So, What’s Your Real Take-Home?

By

-

July 9, 2014

“What’s your real name?” is the question most commonly asked of strippers. The second? “How much money do you make?” There have been quite a few articles written on the subject of stripper income, and the most recent ones all seem to cite one University of Leeds study, a stripper named Menagerii’s Reddit pic of her best haul ever, and several months of income tracking that I posted on my blog which generated a bit of conversation.^* Pretty scant resources. There’s also the occasional boomtown news article that suggests there’s a pot of gold up for grabs by women willing to undress in whatever city is most recently the site of oil drilling or a large sporting event.

Recently, ABC News ran a segment on college students who dance to pay tuition. In that segment, this well-spoken and good looking gal named Maggie claimed to make $180,000 a year dancing on the weekends. Because I once shared my monthly income with the internet, Huffington Post writer Arin Greenwood e-mailed me while she was working on this story to ask if Maggie’s figure seemed reasonable. I told her anything was possible, although that number was high. But more importantly, I wanted to know why everyone was so interested in how much strippers make.

Continue

Labor of Love

By

KImberley Allison

-

June 3, 2014

(Image via Melissa Gira Grant's twitter account) — (Image via Melissa Gira Grant’s twitter account)

You might recognize this sentiment: the sex workers’ rights movement is funded by “the industry.” We are “the pimp lobby,” whether we’ve ever been in any sort of management role ourselves or not, let alone whether we’ve abused or exploited other workers. You might think it’s pretty easy to laugh at that sort of thing, but if you’ve ever spent any time going through the e-mails that sex workers’ rights organizations receive, you’ll hear a lot of this, even from people and organizations who are sympathetic. They’ll make assumptions about “staff”—”we want to meet your staff”—or they want to meet in “your office.” There are people who try to chat you up about nonprofit careers at events, thinking you have jobs to offer them. And so on. It would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating, and if people with nasty motives didn’t use these assumptions against us.

It’s human to overestimate the resources of others and to underestimate one’s own. But let’s have some real talk.

Management doesn’t want to fund the sex workers rights movement. They do not have an interest in our vision for social change beyond issues of their own legality. Don’t believe me? This is management in action, or more specifically, strip club managers in action, allying themselves with anti-trafficking organizations. Management-directed organizations want to cover their own asses and reap benefits from the REAL money spigot, the anti-trafficking movement, of the “End Demand” variety, funded by former ambassador and current filthy rich lady Swanee Hunt. You’d see the same from escort agencies if they were legal, and you already do see the same from the legal Nevada brothel industry. As it is, some of the individuals in sex work management give us mild, conditional support, sort of the same way clients do. You know the story—they have many more demands than they do contributions. I have never seen any of them donate money.

Radfems, the “pimp lobby” is pretty firmly on YOUR side on this one.

Continue

Who Makes Your Money: WePay and Eden Alexander

By

Bubbles

-

May 19, 2014

Eden Alexander’s current fundraiser is live here.

This weekend, a Twitterstorm erupted when payment processor WePay shut down a medical fundraiser for porn performer Eden Alexander. Alexander found herself in an unforgiving position after the complications she experienced from an allergic reaction to a prescription drug were misdiagnosed when a doctor assumed that since she was in the sex industry, her symptoms were those of drug use. The delay of proper care meant her condition worsened, and she couldn’t work. Like other self-employed Americans, Alexander doesn’t have sick days, and friends who were helping care for her set up a fundraising page on GiveForward to raise money for her.

GiveForward is a WePay-powered site where people can set up medical fundraisers. WePay came across tweets from Alexander’s friends offering adult materials in exchange for donations to Alexander’s fundraiser (yes, a payment processor was monitoring a user’s social media). They decided that this qualified as accepting payments for prohibited pornographic materials and shut down the fundraiser. Kitty Stryker, one of Alexander’s friends who set up the initial fundraiser, wrote about it here.

And then they experienced the wrath of Sex Worker Twitter and that of some allies with large follower bases. Coverage of the incident showed up on Gawker and The Rumpus, in blog posts by feminists and sociologists. Thanks to Molly Crabapple’s strong influence across Geek Twitter, Patton Oswalt tweeted about it. By Saturday afternoon, WePay had issued an official statement about the Alexander fundraiser, giving as their reason the offering of adult materials as rewards, and offering to help her restart her campaign. They did not mention if they would shut it down again if, say, a friend of Alexander’s, maybe another adult performer, offered a video or a photograph to someone who donated. This is something out of the control of a person who starts a fundraiser, although the founder of WePay said just the fact that Alexander retweeted those unasked-for incentives implicated her in a hypothetical exchange of funds for porn.

Continue

We’re Trying Something

By

suzyhooker

-

May 6, 2014

As you may know, Tits and Sass is an all-volunteer operation. Our editors and writers do everything on the site as a labor of love for our community. But we’d like to be able to change that by paying the people who do the work you see here, so as a small experiment we’ve signed up at Gittip to see if any of our readers are interested in supporting us with small cash gifts on a regular basis. If you click on the button in the sidebar over there, you can donate to the site by signing up to give us a buck a week or a lapdance a month or whatever you feel like. Anything we receive will go directly towards supporting the site! If you’re interested in contributing in a different way, please contact us at info@titsandsass.com.

Piñatas & Profits

By

suzyhooker

-

December 11, 2013

Cash
Hi Tits and Sass,
I realize this is not a picture of a pet and money…but it is a picture of a paper mache dick I made, making off with cash from a nude modeling gig. Not sure if it fits your bill but wanted to share it 🙂
Thanks for your amazing work in sharing sex worker voices and news!
-Cindy

The category is “FurBALLS and Funds,” so we’ll allow it this once! We would also like to know when you open your Etsy store with penis piñatas and suggest the name Peeñata.

Sex workers, submit pictures of your furballs and funds here.