So here are 10 other things I might consider doing if I hired a male escort…

1. Massage. Yeah, I should really just hire a masseuse if this is what I’m after, but there is something different about a massage that is allowed to be flirty or even sexy. It has a different energy and I’m able to relax into it in a different way. Sometimes it’s nice to be touched in a way that is sex-adjacent but not explicitly sexual, y’know?

2. Masochism. As a masochistic submissive, I crave pain and subspace almost as often as I crave sex. But unlike pleasure and orgasms, good pain isn’t easy to administer to myself. Outsourcing the task would be better, especially if I found an escort who was experienced in whatever activity I was craving (let’s be honest – probably spanking).

3. Topping practice. Granted, I would imagine submissive male escorts are harder to find than dominant ones (correct me if I’m wrong), but I think some “hired help” could allow me to hone my topping skills, like impact play, face-slapping, and even just dominant dirty talk. It’s less embarrassing to practice on someone who does this stuff all the time than on someone who could literally break up with you if you mess something up.

4. Vacation accomplice. A while ago I was invited on a press trip to an all-inclusive swingers’ resort, and I had to decline, partly because of scheduling issues but also partly because my partner wasn’t available to accompany me and I would’ve been in social anxiety hell if I went alone. It’s a pipe dream that I’d ever have enough cash to splurge on a whole weekend or week of an escort’s time, but in a dream world where I do, they’d be a good date to a getaway.

5. Flirting. So underrated and so important! Sometimes – especially when you’re single and/or lonely – you just need somebody to make you feel wanted and wantable. I could see hiring an escort for a fun dinner-and-drinks date for the express purpose of being flirted with. Mmm, crushy energy.

6. Cuddles. Some studies show human touch is actually necessary for our well-being, and I believe it. It would be nice to hire a professional cuddler in the midst of a particularly lonely dry spell, or to comfort me at the end of a hard day.

7. Wedding guest. Weddings suck if you’re sad about your romantic life. I have definitely cried at them for totally self-absorbed reasons as well as the normal reasons people cry at weddings. I could imagine hiring an escort to be my +1 if my originally-planned date dropped out for some reason (like a breakup) and I didn’t want to go alone.

8. Photos and videos. Provided the escort was okay with it, it might be fun in an artistic-collaboration way if we shot some sexy pictures or clips together, either to sell (with profit-sharing, of course!) or just for personal perusal. Seeing myself from different perspectives is sometimes a good way to boost my self-esteem when I need it, and “entwined in intimate embrace with a hot escort” is certainly a different perspective!

9. Tourism. When you visit a new city, your experience of it is vastly influenced by the person or people who show you around. My Toronto is different from a Bay Street banker’s Toronto or a hippie artist’s Toronto, for example. It would be neat to hire an escort while visiting a new place, and have them lead me around to some of their favorite spots.

10. Learning. I have known enough escorts to know that they have skillsets almost nobody else has. They have to have above-average emotional and social intelligence, in addition to whatever sex and kink skills they may use in their line of work. I find that inspirational and could put similar skills to use in many areas of my life, so it would be cool to get some one-on-one tutelage from a willing escort on these topics.

Would you ever hire an escort for a non-sexual reason?

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at Gentlemen4Hire. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.