Another difficult part is explaining to non-SW friends.

Because they sympathize with you and care for you and are horrified you’re treated like this / unable to get help simply because you’re a sex worker. But when it’s someone they don’t know, when it’s just an SW in the news.. they still get whorephobic and blamey. Because, y’know, you’re not ‘like that’. They don’t change their image of sex workers when they find out they know one. They just make you a mental exception and keep on carrying their shitty attitudes towards all other SWs.

I can relate to everything in it. Before I was a sex worker, I was in an abusive relationship, and when I left him, the guy went nuts. I had to get a restraining order, go to court, and basically go into hiding–I left the relationship penniless and desperate, which is why I started working as a prodomme in a commercial dungeon.

My next relationship was with a client (I know, I know…) and he got jealous and whorephobic and made me quit the Biz a year after we met. And he never stopped blaming me for how I met him.

I know so many women in the industry who have or had abusive, whorephobic ‘partners.’ A few of them–including mine–have come to the dungeon looking for us, and it’s just as you describe: talks with management to alert them and posting up pictures of the asshole in question in the locker room so people can ID him.

Domestic violence is finally starting to be taken more seriously by society (though not seriously enough), but, as you say, SO MUCH of the concern for abused women goes right out the window if she’s a sex worker. I can’t bear to read any more of the comments on the Mack articles. There is so much hatred and ridicule of her because she worked in porn, and so much tsk-tsk ‘that’s-what-you-get’ that it makes me sick, and also frightens me.

One thing that I have observed about women in the sex industry is that we really “get” men, presumably because of our many personal and intimate experiences with so many of them. I think we tend to understand them a fuck of a lot better than most civilians do. The women at my dungeon were some of the only women I felt comfortable talking about the awful things my abuser did to me, because they ALL believed me and nobody gave me shit or even asked an insensitive question like “Why didn’t you see it before?”