Comments on: The Week In Links—January 30th https://titsandsass.com/the-week-in-links-january-30th/ By and about sex workers Sun, 01 Feb 2015 03:55:46 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 By: Brandi https://titsandsass.com/the-week-in-links-january-30th/#comment-641834 Sun, 01 Feb 2015 03:55:46 +0000 https://titsandsass.com/?p=18847#comment-641834 I worked at Allure last year. It was dead most of the time and management takes a massive cut at the end of the night, having each dancer go into the office one-by-one, pressuring her to tip more. Multiple managers stood over me, saying things like, “I have to eat too,” in a way to persuade me to tip more and to everyone. They are unable to pay their employees because it is so dead in there.

Above the stage at Allure is a camera for both stills and video. I takes pictures of dancers while on stage. I never signed a consent form, or a contract of any kind, when working there. One day, I looked at the electronic food menu of the club, and saw there was a dancer menu as well, with photos that the camera took of me with my clothes off, on the menu. All of the dancers had a profile picture on this menu, all taken without our knowledge or consent. When I asked that my picture be removed and to not have my picture taken again without my consent while I was topless on stage, one manager told me that I didn’t have a choice in the matter. He was pompous and rude. I left the club and never returned. I got text messages from the manager/DJ later, telling me that I stole from the club that night because I didn’t pay my house fee.

This club is ridiculous and I hope their business fails miserably, because they treated me like shit. I went to a labor lawyer during this time, but they did not want to invest in the case. I told the IWW and we tried to get more dancers involved from Allure. Unfortunately I was fired from every good club in the Chicago area for my insubordination, had to move to another state and could not continue my campaign against Allure. Catholicism is wicked, but Allure’s exploitation and utter disregard for my rights or well-being as a dancer and a human is just as awful and if the owners of this club died in a horrible car accident, the world would be a better place.

]]> By: RJHJR https://titsandsass.com/the-week-in-links-january-30th/#comment-640672 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 16:52:39 +0000 https://titsandsass.com/?p=18847#comment-640672 Thank you mentioning my blog, and for calling it “cool and level-headed.” You can always appeal to my vanity by telling me I’m cool and level-headed. In some cases the claims I’m challenging are “salacious funding bait”, as Red put it, but it’s important to remember that most of the people making these claims are good people trying to do their jobs. We have an adversarial judicial system, and prosecutors can’t get convictions with turning messy reality into simple stories. Somaly Mam is a scandal, but every NGO in the world has to try to shape the message that goes to donors and the news media, or it will be forced out of business. Jenny Gaines from the Trafficked Report may have an atypical horrific history in prostitution, and that may lead her to misrepresent the experience of the vast majority of prostitutes, but her current job providing services to sex workers may actually be of benefit to other workers with similar histories of horrific abuse. I found myself occasionally rewriting and reediting my sentences in an attempt to ensure that I didn’t write something that could be taken as criticism of her personally. Her experience was real, and she doesn’t need some random dude on the internet telling her that her story is salacious funding bait. (I haven’t mentioned her yet in my blog, so Red’s comment doesn’t refer to her.)

I’m opinionated and stubborn, and sometimes I have to hear the same thing many times before it sinks in. I’m grateful to every sex worker that has ever written an article for this web site (I’ve been reading from the beginning), or written a blog, or written an article about their experiences for a media outlet, for insisting over and over again that their understanding of their own experience was valid. I had to read that repeatedly before I realized that even reading sociological field studies wasn’t giving me a satisfactory understanding of sex work. Anything “cool and level-headed” in the blog has it’s origin in discomfort over my own state of knowledge.

I can always be improved by criticism. Please be polite and blunt.

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