I don’t want to alarm anyone, but tomorrow is election day. Are you registered to vote? Good. Do you know your polling location? Excellent. Got a handle on the candidates’ platforms? Fantastic! Sounds like you’re ready to vote.
Voting for president as a sex worker for most feels somewhere between futile and downright alienating. It’s not like a new president is going to make sex work any less criminalized, or anti-trafficking hysteria any less rabid. But you can still head to the polls and vote in your local elections, which are ten times more important and actually will directly affect your day-to-day life. Speaking of local elections: If you’re in California, you need to vote NO on Proposition 60, the measure that would make condom usage mandatory for porn workers.
A common refrain I hear in progressive circles is that “your vote doesn’t matter anyway,” that voting is a sham, that the electoral college has rendered our democracy a joke. I can’t argue against those sentiments, but maybe keep them to yourself on election day? Smugly quipping “lol ur vote doesn’t matter lolzz” is a pretty dismissive slap to a friend of yours who may be more marginalized than you, or to the person who patiently navigated through a system of voter suppression to get their ballot counted.
Sorry about all that! Nobody likes it when their favorite neighborhood sex worker blog condescends to them about what they should do on Tuesday. Moving on!
What I’m going to be doing on Tuesday (besides voting) is stripping and the thing that sucks the most about working on election day is that every customer wants to ask you who you voted for and then tell you why your vote is wrong. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing, also it’s impolite to ask strippers who they voted for,” Socrates once said. Not one strip club customer listened.
So, who are you voting for this election? You can literally take your candidate to the pole with a little planning. Make your customers deduce who you’re supporting! Don’t indulge their inappropriate curiosity.
Voting Libertarian? Offer customers a free pocket constitution with every lap dance. (Kidding, don’t do that, hard work earns pocket constitutions.) The Beatles/George Harrison’s ode to the tax man and Rush’s ode, to, well, free will are good sets for you.
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More of a Green party stripper? (Side note: Pleasers started selling vegan heels.) The environmentally minded have always been fond of John Denver. His “Leaving on a Jet Plane” has the lyric: So kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you’ll wait for me, hold me like you’ll never let me go, ’cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane, where the wifi can’t infect my brain.
If you’re feeling the Capital D this year, you could try this throwback remix and this BRAND NEW (and quite frankly, awful) Le Tigre song. Don a crotchless pantsuit.
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Last but not least, something for the Republican dancer…if she’s out there. I’m 99% certain the only sex worker that’s voting for that nominee is the one that married him. Here’s your song.