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Tits and Sass at SXSW PanelPicker


Mad Men to Magic Mike: Sex Work in Popular Culture from Tits and Sass

Hello, readers! If you’re the sort of person who’s interested in these things, Tits and Sass has a panel proposal up at the South by Southwest PanelPicker. We’d greatly appreciate your support. If you enjoy reading us chat about Mad Men and Magic Mike, along with our discussions of why it’s not cool for pop culture figures to joke about how sex workers were abused as children, you’ll want to see this panel happen. Please go vote for us and help spread the word.

You’re Not Funny: The Content Farm

Screenshot from The Content Farm

Last week I saw a SXSW panel called “Secrets of Fake Twitter Accounts.” The speakers included @BPGlobalPR, @JasperSloburushe, @MayorEmanuel, and @FakeAPStylebook. They were all pretty diverse in their reasons for starting fake Twitter accounts, from “What’s going on in the world outrages me” to “Those guys are dicks” to “We were just emailing jokes.” The guys behind @FakeAPStylebook, the “just making jokes” dudes, also have a mock eHow/Demand Media parody site called The Content Farm, where they publish fake how-tos like “How to Pour Milk” and “How to Tell If You Are Bleeding From the Scalp.” It’s a pretty great idea for a humor site. The submission page warns “We are a content farm, so odds are you won’t be paid.”

But today in You’re Not Funny, we bring you the recent “How to Bury a Hooker in the Nevada Desert.” “Note that this guide offers no instruction on how to bury a prostitute, escort or stripper in any region but the Nevada desert. Refer to the article, ‘How to Bury a Prostitute, Escort or Stripper in Areas Outside the Nevada Desert.'” OH HILARITY. I look forward to future “How to Lynch a Black Man” and “How to Kill Your Domestic Worker” articles from this dude. Making sport of the real dangers created by the marginalization of sex workers? Buddy, you’re not funny.

Hookers Stand Up

Last Sunday, BDSM community site FetLife did what a lot of popular sites do every once in a while—it crashed. And the person running FetLife’s Twitter account made a poorly chosen joke: “Whoops… FetLife just went down like a drunk hooker…”, later saying that they “Couldn’t think of anything better to say!” and “I make equal fun of everyone.”

People (most of them polite) called FetLife out on both the comment and what sounded like a justification wrapped in apology packaging. All in all, they were pretty gentle reactions for a tweet that encouraged the stereotype of the incapacitated hooker:

You’ve Got Problems: Sex Worker Childhoods

By RedSofa on Flickr

It’s supposed to be common knowledge that I ended up in my job as an escort because, as a child, I suffered some serious emotional damage. But from the inside looking out, it’s clear to me that non-sex workers have plenty of issues all their own. Last week, one of them kept jumping out at me: civilian women’s cavalier clichés about sex workers’ pasts.

I know plenty of men believe that every sex worker has had a screwed up childhood. For me, though, accusations of familial damage cut a lot deeper when they’re thrown around by women, particularly women with otherwise feminist chops (*coughcough* Tina Fey.) We all suffer from slut/whore/man-hater sexism—meaning we’re all vulnerable to the stigma against a woman expressing sexuality in any “deviant” way—so shouldn’t we all reject that misogyny? It’s obvious that the abused sex worker myth is a symptom of our culture’s need to pathologize sexual women, and it should be obvious why the “some adult must have screwed you up when you were little” jab is a mean-spirited, ignorant, and completely trite accusation—but apparently it isn’t. For women like Mary Elizabeth Williams, let me break down the myriad ways it sucks.

You’ve Got Problems: George Takei

150463_637864889576301_2061639033_nFamous for being helmsman Hikaru Sulu of the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek series, actor and author George Takei is America’s clever gay grandfather. Takei currently plays to an audience of thousands via social media and is known for quotable and insightful Facebook and Twitter posts on everything from politics to gender issues to cute animal macros. On April 2nd, George alienated a decent amount of his followers when he posted this meme.

As a mother, wife, and child, I was annoyed and almost a little hurt.

My 54-year-old mother sat nearby, her eyes deep in her Catherine Crier book. We had stayed up late despite her return flight being early in the morning. I was rubbing my wrists in anxiousness, set back from the laptop when she glanced over. I turned the screen toward her.

“Who posted that?”

“George Takei.”

“The actor?”

“Yeah. He posts a lot of stuff, but nothing like this usually.”

“Weird.”

“Mom, how does that make you feel? That society says you’re a failure? That I’m a failure?”

A very long pause.

“Well, it doesn’t make me feel good.”