Over the weekend, the internet news show The Young Turks drew my attention to this story: a 37-year-old Houston escort who works under the name of Shelby is offering a discount for clients who donate a toy to Toys for Tots. For any guy who booked an hour and brought an unwrapped toy, Shelby offered a second hour for free.
Cenk Ugyur condescendingly calls her “an escort with a golden heart” before launching into his incredibly twisted analysis of the “consequences” of Shelby’s offer: “There’ll be a lot of guys who take their kids’ toys to go get a second hour free with a prostitute. … It seems like she’s doing a good deed, but think of how those guys get their toys.” His sidekick, Ana Kasparian (who rarely offers anything new to Cenk’s analyses), agrees immediately that it’s “disgusting” and makes her “sick to her stomach.”
The one thing that all the well-adjusted, fiscally responsible, long-term sex workers I know have in common is a sense of humor. Not that I hate my job, but certain things have happened where I’ve had a choice of either collapsing into a fetal position and bawling, or folding over with laughter, with really no middle ground between the two. It’s like Abe Lincoln said, “I laugh because I must not cry.” (Actually, I just wanted to quote Abe Lincoln and have no idea whether he’s talking about the Civil War or what.)
As a fan of standup comedy, I’ve had to sit through too many jokes about my vocation to count. There are just so many strippers’-names-are-so-fake, dead hooker, and porn star bad childhood jokes out there.* Have you heard the one about how we’re all dead inside, which you can tell from our lifeless/soulless eyes? Yeah, me too, about a million times since I first heard it on Family Guy. Sometimes after I hear these jokes, I worry that people can smell the stripper on me, what with the blond mane and the not laughing. And then I wonder why these people at the open mic can’t make fun of their own coworkers at Kinko’s and why I can’t just see some comedy without being reminded of my daddy issues.
Where are all the sex-positive comedians with Women’s Studies degrees who can discuss Female Chauvanist Pigs? Wouldn’t it be nice if they were also Jewish and loved animals? These guys really exist and their names are Eli Olsberg** and Jake Weisman. They host a podcast called The Morning After and I love it. Each episode typically has one porn performer guest and one comedian guest and they all discuss the porn industry and life.
Complex is an ironic name for such a shallow publication. When your major “News” categories include “Rides” and “Girls” alongside “Sneakers” and “Video Games,” it doesn’t bode well for thoughtful commentary. So reading “10 Downsides to Being a Gigolo” didn’t really surprise me: most media discussion of sex work is divided between horror stories and not-so-subtle nudge and wink humor anyway. It is striking how shows like Showtime’s Gigolos can entrench existing assumptions, however. So, while a companion may be subtly different from a gigolo, here is my point by point reply to these supposed downsides:
10. Being Professionally Obligated to Have Sex with Undesirable People
The first problem with this is the assumption that sex is an obligation. While it certainly is safe to say that I have sex with the vast majority of my clients, if I ever felt uncomfortable or unable to perform, I would give them a refund and call the whole thing off. That said, I have had sex with clients who I wasn’t attracted to physically. It is indeed part of the job and, for me at least, it becomes more about finding aspects of personality or focusing on the pleasure that your partner is getting out of the experience. Of course, that’s something men should pay more attention to in bed anyway.
This is kind of neato—The Star Tribune has a blog called “Yesterday’s News” where it digs up old-timey newspaper articles, photos and ads. This week’s feature made the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune on May 9, 1953: Darlene LaBette Varallo, an “esoteric dancer”, was jailed for disorderly conduct. Two follow-up articles detail the handling of the evidence (“two little rhinestone-studded cones, a few lengths of gauze, a fringe and a pair of black net tights”) and the trial, which was complete with a lie detector test and testimony where the defendant explains that she was only guilty of a wardrobe malfunction:
SHE DESCRIBED her dance as a “can-can” plus a mixture of “a shuffle, ball hop, kick, twirls.” She denied Sullivan’s charge that she had bent over and shaken parts of her anatomy at the audience.
“You can’t bend over when you dance or you lose your equilibrium,” said Darlene, who testified she has danced since the age of 3 and was an Arthur Murray instructor for two years.
She said she certainly was wearing state’s exhibit F (the brassiere) when she began to dance but had to discard it because a strap broke. She also denied removing the state’s exhibit E (a tasseled fringe) from its original position around her – ah – middle.
Behold, the prototypical art bro: Ryder Ripps. (photo via Ripps’ Facebook)
Juniper Fleming co-wrote this with Tits and Sass co-editors Caty Simon and Josephine. Josephine and Caty discuss the project and media reaction and Juniper analyzes the project video.
Juniper is an artist and writer living in New York. Attaining her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2014, she was the recipient of a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellowship in 2013. She has shown her work internationally, and has been published in such places as Dear Dave and Make/Shift Magazine.
JOSEPHINE: It was Salvador Dali who famously said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Perhaps New York-based artist Ryder Ripps was considering those words when the Ace Hotel in Manhattan brought him in as a one night artist-in-residence and provided him with a free night’s stay and $50 for supplies. Ripps decided to outsource his work to a couple of sensual massage workers from Craigslist and dubbed the results ART WHORE.
An internet controversy ensued; bloggers and critics accused Ripps of exploitation and ignorance. Ripps posits that he was actually making a point about exploitation. See, he did not feel fairly compensated for his work so, obviously, the “creative” thing would be to make someone else do it! Ripps was paid nothing for his work, in fact, at the end of it, he said he’d actually lost money after paying the workers for their labor. In essence: Ripps felt exploited by Ace Hotel, so he exploited someone else in an effort to emphasize his own exploitation. I think? Whoa. That’s deep. Mind blown.
His narcissism is so meta.
It gets better with Ripps’ oh-so-eloquent defense of the labor provided by the massage workers for ART WHORE: “Because good art is like good sex.” Got it. Sex workers making good art is very similar to sex workers making good sex, and good art is like good sex so, see, this whole project makes perfect sense. You just don’t understand.
