“If you kill him, he will win.”

This is what I think about when I think about breaking character at work.

A letter I wrote to Seventeen while I was sitting around waiting for calls, which he’ll probably never respond to

I try really hard to keep the stress and drama away from you [as you have specifically requested in the previous email] but it’s very hard for me to tell which things you consider “stress” and “drama.”  In a way, all of my human characteristics (i.e. the things you have to deal with as side effects of the fact that you’d rather fuck a human being than a doll) are stress and drama for you.  I think a lot of what I’ve been worrying about so far in my time of knowing you has been based in my lack of understanding of exactly which parts of that stress and drama you want me to allow to show through and which parts you want me to hide, and how hard you want me to work in hiding those parts considering that hiding it might put extra stress on me and make me more stressful for you in specific ways.  You haven’t realized until now that this is necessary, but it’s a lot of what I’ve been trying to tell you.

I totally understand that you need to keep this stress-free.  It’s not worth doing if it isn’t enjoyable to you (or so I’m assuming; unfortunately I can’t say the same for myself so I’m not certain I understand your reasoning).  I’m sorry that I can’t get another girl to commit days in advance to an appointment with us, but whether she is reliable is not under my control and I’m just trying to make that clear to you.  I actually have no idea whether she’ll be reliable or not but I am just trying to warn you that something about making plans days in advance in this type of transaction (and with this girl) isn’t sitting right with me and I don’t want things to end up falling through and wasting your time.

I also know that I might become very upset if I end up spending the next few days (a) trying to organize something for a coworker who wants me to go behind the boss’s back and/or having to give her extra (which I planned to pay for) to get her to do it the legit way and (b) psyching myself out to do a sexual favor of a nature which I’d be comfortable with if I felt some kind of support from the person I’m doing it for, but which feels wrong when I don’t have that feeling.  I’m putting myself in a lot of bad positions for a lot of people and getting nothing in return.  I meant it the other day when I told you that I genuinely wanted to organize the threesome for you, but that was also when I was believing the things you were saying.  I also don’t want there to be any misunderstandings or disappointments about the nature of my (possible) enjoyment, which I cannot guarantee for you.  I am happy to give you my body and my time and presence for threesome, but it seems like that is not enough for you.   Of course I would keep up the act during your paid hour but I can’t promise whether it will be sexually exciting for me.  I also can’t guarantee that I will feel okay with it afterward; it might be the last thing I do for you.

I know I have to barter when it comes to things like this, for the exact reasons you’ve stated.  At the same time, I don’t know how to make the best sexual experience for you if I don’t talk about certain things.  I’ve learned not to expect respect of all my efforts (which is why I seemed both frustrated and slightly distant when we were talking the other night and in the car in the morning; I am both unprepared for that type of conversation and also will not allow myself to get prepared because I expect you to cut it off at any moment).  So I have to ask that if you respond to any of this, you respond to the first paragraph and tell me, for stress reduction purposes, exactly which parts of my humanness you want to show through so that you know you’re fucking a conscious person and which parts of me you want to be robotic.  (You have to understand that I also have to take my own measures in order to make this happen, so it won’t be perfect.)  This is something that I’ve been working out for a long time; I can’t promise you that it works because no one has ever allowed me to get to this point of asking it (just as you have been telling me I’m wrong this whole time), but obviously you need me to ask it, if you expect me to be stress-free.  So just answer the question.  I’m not sure that this is the right way but if this isn’t right then nothing is and there is no such thing as a “stress free fuck relationship,” at least not with someone who will satisfy your ego to feel like you’re fucking a real, whole person.

“Miss Delaware Teen USA Melissa King was paid $1,500 for a sex video…King resigned her title.  [She] sent several tweets…in which she wrote: “I don’t know what the lesson to this is yet… Was it really worth it.”

No.  She wasn’t paid enough.

You know how we were talking about the way that telling a person to relax is a quick way to make them angry?  That telling an already-calm person to calm down is a very successful strategy for making sure they stop being calm and then you have an excuse to kick them out?

This is not exactly the same thing but it’s the same feeling.  How would you deal with it if people approached you like that, every day, often multiple times a day?  What if instead of using that as a strategy to make a customer leave your bar, the customer used it on you?  What if your ability to deal with that, and keep a smile on your face (the presence of which will cause the customer to keep escalating things), and act interested in him like you totally want to be friends even though he’s being an asshole, what if that directly determined whether you got paid for doing your job or whether you went home broke?

I don’t want to insult you, Sixteen, I don’t want to complain about something that guys might experience too.  I know that everyone in the service industry, and maybe in every industry, has to deal with meeting people’s needs.  But I can’t think of any other industry where payment is optional depending not only on how good you are at keeping a straight face while your customers endlessly fuck with you (this might be the case in other industries), but also how good you are at discerning the ever-moving target of exactly which type of fucking-with it is that they want.  I got into the sex industry so I could give those people exactly what they wanted and so that I could get paid for it, and all I want to do is get paid to be taunted and criticized by men who I’m sure do this to a lot of people in passing just because they can but set out specifically to do it to girls.  But if you don’t let me settle on one type of fucking-with then you can’t be unsatisfied when I don’t figure out what you want and you certainly are not allowed to withhold my money after I sat there and chased around your impossible target for most of an hour.  Do they set it up so that I’ll fail and then they don’t have to pay?

Maybe it’s the chase they want.  My job is to meet customers’ needs but their needs are a paradox.  Whatever they want is whatever I don’t want, and if I give them what they want then they want a different thing.  They want to see me squirm and see how much I hate it, and then they want me to love them, too.  How can I convincingly feign two contradictory things?  Which is to say that people who walk into the club think I should be their free sex object.  These people have money, you know, these are the people everyone thinks are nice guys.  I wouldn’t even care about their status or mine if it didn’t end up meaning I have to beg for their money.  They do not think this is a real job and they think they are doing me a favor, that if I buy a meal they fed me, if I pay my rent it’s like my apartment is theirs, maybe they like to think they can barge in the door at any time.  Do anyone else’s customers hold that over them like this?  I’m seriously asking.  Do they hold it over your head like this.

Today a customer gave me a silly political lecture about how terrorists have a lot of money and if he had that much money he would give it to children and to hospitals.  (“What if the moon was your car, and Jupiter was your hairbrush?”)  But not before he told me and another girl that he thinks women are smarter than men, a comment which when said by a man trips a subtle and dark fear in me.  I don’t think either sex is smarter than the other biologically.  I think we start out the same.  But I do think that experience, especially negative experience, makes people smarter and I think women have a lot more of that.

Notes From The Club

If a girl beats up a guy for trying to go around her garter and touch her crotch, she should be nicer and more understanding.

If a guy beats up a girl for not giving him the sex he wants, she should be nicer and more understanding.

Strip Club

When you cover yourself, the whole world is a strip club.

Halloween: If you’re dressed funny when you act like a creep, it doesn’t count!

For a long time I thought people were just being jerks when they said that sexual violence was just boys being boys, a joke, fun that got out of hand/that you are taking too seriously, etc. and I thought it was a way to dismiss and avoid the truth.

The more I experience, and the more I hear about others’ experiences, the more I realize that men who push unwanted sexual advances onto women do not have the intellectual conflict or guilt about going against their victim’s desires that we assume they do.  Men say that they care that their sex partners enjoy (“enjoy”) the sexual interaction; whenever you hear that, remind yourself that it means the opposite of what they say it means.

Women: train yourselves to do this.  Eventually you will see it everywhere.

It is only when we realize that they do not think our feelings count as valid human responses that we will begin to require compensation for all interactions (including non-sexual interactions, because it may turn sexual at any moment and they will turn it that way if you give them the chance, even when they say they won’t).  I am NOT saying that you should charge money (or other pay) for all sex and I’m not even saying you should charge for any sex at all, but what I am saying is that the option should be available and you should be fully conscious of it; if men knew that they had to pay even to look at us, they might start acting nicely so as to minimize the amount of time (and therefore money) that they have to spend before we no longer need to charge as an insurance.  If we controlled it as much as possible and charged them more the more they take from us, we might be able to minimize things like this (or at least call it out as clear-cut stealing when it happens):

FetLife user Dayna posted about being sexually assaulted on Halloween…she was approached by a “gaggle of revelers”…

Having a good time always has to involve violating someone else’s space, right?  Especially in college–the best time of your life!

[they] asked her what she was dressed up as… [she] said she didn’t have a costume this year. “C’mon, you gotta gimme a kiss for not being dressed up, it’ll make you feel better.”

THIS.  The victim’s true feelings are not acknowledged and are pretended to be whatever the perpetrator wants them to be.  We all know from reading the victim’s account that the perpetrator did not care about whether she felt “better.”  But, the point I’m trying to make here is that I don’t think he was trying to make her feel bad, either.  He wasn’t trying to make her feel any way at all.  Recognizing her feelings is so far away from what he intends to do that he actually thinks assaulting her can have a positive affect on her feelings if she would just open up to him and stop being such a closed-off un-Halloween frigid bitch.

Why did I bring it on myself?…I’m so angry people still try and deny rape culture exists as a pervasive, damaging, unacceptable part of our society.  I’m so angry about what has to happen for people to notice.  I’m so angry about what happens and they still don’t notice.  I’m so angry.

But you don’t have to be!  We could all fix this, if we charged.  I’m not sure that we would make a lot of money–it might last days or it might last years or forever before they decide to get their act together.  What I am sure of is that the money we would make is equivalent to the amount of suffering we go through.

I proposed a similar type of requirement on OkCupid* that you always pay until I trust you and they all thought I was asking for something special.  I am not.  I am asking to have the same type of assurance that I will be respected that men have all the time every day.  Don’t talk to me about equality until you have agreed to this plan.

*In keeping with the themes of “FetLife” (as mentioned in the article) and “misunderstanding my OkCupid profile,” I had one guy, upon deciding that (as a different OkCupid man put it) I was “on a quest for casual sex,” suggest to me that I join the FetLife website.  What I thought was gross was that he didn’t tell me what it was (I mean how should I know what “fet” is?) and probably thought it would be funny if I were expecting a regular dating site and happened upon a fetish one instead, unexpectedly.