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Dear Tits and Sass: Dating Edition

By
suzyhooker
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Those two biblical lovebirds, Ruth and Boaz. (image via the New York Public Library Digital Collection)
Those two biblical lovebirds, Ruth and Boaz. (image via the New York Public Library Digital Collection)

Dear Tits and Sass,

I’m 28 and I’ve been a stripper for almost seven years. The last couple have definitely been the hardest, but the most profitable. I’ve created a life better than I could have imagined for myself before I started dancing—riding horses at nationally rated jumping shows, buying a house, driving a nice car, zero student debt and actual time to go to college as an adult, traveling to marathons and going on luxury vacations often, eating healthy food, and more. I wake up every day to a life I love, good friends, my pups. I’ve spent the single years doing my own thing.

I’m ready for and really want a partner. I haven’t dated in almost five years, save for a month of dating an impotent obese man. My 65-year-old customers probably have exponentially more sex than I do. Dear God, I want a steady flow of conversation that doesn’t involve being paid, and holy cow I would love a steady supply of dick before my vagina dries out like the Sahara. Online dating was a big fail on one free site and two paid sites—the few dates I had were either okay and didn’t work out, or sucked. I choose not to date customers of the club I work for as a personal boundary. I’m not so much into casual sex, but the few partners I’ve tried have led me to believe that I’m an unsatisfying-penis magnet.

It’s gotten to the point where even thinking about dating really sucks, and makes me unhappy for days when someone brings up the idea. It seems like as soon as I reveal my job, guys either flee or do the “trophying” thing until it quickly gets old for them. Recently, a friend wanted to introduce me to her boyfriend’s attractive pal. When I asked her if she’d told him about my job, she said she and her boyfriend would wait for me to tell him.

I feel like I’m tricking someone into a date with me if I don’t come with a huge red flag, a scarlet “S,” and some infamous Jaws-esque warning music. I don’t want to quit my job, and I’m not apologetic about what I do, but it does seem to be a big deal to men who aren’t meth addicts, have all their teeth, and live indoors. I don’t think it’s fair if they’re set up on an outing with me if they’re being…um, tricked. I’d want to know if someone was setting me up with someone that had a pretty big possible dealbreaker.

My question is: How in the fuck do I start dating again? Do I tell prospective gentlemen about my job, and when? Should my friend tell this man about my job before he decides whether he would like an outing with me? Do I lie entirely for as long as I can, despite my work being at obvious hours, and the stilettos and g-string laundry that litter my house? How long do I lie? Do I really have to wait another six-to-sever years (quittin’ time) before men will take me seriously as a partner?

Sincerely,
Calloused Masturbation Hand

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The Peculiar Political Economics of Pro-Domming

By
Lori Adorable
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lumpenproletariat meme 1“So, I figured out what happened to Jane,” the dungeon manager said.

“Oh?”

“My friend ran into her the other day. She’s a cop now.”

“I guess that makes some kind of sense ,” I said.

“Mmhhmm. She can beat-up people legally now.”

That’s the punchline. Do you get it? Let me take all the humor out of it by explaining: in most U.S. jurisdictions, professional dommes are criminalized under prostitution laws 1, and police can de facto brutalize whoever they want, especially if that person is Black like the dungeon manager is. Her joke isn’t funny-ha-ha; it’s ironic. It’s also funny-strange: why would a fascist like Jane spend years working as a petty criminal?

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that Jane bought the popular line about pro-dommes. It seems we’ve confused dressing up in Slutty Cop Halloween costumes and consensually slapping men’s scrotums with having real power. And when I say “we,” I don’t just mean Jane and other BDSM pros. I mean everyone. I mean, look at this recent example of how the media covers professional domination:

“The new group Dommes for Bernie placed an ad on Manhattan’s Backpage.com classifieds on Friday, calling for Wall Street workers to step up for punishment worthy of the Bernie Sanders presidential platform,” Mary Emily O’Hara writes at The Daily Dot. Both O’Hara and the DfB present ad copy as testament to a reality in which pro-dommes really do discipline our clients. “We think it’s poetic justice to dominate men who benefit from capitalism, and then donate their tributes to a candidate who stands up for those most harmed by it,” O’Hara quotes one of the dommes as saying. I fail to see the poetry or the justice of a man quite happily paying a woman for a highly gendered form of labor, and the woman taking her money and doing with it as she sees fit—in this case, donating to a center-left candidate for the presidency of a neocolonial empire that stands on stolen land.

But then, I also don’t see how a half dozen or so fin-dommes have transformed “fuck you, pay me” dirty talk into a semi-coherent rhetoric of wealth redistribution on certain strains of social justice Twitter. It seems obvious to me that gamely paying $20 in Amazon gift cards for a carefully calibrated performance of sexualized bitchiness is not full communism. Where did everyone else get it twisted?

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Sex Trafficking: A Media Guide

By
Tara Burns
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This isn't sex trafficking. (An image used in a campaign for anti-trafficking organization Voices for Dignity, by Flickr user dualflipflop)
This isn’t sex trafficking. (An image used in a campaign for anti-trafficking organization Voices for Dignity, by Flickr user dualdflipflop)

Sex trafficking is when evil men steal little girls from the mall and keep them chained to beds where they are forced to service 100 men a day. Sex trafficking is when you ask your husband to sit in the next room while you see a new client, just in case. Sex trafficking is when a child molester agrees to pay for sex with a hypothetical, nonexistent eight-year-old and then shows up to meet them with duct tape and handcuffs. Sex trafficking is when a client asks for a duo and you book an appointment for yourself and a friend. Sex trafficking is when you “conspire” with your rapist and kidnapper to torture yourself. Sex trafficking is when you place an escort ad online for yourself.

Words mean things. Sex trafficking is a legal term with many different definitions in different states and countries. The legal term has become confused with the common mainstream usage—which tends to involve people being forced into prostitution—and this has led to a lot of confusion all around. As journalists, our job is to be precise with language and provide accurate information to the public. When reporting on sex trafficking, or sex trafficking cases, consider describing what has been alleged or what the statute the person is being charged with actually says—because it rarely refers to people being forced into prostitution.

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The Tedium of Trans Sex Work

By
Sarah
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asarahtransmisogynycomingAs a trans woman doing full-service sex work, I’ve found that my work provides sharp and unrelenting insight into how men sexualize and fetishize trans women. This phenomenon isn’t unique to trans women in sex work, of course. But these attitudes define my experience of the industry in profoundly different ways to those of non-trans women in the industry.

There is not much about trading sex for money that inherently bothers me, and the usual challenges of the industry, such as the income instability, are things that I can deal with. So I find that this often makes me particularly sour about just how much the added impact of transmisogyny changes my whole experience of the industry. Clients who treat me remotely like they would a cis woman are easy as pie. The sad reality is that, sticking this out in the long term, those clients tend to be few and far between, and with my average clients, the day-to-day weirdness and unpleasantness of those bookings drains on me something fierce. I’m lucky in that I’m surrounded by lovely friends in the industry, but almost all of them are cis, and this side of my experience can be quite difficult for them to understand.

Trans women are sexualized in bizarre and frequently contradictory ways. We are so often seen as disgusting, even monstrous, but simultaneously considered desirable in the most shameful and mysterious of ways. As a civilian trans woman, this was just a depressing reality of life that I could avoid where possible. But as a sex worker, it fundamentally defines my experience on a daily basis.

My clients rarely see me for the sorts of reasons they might seek out an escort who wasn’t a trans woman. They want some kind of once-in-a-lifetime bucket list sexual experience, have no idea what that is, and expect that you’ll be able to provide it—because that’s what they think trans women are there for. I know this is also a common complaint among cis fetish workers: clients who show up with a vague fantasy that they’re too scared to communicate, expecting you to magically work out what it is. I know they, at least, know how maddening those bookings are. However, when the fetish property concerned is your mere existence, I cannot under-emphasize how dehumanizing that can get.

A cis friend of mine made this tongue-in-cheek observation: “I think all I need to do is turn up and actually touch a dick and I’ve done an amazing job”. When I think of the psychological workout nearly every single booking I do takes, I find myself wishing “Oh, if only.”

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Flesh And Bone (2015)

By
Red
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The intro sequence of >i> Flesh and Bone .
The intro sequence of Flesh and Bone.

Flesh and Bone is on Starz, and predictably over the top, and you know it will be from the moment the credits start. A tiny ballerina dances amidst red dust that’s maybe blood, maybe drugs, who even knows, accompanied by a cover of that Animotion song “Obsession.”

Flesh and Bone is a dance story, and as such, it needs a wide-eyed young woman in a new and anxiety-provoking dance environment: sadistic and deeply unhappy gay impresario Paul’s (Ben Daniels) company. The show adds some seriously Black Swan elements of grotesquerie and personal torment, and then its own unique take on compromise.

And that’s what made it interesting to me. Not the dancing, although I like it. And not the relatively few strip club scenes, which is how I got sold on it. I’m interested in the way it works with compromise, or what some would call prostitution. Not just actual whoring—although yes, also that—but the other dictionary definition, the exchange of personal values for some other kind of gain. What do we do for money, the show asks, in between shots of beautiful bodies stretched to improbable limits and monstrous shots of pain and suffering. What’s the price for a chance at success, and what does that cost?

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