Letter From An Extras Girl: If It’s So Easy, Why Haven’t You Done It?

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April 25, 2013

barcode panties

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.—Yoda

Hola Hater,

Thanks for the helpful suggestions in “An Open Letter to the Extras Girl.” You know, for telling me how to do my job. Don’t take it personally if I ignore them. This is business, girl, and if you can’t wrap your head around what we—you and I—actually do for a living, it’s no problem of mine.

I know times are tough. This recession settled in on the whole country and it’s not going away anytime soon. I’ve been at this job long enough to know that the legendary monsoons of cash in the aughts—when girls could flash a titty and a smile and walk out with one large in their pockets—aren’t coming back. If you want to ply your craft and still turn a profit, sucking and fucking is going to be part of the deal, eventually.

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

By

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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Deep In The Shadows: Working Trans Without Disclosure

This Time, It's Personal

By

Harley F.

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May 22, 2018

Being a sex worker who doesn’t disclose their transgender status is a minefield, and it’s one I have to navigate every day. The trials workers like me face range from navigating transphobic workplaces and colleagues to selling sex to people who would likely not be happy if they knew our truth.

I began doing sex work a few months after I had sex reassignment surgery. I entered sex work for fairly typical reasons: poor mental health, poor physical health following my operation, and the resulting need to make money without working long hours. I had to choose between advertising myself as a cisgender person or a transgender person. Considering the lack of a profitable market for trans women sex workers who have had sex reassignment surgery, I decided to not disclose my trans history in my sex work, and instead to advertise myself as a cisgender woman.

There is a trope that trans people only do sex work in order to “save up for the operation”, but this is not true. Trans people, like everyone else, do sex work for myriad reasons, reasons which are too numerous and diverse to be reduced to one easily digestible motivation. But as a result of this common misconception, people regularly refuse to believe that trans people who have gone through surgical reassignment could still need to enter sex work. Yet our position as a minority group that faces a lot of discrimination in employment and housing doesn’t disappear should we choose to go on the operating table. This reality is a hard one to accept, but it’s our truth—people don’t suddenly start to treat you as human when you have surgery. Our struggles as individuals living under a transphobic society remain regardless of our genitals.

I entered sex work ignorant of the ins-and-outs of the industry. I simply walked into a local place that specialized in the field I felt most comfortable working in and signed up for my first shift. I’ve since been doing sex work without disclosure as a trans woman for a couple of years. I’ve met many sex workers, seen many clients, and managed to succeed at making a living.

There are some close friends who I work with whom I do disclose to and others who I’ve decided will never get to know about my past. Every time I tell someone I have to make absolutely sure they will be okay with it before taking that leap. All it would take is sharing my history with one person who reacts badly, and before I know it my whole client pool could find out, and I could end up in poverty, or worse, dead.

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An Open Letter From A Detroit Extras Girl

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M

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April 23, 2013

This is one of three responses to Josephine’s “An Open Letter to the Extras Girl” that we’ll be running this week. First up is M, a dancer who, like Josephine, works in Detroit.

On a sweltering August afternoon in 2012, I walked through the impossibly heavy glass doors of the glitziest strip club in Detroit. I had done copious amounts of research on the strip clubs in the area, spending nearly a month scouring reviews online and taking trips to clubs in the area. This particular club was the shiniest and it was filled with executives, physicians and lawyers. Promises of riches sparkled like the strobe lights overhead. Even though I had never stripped before, I forged ahead, fearless. Go big or go home, that was my motto.

Looking back, I was somewhat naïve. I had no particular urgency to my sales pitch. I was simultaneously working my “normal” job and stripping. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t pay my bills. So I started with the thought that I would only dance, no extras whatsoever. Perhaps I was conceited enough to think that my pretty face, tight body, and educated mind would be enough to make me money. Unfortunately that notion was completely false.

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Tap Dancing For The Man: Leaving Academia For Sex Work

By

Bubbles

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July 3, 2014

Leaving academia isn’t just for sex workers, but there are a good number of former academics among our contributors and readers. Once you’ve done sex work and experienced the particular freedoms it affords, academia’s constraints can seem more chafing and its endgame more pointless. This post in particular prompted us to have some of them talk about their experiences with higher education and why they left. Thank you to our participants, who will introduce themselves:

Charlotte Shane: I’m in the US and I went to school here, mostly. I got one graduate degree (M.A.) and then went for another. The second time was when I became…A DROPOUT. I’ve been sex working in one form or another since the start of my first grad school stint. I also have various straight jobs, but none of them are dependant on any degree. (Not even high school, I don’t think.)

chelsea g. summers: Possessing a checkered academic past, I didn’t graduate college until my mid-30s, a few years after I started stripping. I worked the last year or so of college as a stripper, the year between undergrad and grad school, and the first two years of grad school. When I started my Ph.D. program, I quit stripping because I realized my students had fake IDs. It was fine if they were hot for teacher, but I didn’t need them to see the evidence that teacher was hot. Plus, I did my work at a Jesuit college here in New York City. I left my program with an M.Phil in 18th-century British Literature and a staggering amount of debt.

Lux ATL: You can find me on Facebook and Twitter. I spent 12 years in higher education, earning a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in Literary Studies. In 2013 I finished my Ph.D. and officially became a doctor. I taught Freshman Composition from 2006 until 2014. I also spent my entire adult life working on and off as a stripper and occasional nude model. I started stripping when I was 18 and have continued to strip, with breaks in between, until present. I am currently 32.

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