Former Escort Refreshingly Less Calculating Than Former Housewife

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August 9, 2011

Haters can't handle it; she's a cutie pie.

I doubt anyone who reads this site needs my condensed Wikipedia version of who exactly Ashley Dupre is, but here it goes: After her outing as Eliot Spitzer’s—one time! Though every media outlet started calling her his “favorite”—escort, she became a national joke for her music aspirations. Because everyone knows prostitutes can’t sing, or whatever. And no internet post about her was complete without a slew of comments making rude remarks about her asking price with relation to her looks. (Once again, civilians are complete dunces when it comes to the sex industry. Is there some national ranking system of attractive women that should cap rates of escorts? It was New York pre-recession, Dummies. Any twenty-something girl with decent teeth who wasn’t asking $1,000/hour was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.)

All of that didn’t stop certain jackasses from claiming that Ashley’s forced outing made her “a big winner,” as though the only reason she was escorting in the first place was in the hope of getting famous for having sex with a married governor. Even Barbara Walters had the audacity to imply that having her life ruined was worth it since she got an advice column in the NY Post. You figured us out, Media! All prostitutes are secretly dying to be nationally outed in a political scandal, which can only make our miserable lives better than they already are. What gave it away, the fact that we work under our full legal names and offer discounts to public figures?

So now Ashley is back in the public eye, sort of, if being on VH1 counts. She’s one of the semi-recognizable people on “Famous Food,” a show that claims to be about completely unqualified folks competing to join a restaurant group formed by two former reality TV stars. More accurately, it’s a show “about” people yelling at each other and coming up with bad ideas while they sit in an ugly room around a coffee stained conference table. It’s pretty hard to watch, but Ashley Dupre is the only element keeping it from being impossible to watch.

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Your Story Already Sucks: An Open Letter To Tourist Journalists

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Charlotte Shane

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September 18, 2012

Oh, hello there. It’s such a surprise to run into you here, Clueless Journalist Who Successfully Pitched an Article About Prostitutes Which You Have No Idea How to Actually Deliver. I know how much you hate to do even the most basic amount of research about the huge, knotty subject you’ve cavalierly decided to tackle, so it’s refreshing that you’ve deigned to stop by Tits and Sass. I’ve been involved in the sex industry for about 9 years, which means I’ve had plenty of time to collect examples of the emails you send to solicit my time and expertise in order to support your own career, and boy, are they compelling. Time and time again, before even doing fifteen minutes of self-education, you get straight to the interview solicitation. Why try to learn on your own when there will surely be a bevy of call girls dying to tell you everything you need to know for free, right?

Here are the all the important points to include if you want to make it clear right away that you’re completely unqualified to say anything on the subject of prostitution.

1) You don’t want to “demonize” me. Color me impressed. We all know that famous aphorism about how good intentions reliably pave the way to magnificent results, so the ability to not hate me is the only credential you need in order to earn my trust. Plus, it’s federal law that journalists, like cops, have to tell you the truth if they’ve not got your best interests at heart, so I’m sufficiently reassured that you mean exactly what you say.

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Misérable Politics: Why Anne Hathaway Should Go-Away

By

Johanna

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February 21, 2013

In last year’s Les Miserables, a movie with a lot of famous people in it that will probably win some Oscars, Anne Hathaway plays Fantine, a single mother struggling to provide for her child. Fantine turns to prostitution in a moment of ultimate desperation, having already sold her hair and teeth—I know I’m not the only hooker whose first response to that was “Wrong order, girl”, but whatever—and she and the audience feel very sad. Then she’s saved, and we feel happy, but then she dies of tuberculosis, and we are sad again. At least she’s not a hooker now though. Phew!

No one is more concerned about Hathaway’s Fantine, however, than Hathaway herself, as evidenced by her various comments during the lead-up to the film’s release. One of the most circulated quotes has Hathaway outlining her research “into the lives of sex slaves, which are just unspeakably harrowing,” and her attempts to “honor” the experiences of women who are “forced to sell sex”:

I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now, probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world. So every day that I was her, I just thought ‘This isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world.’ I hope that in all our lifetimes, we see it end.”

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I’m Katha Pollitt’s “Highly Educated” Leftist—And A Sex Trafficking Victim

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Tara Burns

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May 22, 2014

tniconsent — If you can read this, you’re too fancy to matter. (image courtesy of The New Inquiry)

Earlier this year, The New Inquiry published this quiz, “Are You Being Sex Trafficked?” which appeared in an earlier form here on Tits and Sass. Katha Pollitt hinged part of her “Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to Be the New Normal?” essay on the imagined qualities of TNI’s writers and audience:

Of course, if you are reading the New Inquiry, chances are you’re not being sex trafficked; if you’re a sex worker, chances are you’re a grad student or a writer or maybe an activist—a highly educated woman who has other options and prefers this one. And that is where things get tricky. Because in what other area of labor would leftists look to the elite craftsman to speak for the rank and file? You might as well ask a pastry chef what it’s like to ladle out mashed potatoes in a school cafeteria. In the discourse of sex work, it seems, the subaltern does not get to speak.

The problem is not that the subaltern was not getting to speak, but that Pollitt was unable to listen because of her own ideas about how trafficking victims should present. We asked Tara, the author of the quiz, to respond.

On April 2nd I was at the Freedom Network’s Human Trafficking Conference in San Francisco speaking to a group of law enforcement and service providers about how to do outreach to people who are trafficked in to the commercial sex trade. I was there as part of a federal program designed to offer the experience and expertise of sex trafficking victims like myself with the goal of improving services to other sex trafficking victims. The other survivor presenting and I both had extensive experience as youth involved in the sex trade, as adult sex workers, and as social service providers. We spoke of our experiences with law enforcement and service providers and made recommendations to those present about how they could best provide outreach to sex trafficking victims.

At the end, the facilitator flipped through our feedback forms and laughingly told us that one person thought that our presentation hadn’t been about sex trafficking at all. Apparently there are rules for being a good victim: 1. Victims should cry 2. They should talk about horrible things done to them by criminals, but not by the police 3. They should not have opinions, and 4. If they do have opinions, they should present themselves as traumatized enough so that those opinions are easily discountable. If victims don’t behave this way, their status as victims can be called into question.

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Going Negative In The Champagne Room: 2014 Gubernatorial Edition

By

Bubbles

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October 8, 2014

“I was never accused of having done anything wrong, but rather I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”—Paul Davis

“What’s the difference between a hooker and a politician? There’s some things a hooker just won’t do.”—an old joke I first heard from a lobbyist

Regardless of your opinion on reproductive justice, single-payer health care, or self-employment taxes, there’s someone running for office who will reflect that position. No viable candidate, however, supports sex worker rights. When it comes to the sex industy, a candidate need only be sex worker-adjacent to be subject to a vicious attack, no matter his party. Sex workers truly have no friends in major party politics in the United States (sure, Libertarians, in theory, but once they decide to run as Republicans they tend to neatly pull back on select issues of personal choice). This election year’s sex work-adjacent scandals are pathetically unimportant and an indication of campaigns that are desperate for distractions. One deals with a 15-year-old raid on a strip club; the other with a state-run jobs website that “accidentally” listed some adult-industry jobs. One’s a Republican attacking a Democrat; the other’s a Democrat attacking a Republican.

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