I do believe in some form of what you call “behavior profiling,” Amanda, but for me it has nothing to do with race. Like, this morning I got a call from someone at 7 AM speaking in a fuzzy, garbled, slow fashion, saying he was in a room at the motel 6. Conclusion? Cocaine or crack or speed binge, and party on, guy, all power to you, but I don’t want to deal with your volatility and impotence. Sometimes I’ll do something similar in which I’ll quote somewhat higher prices for multi hour calls (rather than rounding down as I multiply up) to someone who gives off certain subtle signals of wealth. That kind of thing.

Really?! That’s news to me… The wealthy part and the Jewish part and the Massachusetts part. Hahahaha! Goddess bless ya, Kelly.

I don’t disagree that most sex workers who have a string of bad experiences with clients of one ethnicity will avoid that group in the future. But there are other ways experienced sex workers assess a situation.

Maybe the correct term to use is “behavioral profiling.” A guy (with any skin color) wearing baggy pants and a baseball cap backwards in the club probably won’t spend money and will be unpleasant. A guy in baggy gym shorts slouching low in his chair with legs spread is looking for one thing. A group of guys yelling at the game on the TV hanging around the bar are pretty much a waste of time until the game’s over.

It’s the same thing with escort work. I learned very quickly to profile someone’s likely behavior based on their emails. I was often wrong about their skin color when I saw them in person, but rarely was I wrong about their presumed behavior (which is important since I was trying to screen out bad behavior, not skin color). This isn’t an absolute standard, because my bad behavior is another escort’s shoulder-shrug.

Anyway, just wanted to toss that out.

I definitely know what you mean. Being deep into the activist scene myself, I find callout culture very wearying, and it’s also easy toget infected by it and thus derailed from important policy work and basic solidarity. And it is cis white girls like me who are the main offenders. Guess the only thing we can do is remember to keep focused. Thank you for the timely reminder, seriously.

I’m not sure what I can add to what Caty has said; I take on a lot of Indian clients, I have never had a problem with them. I feel most uncomfortable by clients who actually don’t share my ethnic background and making invasive assumptions because they think that all Indian whores are the same.

Actually, they sound remarkably similar to you. However, I’m not going to relate your bigotry to your race and lump all other white sex-workers with you.

I agree with you there, Caty, it’s not cool & she seems to be taking pride in being obnoxious just for the sake of it, and if she thinks TaS is such “bullshit” then she sure is spending a lot of her time here!!
But the thing – as this comment thread has obviously pointed out – is that sex workers are not a monolith. Sometimes I think the discourse around sex work activism has become so impossibly politically correct that it’s almost self-defeating. I don’t quiz my co-workers on their politics, and indeed there are some who I would vehemently disagree with. But you better believe I will have their backs against any shit they might incur from clients or the wider community. It’s kind of the same as the workers who love and are inspired by “Secret Diary of A Call Girl” vs those in the hipster-hooker activist scene who pour scorn on them for liking it because it’s supposedly “problematic”. And it’s also why I’ve always been hesitant to join the activist scene, because a lot of the time people in it seem more intent on calling each other out, ie: yelling at each other & belittling each other for being problematic (there’s that word again!) than they do about taking on anti-sex worker legislation or the inherent whorephobia in the media. And the thing is(in the west anyway) it’s always cis white workers I see doing this, not transgender SWs or SWs of colour. I feel sometimes like the whole movement has become derailed somewhat by cis white women looking for cookies, when in reality we are many and varied and if we were going to discount someone every time they said something flawed, we’d end up with like maybe 3 people in the movement!

,,,I mean, is this an example of the accuracy of your racial profiling? Did you think, “oh, Simon and Heineman, obviously those kikes have money”?

…and you’re so comfortable with your identity and your argument you made up a new persona to hide behind.

Obviously a sex worker should see whoever the hell she wants to see and no other sex worker should question it. One of the way strip clubs are oppressive is b.c there’s pressure from management to put up with customers. I prob fucked up saying “refuses to see Indian men.” And I’m certainly not ideologically pure–I’ve been racist plenty of times. However, a white stripper coining the phrase “molesting Indian men” and using it repeatedly and trying to get the rest of us to agree that it’s totally cool the way she talks about South Asians? Then pouring some anti-Semitism and lateral whorephobia on top of the mix?