HEY!

I am going to be (for Educational Reasons I’m actually super stoked about) in IOWA CITY for two months this summer.

Does anyone know anything about stripping, massaging, or domme-ing in the area? From one sex-worker to another, help a sister out!

Hos Before Bros! Madrid’s escorts are on strike; refusing services to bankers!

Madrid’s high-class escorts have found a way to regulate the Spanish banking sector. The ladies want to have their say in the economy by withholding sexual pleasures from bank employees.

The largest trade association for luxury escorts in the Spanish capital has gone on a general and indefinite strike on sexual services for bankers until they go back to providing credits to Spanish families, small- and medium-size enterprises and companies.

It all started with one of the ladies who forced one of her clients to grant a line credit and a loan simply by halting her sexual services until he “fulfills his responsibility to society.”

The trade association’s spokeswoman praised their success by stressing the government and the Bank of Spain have previously failed to adjust the credit flow.

“We are the only ones with a real ability to pressure the sector,” she stated. “We have been on strike for three days now and we don’t think they can withstand much more.”

She has revealed that bankers have made some pitiful attempts to use their services by pretending to be engineers or architects.

“But they don’t fool anyone since it has been many years since these professionals could afford rates that start from 300 euro an hour,” she continued.

The bankers reportedly became so desperate that they even decided to call in the government for mediation.

The Mexican website SDPnoticias.com, which initially published the story, cites the Minister of Economy and Competitiveness as admitting that the lack of legislation regulating the escort sector makes it very difficult for the government to intercede in the conflict.

“In fact, there has not even been a formal communication of the strike — the escorts are making use of their right of admission or denying entry to…well, you know. So no one can negotiate,” he was quoted as saying.

(Source: rt.com)

The Best Time Someone Complimented My Nose

Boss, running in to restock the requisite lotion and papertowels: Is that your real nose?

Me: Yeah

Boss: Really? Huh. I would’ve sworn you paid for it.

Doing sex work has giving me a new respect for plastic surgery, one that my feminism is currently complicating and working through. In some sense, I respect any  guy or gal’s decision to help her make scrilla in the way she sees fit and move in the world in the way she feels comfortable. I respect someone’s right to plastic surgery for aesthetic purposes (and, let’s be real, aesthetic decisions exist in culture not in some classical vacuum of spiritual beauty) the same way I respect a transperson’s decision to have or not have surgery. Without equating the two, and without supporting the overall culture of batshit beauty standards and crazy gender binaries, I can recognize both decisions as being a choice that make economic and lived relations a lot easier and simpler in the sense of moving through the world, making a living, and as a form of self-validation and determination in a world that is pretty imperfect.

THE BEST CUSTOMER EVER

A MIDDLE-AGED BUSINESS MAN FROM HOLLAND JUST WALKED IN, JERKED HIMSELF OFF IN TEN, AND THEN FELL ASLEEP ON MY MASSAGE TABLE FOR THE REST OF THE HOUR.

At the end, he tipped me a 50 for nothing! wtf? I am so glad he is not dead.

1. I’m at 7A trying to have a calm late night dinner with my boo. As always when we are in public, there is a black cloud trying to ruin our couple time. The lady at the next table is holding her table companion, and a large portion of the east side of the restaurant hostage. She is upset. She wants to be married in a year, but there are no good men. There are no good men because all the men she knows like strippers. There are two kinds of women: strippers who give blow jobs and women with brains. Men don’t like smart women with brains because they want blow jobs. I’m not sure what kind of desire economy experience she is drawing from (brainy women don’t give blow jobs?) but it’s clear to me that she hates me and she doesn’t even know it. I consider turning around and telling her I’m a stripper, that I have an honors degree in women studies and that I’d appreciate it if she would tone it down. I know, sitting here as a queer couple in my Audrey Hepburn on a yacht outfit, it would be taken with some amount of appropriate surprise, but I don’t because I’m terrible at confrontation and, anyways, it shouldn’t matter whether I was passing or educated or if I looked every bit the blow-job giving stripper she imagined. Later, as we leave the restaurant she calls after my boyfriend: Hey, sir, can I use your lighter? and then pardons herself. Sorry for thinking you were a guy. We were just neighbors, I’m so sorry. Thanks for the light. As X states, that was the least offensive thing she had said all night.

2. I have this client. A regular. He is always busy doing rich people things. He will walk in after a weekend at his cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, on his way to his Harvard reunion with Yo-Yo Ma ,or after he has just gotten back from breaking up a bad business deal in Tokyo. He lives permanently in Florida but he has an apartment overlooking central park that he invites me to frequently. He will tell me about the various corporate boards he sits on while my forearm is halfway up his ass. He will often forget to tip the fifty dollar extra for the fisting.

3. I’m with a friend at a wine bar in LES. We are both spending money we have made off our bodies. I as a sex worker and her as a model. She wants to talk about how we both exploit our bodies for money, whether or not we are successfully manipulating the male gaze for our own capital gain or whether we are being exploited. She talks about how tricky it is to navigate an unethical industry, how she has to prove to others she’s smart, whether or not we should apply to grad school, whether or not we’re both wasting our talents this year. She talks as if we are in the same industry, but we’re not. If I go to parties with the CEO of American Airlines or a top criminal lawyer they don’t know my real name and if we bump in eachother on the street, we pretend like we’ve never met. When she goes to parties with the Editor of Italian Vogue, it’s because she was Invited. E, I remind her, at least you can put modelling on your resume.

4. I often joke with my friends that my sex work memoir would be titled “Lee and the Titans of Industry.” As I rub literal shoulders with these strange rich men, the irony of the title hits me over and over. These men are not business contacts, they are not in my rolodex, they are something else. A strange subspecies of walking hundred dollar bills with dicks. I used to enjoy conversations with old men, now I am constantly waiting for the flip over. For the moment in conversation when we get to what’s really going. In their minds: how much will you do for how little? In my mind: how much will you pay for how little?

5. I’m watching the Matt Damon narrated film the Inside Job. It’s a simple documentary, the sub prime mortgage crisis spelled out in lay man’s terms. In it, they interview a woman who ran an escort business in the financial district before the bubble burst. She describes investment companies hiring girls out for top tier clients and executives, being given blank invoices for her to fill out. She states that before the crisis any girl who wasn’t charging 1000/hr at least was missing out. It’s a point about the excesses of Wall Street during the financial crisis, but also a jab at their morality. Y’know, how the far the mighty have fallen. It’s true, I work in a luxury industry - anyone who can afford to subcontract out their own masturbation certainly has an excess in pocket change - but it still grates a little. How often do I have to be reminded that I am a fallen woman?

SOMETIMES CLIENTS ACCIDENTALLY SHOOT CUM IN THEIR OWN EYES OR ON THEIR OWN FACES
but sometimes they accidentally shoot cum on the floor or on me, which is less fun.

Six Fun Things Clients Have Said During Session!

1 “If only Dominique Strauss-Kahn had known about this place, maybe he wouldn’t be in this mess.” - an aged worker for the NYC mayor’s office.

2. “Mmm…how old are you? 22? Yeah, I got a nanny like you back at home. She lives with us. She’s Dutch or something, god, it’s hard not to fuck her. Sometimes I take her panties, yknow, just once or twice…” - Businessman visiting from Connecticut

3. “Capitalism is natural! People are just naturally greedy [Later in conversation] You know what I realized? Everywhere white people took over, everywhere they went and colonized, they fucked up. Why’d you guys do that?”

Me: “You realize capitalism is a white import, right?” - Young black hedgefund manager doing lines of coke in his 7.2 million dollar Tribeca apartment. He gave me cashmere socks. He also told me that “pubic hair and small tits are the last great art of the 21st century,” a thought I appreciated.

4. “Would you come over and dominate my wife? Yeah, we could tie her up to the bed and fuck her together.” - Middle-aged married guy.

5. “You’re gonna go to Egypt? Oh, you don’t want to go there. They treat women like dogs there!” - Queens born and bred construction company owner who repeatedly pushed for a blowjob after being told no.

6. “I think women are less sexually free. They need emotion in order to enjoy sex [pause, thinks about situation]…unless they’re getting paid for it.” - Some old dude.

How Race Sets Prices in the Sex Industry (and the rest of the world, too)

What I like about the sex industry, and why it’s such a fascinating industry to study, is that it’s often a microcosm of the way the world works in terms of sexuality, gender, race, economics, and class. The world it shows me is very rarely pretty, but at least it’s simple. I can present it to someone and say: See, that’s racism. That’s how racism works economically: your labor is devalued because of your race. I know immigrant women from East Asian countries performing sensual massage in New York City get paid less money than I, a white girl with a Canadian education and an American accent. We provide the same service, but one of us gets paid less. That’s racist, it’s sexist, and it’s what people mean when they talk about structural racism. Racism is embedded in the economic structure.

I always like to ask clients about their first time. When did you know this was right for you; that this was what you wanted to do on your lunch break from Morgan Stanley? A young man told me his roommate got him into it. His roommate took him to an Asian place because that roommate had an Asian fetish. He says, It’s good for him, y’know, because he’s into that – but me, I like white girls like you. I like girls who can speak English. It is so nice to have a conversation.

Clients are always so relieved when they can have a conversation with me. They are just pleased as punch. I wonder if they ever have conversations with anyone at all. I once brought a man to orgasm while he moaned about the fact I was reading Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. He thought that was just the neatest.

I ask the young man if he paid his masseuse at the Asian salon less, he says yes.

That’s fucked up, don’t you think?

He says yeah, kinda, in a slow drawl as if he’s never really thought about it before. I think he knows, but doesn’t want to dwell.

When clients tell me they’re so pleased to have a conversation with me, they are implicitly saying a lot of things. One thing they are saying is that they are surprised I am smart. They are surprised I can quote Henry Miller or quip at them in Latin. Another thing they are saying is that they don’t receive a lot of intimacy in their lives; that they have intimate and interesting conversations very rarely. The most important thing they are really saying is that they are glad I speak perfect English.

Yes, my clients are often racist.

There are a lot of white immigrant ladies working in the sex industry. They’re usually from former Soviet states such as Russia or the Ukraine, and they often make less than I do. They get paid the same hourly rate, but there are fewer of them working independently and the parlors they work at often take a larger cut. The general rule in the industry is that the split is 60 – 40. Which way this split goes varies. The first place I worked at, the one in the financial district run by the Iranian women where I met all the Eastern European mothers who had come here working on a cruise ship and had ended up staying, the madame there took sixty percent of the cut. The service provider only took home forty percent of what she made that day.

The place I settled in to working at had a better policy. She only took forty percent of our cut. This madame was strict about hiring All-American girls with some sort of an education. There, you worked one girl per shift. There was no bunny ranch line-up and no madame all up in your business. In fact, the madame was most often in her suburban house in New Jersey with her toddler. You answered your own phone, you wrote your own ads, and you decided your own boundaries. My madame was explicit about the types of girls she hired, yknow, smart girls. All American girls. She was explicit that this was not a ‘Russian place’. Her clients had standards. I had told one of the girls at my old place, a thirty year old mother from the Ukraine named Bella who showed me pictures of her fifteen year old daughter back home on her iPhone that I would ask if there were spots for her here. There weren’t. This place, with the sixty-forty cut instead of the forty-sixty cut and the non-crazy madame and the no touching between the legs policy, this place was for girls who passed as American.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Independent sex workers set their own prices. There are workers who deftly advertise their accent or race as exotic or cosmopolitan and who confidently capitalize on their exoticified features.   But the existence of Asian-advertised spas charging almost sixty percent less than the going hourly rate of a sensual massage in New York is a clear cut example of the way race and gender puts a price tag on labor. The lower prices of Asian spas are a result of many things: the devaluation of a woman of color’s sexuality, the persistent construction of Asian women as demure and obedient workers who will accept being paid less, and a large labor pool of recently immigrated Asian women who, upon arrival in the United States, find it difficult to find high paying jobs.

“Experience a totally sensual massage by a attractive, petite and pretty Asian girls. We take the best care of you Because we love what we do and make you relaxed all over! Please call us at 347-XXX-XXXX to book your Appointment and let our incredible touch soothe you, relax you, invigorate you, and pamper you! Open from: 12:00pm-12:00am 7 days ====== We charge: $ 60 1 hour” -

-copy from a backpage ad, posted August 28th 2010 at 1:08am

The going rate of a happy ending massage in New York is $200 per hour. When I think abut the way these massage parlors advertise themselves, as a place that specializes in petite and pretty Asian girls, a lot of things come to mind. I think about the places in New York where you can go get a real massage for only forty-six dollars for the hour where mostly all the attendants are East Asian women. I think about how race-specific salons only exist for East Asian women, not South Asian or Middle Eastern or White Girls and how White Girls aren’t considered a fetish in this industry, whose client demographic is mostly white. I think about the clients who would ask me what I look like on the phone, no I mean like what your race is, and when I said white or caucasian in a flippant tone they would ask ‘like what? like Irish?’ and I would say ‘no, like Greek’ and they would say ‘you aren’t Russian, are you?’ I think about the woman from Korea who gives me my seven dollar manicure and the line up of all the white ladies in their massage chairs in Park Slope having their feet scrubbed by their Korean mani-pedicurists. I think about the Chinatown down the block from me, in South Brooklyn, touted as the ‘new’ Chinatown, and how a friend of mine revealed that a large population of Asian immigrants are concentrated there because it has one of the highest concentrations of sweatshops in Brooklyn. I think of my Wall Street clients and the way they keep labor cheap and stocks high and the money I could make as a manicurist, or a sweatshopist, or a real masseuse, and the money I could make giving handjobs for sixty dollars. I think about all the ways labor is made cheap in this world and all the ways people are devalued, and yes, it’s a simple economic flowchart:

One stock trader, one handjob, and three twenty dollar bills and I just made more in one hour than I would in the twelve hour day I worked at the Sunset Park sweatshop; where the pay is typically around one hundred  to two hundred dollars a week.

This example of devaluation of labor offered by Asian massage parlors is useful because it shows how labor is priced in regards to race and nationality. The race and nationality are even on the menu as part of the commodity being offered.  The usual arguments that say immigrant labor is cheaper because it’s largely unskilled (for instance, that seamstresses working in Sunset Park sweatshops are cheap because they’re unskilled) can’t be made. While I contend that sex work is skilled labor, there is no way to argue that the Asian-immigrant women working in the cheaper massage parlors have less skills than the mostly American and mostly white girls working in places with higher service charges. It’s a prime example of how little actual skill level has to do with the way labor is value, and how the ranking of low and high skill sets is often colored by factors such as race, gender, and nationality.