the money is never enough for the work

While I’ve a massive backlog of things I’d like to post on, I will just go ahead and continue posting smaller nota benes. Like this one.

I see the title come up periodically, when girls are like ‘For the BS I gotta deal with, the money is BARELY enough’. Or when girls who will not do the work are like ‘Oh you couldn’t pay me enough to do that stuff!’

I’m not going to get into nonworker views of the value of the money, but rather focus on some of the lines sexworkers draw regarding the money.

When I worked, there were lines no money could make me cross, and my reasons often seemed goofy or absurd to customers and sometimes other girls. And in turn I was baffled by the lines other girls drew if they chose differently than me. At least for me, the money was never, ever enough. A thousand dollars for an hour– coulda been 2k. Five hundred a shift– shoulda been seven hundred. There was no dollar amount I could have brought home that would have been ‘good enough’.

One of the reasons the money was never enough is that the calculus of desire is too fluid in sexwork. Four hundred an hour is worth it in one context, for some acts, but not worth it in other contexts, for other acts. Sometimes you make a relatively small amount and it’s ‘ well, at least it was easy money’, while other times you make a lot of money and ‘it was pulling teeth to make my ends’.

The definitions of what is ‘easy money’ vary wildly from sexwork-category to sexwork-category. And from girl to girl. No matter what line of sexwork you’re in, there is always chatter about how other girls in other lines (or your own) are doing ‘too much’ or ‘barely anything, damn her’, for the money. Sometimes you’re the one being chattered about and sometimes you are the one chattering.

Sometimes you resent other girls for being able to do so little and still make money, and sometimes you’re the one resented for ‘not doing shit, I can’t figure out how she makes all that money’.

Another reasons the money’s never enough is because once social boundaries have been crossed, you’re left with what you can draw for yourself and get money for. By definition, all the boundaries will vary, but this is so hard to explain to people who do not or will not understand the work itself. All they see is that social boundaries are crossed, so you must have a price for anything, everything. Somehow your personally drawn boundaries aren’t good enough explanation.

And so the money is good, but never really enough.

Stripping is magic.

This doesn’t mean it is good magic. But that cruelty is ever unexpressed by the demimondaines revelling in the beauty and allure of their hateful magery.

A thing can be beautiful, a freedom can be precious, a choice can be freely made, and it can all be completely incorrect. I might dare say evil. Oh, and I might.

I am off to read some more tonight of strippers claiming the work is clean charm.

a moment in time

Picture this: the intimate closeness of being up against him in the midst of a boiling crowd, pressing back into him, feeling the subtlest of caresses as you brush against him to the beats of the music. And sense the urge.
“What does she have that I don’t?”
“His attention.”

Sweden Is Not Utopia, Even Though White Liberals Think It Is

The white progressive/liberal obsession with Sweden as the land of Ideal Social Policies and Perfect Socialism is one that never fails to discomfit. A bunch of blond white folks sharing everything is the fantasy white liberals have of it, and yet when trumpeting Sweden as the One Right Way, white liberals never mention how much difficulty Sweden has in accepting those who aren’t blond white folks.

They also don’t wanna hear about how Sweden did something imperfectly in its law-passing. They like that Sweden’s ‘let the government raise your children’ policy has caused childbearing rates to plummet because all they can see is a bunch of healthy white women each with one perfect white child. And those white women get to take three or four years off and not lose out on promotions against their white men who also get to take time off (but not quite so much as the women of course).

By removing the personal responsibility almost entirely from parenting, fewer and fewer Swedes actually want to be parental units. It is easy to provide excellent healthcare to an annually shrinking pool of mothers– your costs are dropping anyway, so you can easily afford to take care of those few white mothers. Not so curiously, Sweden isn’t so liberated with care for those (brown) immigrants it does happen to have. But the white liberals neeever mention that little titbit.

They also don’t mention Sweden’s wonderfully passive-aggressive prostitution policies, which are the actual point of this whole spiel.

Several years back, closing in on a decade ago, Sweden basically made prostitution illegal for johns but legal for working girls. Sounds very pro-prostitute, very sexworker-rights-friendly, doesn’t it?

It totally isn’t.

In a nutshell, the Swedish model, oft-cited by feminists of multiple stripes as The One Way To Help Prostitutes, basically leaves them open to every kind of abuse with almost no true legal recourse.

The law forbids ‘third party enabling’ of prostitution. While this was put in place to protect prostitutes from pimps and brothel owners, what it means in practice is that prostitutes cannot get apartments easily. They pay exorbitant rent, effectively creating through ‘rent pimping’ the very situation the ‘third party’ clauses of the Swedish model set out to prevent.

Prostitutes are supposed to pay tax on their income, but other people aren’t allowed to receive the income of said prostitutes. Again, meant to deal with pimps and boyfriends living off the woman’s money, but in practice means prostitutes cannot support relatives or even their own children.  Shockingly, the oh-so-liberated Swedes consider prostitutes to be ‘bad mothers’.  One cannot legislate social attitude changes, although Sweden is very fond of trying.   

Because it’s illegal for johns, a prostitute who attempts to involve the police in a dispute with a john risks loss of her clientele entirely. Which means that johns get to be more abusive, cheaper and any other unpleasant adjective one can think to add. So the risky behaviors the Swedish model was meant to prevent prostitutes from having to engage in become the only way they can make money at all.

Also due to the illegal-for-johns thing, there are lots and lots of trafficked women prostituting illegally. Plus prostitutes in Sweden travel to other countries to work, because even working illegally in other countries is better than working ‘legally’ in Sweden under the Swedish model.

And finally, the Swedish model does not allow prostitutes to even work together to notify each other of dangerous johns or pool resources to work out of a safe incall location.  It is quite unclear how not allowing women to work together to reduce their risk in a dangerous line of work is feminist or progressive or liberated.  

This page contains links to critiques of the Swedish model of regulating prostitution, including the text of the relevant laws.

Now generally I do not see any white liberals posting about those critiques, some by *gasp* actual prostitutes. This is no surprise, since admitting that the Swedish Way doesn’t always work out so well with actual people would screw up their gleaming white fantasyland.

Sweden is an interesting country, with a curious past and history, and the white liberal notion of it as some kind of utopian socialist paradise is really maddening, because Swedes are people too, and they screw up same as the rest of us– sometimes massively, as with these prostitution laws that penalise the women they’re supposed to be helping.

I will get back to finishing the series on Christian marriage and feminism lateron. This was a slight digression inspired by seeing yet another radical feminist gloating about how the Swedish model was some ideal solution for prostitutes.

Christian Marriage is feminism (part two)

While the Song of Solomon gets a lot of play in discussions about Christian sexuality, I am not going to explore its depths in this essay partly because even in secular marriageland the honeymoon is supposed to rock out and to some extent that text goes beyond the scope of this discussion topic.

I will however happily discuss sexuality in a Christian marriage from the New Testament’s perspective. In a handful of verses, the New Testament expertly describes a view of sexuality within a Christian marriage that is extraordinary in its mutuality. Paul makes a point in 1 Corinthians 7:3-4 to state that mutuality is a requirement of a Christian marriage. The wife and the husband are equal sexual partners, with each belonging to the other. This is a complete departure from the false idea that Christian marriage is only about the man’s sexual needs being met at any time. Sexual gatekeeping by either the husband or the wife is forbidden in verse five of the same chapter.

The operating premise here is that women, too, have sexual desires that are equal to a man’s potentially, so wives should be denied no more than husbands should be. The ideal Christian marriage is one in which both spouses are satisfied, not just the husband. The Puritans, among evangelicals of the ages dealt with this in a slightly legalistic fashion by penalising husbands who did not sexually satisfy their wives. They wanted to be sure this equality of sexual satisfaction was met as best as a couple could manage.

Christianity does not really get into the minutiae of what sex acts are appropriate for marriage. Anyone claiming that only missionary-position sex is ‘allowed’ is adding to the Bible, which does not get into such details. The biggest thing here, though, is that nowhere is sex held to be unpleasurable. The Bible expects sex within a Christian marriage to be joyful and pleasurable for both the man and the woman. The wife is to have full access to her husband’s body sexually and vice versa. Again, the Bible itself speaks against the myth that ‘Christian sex’ is only for procreation and the myth that ‘the Bible says sex is bad’.

What the Bible says is that women have sexual desire too, and that they should enjoy sex within their marriage as much as their husbands do. Again, a completely feminist notion.

As in the Old Testament, the New Testament speaks out against women being pressured to gussy up solely to draw male attention. 1 Peter 3:3-4 speaks against the glitterati of the time in encouraging women to appreciate and focus on improving their inner beauty rather than obsessing about how hot they look in a bikini (in Biblical terms). That is another remarkable thing about Christian marriage– women’s greatest assets are their love of God and their personalities. A beautiful Christian wife is never beautiful because she may happen to have physical attractiveness– she is beautiful because she loves God and lives the Word every day. She is beautiful because she works hard and enjoys life to the fullest. She is beautiful because she cares for her children (if she happens to bear any). Once again, the New Testament is also shown to emphasize that all women do have beauty and don’t have to chase it via extravagant showiness. It’s a lighter load to be beautiful to one guy than to vainly attempt to be beautiful to *any* guy. And a husband is expected in a Christian marriage to love his wife as she is and lives, not for looks that fade. He is not allowed to force her to chase youth or make her sleep with him when she is unwell. These things are not part of a Christian marriage. Colossians 3:19 states that a husband ought not to even speak harshly to his wife, much less be physically violent with her. One can’t get more feminist than insisting men not be violent to women and in fact requiring it as part of marriage.

Speaking of the husband’s role, I will now tackle some non-sexual aspects of Christian marriage that are routinely used to explain how Christian marriage is anti-feminist and anti-woman.

Christian Marriage is feminism (part one)

If one defines feminism as the radical notion that women are people, then Christian marriage (and of course Christianity) is that notion put into daily practice. If one defines feminism as being about women being valued for more than their looks, about all kinds of women being beautiful, about women not being subject to unattainable beauty standards and pornified sexuality as a requirement for romantic relationships, then Christian marriage is quite definitely feminism.

It must be noted that I distinguish between Christian culture and Christianity. Christian culture is works-based, and about how looking good in front of others will get you into heaven. There are multiple kinds of Christian culture, ranging from the right-wing stuff to the left-wing stuff. The key thing in either extreme (whether it’s Episcopalian “Christian-Muslim” lady pastors or people claiming birth control pills are abortion) is that it’s never about God, only about what other humans think of you. The right-wing side of Christian culture wants to be more righteous than thou and talk about fetus-rights while denigrating single mothers. The left-wing side wants to have progressives like them, so they downplay the parts of Christianity that make progressives upset, like Jesus being fully God and fully human.

This stuff isn’t Christianity– it is just a range of cultural viewpoints that happen to wrap themselves in the robes of Christianity to claim moral high-ground. When I refer to Christianity, I refer to precepts for life as described in the Bible. Both right-wing and left-wing Christian culture-folk like to downplay that book, and it has ever been a problem of Christianity. It’s Christian culture if it downplays the truth of the Bible or consists mainly of denigrating gays/single mothers or if it is ‘prosperity theology’ or if it is Mormonism (which is exceptionally Christian-culture despite not being even a Christian denomination at all, though many Mormons are raised and disseminate otherwise) or if it says sex is bad/evil, etc, etc.

Christianity may involve some rude words, and some upsetting statements, but it is emphatically not about making other people feel bad after you go on and on about how much you tithe and how awesome you are. It is about serving God and loving God, and how doing His work ultimately glorifies Him and brings you and those around you happiness. A person can believe in Christianity and live it poorly– I am not playing ‘Who’s the better Christian’, as that is itself more Christian-culture stuff– but even their sin will often aspire towards God. Grace is a catalytic gift.

And in a spirit of grace (I do hope), I will now explain how Christian marriage achieves feminist goals elegantly and delightfully.

To begin with, in a Christian marriage, a wife is a partner, whose goals combine with her husband’s towards glorifying God. Yet she is allowed to have her own sphere of life distinct from her husband’s. The ideal wife is outlined in Proverbs 31:10-31 as a business owner. This is crucial, because it is often claimed that Christian marriage means a wife can never be employed earning money for the household, only the husband. Yet earning money for the household by a wife is both encouraged and held up as an ideal in the Bible. The Bible certainly does say ‘be fruitful and multiply’, but it never limits women to *only* that. Additionally, this ideal wife is praised for being strong, wise, hardworking and cheerful, with a note towards the end deliberately downplaying the importance of physical beauty.

The Old Testament further advocates the idea that all women are beautiful in Proverbs 5:18-19, in which the son is exhorted to always be satisfied with the wife of his youth. An encouragement to stay with the same woman for life and always find her attractive is a refreshing alternative to modern raunch culture, which leaves women pressured to always follow the latest beauty trend in order to be more appealing temporary partners. The idea that how a woman ages naturally is what her husband should come to consider beautiful is a powerfully feminist conception of the marriage relationship.

The most insidious lie of sex-positivity is that it is better to wear oneself out trying to be beautiful for everyone rather than accepting the opportunity to be beautiful for only one person (through a Christian marriage). The second thing is far easier for the vast majority of women, even though it is difficult for men. But the Bible doesn’t give men a pass because they ‘naturally like variety’. They have to embrace and love and find beautiful the woman they chose to marry above all others. Again, this is very radically feminist because it really emphasizes the nature and idea of partnership.

As one moves into the New Testament, this notion of equitable unions and true partnership is repeatedly expanded upon and really driven home. One can already see that women are encouraged to be part of the economy as producers and are to be accepted as beautiful just the way they are. Now let’s talk about sex.

a month of beer– day seven redux, Rodenbach

This would be the second beer I had that day, with the same lambwich and excellent frites…

Again something wonderful from Brouwer’s. This was also a sour, but of a much more brown coloring than the Duchesse, which defines blood-red. It was much much lighter and went down quite easily, almost too easily. It was also not so sweet as la Duchesse, and was cidery with some peach. This were a quite mild and sedate tasting sort of beer. It went quite smoothly with the lambwich etc, having much less kick and more effervescent sweetness. Curiously, directly following the lambwich, it tasted quite like the Duchesse, go figure. All in all, for a recommendation so hot off the press it didn’t even make it to the draft list, it was a brave and delectable experiment. I am a confirmed sour girl, for all that might entail. In any case, eight monks of ten happily and cheerfully.

a month of beer– day seven, Duchesse De Bourgogne

So my Constant Companion and I went to Brouwer’s, this amazing bar that serves a huge range of Belgian and Trappist ales, plus tons of other stuff. They swap out their draft list regularly to assure the discerning beer drinker maximum variety and flavor.

So I went there for a lambwich and had my first sour beer evar. It’s called by ‘Flanders sour’ and was the most wonderful dark red, like lightly foamed wine. The first sip is like drinking sweet food, but there’s definitely kick to remind you that it’s beer after all.

Incidentally, sour beer turns up in the Grimm Fairy Tales, but as a lesser sort of thing to wine. Oh, but it was so good for a peasant drink. It tasted quite as I imagined and even was the shade of dark cherry I’d ever imagined in the B/W illustrations of my childhood copy. It starts sweet and finishes sour, which is quite all right. Though another patron was drinking it and mentioned cherries, it put me in mind of blackberries for some reason.

(I wrote notes for all of this on one of the draft lists, with a pen borrowed from the ever-helpful waiter, who was quite bemused by the whole thing. There are even notes I can’t read, whee.)

Around the halfway mark, I had a lamb sausage sandwich which came with mozzarella and some other stuffs, and some wonderful frites that had their own aioli garlic dressing. Ultra-yummy. The food left it sweet only when I drank after the frites, and sweet primarily (the sour was still detectable) when I drank after the lambwich.

I have to say it was about the most ultimately cool beer I’ve yet drunk. Nine dancing monks out of ten, easily.

I may post the original notes at some future date, heheh. As an exception to my usual beer-posts, it must be noted that on the day in question I drank two kinds of beer. The second one will follow lateron today (though not in blogtime, since that is UTC and I am hours off it).