The Whore Revolution Has Just Begun

Sometimes, surrounded by my little sex-positive feminist bubble, I forget that not everyone is down with the whole hooker thang. In fact, I would venture to guess that most people think that all sex workers are crack-addicted whores (in a bad way) who are out to wreck happy marriages and coast off the welfare system while they collect beau-coup cash from sucking back-alley dick. Sure, sex workers and feminists have done a lot (A LOT) for advancing the notion that empowered women can (and do) choose sex work for a career and that it's ok, but most of the world hasn't caught up. Even a lot of the leftist community has a skewed vision of the sex trade industry; it seems that the large majority of those folks think that it's made up entirely of agency-less children who have been forced into sex slavery by abusers (which, of course, is the truth in many cases, especially in certain countries abroad, but certainly not all).

So I had this moment sometime last week when I realized that, duh!, I'm going to have to disclose my occasional job to future partners. When the only form of sex work I did was modeling naked for a feminist erotica website, I didn't think it was really anybody's business what I did. After all, looking coyly at a camera in my skivvies for a token sum doesn't really affect my sex partners. And even though I'm safe with the johns in the work that I do now, the fact that I do it for money is something that they probably have a right to know. And, taking that fact into consideration, the chance that I'll get rejected multiplies many fold. I of course knew that this was a possibility in theory, having read lots of sex worker literature, but it didn't quite hit me as reality until I was thinking about some of my current crushes and recoiling in horror when I came to terms with the fact that I might be having to reveal this intimate part of my life with every casual fuck and every potential long-term partner I might come across.

But this is sticky territory. I mean, do I really have an obligation to disclose this to someone if we're having a one-night stand? Because, how is what I do that much different than a person who is very sexually active? And, as my journal title indicates, the sex work I do is an occasional thing. I actually haven't had a ton of clients. So, unless someone is likely to be a long-term partner for whom this information actually matters, am I bound by my own ethics to disclose?

All of this makes me feel very very icky, as I am forced to remember what awful awful things people in our culture think about people who trade sex for gain. It makes me shake with fear that I have no legal protection should my job find out about this, or my parents, or even people that I would have thought to be open-minded, but who would really be willing to condemn me in a hot second. Of course, it doesn't mean that I plan to stop doing what I'm doing, because I have and will continue to be for the whore revolution. Maybe I should choose to be positive and see this as my opportunity to dispel those nasty myths and catch people up to speed.