Joan, it sounds to me like you have a lot to say. I think you should write it all out, and save it, or publish it online, or send it to a publication, or something. I’ll read it if you post it here, because I have this thread on RSS, but your thoughts deserve a real audience.

LK, thanks for the link — I sent it to my roommate who is going back to India this month. I wish I read Hindi.

Anyway, that’s why I wrote what I did, not because I was insulted. And, actually, I didn’t see your comment saying any of the sex-workers-have-mental-issues stuff, it was someone else.

Point being, you are a good egg for even wanting to consider stuff like this, and I appreciate it, whatever yours or anyone else’s conclusions.

In thinking about how we disagreed with each other, a couple of things nagged at me. One, I am/was interested in having the conversation, and although I am aware that things get pretty contentious in some discussions online, fighting’s not so much my thing even when disagreeing and discussing disagreements is. And I do want/hope to be someone who can talk about stuff, even passionately at times, without the person I’m talking with feeling pounced on. I don’t always succeed at that, but it is also an agenda of mine, to respect and listen to other respectable people who are listening.

Two, I was thinking about why I felt at odds with your original comment. In my head I was like, fantastic, another sex worker or former sex worker who thinks her experience with it is more important and should get more consideration than everyone for whom it sucks, and that not-getting-attention for her view (and the views of women who feel how she feels) is some kind of oppression. And *she’s* the one exasperated!

The thing is, I think it’s possible for Hedgehog (sorry to talk about you in third person here) to have felt what she expressed without being simply narcissistic privilege lady. Bear with me (as if anyone is even reading this, ahem) - I have had people I knew and people I didn’t know tell me how I felt about things when I was doing sex work. I never actually felt like in defense I had to pretend it was a great thing or that I was the happiest ever and it was a form of empowerment - but being talked down to fucking grates on my nerves regardless. I tend to have more patience around it when it’s people who I think are coming from a place I agree with or who care about me. I tend to not get the “but some of us like it so how dare you disrespect us!” screechies around it (not saying you had that, Hedgehog, just that I have seen it a lot). But, uh, my patience is not really relevant to someone else’s patience or lack thereof.

I do really strongly feel like it’s unnecessary to talk about the I-make/made-$300-an-hour-to-do-things-I-sometimes-enjoyed sex work experience WHEN talking about what prostitution is and what it does, never mind talking about real examples where real prostitutes are treated as the subhumans that many people believe they are. I agree with Twisty’s points here, vehemently. And I have a verified bug up my ass about the way this culture hates the street prostitute but fetishizes the high paid “escort” and her sometimes much less critical take on hooking.

But Hedgehog, I do appreciate (for real, not the casual use of that word) that you wrote to $pread and said what you did. I haven’t. And, I am still fucking head over heels for a couple of the women I used to know in that business. I don’t hate any of the rest of them, and it’s my experience that many in that field are, as someone in here implied or said outright, on drugs and fucking crazy. I will not assert that I am a bastion of mental health myself, although I haven’t been imbibing anything at all for a while now. Still, I guess my point is - the women I love(d) in that business were much like the women I love most, say, in the online world of kickass bloggers for example. They don’t take any shit, they don’t mince words, they have compassionate hearts and fierce senses of humor. Some of them, um, have sanity issues or substance abuse issues of one kind or another. So do some people I know and love who are not in the sex industry. (Although I am not aware of my blogger crushes having those issues, I am not making that parallel at all.) Some specific kinds of crazy are definitely a pattern among sex workers that I’ve known. I think that they do what I mostly did, to varying degrees - tell themselves this is the best economic deal for them with what their options are, and the free time is enjoyable, and the sticking-it-to-the-9-to-5-Man feeling is satisfying (not being stuck in an office all day), and everything that is unchangably horrible about sex work is minimized or ignored to the best of their ability in their minds and lives.

And to me, all of that is a luxury. Being able to believe you have a livable life is a luxury in that business, when it is forced in so many people’s faces that their lives are shit, are worth shit, are for sale for almost nothing. I don’t imagine I speak for those women, but I do speak to their not-accidental silencing, because I can’t live with it.

This is my exceptionally long winded way of saying, Hedgehog, that I didn’t want to leave it at me not acknowledging that I feel like I understand why you might have made your first comment, even though I got aggravated by it, and I don’t think you’re the enemy. There is so much going on lately that makes me feel like that’s necessary for me to state clearly rather than assume the other person knows it’s a given.