Sex Workers: A Close Encounter
My dad used to always say, "nothing is free." Actually, your dad probably said that, too. I think it's in a "How to Convey Banal Platitudes to Your Unruly Teen" parenting handbook somewhere. That said, it's only after we are parents that those banal platitudes not only become golden nuggets of truth, but slyly make their way into the "My Parenting is Superior to My Parents' Parenting" handbook we use with our own kids. We aren't so much into the authority thing, so we tell our kids the same stuff we were told, only we cool it up by finishing it off with, "you feel me, dude?" or "you pickin' up what I'm layin down?"
I don't know why my kids make faces at me when I say stuff like that. I mean...I'm hip.
My dad isn't here for me to tell him he was right, about almost everything. Almost.
One thing we are told is free...isn't. Speech is not free. It comes at a cost, always. If you hold an unpopular opinion at a party and you assert it to a group of people, the cost is immediate: censure, resistance, outright hostility. In a real-world situation, you get real-world consequences. With the advent of the Internet, however, those real-world repercussions are not so apparent. It's the equivalent of piping your unpopular opinion over an intercom into the party, then sneaking out the back door before people can find where you're hiding.
My dad also used to say, "you can't please everyone, all the time." Another golden nugget, but difficult to ingest when we, as members of a society, want to do just that. It's inherent in our natures to want to be accepted, liked, and validated.
As a writer, I have learned that no matter how much I want to be loved for my writing, it's bound to rub a certain portion of the population the wrong way. But here's what I find fascinating: when people get offended by something I write, rarely do they take a step back and self-reflect; rarely do they say, "now hold on a second, why is this offensive to me?" No, they lash out at me, completely unable to examine their own pathology, as it were, and take responsibility for their reaction, whatever it may be.
I don't write hateful things, I don't set out to offend. But I manage to offend. All the time. Case in point...
Part of my daily routine is promotions. I have a Tumblr account and I post poetry and microfiction on there, at least 4-6 times per day. It's part of a strategy to increase my reading audience.
Recently I posted a poem about a sex worker. The poem did not paint her in a flattering light. In fact, it called her out on some bad behavior. Of course, the whole poetry book is filled with poems about the sex work industry, and 98% of them are positive--and 100% of them are realistic. This one poem, taken out of context, gave these sex workers the erroneous idea that I was insulting all sex workers, even though it was clearly targeting only one. Only one. But that didn't matter to the sex worker community on Tumblr.
In that relatively small community, my poem spread like an STD. Viral, ugly, and filled with all sorts of puss-y (read "pus," not "puss") nastiness. I received hate mail, vitriolic messages, and became the target of angry sex workers all over Tumblr. Even when I posted the background of the poem, a calm explanation that I thought would surely cool the fire, they were furious--filled with a righteous indignation that was and is almost comical.
Weirdly, my explanation made them even angrier, and they didn't relent. Of course, not one stopped to ask herself, "Okay, why am I so angry?" Heaven forbid we have an introspective moment, ladies. My gut feeling is these women are marginalized and ignored by our society, so they must carry around a lot of unconscious anger. It gurgles and explodes out of them at the slightest provocation. It has also given them some sort of self-proclaimed entitlement that they are all above reproach, no matter how badly they behave. Sorry, not how it works.
I handed over my social media accounts to a screener who winnowed out the hate, blocked the haters, and that has pretty much ended the harassment. For a while there, I felt like a bull's eye. I felt the full glory of free speech--in other words, the sex workers said things TO me and ABOUT me that absolutely qualifies as hate speech and libel/slander at worst, and at best? Trolling and harassment/bullying. They wanted me silent. Anywhere they could post something hateful and detracting, they found. I had to "privacy" the shit out of every account I have. No matter what I wrote, no matter how much empathy I employed, the hate just kept coming.
The point is, however, that these women did it from the safety of that anonymous Internet culture: no names, no addresses, no faces, no real-world consequences for them. They could say what they wanted, however they wanted, and there wasn't much I could do but ignore it and move on. Of course, my moniker isn't a moniker--it's my name, my face. I don't do anonymous because it's cowardly. I own my words.
The price I paid for my thoughts, my honesty, my "free speech" was some kind of warped hooker fatwa ( I usually avoid pejorative terminology for sex workers, but these gals sort of deserve it) without the real, bodily threat, only a cyber threat. Nothing was off limits--with the smallest slices of information about me, they took off and attacked everything from me as a woman, a person, a writer and artist to anything else they could get from what little they knew of me.
Meh, I survived. And one thing remains true at the end of the day: I have a right to write about my experiences, my perceptions, and that right is protected, yes--but not free. I paid the price. Was it worth it? Hell yeah. Because for every angry sex worker writing about me publicly, three approached me privately and told me that they were horrified at the way I was being treated and please, don't think all sex workers are that repulsive. I didn't, and I don't. And I've made some fans for life.
Being a writer means pissing people off. And you never know what will do it. In the age of the internet, though, the results of your writing or what you say are immediate and extreme. It could be something as innocuous as the statement by author Jennifer Egan
made in an interview following winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She said that her advice to young female writers is to 'not cower, and to avoid writing banal, derivative stuff' that already fills the literary world. Well, the backlash on that statement was huge--all of the authors of banal, image courtesy of www.npr.com
derivative stuff got their panties in all kinds of twists. Ah, irony. So lost on the stupid. During the brou-ha-ha I posted a poem about internet trolls, because that's what they were. And THAT poem made them angry, too--they got angry at me for calling their obsession with me troll-like, so they continued to act like trolls. Anyone see the irony here? Anyone? Anyone?
No, speech is not free. But like anything worth fighting for, the rewards are great. It seems I am perhaps one of the first female writers and poets to tackle the world of sex work in the way I have, without the beneit of ever being a sex worker. That was one of their beefs--I had no right to write about what they do. Some of them fancied themselves the next literary big deal and sex work was their way into the literary world. I'd like to posit that one must be a writer first. Just having an unusual story to tell doesn't make you a writer. But who am I to dash dreams?
The truth is this: it's always hard to be the first one out of the gate, because the first guy gets all of the negative blowback. That's why people like being second. Once the fires from the first guy die down, all of the positives crop up. Ah, then the second guy out of the gate can capitalize on the good, and avoid the bad.
I'm okay with being first. I want to be first. It's what people do to pave the way. And if I've paved the way for more honest writing? I can live with a bunch of angry women spewing vitriol at me. Especially if the vitriol really has very little to do with me, which in this case, it doesn't.
So this is a shout-out to "raging-hookerbitch" and "angrysexkitten":
I'm not going anywhere.
That, and it's really not a good idea to become terribly interesting to a writer. We tend to, you know, write.
