Before you get vomited out, you must first pass through the belly of the beast

it’s official.  i hate sex work right now.  and i think i have for quite a while now.

but i am not trying to “get a job” either.  I am working hard on my art, submitting proposals, actively seeking new opportunities on a full time basis, doing the work to become the artist I want to be, as Gandi would say.  I wish that I wasn’t such an idealist, i am so suprised it hasn’t been burnt out of me.  I remember this feeling of nausea, of hatred of each day…of the impatience at the same shit on a different day.

2 bum calls and one Black guy who had such scary energy I was super glad I got out of there when I did and not a second sooner.  He was the kind of man who looked like he wanted to kill me but couldn’t find a reason to.  I shined all my golden light into him but he never received me.  He was evasive and didn’t want to answer my questions and he had the death look in his eyes.  This death look is what you see when you think someone could kill you.  You may have seen this gaze in a lover or a partner’s eyes before.  I’ve seen it before.  Nothing that I could say, me the master of de-escalating myself out of violence over and over again, was going to make this guy WARM UP to me.  And that was what made me nervous.  I did not want to have sex with him.  I upsold the sex so he wouldn’t do it.  The truth was I was sick to my stomach of Asiaphile Black dudes with their Asian fetishes and varying annoying personalities.  I did a hand job/body rub with one and then actually turned down his money because I just would not allow myself to sit through a situation where I would feel molested for money again.  At least not in such a short period.  Is it their racist imperialism?  Or is that I can’t stomach faking it more than once.  I’ve concluded that that was part of it.  I actually kind of HATE regulars.  And the guys that I am actually attracted to, I just end up trying to date or discount and so it doesn’t really last long either way.  But fucking the same dude that I didn’t like the first time gets super hard for me pretty quickly.  I remember doing mushrooms with one of my sugar daddies who insisted saying “I love you” to me all the time and I literally started vomiting.  It was a great way to get out of having to be close to him or have sex with him.  I chose to hang out with my best friends instead of make $1500 a day.  They thought I was crazy.  They were worth more to me though.  I know more than ever since doing so much sex work what in this life is PRICELESS and what is not.  I knew i couldn’t stomach him anymore is why.  Throwing up was the last resource I had.  I used that money well.  But it’s gone now.  I launched my solo theatre show with it and funded a cabaret.

This Black guy wanted me to be his personal travel assistant, around the world rubbing his shoulders, Thailand, Japan.  Bleah.  That would be my equivalent to sex slavery.  I can barely work a regular job with a boss., let alone be a sugar baby for longer than a week.  My true colors shine through and I throw off their patriarchal (they usually can’t help it, they’re in their 50s) shackles and usually walk out with my last donation liberated and relieved.

I drove to this tweaker’s house 30 minutes away and the way he talked to me was so cold.  He did not care that he had wasted my time.  He didn’t have weed, or a beer to offer me, nor gas money for my time.  He wasn’t going to give me shit.  just a bongful of shit.  Bleah.  No thank you.  I just gave that up for the last time, nasty horrible fucking shit.  I won’t even try it for kicks like I used to.  Sometimes I would do it just to see if it would do anything for me.  I would take it in a few hits and marvel about how I felt nothing, compared to a few hits of smoking a bong of weed.  I was boggled by how much power it had over so many people!  I use it as a tool of hopeless self injury when I have done it, not in the ways of how many tweakers use it.   I tried to understand the mind of a tweaker but I could never do it.  I am too strong and healthy.   Never again.  The vultures they call you to partake, they have no intention in paying you.  Just getting you high and fucking you to death.  I’m so sick of all the toxic drug addicts.  I am no longer content to just take their money and exploit their addictions, because this becomes my addiction too.  It’s a form of codependency that I have…and I am trying to kick it…Because the nature of SEX WORK includes dependence on money, it a really hard addiction to kick, especially in my personal economy when love and money are in constant need.

When you are doing sex work with a partner that you despise and you hate every second that they are intimate with you, it feels like you are being molested.  (I have only been date raped so I can only imagine this is what it feels like).  Me, the survivor is always trying to push myself to the limit, to the edge….I have pushed myself for nearly 5 years now and now I would like to be done.  I have danced with the devil and burned in the belly of the beast, fought off its invitations, corruptions, and henchmen.  I have seen my potential and realized some of my dreams with this work.  I have fought hard to create normalcy and justice for myself, for other sex workers who hated me, for those that never knew.  I’m done.  But i’m just done in my head, because as you know this transition can take months or years.  I did almost transition in 2009 when I was on probation, I quit one of my agencies and had a hard time of going indy and faced the famine which led to the nearest I have ever come to suicide in my life.  I have NOT truly considered it since but i often use it as a reference point so it concerns people sometimes. I was on probation, had just lost my teaching rights and just ended a horrible relationship and quit swop-la the first time.

My facebook friend Wendy Babcock recently died.  They said she committed suicide but I don’t believe it.  She was alive and well when I was “talking” to her through her facebook posts. She was actively writing, being interviewed, doing activism and reaching out to me.  Not the kind of person who is hopeless, depressed or suicidal.  Perhaps we don’t really know what suicidal really looks like then.  It scares me.  She was born on May 29.  We have the same birthday.  When she died, a part of me died too.  She was a valiant sex worker activist in Toronto, Canada.  She and I had just connected on how negative I felt about sex work and she was a thread of hope and support for me in this time when I do need it and continue to need it.

I am trying to date men and women on various internet dating sites with very little luck.  I am experimenting with telling them I am a sex worker on the second date.  I don’t blast it in my profile.  I used to just say, fuck you, i am a sex worker, love me or leave me!!! but the kind of men I attracted were just losers and abusers so I thought I’d try a different approach…

last nite someone stood me up and I knew it was NOT about me but it just bummed me out hard because I have been working so hard on creating these loopholes, revising my profile, trying to ease someone into the idea of dating a sex worker, testing the boundaries by talking about porn, hiding the true details, accentuating the minor into major to cover up the sex work…

there are still good days and good clients.   great clients and good times to ease the pain.  thank the universe for that.   Unlike my stripper days, I am older and wiser and I know how to take good care of myself better…but it is still hard.  I am single and dealing with this on my own.  It is sort of unfair to bring a new romantic date into my chaotic mix because I am really negative and emotional…it’s hard not to just unload on someone that I want to just hold me…

I think my reverse escorting days are done too.  I tried to make it work time and time again, but in the end, it never did.  It was just a long, drawn out, unpaid or low paid session.  I was never their girl.  Never qualified and they let me know it.  In Gun Hill Road, the trans woman character (who is not a sex worker) has a lover that just fucks her but won’t take her out to restaurants or movies.  Sadly, I could identify with my last lover that I would find myself gushing wetness under every month.  twice a month at most. I knew it was abusive.  But more self abusive though.  I was complacent in going over there and indulging in what he was offering.  I do not blame myself at all because I WAS better off than alone.

I still stay in their arms if they’re decent and willing and we are exchanging good energy.  I ended my 9 month unhealthy affair with the above mentioned former client turned lover who was really just a PnP addiction.  It was just a little bit of money, lots or orgasms, affection, and a little bit of drugs.  I trained him to go from 0 to hero in 3 sessions.  I used to hate having him go down on me and soon i begged for it.  9 orgasms was the most I’d had in perhaps ten years!  Do you blame me?  In my 30s, the combo of sex love magic stays in my body and warms my spirit for a good 24 hours afterwards.  I don’t remember being that conscious of it in my 20s of even having the kind of relationship I have to body and energy as aI do at 35.

Gay boys and hookers PnP for the same reason.  Toxic people, mutual loneliness, trying to live up to beauty and sex machine standards, remnants of past trauma and the emotional deficit collide.  he didn’t call me for the last time and I wanted to injest him for the last time until he cut through my veins and caused every muscle in my body to hurt and tense up in soreness for over a week.  And then I blocked him from being able to call me (My wireless carrier allows you to do that now! I wished they had this service when the crazy white trash girlfriend was texting me cussng insults once she found out i was fucking her man).

I did a cathartic sort of Amy Winehouse-esque memorial ritual the weekend she was found dead and I learned that I was stronger than letting your addictions kill you.  stronger than drug addiction.  stronger than sex work.  stronger than rape. robbery. arrest.  racism. conspiracy theories.  mental illness.  rape culture.  pimps.  I’ve learned my lessons and it is time to move to a different chapter.

epiphanies

i’m limiting my facebook time to 15 minutes everyday.
a change of pace.
it means i’ll be writing more here.

understanding, analyzing and identifying MY MANIA! (patterns of manic behavior) comes like some sort of GREAT RELIEF to my psyche. Now, I am just self diagnosing myself here but i am on the road to getting a real psychiatric evaluation, but the process for the uninsured low income folks has to be an ardous one.

The feeling I’ve had lately with this self diagnosis is comprable to the feeling I had once I realized that the chronic coughing that I had been doing for 4 months in 2010 was an ASTHMATIC COUGH not a whooping cough, a cold or a side effect of my bong smoking. The feeling I had once I had come to terms with my many instances of sexual assault/abuse before 21 and had committed to working with a counselor towards healing the past and becoming stronger to survive the inevitable imperfect future…the beginning of identifying as a survivor.

I had always known I had anxiety and depression, but had never until Jessie took over SWOP-LA did I start to see that I had these manic leadership tendencies that really stunted the growth of many of the projects that I’ve started. Manic people do amazing and brilliant things though, do not underestimate our abilities! I feel liberated in identifying a pattern, but scared that every great idea is just mania and needs to be controlled with someone silencing me. like i shouldn’t raise my hand anymore. is this what psyche medication will do?

one of the peer counselors at the domestic violence/rape crisis center I started going to after breaking up with the crazy abusive ex suggested that I have ‘borderline personality disorder,’ which wasn’t curable and could be improved with the support of group therapy.

i watched a few youtube videos on a few different personality disorders and I did not see myself as having borderline personality disorder AT ALL. Her misdiagnosis could be so potentially damaging to another client who wasn’t as analytical and fact checking as i was. This counselor just did not really understand my drug use and sex work behavior. She did not understand that the period of self destuction had everything to do with the sexual abuse that occurred from my martial arts instructor.

The borderline personality is characterized by the feeling of “walking on eggshells” around an unstable person who could snap. one day they LOVE this person/husband/girlfriend and the next day they HATE them, they broke up with them, they’re throwing their stuff out the window, etc. They are deathly afraid of being alone. This describes one of my friends really well, and explains why she keeps going back to her abusive husband with co-dependent boyfriends in between. This personality disorder is believed to be created or [un]nurtured by abuse or neglect in childhood. I may have had some of those traits when I was early early in my dating career from 16-21. the time period before sex work. the golden innocent but naive era of my life. when i cared about what men thought and said about me. The period where my happiness often revolved around liking a guy and whether he liked me back. It seemed like he had all the power over me back then and it wasn’t until I started hustling lapdances that I finally got my power back. But that’s a different epiphany….

while i was researching on youtube i started looking at manic depression/bipolar videos. Manic 1/Bipolar 1 clients I have had lots of. I have been elated to princess of the week by two extremely manic sugar daddy clients. I am typing on a MacBook Pro I was gifted, can boast of being flown to Vale, Tampa, new snowboard boots, 5 star dinners…I was Sasha Gray for a week! high class escort for a month and then a piece of forgotten shit the next! O well. I still have all the things and the memories! I never saw myself in this man. I was much healthier than him, i thought…

we are all crazy. just different levels of crazy. finding compatible pathologies and mating. pair bonding in dysfunction and semi function or living life alone. My friend might be a borderline personality but I care about her, am still her friend and want her to get out of her abusive relationships and heal. but i don’t spend too much time on trying to fix her. We don’t hang out that much but i try to support her, and in turn, she does well in trying to support me but each of us has our plates full with our own stuff.

I love the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland. When the Mad Hatter character has MANIA he starts spouting off Scotish soliloquies until Alice and his other friends make him snap out of it by calling his name so that he calms down. I remember having to do this with my late best friend David. He would paint for days and then sleep for days. He would mash his teeth and go off on literal mad tangents just like Johnny Depp portrayed but in such a lovable, non alienating way that you accepted it as part of him and wanted him to know that he was still lovable and talented, though he was mad. David wasn’t as mad as the Hatter, he would break out in spot on Chris Farley impersonations who no doubt was also manic but it was his mania that made him hilariously famous! My best friend David was equally brilliant as Johnny Depp, and most definitely bipolar. I am the one who introduced him to medicating with marijuana. His paintings transformed from dark, grey and green Francis Bacon (screaming zombie like figures stabbing themselves) type of paintings with suicidal themes to happy, funny stoner paintings, brilliant, bright colors, equally skilled but clearly riddled with so much less mental pain. Marijuana is medicine. It helped him, it helps me and so many others but sometimes, some of us need a little more. “DAVID!!” me and his girlfriend would yell…and he would stop doing the Flashdance chair scene in the restaurant because our table was ready…”What? What? Was I ‘going off’ again?” he’d say. “Yes, calm down. Restaurant. table’s ready.” we’d say laughing as we all headed to our table. When you are unmedicated and the world is nothing but dark and hopeless, how could it be bad to feel better, especially if the substance that medicates you does not destroy you at the same time.

I feel like I am going back in my own timeline and noticing all the times my mania was controlling my decision making and driving me to the point of burnout or inevitable failure. Sometimes at the last minute, I will look on the schedule of my martial arts school and find out that the next class is in 25 minutes and rush rush rush to try to make it, run in 10 minutes late, fight for an hour and then and only then do I calm down on the drive home. I inhale cannabis AFTER my workout, take a hot shower or bath and wait for the phone to ring. Sometimes I do all that rushing to class and I am too late and I end up getting angry at myself for always being late! Its like I get an emergency telegram to my brain and it RUNS with it vigorously for a couple of hours and then stops. I think I use the marijuana to calm myself down as well as to help with the depression, although at times being stoned has increased my mania, increased my good idea outbursts at meetings and increased my dominating the room or conversation with jokes or performances. People definitely think that I am funny and have good ideas, but they rarely get on board with them and now I know why! It’s almost like I need to call my own name and calm myself down when I begin to “go off” and start envisioning fire department permits so we can have Burningman style flame throwers and live amplification in West Hollywood for the next December 17th Day of Rememberance.

i have had clients with borderline personalities, in my last relationship i fell in love with an undiagnosed schizophrenic who may have had borderline as well, and have lived with a mother who went completely mad for over a year but somehow came back but not nearly quite back to normal. The videos say that the best way to be X is to be raised by X. This is true for alcoholism, abusive patterns and mental illness it seems. Most of my exes are codependents and this man that I was most recently attracted to is also a codependent but with interesting talents, a job, a car and more direction than most of them have ever been.

Escorting has a lot of head games. A borderline personality type client will say they are coming to an appointment, they are on their way, getting off of the first light, and then oops, they’re cancelling at the last minute. What makes them borderline and not just regular clients who are flaky though has to do with the story that they spin and weave you into BEFORE this manipulation. They pretend to empathize with your situation, they will haggle your rate down knowing it degrades you, and then on top of that they will cancel at the last minute. They feel that if they let you down before you let them down they have somehow survived something. Or maybe they never had the money in the first place and were just playing a game with you. I am in contact with a lot of head cases as both a sex worker and as a sex worker activist. But perhaps it’s because I am also crazy and only crazy people can tolerate crazy, but our pathologies have to match up!

The feast or famine pattern of sex work IS MANIC DEPRESSION defined. How could it not be depressing to be unable to pay your rent on time, pay bills that you normally can pay, to not be able to do destressing activities like workout in martial arts and yoga so you don’t feel so much anxiety? How could it not be elating to suddenly have money to pay doctor bills, buy needed prescriptions, pay musicians to back you up in gigs that you have coming, pay a director to get your solo theatre show off the ground and premiered to the public? I reasoned that if you were not manic before you started sex work, independent sex work and (stripclub stripping also has this pattern) will CREATE symptoms of manic depression in anyone. But maybe this is just the way it is for everyone who runs their own business. When I worked for the agency 4 days a week and took indy calls on the side it was way less manic, but crazier in a different way. (you can never win).

I get soo excited by men (and women, really) who are above and beyond because I’ve dated such low men on the totem pole. When the “ideal man with the ideal job/house/car” that I had a mad crush on called me back to talk I felt incredibly insecure about my class and my work and any future we could have. He would never accept or like a girl like me, I knew it. I can’t keep my mouth shut about my bohemian lifestyle. It emanates out of my person even when I am not speaking. I suddenly realized why I sometimes shoot low, and crawl into bed with a sancho that I nicknamed my LAME (but sweetie). I get to see him whenever he feels like making time for me, which is randomly about twice a month. He makes me feel great in limited doses until something true comes along. He reverse escorted me somehow. I use him for short term Boyfriend experiences. (BFE)s and it is good for what it is because I have zero expectations. I care about him more than he cares about me. Sometimes, I wish I could make him better or somehow up his game and fall in love with me and do those things that people do for people that they love, but he never will. But when he is there for me it’s soothing and nice. It keeps me from being undergoodsexed and lonely. He’s not capable or interested in having a relationship with me or anyone, and it’s really okay because he’s pretty inadequate as a temporary boyfriend as it is (...youd rather change your own windshield wiper blade than see his weak ass whiny reaction to your request). The relationships that he had had not been as demanding as one with me would be. We are very different. We don’t talk about art and music. He likes the Lakers, gambling (throwing money away) at casinos and watching ESPN on a big screen TV (i don’t own a TV) are fun to him. (Bleah..) We talk about wrestling entertainment and laugh and have a great time staying in bed all sunny day (with real boyfriends I would be going on hikes or to the beach) having lots of orgasmic great sex, sleeping cuddled together, showering and making out. We go to dinner and I go home fulfilled and wanting more but am always denied. I bitch at him like I’m his baby mama sometimes but neither of us have a kid together nor are we even in a relationship tho it’s the way we interact. I even tax him when he pisses me off and he pays me a little cash so I will keep seeing him. That’s what gives it that baby mama vibe that I’m sure would be the same whether or not I had a kid or not. He helped pay for my engine repair and from that night he became my favorite client and slowly won over my heart. Money, (when someone gives me the money I need in a desperate situation) is also a trigger for MY codependence. Orgasms are also another way to keep me hooked! I am really amazed and proud that I easily trained this man from being a painfully shitty lover to the first guy to give me 9 orgasms in 12 years, so in that way I literally feel like if I can coach him to success in the bedroom, why not outside the bedroom as well? My favorite line is,”If you aren’t going to put the effort in making this like a real relationship then you gotta pay me to be your whore.” and he does. otherwise Fuck the sex. and the intimacy. RIGHT?? sometimes. something about this unattractive mediocre man is so irresistible to me….sigh.

Money (not having money suddenly) is my trigger. The borderline will say come come come come come come and at the last minute push you away and say, never mind. You can see how this can INFURIATE the wrong person into a fit of rage. Sometimes I have been that wrong person and its because I felt manipulated by them dangling a carrot and having me follow it and denied at the last minute. One of my ex boyfriends did that to me once and I nearly broke up with him because the situation led me to an outburst early on in our dating. A client that was going to be the first client in a dry spell of almost 2 weeks with little or no income decided that he would cancel in my face without giving me gas money and then turn around, run in the house and slam his door in my face as I chased after him. I started to kick his gate on his front door while I rang the doorbell vigorously. I was yelling shamelessly revealing what I did and that I needed the money, i Pleaded with him to open the door…and he did. And we went from that to a multi-hour appointment and me selling him a couple LINES of coke for $50. (like buying a beer at a baseball game, I charge A LOT). I did a couple lines with him like I usually do. I had an appointment in the Valley to escape to. I sped up the 101, flipping through my ipod and switching my air from hot to cold every five seconds. When I got to the gas station at the Universal Citywalk exit, I parked and reclined my chair to relax and think.

Thoughts raced through my blood into and through my brain…

I was too jacked up to see a client now.

I stayed in the car and put my phone on silent. The prospective clients hotel was 5 minutes away, but I chose to pass on the call and try to calm myself out of the anxiousness I was feeling from just 2 lines of coke, which usually doesn’t give me a rise like that.

This was the 2nd call since my mushroom meltdown that I had had to pass on for safety reasons. I was too jacked up to drive and the anxiety that coke sometimes brings on is crazy for someone who already HAS anxiety…! I know some of you don’t get the continued desire to use. Like living queer youth, it does get better. I love the numbing effects and the ride slowly up is light but euprhoric..the down is usually not so bad, especially with the pop of xanax as a calming aid…but lately its not been fun at the top. and that’s when we know it’s time to stop.

I decided to take a drug break. TWO TIMES now I have had to pass on seeing clients because of drugs. Drugs getting in the way of my money? Not acceptable.

I did this in january. They last about a month. A month and a half. In a period of 120 days, 100 of those days I will be offered drugs to do, often for free.

Fits of rage are exhausting. By the time I dated him, I was no longer willing to fight and yell with anyone that I was in a relationship with on a regular basis. I was not afraid to be alone. Being around him was like walking on eggshells. One moment we were in love, the next he was texting me verbal assaults and calling me out of my name with death threats. I thought that HE was a borderline. BP people make good abusers or good abusive partners. Abuse to honeymooon. Rage to honeymoon. Repeat. Not me. I did 2.5 months of that shit and threw it back in the trash. (well it wasn’t that easy, but anyway..)

I think if i can recognize my shortcomings I will be able to work on them better. If I recognize my pathologies I will be able to control their effects on me and others around me. I will understand why I tend to get fired at jobs so quickly and why my relationships attract codependent and helpless men. I am scared of psych meds. scared of losing my sex drive. I am scared of my asthma inhalers and the detrimental effects of steroids. Scared of the price. Scared of how to have a sober pregnancy when I depend on marijuana and asthma steroids everyday. I have no choice now in taking those as they change my daily physical state daily with or without them. My depression is certainly affected by the level of asthma sickness I have in any given day or week. I am dependent on these drugs to breath. 10 minute coughing fits and feeling like you might pass out at a party is depressing. The weed helps but it has not been strong enough lately. I am doing much much better now after having these epiphanies and finally making some money.

Money makes so many things possible and better in my life. I am working everyday to eliminate this cyclical pattern and make it less painful for me. My health is currently much better than it was in Palm Springs. I changed inhalers to a stronger one. A flurry of clients came 4 days in a row to ease the finnancial deficit. Her misdiagnosis was a blessing in disguise.

You look Familiar…

Greetings to all my readers, my lovers, my former lovers, and most of all taking a moment to acknowlege ALL MY FUCKING HATERS. FUCK YOU AGAIN but THANKS FOR READING MY BLOG.  Hope it teaches you a little something or two.

I’m not going to post all or even most of your comments, I’m at best going to paraphrase them for my own purposes but I am definitely not to glorify your abuse.

I know the internet and text message technology allows you to spew hatred very disconnectedly and without feeling much consequence.  All I can say to you from inside of me, if you are hating and thinking abusive thoughts about me understand that I spend many evening preparing for our next meeting in person.  3-4x a week I train to defend, punch, kick, eye gouge, headbutt, take painful blows and dance circles around the average unassuming DICK like yourself.   There is an inner MONSTER that all sex workers have.  She is the spirit of Aileen Wuornos that has been wronged too many fucking times and YOU might just happen to be the final trigger, the final tipping point into that 5150 land of no quick return…Do you REALLY want to trigger my inner Aileen?  REALLY?  You call me a crazy bitch (or some variation of that phrase) to try to break me down, but it’s you that made me this crazy bitch.  (Men who argue with me ALWAYS call me crazy.  Why?  Because rising up against masculinity to them IS crazy.  You as a BITCH thinking that you can DO SHIT, IS CRAZY, according to them).

I was fearless before I even knew I could fight.  Now I am even more ready for you if you ever decide to act up in person.

I just imagine me biting and tasting your blood in my mouth and not stopping because you are screaming…

You think it’s fucking bad to deal with a bitch who has PMS? try a bitch who has PTSD…

Who am I talking to?  A few different MEN actually.  Its scary that there’s so many people who actually wish bad things on me for telling my truth.  For showing my belly and thighs with a short tight skirt, for being a size 11 and not size 7 or 3.  For demanding that I HATE MYSELF.

No, I’m not pregnant.  I’ve never had a child, but I stand ready to have endless baby making sessions with the next person that comes to me bearing true partnership and love.   (You think I’m joking?  I’m not!  Wall to wall unprotected sex with my future baby daddy in some beachfront Condo please please please…) *ps. this does not declare my heterosexuality but I’m sure I want to make a fuck/love child not a turkey baster one 🙂

Am I FAT? I'm sure that's not what she is thinking...

When I was a teacher, I was 7 lbs lighter than I am now and students would always ask if I was pregnant!  Everyday!  Girls would ask it so often, that I had to make it a CLASS RULE that I included in a handout!  4 years older and looking back, I only WISH I had the body I had then!  I just figure that the Renaissance figure that was popular back in the day that allowed women’s thighs, hips and bellies to express themselves in any direction they wanted were all en vogue.  I have a pear shaped figure even when I am the ideal body weight.  This is why students would ask me if I was pregnant back then, even that I was thinner.

It is truly a sad state of things, the amount of FAT OPPRESSION I am enduring by these misogynist abusers.  I am FIFTEEN pounds overweight (according to current Beauty Standards as defined by the mainstream) and I get name called every obese vocabulary word combined with the derogatory for prostitute as if I were THREE HUNDRED pounds overweight.  FAT OPPRESSION is a tool of the SEXIST PIG to keep you silent about who you really are when they are usually the ones out of shape and sloth like.  I actually don’t care that much about being overweight.  Okay, sometimes I do.  It’s pretty hard not too isn’t it  But not enough to get a lap band or go on a crystal meth diet or even a Raw Food Molasses Lemon concoction diet!   But,  it’s really the OTHER PEOPLE that care way more than I do.   I don’t like being out of shape when I am.  I often can see my body change when I go out of town away from my martial arts training for 1-2 weeks.  I’ve seen my arms and legs seem bigger after doing Krav Maga for 10 months.  It is the other people that MAKE me care.  It is the other men that DEMAND that I know that I am NOT HOT, not fuckable, not worth their money.  And if I were fifty pounds heavier, then the rape jokes would come I’m sure.  “You’d be lucky if someone raped you.” (there is a great chapter on this in the Yes means yes anthology)

“Of course you fuck fat guys!  You are fat!”

“Anger Bitter Overweight Discount Hoe”

comments from 2 different assholes, I said I wasn’t going to glorify their abuse* but I’ll just keep it brief.

I have a body like my mother did at my age.  Look to your parents to see how you will age.  She was a hot hostess with a rocking body in Japan in her 20s.  I was a smoking hot 125lb stripper who graced the cover of 2 national San Francisco magazines in my 20s and my dad still says,”You were gorgeous? When?”  (My dad is great with sex worker rights, but horrible with how to talk to the ladies, which is why he has never dated (or gotten laid) after my parents divorced.  My dad also thinks that I am fat.

All I know is that in ten years I am going to hate that I didn’t enjoy my body more when I was 34, just like I hate that I didn’t enjoy my body more at 30 because all my students kept asking if I was pregnant.

I wonder..(really, I really DO wonder) HOW MANY hits of mine you could actually TAKE of mine before you hit the fucking ground?  Then will you say that I am weak?  Have you EVER had your face stomped on by a PREGNANT LADY?

Would you like to volunteer to be my human punching bag in an upcoming performance?  I fantasize about having you stand there and just take my hits while laughing and taunting me.  It would be the ultimate belt test…and a true test of your MANHOOD Don’t you think?  I do, tough guy.  If you want me to set up a cage match and even take BETS on how long you can remain standing as I attempt to lay you out in 5 hits through facebook, EMAIL ME NOW (mariko.passion at gmail).  Let’s take this to a performance art/youtube level motherfucker, I’m ready.  I’m obviously not afraid to put my vulnerabilities out there for the public to consume, ARE YOU?

(Inspired by the one who had the nerve to say

I take “WANNA BE martial arts and yoga” LOL)

A former Wells Fargo Bank robber was one of my clients the other night and he took me to eat a seafood plate at Denny’s  (that’s how GFE I really am, take NOTES).  He let me SHOCK HIM with my stun gun!  I didn’t do it for too long and I didn’t hold the gun at his throat like I would to a perpetrator trying to rush me and follow up the shock with several groin kicks and punches just like we train in class.

“It feels like you just stabbed me in the chest.” He confirmed.  He was a crazy man indeed.  Entertaining clientele as always.  I hate banks and especially have a bone to pick with Wells Overdraft Up the ASS Fargo.  I was glad to hear that he had gotten away with robbing them 3 times without even using a gun.   We talked about our Bonnie and Clyde fantasies.  He could have been dangerous.  Convicted felon.  Former bank robber?!  I wasn’t scared, fascinated.  I like meeting people of all walks of life.  I like my job.

He was massaging my back when he told me he robbed banks.  I had to turn around and face him so I could read his eyes and his energy.  His intentions…my safety.  I read that he was cool.  He was so happy to be with me, I felt safe.  “But that can all change,” I said snapping my fingers and looking in his eyes,”Just like THAT.” I said recalling the two times I had been robbed by male clients.  He told me he didn’t even use a gun when he robbed them, so I figured he wasn’t going to pull a gun out on me.  We were at his mom’s house and she was pattering around in the kitchen getting ready for work, so I just felt like he wasn’t going to flip on me at his mama’s house.  The two men that robbed me did not use guns.  One said he had a gun and I just believed him.  The next person who tries to rob me is going to be attacked by me NO DOUBT.  I pepper sprayed my 2nd perpetrator 3x while he stared without blinking at me walking backwards out of my house.  His reaction was psychotic or drug induced indeed and I didn’t think to kick his ass in my own house, I just wanted him out.  I am pretty sure today if that happened things would end much more violently.  I WILL NOT ALLOW MYSELF TO BE VICTIMIZED AGAIN IF I CAN HELP IT.  The 2nd time I reacted better.  The 3rd time is the charm!  (Well, not for them).  I don’t even care if it isn’t in the context of sex work.  It may very well NOT be.  I feel the same way.  FUCK YOU FOR THINKING I AM EASY PREY.  I WILL DIE TRYING TO SURVIVE THE NEXT ATTACK I SWEAR.

DO NOT TRY TO USE THE CONTENTS OF THIS BLOG AGAINST ME.  If I have posted it here, I am already aware of it and you aren’t telling anyone anything they couldn’t read for themselves.  (I know I suck dick for money, I know I have herpes, thanks anyway). I’ve processed it through writing and posting and so throwing it back at me is pretty fucking stupid of you.  I’m not even going to give you an E for effort.  I’m not TRYING to sell a sexual fantasy.  I don’t put my best photos up here on purpose.  I know about the imperfections.  I’m putting them up there so readers can understand the reality of a sex worker.  This is not an escort blog for the boys.  I have one of those on my work website and it pains me to try to write in such a way that holds back so much of who I truly am.  This is a skill that comes naturally to most people.

Lots more people are reading this than I originally thought.  I had an escort call through my agency and met a man waiting for me outside his apartment building.  He was extremely cordial.  He recognized me immediately.  “You have a blog, don’t you?” he asked.  I felt a tad reluctant to admit at first because I wasn’t sure if this was going to HELP or HURT my business as an agency girl.  LOL.

LOTS of issues here.  In escorting, I try to stay as neutral as possible so I can appeal to everyone potentially.  “Can I get my donation and then I’ll talk about my blog.” I wink.  It turns out he’s a huge fan.  He thinks I am awesome and super hot and he respects me for my writing and all this great stuff!  I am laughing while we are rolling around on his bed because I have arrived there under the guise of another fake picture which rings the agency that I work for on most nights.  Here is some random internet developer who I do an outcall in Los Angeles to, who is already familiar with me and my blog (which is based on my real life events) before we EVEN have sex!  “You went to New York right? You had a threesome for your birthday?” he said!  I was laughing my ass off (LMFAO)! Tooo many things like that have happened during my agency work in LA lately.  It’s become a small small city to me lately based on this and other coincidences.

This blog is NOT really made for most clients (he was the exception).  This blog is anti-patriarchy, anti-sexist, anti-racist, radical feminist shit and the average escort client in LA is simply not that demographic, go figure.  Some dickheads have a PROBLEM with me for telling my truth but this blog isn’t made for THEM.  Hobbyists haaate me.  Submissives want me to dominate them and spit in their mouths but get angry when I say I need a donation for that kind of treatment!

This blog is made for ME first and foremost, so I can get my issues and pain off my chest through writing it out because I have to FAKE IT TO TAKE THE MONEY TOO MUCH SOMETIMES(I played a board game for tips with a diehard Glen Beck fan for hours!) so I gotta put the words on this blog so I don’t go crazy from keeping all my good stories to myself.

I arrived at another escort agency client’s house.  I climb the stairs to his bedroom, the guy says, “You look familiar.” Here we go, I think as I smile.  “Do you go to the Standard Hotel? In Hollywood?” he asked.  There was only a very limited times that I actually get to go out and enjoy club nites for just me so it’s easy to remember.  “Ah, yes, I said. I know you.  How are you?”  I had taken his drunk ass home when he sat in my booth as I was eating at the diner at 3am.  “Yeah, you never called me back.” I said.” Too bad for you, $300 please.”  PAYBACK TAX.  Of COURSE you have to pay me!  But if you had not been an asshole you might have gotten a few free lays out of it and maybe some good company, but oh well.  I decided not to hit him up for the $200 tip at the time of this call since we had been together before.  A pity fuck indeed.  I did not have to be so nice.  The sex was mediocre as I remembered it the first time.  We exchanged numbers, but I haven’t called him again for a freebie.  No thanks.  LA: smaller and smaller every day.

I wonder if people recognize me when I walk through the city…I have very distinct hair colors and tattoos and style of dress…They may have been an agency client and are embarrased cuz they paid $500 to have sex with me for 20 minutes but most of them have actually great memories of our time together once they get over the money part.  I don’t rob them of their money.  They give it to me with a desperate smile on their face very willingly.  They paypal me from their computers, I drive them to the ATM (sometimes), they write me checks with the drivers license and work phone # on it…they are consenting tippers accepting of the agency fee that they got hustled into paying.  “It’s a tax on both of us really,” I say,”But if you call me again, you won’t have to pay it!” I smile.  I wouldn’t get repeat clients from my agency work if they were all dissatisfied and disgruntled.

This blog is for others like me, sex workers and similar souls who I may be speaking about, educating, coming out and marching for.  I speak my words and music for you.  This blog is not intended to get me escort clients, I don’t escort or dominate under this name at all.  I work for 2 agencies and I work for myself so it would be really really difficult for you to try to hurt my business in such a way that would be crippling as I have multiple names and identities I use at any given time.  What does it matter anyway?  Half the time I try to not even exchange names.  Unless I decide to pull them into my reality.  Then they get the personal phone number and my “real name.”  (Priceless).  Suprisingly with usually a 2 sentence recap, I can remember everyone who I’ve been with, even if I don’t know their names anymore.

Mariko means CHILD OF PURE TRUTH.  It’s really my Japanese name.  I speak the truth using this name as a blogger, a writer, a poet a singer and an artist.  I created a name where I COULD candidly talk about being a sex worker without fear of losing credentials in the “real world” or have anything I say as an activist affect my profits as a sex worker.

You cannot be so candid in ANY business and expect to gain business.  It’s just a numbers game.  Staying neutral is obviously to your advantage.  Trying to agree with everyone.  Having something to talk about with former meth factory manufacturers, gangsters, bank robbers and other criminals as well as hold your own with the Glen Beck/Tea Partiers, hedgefund bankers, and litigators of the world.

I realize also in putting my video on the change.org petitition with its 1,869 views that there are a lot of WOMEN with a lot of strong viewpoints about me.  I have created myself as a target of judgment and criticism for the anti-prostitution movement through the petition I created to make advertisers verify that the escorts are over 18 and not being forced or held against their will.  Many SEX WORKERS who are well known in the twittersphere and in the sex worker literati circles were VERY OPPOSED to my petition.  The amount of opposition surprised me.  For some reason, I didn’t expect it!  It was exciting to see which sex worker rights advocates were actually unafraid to endorse and which ones (Scarlot Harlot, my whore mother and mentor) were afraid to outwardly sign it.  “If some sex workers strongly oppose,”that could be a good reason to look it over very closely,”Scarlot said but I realized something that I knew already.  With policy, it is really rare that you would be able to PLEASE everyone so in order to be effective it is a strategy of picking battles.  We saw this happen with Proposition K in San Francisco.  Not nearly did all the sex workers agree with the wording but we all came out to help pass it anyway.  It was drafted by a woman that many sex workers don’t really always agree with online and in person.   There were some labor disagreements between the people that actually acquired the signatures to get the measure on the ballot and actually 2 separate sex worker parties endorsing the measure.  We managed to look like a somewhat unified whole and achieved 41.3% of San Francisco’s yes vote that year even though there is usually sever infighting in SF sex worker politics and very little real policy ever gets passed as a result.

I did the petition to start a better dialogue at change.org about sex work and sex workers rights.  I made myself the sacrificial lamb so they would stop being so ridiculous on that site.  I did hope that it would be a good enough idea to be implemented by at least the local LA Weekly paper of which I am a weekly adult classifieds client.  Craigslist adult section shut down in the U.S.  Backpage in the U.S and Craigslist in Canada were soon to be shut down as I write this.  I felt a true urgency to do something to SAVE my source of revenue.  I felt threatened and unwilling to let the LA Weekly cave in to anti-prostitution campaigners without an outspoken sex worker like myself advocating for herself!  That was the goal of the petition, but people still find reasons to HATE.  And that has taken a toll on me for sure.  SOME Sex workers on bound not gagged love to jump down my throat like a big dick every time I write something, and that is pretty disturbing and disheartening to me as I feel that I would and almost have died fighting in the whore revolution for the rights and lives of bitches who could give a flying fuck about my advocacy or efforts.

Get a real job! I don’t feel sorry for people like Mariko Passion.  They take the easy money route (of sex work????!!) by using their body to make a “quick buck” and don’t want to work like the rest of us!  And even some religious anti-porn crusaders hitting my youtube with very strange comments about repenting and finding salvation through new jobs…? Retail?  Restaurant work?  I felt like I was listening to a witch hunter from the Crucible movie.  anyone who thinks sex work is easy money, has obviously NEVER done it.  It was pretty insane.  Keeping up with micromanaging their comments and non sequidors has been overwhelming and I’ve just given up in the last two weeks and just left their last words up there without a rebuttal.  I didn’t start this campaign so I could argue and micro manage people’s skewed moralities.  The petition quite likely will have no impact on the sources that I aimed it at, but it did get my face and the sex worker rights agenda front and center into their website which is what it so DESPERATELY needed if it were really a site about creating CHANGE.

What pains me to DEATH almost about the “real job” comments is that I have worked 60 hours or more a week as a high school teacher and as the founder and director of SWOP-LA which I ran and ran and ran for 3 years with very very little pay.  What constititutes the real of the real job?  Running SWOP as a harm reduction/HIV program was very very real to me.  It was so real looking that people that I sat on panels and committees with probably had NO CLUE that I afforded MYSELF a place at their tables BECAUSE I drove around LA all night long “sucking dick for money.”  I’ve had lots of jobs.  None of them EVER paid me what I was worth until sex work.  Now, if I was in Canada, I would have gotten $20-30/hr for running an organization like SWOP-LA but we are in the U.S.  Harm Reduction work usually pays $10-14/hr to start, part time with no benefits, and just like teaching, if you are directing or leading a non profit yourself, you will likely volunteer 20-40 hours of unpaid time to the cause.

With feminists like them, who needs patriarchy?

One sex worker activist local to LA but whom I have never met said that my petition didn’t speak to the “average sex worker.”  This confused me.  Did she believe that I was above average or below average?  I can’t really think of a sex worker who is more average than me.  I call myself “upper” working class!  My clients are UPS drivers and warehousers, gaffers and tweakers from all over LA who happen to be awake between 10pm and 6am.  I don’t have any race based restrictions (i.e no black guys) no weight restrictions, I take crack heads, coke heads, drunks (within reason)!  Massages start at $175.  I’ll smoke weed with you and let you buy me a fish dinner at Denny’s (if you let me practice stun gunning you in the parking lot!).  I was a craigslist, am an LA Weekly and backpage escort and virtually stay away from review boards unless I have to use them.  I am not sure what is not average about me?

This MAY be because I am an artist and I make people suck on my tampons on stage?  That’s certainly not the average sex worker’s routine, true.  Confusion.  The vocal opposition is about not wanting to trust the media outlets with our age verification information.  This is the kind of verification that outlets like That Mall and Eros.com have in place.  These women advertise at these outlets but are screaming online their opposition, urging other sex workers to NOT sign my petition blindly.   My petition was even mocked on her twitter.  “Guess who is NOT going into any advertising office and giving them my ID?” she tweeted.  She also has NEVER made her presence known in any sex worker activist events that I had ever been to, including December 17^th in LA where she lives and works or anywhere else for that matter so I’m not really sure if her opinion of my work is all that valid anyway.  So much for sex worker solidarity.  It pretty much goes along with the rest of the Angeleno attitude of “It has nothing to do with me directly so why should I give a fuck” attitude.  I knew that sex workers were an impossible group to gather in this city unless they were gathering around eating carrots and ranch and talking about nothing during a review board mixer aimed to get them more hobbyist clients.

Another leader for SWOP-LA the chapter of SWOP that I founded and ran for 3 years has finally emerged after leaving the organization dormant for almost a year!  I am grateful to pass the torch as always.  We tried to do this with SWOP-LA’s second leader Ofelia Corazon, but she was unable to take on all that running a SWOP chapter in the big apathetic city of LA requires.  I feel no disappointment.  I was dying to step down.  And when she said that she wasn’t going to run it, I certainly knew I was not going to take it back from her.  It was out of my hands and would lay dormant for up to a year, I indeed focused all my energy, as promised on sex worker rights channeled through my art and music and have never felt sad about not being on a 3 hour conference call since.

“You look familiar…” they say.  Maybe you’ve had sex with me, I immediately think, but I really honestly don’t have sex with that many people.  I tell the HIV counselor 10 a month just to make the “counseling” session that happens before the test easier for both of us to process through.  That 10 includes all client sexual interactions in total which are not all intercourse, so in reality it’s not that many partners.  7-10  sex partners a month for a prostitute aint much ( I don’t think).  Gay men have that many partners during a dry spell.  Internet connection must have been down at their house or something to warrant only 10 guys a month!  If I worked at a brothel it would be 5 a week or more but most of my job is driving driving driving and hustling, negotiating, making nice, defense defense defense.

I’ve actually spoken in front of and educated farrrr more people in LA and beyond than I’ve EVER had sex with in my lifetime.  Just in 3 years I may have interacted with 500 students who are all over 18 now and roaming the world and Facebook trying to say hi to me when I least expect it.  (I’m friends with a ton of them and yes, they know).

My face and body are the subject matter of my entire breadth of artwork, which now has spanned 11 years since 2000 when I started doing self identity pieces after college for  my first exhibitions.   How can I not yet be used to people putting me up and down and making comments about what they believe that they see in me?  I feel like Obama must feel right now.  I know I am good.  I know I am talented.  If I weren’t, I would not have gotten this far, but damn the amount of people’s criticism is hard to stay on top of.  Plus, I have JUST survived a majorly verbal, emotional and finanncially abusive relationship with a crazy person.  My self esteem is slowly coming back after being shook up and taken for a ride.

Do I look familiar because of my art?  Have you seen any of it around anywhere?  Are you one of the 1,874 viewers that has seen my youtube channel?  Maybe you have and my confidence won’t believe that my art is really going anywhere because in my isolated world I don’t feel the pull of anyone’s encouragement from all those views and hits.

36B-28-38, 34 years old. that's not what I tell clients who are buying a fantasy but thats the body i've learned to LOVE so fuck you. LOL

What I realized after meeting my blog fan/agency client was that there are a LOT of people that I don’t know reading my words and hearing my voice that don’t comment.  I spend many many more hours brewing a blog entry before I publish it nowadays.  More careful indeed. There is at least ONE ASSHOLE who has the time to read 7 entries and leave 200 word verbal abuse tirade because his partner is passed out cuz he already abused the shit out of her (or him?) and now he’s fucked up pouring over the internet and hasn’t had enough feeling like a pseudo dominant shithead.

Thank you again, for those that support and inspire my words, my art, my hard work and what I’ve stood for tirelessly for over 12 years now.  Whore Revolutionary since 1998.

But that’s alright because I LOVE the way you LIE

Rihanna has become one of my heroes of late. Eminem has always represented all the guys I’ve ever dated, so it’s fucking brilliant that they decided to do this video together. He’s a great artist. Amazing lyricist. A known abuser and now recovered drug addict. Always the image of a great and loving father. A crazy alter ego that has violent and misogynistic thoughts on every album. On this song Eminem forces Rihanna to sing the role of her victimhood in a way that soon may become more of a verb more than her own name. The archetype of a triumphant and Glamorous Survivor. “Tougher than a lion.. no pain is forever, Yep you know this.” The one we all want to be once the bruises (if there are physical bruises) heal. “She Rihannaed through that situation..” I just heard one of my ex boyfriends’ names being used as a verb by way of another boyfriend I am attempting to ex out…”I Jimmyed that relationship so I could stay at her house another week.” he said. (which means he freeloaded rent and board off of a girl he was dating in exchange for mediocre relationship moments). Ah, the oh so familiar financial abuser that too many “independent women” seem to pair up with. I think Ne-Yo wrote that song for those guys, rather than as a fucking compliment to any women. It was dedicated to all the free loading men that Beyonce and Destiny’s Child in Pay My Bills talk about..

I’m not sure why the boyfriends that I started to get after 22 became tumultuous. (GREEK CHORUS: Because you became a sex worker, LOL! LOL!)  I’m not sure why after being single for 9 years did I fall in love with someone who was so similar in both beautiful and fucked up ways as this other first love of mine who was a closet heroin user who i spent 10 months with in the Mission District of San Francisco trying to heal, love and mentor when I was 23. Different illnesses and issues, different people, same manic cycle, similar beautful lies… I hear myself in Rihanna’s voice as she talks so lovingly about Chris Brown and his future. She wants him to just “grow up and learn from this experience.” She still loves him. Love doesn’t go away right away. she says and I know this so well. An abuser is often the adult victim of child abuse or assault and the other partner often feels sorry for that little boy inside the man that lashes out at her while she tries to mother him. Repeating the cycle of the abuse between the childs parents and the tension between the abused mother and son.

I wasn’t beat up and left in a car before I was supposed to attend the Grammy’s but I’ve been deeply entrenched in other forms of relationship violence almost all of the relationships that I’ve had for the last 10 years. I would throw ‘benign’ objects (like a bag of fast food, a large soda; separate occasions) at one of my ex boyfriends to get his attention and wipe the stupid blank look off his face when I told him to get a job and pay some rent, for instance.  I’ve had another someone I was in love with threaten by text message to do a drive by on my house and set my kar on fire…I told him if he was going to do that he should be the one to pull the trigger [so I could look in his eyes while I died for “love.”] but I knew it wasn’t a serious threat, it was a twisted thought from a very lost person.

I never thought he would do it, but the fact that I have, like Rihanna heard what it sounds like when this person that you think that you are in love with tells you that they are going to kill you [if you stop loving them].

*   *  *   *  *  *   *   *   *  *

I was the one who demanded that Jimmy and I go to counseling together but soon realized that because I was the one instigated physical violence, I was therefore the ‘abuser’ and they wouldn’t see us together as a couple while ‘physical abuse’ was occurring in the relationship. So I quickly learned to control my physical reactions and started to use my voice and just scream my frustrations at him, which did not come out as words but aimed to be a vocal assault of some sort to get him to stop his behavior and see that I was becoming enraged. One time I remember gesturing punches towards his face that were controlled enough to not touch his face but show that I wanted to physically assault him because I was so angry. Things got better over time. We learned how to work better with each other. But I was unhappy for 8 months having this roomate that I didn’t want and couldn’t seem to get rid of before I finally called the cops on him. One day, he decided to get something and he wouldn’t stop calling and knocking on the front door when he arrived uninvited. I was trying to create a new space boundary since he had finally left my house. He had finally packed up his stuff to move out after pleading with him for months to leave. but he was back on a day that we weren’t scheduled to hang out and I didn’t feel like letting him in or answering his phone calls. I have 3 phones and a front door and he was blowing up all of them. In a panic I called 911 and they arrived after almost 40 minutes and 2 calls. I didn’t really feel that he would hurt me, but I had just been pushed to the point of police intervention by this guy after months of warning him that I would do exactly what I ended up doing.  I asked his parents for help with the situation and they shook their heads and told me to call the cops and that I allowed this to continue and they couldn’t help him because he was an adult.

I firmly believed that if someone is knocking on your front door and they won’t go away that you have a right to call the police to ask them to go away. “Are you still in a relationship with this guy?” officer 1 asked.
“yes.” I said, “but he is not supposed to be here right now. I want him to leave and he won’t.”  I had told him that we would stay together in a relationship but he would agree to move out, and I believed that we really were going to be able to do this.
“We don’t police people’s relationships ma’am.” officer 2 said. “someone has to go to jail nowadays, people’s lives are changed because of these calls.” It was a hard call because it wasn’t exactly a DV related 911 call, but it was. I don’t remember how I finished my conversation with them to close the door, but I remember seeing him in the back of the car in cuffs while they searched his car and crying at the sight of what I had just done. I was on the phone with my therapist while looking out the window. That was the last time I saw him. He didn’t return to my house, nor did he return a suitcase and laptop that I had basically let him use during the duration of our relationship just to add insult to injury. He was pissed I called the cops on him so he decided to keep $600 worth of my stuff.

It all occured when i was brand new to Facebook last year. The open ended “What’s on your mind?” was too much of an open space for me to not pour out what was happening from my desktop to reality. I Facebooked it while it was happening without caring about other people’s triggers or discomfort. “If you call the cops on your man, does that mean the relationship is over?” and someone’s response was,” no because when he gets out its gonna be the best sex you ever had and then some!” it made me laugh. you somehow have to find light with these things, and there’s no one better than the victims themselves to make a joke out of a serious matter. I’m just going to call the abusers the victims too because even punching the drywall beside someone’s face is a sign of your victimhood. It is abusive. It is a sign that you are unable to control your anger. You are a victim of your rage and your demons. Your lust when you end up having that make up sex. Your weaknesses when you go back to them. But I have learned so much with every fight that I have endured, and I can truly say that I can fight stronger and better and not allow myself to retaliate and stoop to the level that would lead us into that raging bullfight that is in the video which ends up in unprotected drunk sex spawning a devil unplanned retarded baby. At some point you learn not to take it there, and for some people, they NEVER LEARN. “If he EVER lays a hand on me,” the high school girl feminist proclaims,”I’M LEAVING.” But may she learn that it is never that clean and easy and more often than not, they DON’T hit you with their hands to cause the most abuse.

Eminem’s recent video truly reveals the complexity of relationship violence from what seems like a young addicts perspective. It is a paradigm I am too familiar with having fallen in love with people with addictions OR who might as well be drug addicts because they act that way anyway without drugs. Yes, we still live in a sexist patriarchal world but the reality of domestic violence has changed since the Battered wife image of the 80’s and 90s that Barbara Walters is still polishing the framework for. Eminem’s video and lyrics reveal that complexity. He has a phone number on his hand that she sees. She gets so raging mad that she SPITS in his face while he holds her down. I realize mostly that in these situation that there is ALWAYS a back and forth. He says something. She says something worse. He does something to spite her. She does something manipulative and vindictive to spite him. Sleeps with a co-worker or best friend. Texting a working girl in front of your girlfriend because you know that they will call back or text to get you into the fight that you secretly ask for.  This is how Rihanna and Chris started brawling.  Over another woman’s text message.   Psychological WARFARE. Another woman’s voice, even if she is no real threat but a created threat by a manipulative and demented lover.  This is how the 21 year olds girlfriend found out about me and I about her.  I called his phone and she answered.  this is how she got my phone number to harass me.  Dirty, grimy immature antics made only from the insane minds of people so enraptured in the madness of their own NON LOVE that they can’t stop to think about what they are actually doing.  Some of them, who were born and raised in abuse need to be told better.

“You DON’T say those things to someone that you JUST SAID that you LOVE.”

“SPEAK TO ME LIKE SOMEONE YOU LOVE.” (I just saw a book with this title on this topic at the bookstore)

and this really IS  a new concept to them.  One that they can learn if you can teach them fast enough (and they are willing to learn).

I don’t let lovers or friends make a joke out of me as a regular habit.  Hard love and cruel jokes= humiliation to me.  I grew up as the youngest child and black sheep and am still treated like a 2nd class citizen in some ways by some of my family so I will not tolerate a relationship where I feel like someone’s little sister.  A little humor is healthy, but constant and subtle degradation through mockery, passive agressive comments, passive aggressive jealousy,  is NOT healthy for your lovers, partners or children, it adds up and spills over like a symbollic cup of violence disguised as a slow poison like the syrup of sweet Coca Cola.

I love the scene in the Eminem video where the two are sitting in the aftermath of their own destruction bonding on the light energy of their broken and dysfunctional love. I’ve felt that glowing energy between myself and the most beautiful and worst liars that I have ever loved. I believed that our love was the only true thing about the mess we were in. “Love is blind.” Rihanna says.”FUCK LOVE. Look at your situation from the 3rd person and see it for what it really is.” Great advice. Now applying it to your own life is the harder part. Only someone whose experienced a violent love like hers could even understand that love energy can exist and glow even in the ugliest and most brutal relationships sometimes. Everyone else is probably so judgmental. The abusers that I have known (physical, verbal, finnancial, chemical) have all had a magical romantic gift, charming and endearing a promise of a perfect love that lasts for a few days, a few sweet emails, until BOOM. explosion. and it always repeats.  The 21 year old that I had blogged about before that was cheating on his girlfriend to have an affair with me was an abuser.  I could sense it.  I was part of his abuse, I was the other woman, and at first I was laughing about it.  She was psycho and irritating and perhaps I have gained such a hard skin about insults via text message because I ignored so many of hers.  This 21 year olds cock WAS magical and magnetic though.  I do remember the magnetic power I had to turn away from with all my might.  This is coming from someone who is totally not dick centered, not entirely attracted to genitalia but I knew a good thing when I felt it.  It was quite possibly the best dick I’ve could remember having, but I BROKE LOOSE FROM IT without much damage!

EVERYONE has a QUICK solution to it and an opinion. No one understands but those that are in it that it is a longer process than we would often like it to be, but “just getting up and leaving” is sometimes just not a reality for most of us. Rihanna said she went back 8 or 9 times.  The abused and hurt child desperately needs to have the abuser apologize and caress their wounds and tell them that they did not mean to do the things that they did.

What are your boundaries and how long will YOU let someone go before you pull out the stops on your relationship?

Has anyone ever stolen money from you? Spit in your face? Punched a wall beside your head? Crashed or smashed your car? Used a traumatic part of your past as a verbal assault during a fight? threaten to call your probation officer with lies about you? “joked” about cutting off your dick if you cheat?

Snoop Dogg has a song about the manipulation that goes on with the new DV laws called, “First one gets to the phone, the other one’s going to jail..” The urban reality of relationship violence, hip hop, people of color and probation officers is sung about in a humorous way..A LOT of the Black and Brown community is on probation or in jail or prison so this form of institutionalized racism helps to use domestic violence to further tear families and relationships apart.  Or does it help to protect the victims by giving them ammunition to shoot back at their abusers?

Eminem’s video reveals well the cycle of violence told through the push and pull and the back and forth of the whole thing. I know for some reason that I am a red hot magnet for men and women with major trauma issues because I have my own and that often leads to the kind of relationships where people have to work out through acting out until they understand how to communicate in all the ways that they lacked as a child. I am better now because I’ve burned in those bedrooms. I think I know how to walk away. I just wonder why no matter how far I walk I seem to keep encountering these classic romantic turned abusive characters that are out of these pop stars music videos. Is it because I am so fucked up and labeled a wreck myself that I just can’t stay away from them, or could it be that relationship violence is more common that those of us that are so judgmental would like to admit. Are YOU guilty?