Being Grace Fully

I have been Grace at 22 years old.  I think it was exactly 22 years old when my sexual assault avoidance came crashing down with yet another gross violation of my verbal and non verbal cues.  My whole life changed at 22, and I started to go to trauma therapy for all that happened before this time at 22 and I would continue to progress through 15 more years of more sexual violence and deal with it other ways that you may or may not agree with it.  Nothing is black and white.  And sometimes it isn’t enthusiastic yes or hell no.  Eventually for most people who have experienced sexual violence it does get there, but it takes a few worst nights of your life before that can happen.  Sometimes we do drugs during or after, violence, payback, slutty behavior, denial, acting out, prostitution or long careers of sex work and activism as a result.  And it can ALL BE CONFUSING to us and our perpetrators and the ears of society.  Nothing in a book or workshop can help you when your body and mind decides to do something to survive.   I took years of Krav Maga self defense and I was still sexually violated by one of my instructors in class. Healing ends when life ends is what one of my mentors taught me, I know well that age makes us better at it.  Grace had the worst date of her life, I’ve had dates exactly like that at 22 AND I’ve even had dates with 22 year olds at my age now who pouted and whined because they didn’t get to orgasm and continued to persist even after my verbal and non verbal cues were communicated.  But I didn’t do anything with him at 41 like I might have at 22. It took decades of trauma and healing to become this clear and this strong through “learning the hard way.” 

What I did learn over time, in my getting better at dealing with being assaulted was how to soothe myself through my wounds, how to take better self care, how to recognize trauma symptoms and not avoid them, how to not seek violent or monetary payback or sexual cumback, and mostly how to speak out better than the last time, each time I got better. 

That krav maga instructor knows he violated me, because I filed charges with the school (not the police, fuck the police) and all his managers were called into a meeting with me and he was forced to face and apologize to me.  I didn’t want to ruin his career but I did stop taking his classes, and I learned to take back power a different way, I continued training in the same school for 2 more years never seeing him again.  And still I’m not naming him on social media here because I didn’t and still don’t think it is necessary and it bars him from actual remediation of his behavior, which might happen to Ansari.   This has clearly happened as a backlash to Grace for  “(paraphrased) trying to ruin Ansari’s career and her voice may become weaker and not stronger as a result, but I doubt it.  Life begins not ends at 22.  Hell, it doesn’t even end at 40 like I previously thought.  

The tattoo of the magic wand with barbed wire is about the beginning of my sexual trauma awakening, painful and full of drama as being 22 is.  The magic wand symbolizes my inner light and magic and the barbed wire symbolizes the protection of its beauty and shine.  Barbed Wire also because at this time around 1999, Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire was the hot movie and she the stripper protagonist was my role model who kicked ass and shot weapons in a PVC catsuit and seemingly never gave in to the desires of any of the men in the film.  Later on the arm I tattooed the goddess Kwan Yin, and the character for Agape LOVE, all of this is related to my hero’s journey and the pain that I have endured to get to peace that I feel now.

Mr. Ansari, in a statement responding to the account, said that “by all indications” the encounter was “completely consensual.”  

When I read this, I’m not triggered, I understand.  But I have decades of incidents over both of these people possibly because of I worked as a sex worker for 15 years.  I almost don’t want to use that as a qualifier because half of the sexual violence I experienced happened outside of sex work environments, but 15 years of sex work was the way that I learned how to come to grips with the world I lived in and the bed I made for myself (radical responsibility not blame).  I started to take radical responsibility for some of the situations I put myself in.  I had to because although I tried to make death and addiction an option, the Universe just wouldn’t let me go out so easy.  My first date rape at age 17 and almost all of the violations after that, I’d bet 5 million dollars that all of these men thought what we did was TOTALLY consensual.  The drunken 17 year I was did not consent to being led to a darkened empty beach in Hawaii and laid down on the sand, but my reaction at that time was to hop on top of the dick that non consensually penetrated me and try to take back the power that was just taken from me by maybe trying to “get an orgasm” because at least I would have gotten something, anything.   So, I know too well why Grace might have sucked his dick even if she felt violated, however, I wasn’t there so maybe she didn’t do what I did, we are all projecting into both of these or any of the characters.   But, if it was then this is a behavior I know well.   It grew to be the way that I would deal with healing from sexual violence for 15 years, like an addict chasing their first high, those of us (men, women and in between) that chase power (payback, fame, money) in the world realize that it is a slippery snake if not an illusive and deceptive one that is not even real.  It makes consent look unclear because of the illusion of seduction or enjoyment that you created out of desperation, immaturity, ignorance or insecurity.  

The conversation about sexual violence, rape, assault and ALL the words in between definitely needs to include abuse of power, social justice, dating protocol, conversations and nuances, it needs to include sex work, drugs, spiritual abuse and BDSM ethics, ALL THE 50 SHADES OF GRAY need to come out of the closet and not be judged.  (to be con’t)

 

#Metoo and three and four…reprogramming the Matrix you are running in

I mark the end of my time as an escort at 4.5 years ago now.  When I recap the story that I speak to audiences it goes like this “I was chasing a drug addict client down the street with a stun gun the week I met Destin Gerek, the life coach who got me into Tantra.”  The longer version of that story which I spare the public is that this same fucker once pushed me against the wall and pulled a box cutter on me and whipped his dick out and tried to masturbate on or for me just weeks before me chasing him down the street.   He had been calling my work phone for fake appointments stalking me with a phone number blocker so that each time I blocked him he could call with a different number to repeat his behavior, which happened at least twice before the stun gun chasing incident.  This last incident of running down the street after him, i was taking matters into my own hands because I knew that was the only justice i might be able to get, and I was determined to try to end the madness “by any means necessary,” which was the whore revolutionary mantra inspired by Malcolm X and other revolutionaries.  And yes, I did actually boldly go to the police, to the exact same station that I spent the one night in jail for prostitution to report this man, but it didn’t go well, because all I remember is storming out and jumping in my car to try to find this man by cruising the street clandestinely on in the vicinity the attack just occurred.   I had been seriously training in Krav Maga for over 4 years at that time to help disperse misogynistic energy and protect me from the cycle of violence that I was in.  I had earned a confidence in my physical ability to hold my own.  How did I begin taking Krav Maga for the first time?  A poorly screened client and I had an altercation at my house where I was massaging him, I sprayed him with pepper spray and he didn’t falter, he backed slowly down the stairs (which I should have kicked him down as I have a neck breaking staircase, but as I said I’m not naturally a violent person and I was too scared and traumatized to do much more than I did). He slashed the tires of my car in front of my house to let me know that he had returned once, but thankfully that was the end of me and him.  This was probably more than 7 years ago now, but just recalling it still brings chills to type.  And taking Krav Maga surely helped put me on a strong kick ass warrior path until one of my favorite instructors tried to pull my pants down suddenly during a fight drill in class (i did file admin charges on him with the school’s high ups, hold an admin meeting with all of us after that incident and I did NOT quit the school or training, i just never took his class again).  So while all of the things that have happened to me while I was a sex worker are bad and difficult to recall, there were things that happened to me that could have happened to anyone, and are in fact all part of the same disease that our society is fighting off collectively in the light right now.  I have never been a violent person.  But some things, especially if repeated can bring out the MONSTER in me, or anyone for that matter.  These things that channel the Aileen Wuornos spirit to gnarl its Kali Ma destructive force at all of the collective perpetration of all goddesses in the world.  You want to be the next person to violate me, you need to know that I will reflect your bullshit back at you in SOME FORM and not wait ten years to do so to speak my truth.  

It took its toll on me as a warrior in the battle, as a victim, as a survivor, as a student who looked up to her favorite instructor, as a 15 year old office worker, as a 17 year old, a 19 year old and more, yes me too, yes me three and four and more. There are so many incidents of sexual assault and violence in my life that I don’t even count individual incidents or people because it doesn’t serve me or anyone to do that, it is all one long continuum that did not stop until I made a radical spiritual evolution and jumped out of the matrix that I was in and received a new program from the Universe.  Very much like Neo, as he comes into consciousness and gains more martial arts skills but still his enemy Agent Smith multiplies and becomes stronger and seemingly invincible, I felt like I had no choices so I dove deeper into the depths of fire because I was so sick of living in this pattern of repetition that I felt I had no control over (even attempted seemingly suicidal decisions, put myself in death’s way, tried to become a drug addict myself but it didn’t take to me) before emerging into peace. 

Realizing my power was not about making my physical body stronger or my warrior aura more protected or indifferent, that was me as Neo, trying all the ways I could muster to impossibly to bend the spoon.  ‘Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth…there is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.’

 

The R word, The N Word and the V word: Verbal Ammunition hurts people, people don’t hurt people! Hurt People Hurt People!

…The thing that has stood out to me most, the thing that I was also guilty of was that self determined sex workers HATE being called victims, unless it is them doing the victim name calling on their own situations.  It is really hard to think straight when you are recovering from trauma.  In fact, I know that PTSD is rearing its ugly head out of my wounds when my memory freezes in the same way my body does.  My sense of direction is worse than usual (which is normally not the best) and sometimes I find it hard to find the words and names of familiar places, I find it hard to find my keys or even the keyhole which the key fits in the door of my apartment.  This usually goes on for a few days after the incident and I thank my body for being the harbinger of consciousness around sexual violence in my life again and again so that my brain catches up to what my body knows as the truth.  

What I mean by the first statement is that once we are clear that sex work in and of itself is not a victimizing situation then we can explore the further depths of the trauma that occurs when one is doing work that is criminalized, stigmatized and often residing at many of the darker alleys of the sexual activities of the majority of men and women who participate in it.  Once you are not using the rescuing paradigm then we can talk about the lack of rights that people in the sex industry are afforded in both the legal and illegal sectors.  But it gets more complicated than that IF YOU ALLOW YOURSELF (and are ready) TO GO THERE.  It is easier to go with simple sound bites and hashtags and mantras such as “It’s not your fault” “theft of services equals rape” “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and my personal non favorite “MEN ARE TRASH” and so on that on the surface seem to be the solution, but the solution has a long trajectory.  The sex worker movement, like any other oppressed identity movement also has its own sound bites which I knew very well having been in the forefront of it on a global level for multiple years.  Soundbites and PR crafted responses are designed to take the emotion out of the incident,  but as Uma Thurman expressed so eloquently regarding the recent Harvey Weinstein allegations,”I don’t have a tidy soundbite for you…because… when I have spoken out of anger, I usually regret the way I express myself, so I’ve been waiting to feel less angry, and when I am ready, I will say what I have to say.”  

The whore revolutionary (the old me) often and fearless spoke out of anger and rage against the machine and rage against my perpetrators that I knew that I probably wouldn’t press charges against because there was no institutionalized structure in place to support such allegations.  We can witness how hard it is for established wealthy celebrity females to go up against a more established male counterpart in an industry as mainstream and accepted as Hollywood.  I used this blog as my bullhorn and way to heal and process out loud during and immediately after I’d faced sexual violence.  The more years that were removed from traumatic incidents and the way that I did my work allowed me to see that in sex work, when there is violence or non consensual sexual activity (such as stealthing removal of a condom or theft of services) it is always violence but whether or not it is RAPE is something I often did not take the time to ask myself.  And when my body is screaming the answer, when I am dropping my change clumsily on the floor at the cashier counter, I KNOW THE FUCKING ANSWER! Or…I know one answer, the one answer that helps me feel safe and soothed in my times of seemingly death defying moments of anxiety and anguish.

When the brain is settled, one’s decision to use the word RAPE has the same verbal ammunition potential as using the word N**GER in many situations so we must assess its use carefully.  I started to use the word sexual violence instead.  “I have experienced a continuum of sexual violence both in, out and before sex work.”  (my sound bite which has been consciously crafted to deliberately not sound like “I was raped continuously when I was doing prostitution.’ for various reasons mostly political but also encompassing my desire to NOT CHOOSE personally disempowering language.  And the DIFFERENT choices that I have made since then are what I want my current writings to focus on.  Does our verbal ammunition do more damage than was done in the original incident in question?  Are we or can we even be conscious of the effects our words have?  I thought calling any theft of service a RAPE was my path to empowerment, but personally it was my path to insanity and an endless cycle of violence mostly to myself; and unsurprisingly because Aileen Wuornos was indeed the mother of prostitute insanity and violence who died without ever getting any of her needs met.  

When Theft of Services Equals Rape and When Reframing is Better than Blaming and Going Aileen Wuornos on a Motherfucker

Amidst the #metoo incidents of Hollywood sexual violence I am working as a Love goddess in Seattle, doing my best to fundraise some lost income and property that got stolen out of a car in Los Angeles because I was negligent. It’s my third time to work as a Tantra practitioner in Seattle, every time I have come, it’s been a great, profitable and life changing experience. And again it did not fail me. I was fortunate enough to see more clients in two weeks than I had the opportunity to see in Japan all year since, in Japan, I don’t get to have the same type of business model as I used to when I worked in the U.S so it is always a great opportunity to brush up my skills and work on lots of new seekers bodies. I’ve been working as a professional goddess for over four years now, evolved and inclusive of the seventeen years of total work history in the field of sexuality. 7 of these years I was an escort and a self proclaimed whore revolutionary sex worker activist. In the seven years that I worked, fought, spoke for and rallied with fellow sex workers I became immersed in the ideology and framework of the movement and it became the passion that woke me up in the morning and fueled me through the sometimes grueling and dangerous profession that I called my job. I have since then been extremely happy to have moved beyond all of it without entirely closing the door to how it formed me as the LOVE WORKER that writes this blog now. I tell my seekers that call my phone that Tantra is not just a catchphrase i put in my ad, and i that love is not just a euphemism for fuck or happy ending, i actually genuinely, spiritually, fully engage in LOVE MAKING and sharing with clients which usually does not include intercourse or any of the standard acronyms of prostitution that many men on Backpage might be familiar with (GFE, BBBJ, etc).  And amazing people pay me great money for it as well.  But, because of my vast history, i’m aware of what they might be referring to and can lovingly redirect them to a referral who would better serve their needs.

In order to book an appointment, I require a small deposit to show me that the seeker is serious. This time, upon suggestion from another sex worker, i try to use G**gleWallet to accept my deposit. I usually require just $50 which goes towards the session and I didn’t think twice when the client wanted to send $250 instead of $50. I get an email from G**gle that says,”$250 is being deposited into your bank account.” which means to me as a business owner that I can feel safe to facilitate a paid session.

I saw him the next morning and collected the balance in cash and proceeded to create my 2 hour of magic and love. There was nothing suspicious or ingenuine about this client, we had a beautiful session, I tapped into his God energy and everything ended in a beautiful way.

Sometime in the next day, I am checking my bank balance and realizing that the money hasn’t hit and then I call the company to check and see if there is a delay for some reason. Ggle tells me that the sender can actually cancel the payment even after the email that they sent me has been sent. They tell me that this service is not a safe way to collect money from strangers off the internet and that it should only be used for friends and family (as if friends and family never rip people off).

7 years of being a vengeful, righteous whore revolutionary rose up from the fire of my root to the top of my consciousness and i remembered all the times as a sex worker that i had been ripped off and shorted by escort clients. I was mostly surprised that i was being confronted with these feelings when the way that i had constructed my life, the decisions i made, the clients that i chose and who chose me, the work that i did, the vibration was supposed to be all different now. But, I had gotten ripped off in a similar way from a Tantra coaching client in May whom i had coached for several hours too long for no promised pay received. My live work roommate in Seattle had just talked to me about a time when she was working in New York City and a similar thing had happened and she had “felt raped’ and couldn’t work the rest of her tour because she just felt extremely depressed and violated. I had just read a blog by Lily Fury explaining why she had recently created a devastating fundraising fraud upon the sex worker community all in an attempt to get a bad client blacklisted for what she felt was rape and not theft of services. “he was a client who had shortchanged me (that is, had raped me) when I was desperate after just getting out of jail.” Sex workers and women in general have righteous anger and history about rape and sexual violence not being named for what it is and not being punished equally or justly, so it seems in retaliation to the systems that have failed and ignored them, many of them seem to have started using the words theft of services and rape interchangeably. Since leaving the sex worker rights movement about two years ago to focus on spiritual sexual self growth and other community frameworks, the thing that has stood out to me most, the thing that I was also guilty of was that self determined sex workers HATE being called victims, unless it is them doing the victim name calling on their own situations. (To be cont)

Japanese Men-Stop Giving Me a Bad Impression part 3 (more Hiro Factor)

I came to Tokyo with an open heart and an open mind.  But in the 3 months that I’ve been here Japanese men have given me some pretty bad impressions.  Last night, Im walking around Shibuya without a bra because I hate wearing them and can only handle about 8 hours in them. i am reminded that i’m not allowed to do that in Japan. Showing your tattoos is a stretch enough but no bra as well is more than anyone around these parts has ever seen so boldly in public.   Hiro walks up to me as I am wandering around looking for my next adventure and asks if I want to have a drink. I’m happy when a Japanese person is so bold, and the last time this happened the guys who did this turned out to be NICE GUYS. Real HEROS. They helped me try to find a hotel when I got into town late at night and most of the places available did not accept women in their hotel and the others were way too expensive. We chatted and laughed and language exchanged, they shook my hand and bid me sayonara as I walked alone, completely unoffended and unmolested up the stairs to my love hotel room.  They were both Japanese men who just approached me on the street to converse about my tattoos.

The Shibuya HIRO is now walking quickly up this street and I’m asking him to walk slower and wait for me in Japanese.  When a dude doesnt stop and wait for me when we are supposed to be walking together is going to be my new indicator of the Hiro factor. I follow him up the stairs to one of these very popular private karaoke suites that you can rent by the hour all over Japan.  I hate singing karaoke recreationally but since I agreed to the drink I’d participate in it I supposed. He speaks no English so I was excited for the opportunity to try to learn more Japanese.  it didn’t take too long trying to get through the first Alicia Keys song I chose which I sounded badly singing that he led my hand to his erection, trying to feel me up, down and sideways and now i’m doing my sex worker defense skills which look like me trying to sing while grabbing his hand and making sure it stays away from anywhere I don’t want it, and of course that’s when he puts it on his dick. A REAL FUCKING HIRO.  Have we been in this room 10 minutes perhaps?  He lays back and rests his head on my thigh. I place my head on his forehead and gaze at him with loving, nurturing energy trying to calm him down, a failed Tantra Ninja attempt. He’s unable to control himself and starts to put his hands down his pants. I get up and and pull my phone out of the wall CONSENTO (the Japanese word for wall socket is consento but most Japanese Hiros dont really understand this concept of sexual consent as its totally screwed up in Japan worse than in America, just watch 10 min of Japanese porn or anime porn and you’ll see just how NO, STOP, DON’T!! mean YES! YES! YES! to anyone watching, mostly HIROS. So I dont want to confuse the guy by saying Stop or trying to negotiate the boundaries in any way. I tell him I’m leaving. he opens his arms and tells me to come sit down with him with a smile.  NOPE. LEAVING. i say. For a few seconds he is actually chasing me around the table in the tiny room. i open the door of the room and rapidly walk, in disgust disappearing quickly through the crowded sidewalk weaving up the footbridge and making quick turns through thick Shibuya crowds in case he decided to follow me even though I knew he wasn’t because he had to pay for the room.  I stop to lean over the rail of the footbridge and stare at the traffic and bright lights, crazy Shibuya streetlife.  I take several slow deep breaths of calm and slow myself down. I am more disappointed than traumatized when this happens now.  I pull my bra out of my bag and put all of its ridiculous uncomfortable binding straps and padding back on my always erect but not horny nipples.  Maybe this will buy me some peace so I can pass out on the hour long train ride I have back to my suburban room.

What Goes Around Comes Around

In the last month or more since I wrote my last blog, I am finally blessed with a come up of my previous luck of the summer.  I don’t love the work like I used to as times are a changing, but at least I am not hating every single thing that I have to do for it and there are steadier calls and some better clientele who aren’t trying to fuck me over at every turn.  I know when it is down down down that the pendulum swings and it will soon come back up, but it had been a long summer of bad, economic recession and vultures flying low and clicking their teeth in anticipation of me slipping. I am still working on transition, but I am not naive to think that this is going to be a quick process.  I have made steps toward re-integrating myself into the working world, paid for my own criminal background check so that I could make sure that my misdemeanor charge was showing as dismissed as I had fought for.  The funny thing about expunging your record is that even though you may have gotten any of your previous charges dismissed, the person reading your background check still gets to read what the original charges were alongside the original sentences which are usually set extreme to scare you out of thinking you have any chance of getting off easy.  My original charges read  “7 days of jail, 18 months of probation, HIV test report and stay off Craigslist erotic services section.”  WOW.  Try applying for a teaching job with that even though the final lines say clearly “probation terminated on good behavior and case dismissed.”  Starting this process indeed made me teary eyed, but I feel similar to the process of representing myself pro per (as my own lawyer) in court and fighting for the dismissal would be an interesting exercise in seeing exactly how hard re-integration can be for someone like me who is supposed to have a wealth of so called choices.

I hate the word CHOICE.  Hate it. Fuck choices when it comes to work.  Choice is a continuum.  And for me, so is sexual assault.  I have been violated so many times I stopped counting because it would just be disturbing.  I have been violated so many times that I have accepted that I am a permanent warrior enlisted in the gender violence war.  And that is not my choice. But ‘Choice’ is the dominant paradigm that sits in opposition to FORCE.  forced sex work.  forced prostitution.  sex trafficking.  slavery.  Choice is also a word thrown around in the PRO-CHOICE movement.  This same pro-choice camp also so often fails to notice the lack of choices available to poor, marginalized women of color in regards to reproductive options and sex work is a part of that.   They are all for women being pro-choice with their bodies except when it comes to “choosing” to do sex work.  We sex worker rights folks are aware of the FALSE DICHOTOMY between force and choice.  But still sex workers talk about choosing sex work because it sounds good.  Connecting sexual abuse, drug use/addiction and sexual assault to prostitution sounds awful, pathological, typical.  How can we make these connections without these attributes?  Those sex workers may believe that they have the choice to do sex work just as simply as they choose to eat candy in the morning (or not) or fast food at night (or not).  Perhaps I feel like it is not a choice because so many times I have had to go to WORK and suck up my feelings time and time again and it was far from what I would have chosen to do with my time.  The nature of the SERVICE INDUSTRY particularly ones with BOSSES or SUPERIORS is that when you don’t want to do it, it will always feel like slavery.  This is true of housekeeping, childcare, farmwork, garment work, office work or anything that has a naturally submissive aspect to it in order to earn gratuity above minimum wage.  For me, it started when I was a stripper hating the repetetive monotony of my job.  I had just gone through my first major breakup of my 20s with a guy I was in love with and going to work to be chipper and sexually entertaining to the world and other men was the most difficult thing ever.  It was at this point when I started to medicate with marijuana on a daily basis in order to create a positive facade over the hatred I had for the job.  In the beginning of the healing I would dance on stage and go in the private rooms to cry.  13 years later I still medicate depression and anxiety with marijuana on the daily but now I don’t feel so bad about it.  Using weed is not just a result of being a sex worker, nor is my depression or anxiety but I definitely can be fond of eating a half of a pot cookie, smoking a bong (in the past, I vaporize now) or heating up a vaporizer to deal with anything in my life that I have to go out and do that takes strength.  This included going to grad school, student teaching and regular teaching.  Marijuana allows me to reach a level of seratonin balance that life doesn’t.  I have a deep and intimate relationship with MaryJane.  She is my mothers nipple to nurture my cries in an empty apartment at times when I am bawling hopelessly on the floor.  She is also just a way for me to push out the negative voices and replace them with positive affirmations about the big picture: the beautiful sunny Los Angeles day, the awesome music, the delicious food, the fact that I have many talents, that I am an intelligent analytical being, a writer, a singer, a funny joking child like spirit that deserves to live life to the fullest.  Maybe I choose weed over heroin, alcohol or speed or other substances that close down emotions and thought or maybe I am just choosing to live.  Is that a choice?  I don’t even know anymore.  I think so.  I mean, I know I have potential that is greater than being a junkie or commiting suicide or even relegating myself to a full time “normal” job.   The word has been used in so many negative connotations (mostly in my choosing to do sex work) that I don’t even use it anymore except as a necessary part of sentences.  Let’s just say I don’t use it fervently.  I don’t believe that work is a choice in America or anywhere in the world.

Mostly because I truly believe that I have been attracted to sex work and have stayed in sex work for as long as I have to unravel and discover my power struggle with sexism, rape culture and patriarchy that was NEVER my CHOICE.

My first sexual assault was a date rape on the beach at 17.  A naive teenager is getting drunk at a youth hostel with backpackers in the their 20s.  One of them asks me to go to the liquor store to get more drinks for the rest but instead I found myself laying in the dark at a secluded beach in Honolulu, Hawaii the sight of my first taste of what it meant to not understand the intentions of men.  As Tribe Called Quest would sing,”Classic example of..a date rape.” It wasn’t physically violent so [all my]  perpetrator[s] probably thought it was consensual.  I don’t remember who he was, only that he was some white surfer dude and that I knew exactly at the moment of penetration that this was not my choice.  There were many more after that.  The worst was from the first boy I ever fell in love with at 16, my best friends brother.  This assault would tear my best friend and I apart for many years and create a rift in our relationship that was only fully healed when at his funeral when he died (heart disease at only 26)  I had to face his brother again for the first time since the assault and be cordial. It worked out. We hugged and I was able to forgive him. David helped me from heaven or wherever he was. Then, another backpacking incident in Northern Australia, a vulture asks me to come to his room to get a massage and naive 21 year old adventurous me thinks that he has innocent and therapeutic intentions. NOT.  Because of that incident is the reason I attribute to why I feel I get so much out of the sensual massages that I give men.  Sensual and consensual they come so easily in my hands.  It is more than them ejaculating.  It is like the power blood gives vampires.  A refill of my power supply that had been depleted by trauma.  A refill of my power supply that had been depleted from the sexism of that day walking down the street before I came into my power or dealing with the privilege of men of that given time in my school, in my dating life, etc etc.  Melissa Farley and her clan love to hear stories like this.  It makes them hard, gets them funded, makes them look smart, makes them feel that I fit the stereotype.  The big difference is that I am empowered in the end.  More so than not.  Otherwise I would not be in it for as long as I have.

“Everytime a client comes an angel [hooker] gets her wings…”

Some sex workers are in denial of this connection.  I’m not.  I see it everywhere I turn.  I saw it especially when I was working with street workers in Skid Row.  So many of those girls find street work and prostitution satisfying because it is a gritty hustle.  Because their Uncle used to take for free continuously now they can not only not be around that abuse but get paid for the same desires that their pervy Uncle once had. And yes, it IS more empowering than being returned home or going back to a foster home at times.  I get it.  Do you?  I like craigslist/LA Weekly/Backpage clients for the same reason.  I attain high class clients occasionally through these outlets, but mostly I deal with working class, younger, drug using guys that I can yell at (if they act up) and never see again.  And they call me for the same reason and I DARE them to try to disrespect me.   Workers can be mean and strict with their tricks and get paid for it.  We prey on their shame of what they are doing.  We get paid for their racism.  PAYBACK in the short term, but in the long term perhaps more damaging.

NOT ALL MY CLIENTS ARE DICKHEADS THAT WANT TO RAPE ME.  Lots of them, most of them are great and fine, average guys that I heal myself and them simultaneously by surviving our transaction with ease and bliss.

In my acknowledgement that I am in the tail end of my sex work career, I acknowledge that I have attained enough of the positive and the negative to move on.  I have pissed in the mouths of men and slapped them around with their own dicks (practically).  I have watched them destroy themselves with drugs throw their money at me in effort to seem manly and as a result their manliness has disintegrated before me.  They’re not nearly as strong as I thought they were before I first started dancing at 22.  From my first day at the stripclub, I wore my 4″ stilettos and was suddenly able to look them in their eyes and see them for what they really were: vulnerable.  lonely.  compassionate.

It was the prostitution world that really helped me see this, as well as being a dominant.  I didn’t finish the journey in the stripclub, as all the stripclubs in America are ruled by pimps that exploit their workers at least to some degree and in the worst case scenarios they mirror the sexism that the mafia has with their harem of girls that one has become familiar seeing in movies.  (“Tell her to go upstairs and see the boss if she doesn’t have her stage fee..”) I have defiantly held my ground in verbal altercations and watched them back down.  Sometimes I have lost and a screaming cussing dude has chased me into my car after I have refunded him his money back.  So,  I have also lost and retraumatized myself in this effort.  Prostitution was the only thing that could have done this.  Stripclub stripping is legal, somewhat safer.  I could have not gotten arrested in a Craigslist sting, nor robbed or ripped off in ways that I had as an escort by staying the stripclub.  It was all a part of my beautiful struggle, my journey that I am still on.

Today is the first week of my 2011 marijuana cleanse.  I try to do it once a year.  Last year it was because my asthma had gotten so bad that I could barely breath without coughing like an old man every morning.  I abandoned my bong for 50 days and then broke down and went back to it without condemning myself.  I have since switched from smoking to vaporizing and have eliminated smoking anything from my life.  This also eliminates most of the social rituals of being a stoner because most people don’t vaporize.  I can’t believe it’s been a year already.  I used to love my bongs so much, now the taste of smoke sickens me.  I caught a cold Occupying LA and going to rallies in front of city hall.  It was the first major rainstorm of LA’s autumn/winter cold.  This rally was also the first activist event that I had really believed could make a difference somehow.  I hadn’t been to a march or rally in over a year, maybe two.  I thought often about supporting Oscar Grant’s case, but I just knew what the outcome would be whether I took the time to wake up in the morning to support his cause or not.  I was right.

Whenever I am sick, I don’t feel like using marijuana because clouding my head with what would normally be euphoria just ends up feeling like I’m just clouding my brain with smog.  So sickness often is a blessing in disguise for me to take a break from a medicine that I am usually mentally dependent on.  I have since kicked my dependence on asthma steroids.  I weaned myself off of them slowly using a herb called Lobelia which I would drop into water and drink to help relieve some of the symptoms.  It was working.  This was a relief to me as the ashtma medication that seemed to work on me the best cost $200 for a months supply.  I knew that this was just a sham from big pharma.  The doctors prescription said I NEEDED it twice a day everyday when because of finanncial constraints I started to use it once a day and then once every 3 days and then..only as really needed. (in addition to Lobelia tinctures).  I was proud of kicking this dependence.  Medical expenses are no fun.  I still owe my asthma doctor $350.  A visit to that clinic was the same cost to me as I charged my clients ($300/hr) yet, it never seemed to even out, it was never easy to pay the bills and buy the needed medicine and I still have a tab with them.  Today I am proud of the fact that I have found St.Johns Wort to help with my depression, Passion Flower extract to deal with my anxiety and I have only used marijuana ONCE in 7 days.  The cold allowed me to not crave and the herbs help to alleviate the symptoms that I often use marijuana for.  I use marijuana as a pain reliever for chemical imbalances AND emotional pain.  When I face difficult situations with people I am often running to my weed supply, driving straight to a dispensary to feel better and be cradled by my familiar nurturer who sings an internal lullaby and tells me softly “Do not worry about what they are saying.  Do not worry about what they do.  This, too shall pass.”  It is like an herbal teddy bear, I cuddle it and it helps me sleep better at night.  Judge me if you will but you aren’t the one who is holding me or offering to come over when I am depressed, you are the one who doesn’t want to hear my bullshit, who can’t hear my bullshit because it inconveniences you, because it triggers you.  So keep on talking your shit, and I will keep using my weed.  I want to have a baby in the next five years and join the ranks of all the wonderful sex working mamas that I know who have succeeded in defying society’s stigma.  This year’s cleanse is not for the asthma, its for the future baby.  Twice already this week tough times have come and gone, I have cried in depression without crawling to my usual supply of painkiller and survived.  I am super proud of myself for this.  Every little obstacle that I overcome I give myself a gold star because you won’t.  and it’s quite alright.

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.

whore revolutionary soldier training

WHY DO YOU FIGHT?

Because I live, thrive and survive in a RAPE culture and I will not allow myself to be relegated to an inferior status.  I was born into this battle unknowingly.  I CHOOSE TO FIGHT BACK.

HAVE THEY ATTACKED YOU?

Yes, Many Times

WILL THEY ATTACK YOU AGAIN?

Yes, because we are still divided.  But I have made my mind and now, my body stronger EACH and every time they have attacked.  And the next time, I will be ready to defend, attack and destroy without hesitation.

CAN ANYONE PROTECT YOU?

NO. Ultimately, at the point of attack I will be the only one who can protect me.

WHAT IS THE WHORE REVOLUTION?

A constant RESISTANCE of reversing the roles which dictate that the prostitute must remain the disempowered victim of social control.

I have been holding out on sharing with you all, my blog audience a huge occurence that has influenced my life in the last two months.  I know you think that all I talk about is herpes, but it’s NOT!  ;0

I wrote something on Bound Not Gagged and I’m going to write something on the Yes Means Yes blog too.  check it out!

You know it’s really like being a drug dealer or a gang member in a lot of ways.  you know that you are doing something illegal and that you are in outlaw in the Wild Wild West.  There is cash money involved, risks, violence and drama.   Ask one of your friends who is holding a lot of money and drugs, if they also have a gun in their house and if they’ve ever been robbed.  It comes with the territory of being an outlaw.

That IS the job if you are not an elite VIP escort that only deals with politician clientele and never has to deal with the violence and drama I deal with.  For some reason, my story PLAYS itself out in the type of work that I have found a living doing.  If I was meant to be an Emperors VIP type of escort, surely I would be by now but I’m not.  I decided that I was UPPER working class.  The class between the streetworker without an email address and the high class call girl who looks down on me for doing drugs or taking calls at 4am.

I’ve met “the King of Bel Air” and driven up a windy road to his driveway with the Ferrari and the Mercedes in it.  He wanted me to suck his cock BEFORE payment hoping I’d take care of him afterwards.  “I don’t even take off my clothes without getting paid first.” I said.  “Whose rules are those?”he said,”I’m the fucking King of Bel Air.” and I was like,”sorry King, that’s the way it goes with this game.  Money first, promises later.”  I’m so fucking cocky even with millionaires.  He turned me away because I was an agency girl and didn’t look like the girl in the photo, etc.

Maybe I see myself as sort of teaching these guys something about respecting sex workers.  Maybe I’m just fooling myself too.  What is karma?  I am an agency girl!  Karma is so distorted in this game, but ultimately I feel good when they pay the agency fee, tip me my fee AND have a good time.

Upper Working Class call girls work calls from the weekly papers and Craigslist and make $2-300/hr.  We drive leased cars and rent apartments, live off of credit cards and in massive debt.  We can afford to spend money on Krav Maga training, even though it is something that I wouldn’t have dreamed of spending that much money per month on had I not gotten robbed.  The types of clientele is mostly middle and other upper working class.  Many are also outlaws, fresh out of prison or jail.  the danger is present with all, even the King of Bel Air.

Maybe I like the class struggle I am in in some “sick” way.  I do know that if I could make money with less risks, I surely would but I don’t feel that I can at this time.

I enter the realm of rape culture and I dare them to treat me right.  I don’t attack or provoke them.  Unless you call asking for my tips provoking them.  They do get angry at this point and ask me to leave half the time.  Why do I put myself through this?  Because half the time they just tip me and everyone is happy.  At the end of the week, I’ve made a decent upper working class income and can pay my rent, my car payment and for my self defense training without hurting.

Both men who robbed me in a “classic” way were not from the agency.  I did not provoke them.  they preyed on me.  There have been others who have tried to fraud their way into getting free services.  I fought a credit card reversal for about 4 months with as much energy as I would fighting off an attacker who was physically on top of me.  It traumatized me equally as much…

I’m not sure I CHOOSE it, like everyone seems to think because if I had my CHOICE I’d be living the life of Rihanna or Beyonce right now singing and touring and not doing sex work directly til 6am.  If I had my CHOICE I would work for an agency that gave me $1000/hr as MY CUT.  But I don’t have these CHOICES.  So this is the life I live for now.

ANYTHING LESS THAN THE PERFECT VICTIM

is absolutely unacceptable..

“Why are you sitting there drinking Naked Juice?“she said.

“Don’t one of those cost like $4?”

I was sitting on the floor, trying to get SUPPORTED.  This woman really doesn’t care about what I put in my stomach.  I had been coming to this anger management group which has been politically retitled “Rage Resolution” because anger, they think can be not managed but resolved.  This Black woman was about 10 years or so older than me, had done sex work, drugs and more but of course, because in my report back to the group that I was still broke..she erupted into her criticism on what I chose to eat for dinner that nite: a Cliff Bar and a Naked Juice.  $3 drink, $2 bar=$5 total.  “Yuppie” nutrition and meal replacements that are NOT available for consumption in a good HALF of Los Angeles grocery and convenience stores and most definitely not available in stores in East AND South Central LA.  No one would spend $5 on a bottle of protein and a chunk of calories that looked like a piece of turd but filled you up.  They would rather spend $6 on a Carl’s Jr meal with fries and a big drink.  (Cuz it makes you feel FOOL!)

But it wasn’t about the implied yuppie foods it was the fact that I was even EATING at all and daring to call myself BROKE.  Because if I was truly broke, I wouldn’t have food to eat at all.  (You could live in Aaaafrica! or Innnndia! or Skid Row! they say, but even if you came from those places or lived there now, they would NOT care about you more or less).

I shouldn’t have $10 to pay for a group full of mostly court mandated clowns who would use the 2 hour group to put their 2 cents towards strangers on how they should think and live their lives.  I was there voluntarily.  In fact, including the group I have clocked in 5 hours of therapy THIS WEEK.   I am soooo privileged.  I am eating.  I am soooo privileged.  I have money to medicate with marijuana.  Even if I don’t spend a lot of money on it, but rather sell it off to other friends so I can get mine for free.  Even if I trade sex or companionship with lovers who grow or growers who love so I can stay medicated on my transitioning sex worker budget.  Nope, that’s not good enough for THEM.  Because then you are a drug addict and they can put you into a little box and throw you and your ideas out.  Even if you have a medical prescription people will still say “medicate” as if it is a joke.  And this is also partly a joke in the medical marijuana community because our “medicating” sometimes looks like it’s fun, but that’s only if you are looking at half of the pictures.

They wan’t you starving, bleeding, and DEAD.  But as you walk in zombie form around the world, dying they look at you and don’t feel anything different.  They don’t give you money, love, blankets, shelter.  They won’t get a gun so you can shoot yourself.  Just leave him!  Just get off your medication!  and then once you do and you are feeling the pain from that  They will just look blankly at you as if you are not their problem.  And then they go on with their miserable pathetic lives.  But they’ll probably say some ignorant comment first and call your suffering melodramatic.

The same woman who had her comment about my dinner also burst into laughter after I talked about my car/rape symbolism.  and she was a sex worker and a woman of color who used drugs all her life.  Did that make her an ally?  Hell no.

I should have kicked her ass.

My therapist knows that I medicate with marijuana.  It was one of the main interview questions that I ask them when I decide whether I can pour my guts out to them safely.  Don’t try to stop me from doing sex work.  Don’t try to stop me from smoking weed.  Those things are immutable and inflexible until I decide that they are.  I am not here to work on abstaining from any of those things…(I have already gone through a cycle of therapy trying to do that “unsuccessfully.”  I am a harm reductionist, not a 12 stepper).  One time the last 3 whiteboy roomates that I had at this “bohemian” warehouse tried to pull a marijuana intervention on me.  To appease them, I attempted to stop smoking for 3 weeks.  At the end of 3 weeks, when I broke down and told them I was going to start smoking again, one of them said,”Oh, You weren’t doing that for us.  I thought you wanted to do that.” or something…I don’t even remember but I’ve been high everyday since then AND if I see those fuckfaces in this city I don’t even acknowledge their presence.  If you want me to live my life without my medication, then WHAT do you propose you will provide me to replace it?  Oh, right, that’s not your problem.  Deep breathing and meditation? Yoga?  Walking?  Journal writing? Singing? Dancing? Art?  Activism?  Yes, yes, drug counselor..thank you.  I do all those things while medicated.  If I weren’t medicated, at times, I doubt I would be so profilic and functional.  I’ve cut back on alcohol almost “as a drug” because it makes me black-out after too many.  My first date rape at 17 was under the influence of alcohol and let’s just say that I have not really gained the trust back in how “people” will act towards “drunk girls.”  (You can even go to your free internet porn channel and it’s actually a genre of porn that you can watch (rough sex with a ‘drunk and stupid’ girl), and I have to confess because the way that I was raped was nothing as sexy as that, the clips actually turns me on while it disturbs me as a whole but I’m not on a crusade to ban its distribution or existence.  They also have Japanese Hentai porn which is the same as it’s always been Japanese schoolgirls getting raped and forced to LOVE it: also designed to stimulate and if you watch it long enough, the sounds alone will turn you on!).  Those directors are like, hey, who said Rape was about power?  We want to put the SEX back into rape!  And they and their all male video crew give each other high fives, and they slap about $600 cash in the hands of their consensual victim and she is happy too.  Because she was probably a survivor and needed to re-enact her shit too and that’s why she enjoys scenes like that…

There was a time that I used to only be able to hit the stage WASTED.  I would down a few shots before stumbling on, and then I would wake up throwing up and miserable..crawling to my bong to ease my alcohol poisoning.  But of course, if you don’t drink or smoke weed all of this might as well be in Korean.  It’s why I love Amy Winehouse.  She’s a beautifully talented trainwreck that everyone criticizes.  I probably love pot as much as she loves alcohol.  But we are raw like Billy Holiday, going through our pain and singing our pain away on and off stage.  This is not JUST a music video, this is our lives…So don’t tell us NOT to get wasted because you are not the director and producer of OUR LIVES.  But, sometimes the drugs and escape mechanisms can kill us too…that’s why I picked marijuana as well.  Maybe I’m not as suicidal and self destructive as I think I am.

When I was a student teacher at one of the most rough at-risk school in LA, and I would come home and cry every nite and then some nights had to be strong enough to go to class at night to complete my Masters Degree.  I did it all with the help of Mary Jane…She held my hand and walked me to class and kissed me on my forehead before I went in.  That’s when I was living with the aforementioned roommates…sneaking a bong hit out the window of my own room!  Even though, some would easily say prostitution or sex work is the REASON I medicate, I would say that teaching high school was also a continuation with that dance with men, misogyny and male violence.  I wrote my Masters Inquiry on it actually based on a teenage student who insisted on calling me “sexy” instead of my name.   I was challenged in different but sometimes equally or more violent ways as a teacher, I witnessed a “race riot” or fight of about 20-30 students and about 10 riot pepper spraying school police first hand so I’m not sure sometimes, if people say that teaching is safer than sex work.

I did do a 3 week VOLUNTARY cleanse for ME once last year.  I have done it recently.  But,  I believe I am highly functioning train wreck.  marijuana allows me to medicate the pain but be highly functional.  It is better than alcohol, heroin, other prescription anti-depressents, vicodin makes you itchy, valium makes you forget…(which many people in pain will float to as an option..)

Everyone wants you to leave your bad relationship but they will not be there when you are alone.  They do not even attempt to suggest a replacement for what you cling to that crutch for.   And sometimes, the pain, like the pain I feel from my mother rejecting me doesn’t go away for years.  And once you are a survivor of trauma, the world doesn’t stop being traumatic or get any safer,  so if you have PTSD from previous trauma there is A LOT that can trigger you.  But most of the time the freak outs are few and far between as I have worked very steadily on my healing and nursing my fears.  I usually reserved those outbursts of anger, shouting, and shoving with someone that I loved.  My[ex] boyfriend.  The article in Salon.com talks about the passion and intimacy that fighting really is, and why, to me Fight club is such a gay [homo-erotic] movie.  When I said that in Rage Resolution, the Black man across from me flew into a rage about it! [because that would mean that he was mandated to this group because HE was gay]  I find out later that the GUY that he talks about knocking out cold in a Del Taco was actually a FEMALE TRANSGENDERED woman.

Also on my list, is “do not try to convert me to your religion or ideology” which is what a number of people would like to do with people like me.  But I reflected last night, that I haven’t had anyone try to convert me to any organized religion since my undergrad college days.  I must give off the untouchable sinner vibe that the Mormons don’t even want to approach.  I’m sure people think that “I am as bad as the mormons.”  But I don’t knock door to door, people come to me usually.  They come to hear me speak or ask me questions, and sometimes they violently try to convert me with their rudeness,  or their “interventions of love” but that never works.  The system tried to convert me, but I am still working albeit very little but I believe if your religion is America and American “Freedom” then once you read about and experience who the laws are designed to protect, and once you realize that it isn’t you then you can easier change religions.

I was talking about how the CAR was an extension of your BODY, and your LIFE which is encased inside of it as you drive it.  When I had a Toyota SUV, my car was broken into 5 times.  The 5th time it was completely stolen and gone for almost 2 weeks before it was recovered.  That year was extremely traumatic for me.  I even walked up on a transient guy going through my truck, scavenging around.  I caught him in the act of this, but didn’t kick the door closed on his torso which was halfway inside the scene of the crime.   We had a verbal confrontation and he ran away.  He said he wasn’t the one who broke the window.

I should have kicked his ass.

If I were a “real” man, I would have.  Instead I drove to the class I was going to be teaching and shared my anger with my students.  That was almost 4 years ago.  That poor car was totally cursed.  Three years later, after I got the car back from the impound, I slid on black ice in the Bear Valley of California, crashed into a sideroad boulder and then another truck crashed into me from behind so hard that the back glass window shattered.  Have you ever been in a car that was hit by a car?  It hurts.  Marijuana (eating not smoking) and massage nursed me back to health again.  Considering all of the car accidents I have survived (one time, I hit the center divide of a freeway at 80 mph and walked away) I guess it would seem like a sort of a slap in God’s face to say that I feel so hopeless I want to die sometimes.  I know that I do not have PTSD from just sexual violence.  And suprisingly I was NOT high or drunk on anything when I looked death in the face behind the wheel that one near fatal day (and I’ve been in about 5 other not as major car accidents in 16 years, is that better than the average truck driver?)

I felt raped every time I would come back to a large puddle of broken glass, my clothng and CDs strewn all over, amputated stereo wires and receiver guts spilling out of the dashboard.  File a police report.  Are they going to investigate and attempt to catch the perpetrator? No.  They are not even going to pretend to care.  I paid out of pocket everytime.  Just under the $500 deductible but way over my income disposable at any given time.  I suffered finnancially and felt that this act of invasion was out of my control and one of my family members shook their heads and implied me somehow at fault.  It’s hard to distinguish between the car accidents, parking and speeding tickets (which are my fault BUT also the very profitable industry of policing and fining drivers as part of the state revenue that plays a huge role) and the car jack and break ins (which are not my fault and San Francisco is known for). This has been a symbol of all the many times I have been sexually violated and have not used the police to help me “catch the guy” or help me to heal.

I know, I am NOT the perfect victim.  I smoke weed everyday.  I eat.  I don’t have enough of a drug problem for you to discount me.  I am a sex worker.  I have a car. I still have food to eat. I have a laptop that I got from a sugar daddy but that I could sell if I needed to pay my rent.  But then if I sold my laptop, it might make me feel more hopeless, even if it helped me stay housed.  It would be a sad day indeed.  My computer symbolizes any hope I have for the future.  And once I give that to some hustler for half of what it’s worth because I am really that desperate it will be the end.  So I guess, to the critics credit, since I haven’t yet stooped that low, then perhaps I did have an option that I hadn’t yet considered.  But a miserable one to wish on someone.  I chose to forfeit something less tangible.  I dropped my car insurance until I can get more income.  I am driving illegally.  I still have things.  Services on the verge of being disconnected but nevertheless you have services.  VOICE OF JUDGMENT AND CRITICISM: “You need to appreciate your life and all that you have.  You are just an ungrateful selfish piece of shit and you need to shut your mouth everytime you think you want to share your feelings with the world.  Because unless you are the perfect victim, no one cares.  And even if you are, they are just pretending to care, by making comments about your life or maybe they’ll suddenly start caring during your funeral, but unless you are Robert Kennedy or michael Jackson, no one will even know that you are gone.”

I am parked in the parking lot of my PO Box.  A small unconventionally dangerous to squeeze in lot with a rent a cop Korean security guy with sunglasses and a nitestick.  There are a TON of parking lots like this in LA.  I’ve been hit in one parking lot (her fault) and been in one other collision which was another her fault while driving this car that I currenly drive which is OWNED mostly by Chase Bank, not me.  I recently got into a smash up that was my fault but because of car insurance, I was covered.  They were covered.  I am very very familiar with filing claims with insurance companies and how long the whole process takes.  I am very aware of how insurance companies create a barrier between the rage that occurs between the two drivers that have collided.  Like lawyers act as a mouthpiece for the convicted so they don’t tear out the eyes of the cop that arrested or beat them up.

We start to exchange information and I have to reveal to this guy, who I’ll call Kumar (cuz he looks like and his about the age of the Indian actor who played Kumar in Harold and Kumar stoner films) that I don’t currently have insurance.  He reveals to me that he WORKS for an insurance company and that he and 3 other clowns were out on lunch.  “Wow.  How hilarious.” I say sarcastically.

“And what are you doing parked in a loading zone?  Did you pull in AFTER I was already backing up?” he said.

“NO.  I was sitting here trying to have a nice day, checking my messages when you BACKED INTO me.”

“Well look, I’ll help you out here.” he said looking at the shark bite in my left fender.  “I can give you $200 cash for the damage then and then we’ll just say it’s even.”

“You mean to tell me that you work in insurance claims all day long as your day job and you’re going to estimate that damage at $200 knowing that NOTHING on a vehicle costs $200 when it’s been hit” I said. One of my mirrors is missing half of the plastic cover cuz I hit it off someone’s fence.  “Replacing the driver side mirror in it’s entirity is like $250.00 from the dealer, I said, that’s why I haven’t done it.  There’s no way that repair of that is going to be $200.  You are totally exploiting my situation.” I said. “But, hey, there’s nothing keeping you here.  You CAN just walk away and screw me if you wanted.”

“How do you know it was me who did that? Maybe you already had that damage? You’re car is pretty banged up”he said.”Like in the same accident that broke your mirror.  And this is a loading zone, you aren’t supposed to be parked there!”

“But you STILL would have hit me, if I was a truck or a car.  So your logic is not a good enough answer for you to not be at fault.” I argued.

“But then if you were a truck, I would have saw you.” he said not getting nearly as angry as me, mocking me..

“Look, I gotta get back to work, so you can either take it or leave it.” he said.

“Are you trying to deny that you FUCKING hit me??” I yelled and I could feel myself boiling up.  “I can’t even talk to you right now.  Just write your name and info here.” I said and sat in my car to cool down else I might try to knock this guy out in front of his stupid clown insurance friends.

I was already unstable and depressed about my finnancial situation, my loss of trust in so called friends and lately because so many people have questioned my right to call myself a survivor, I have been remembering and rethinking about all of the sexual trauma that I have survived in my life throughout the week.  I couldn’t believe this guy was trying to blame me!  It was all so symbollic of male privilege and power that my trigger was flicked and now I was full of rage at all the rapists and men with male privilege in the world.

I wanted to kick his ass.  To knock him out in one fell swoop and jump on his 5’8, 160 lbs body and start punching him and screaming,”What the FUCK do you mean it’s not YOUR fault???” I would start hitting him and not stop…

but I didn’t. On Facebook, I posted an article on the West Virginia rapist, “The father of five children and midget football coach did not testify. But jurors watched a taped interview in which he confessed to picking up at least 15-20 prostitutes and holding a knife to their throats or choking them while he had sex with them.”  He is a handsome Polynesian looking guy who picks up street workers with baby seat in his car.  He is a family man, community member, misogynist and violent rapist and even though he is in West Virginia I feel that he is living in my neighborhood too…

When I watched “Boys Don’t Cry” with my then boyfriend and he didn’t feel moved, and every time he insisted on calling a transgender person by the wrong pronoun, I felt like he could be even sleeping in my bed.

“We take shoving to be a provocation after which one is justified in committing violence. But kids shove. Brothers shove each other. We can shove each other. A shove is nothing. It is just a shove. There is no logical reason why it should lead to violence. It is perhaps technically battery. But the rules and laws around battery and assault, I would argue, are also formed around our the cultural assumptions of a fundamentally violent culture. We all know the dance. Why could not two men simply have a harmless shoving contest? It would be funny. Consider what the shove actually says. What the shove says is, I love you and I want to feel the violence of my love for you by having some contact. The shove says, I want some pain inflicted, will you please engage in some mutual infliction of pain? I need some pain. The shoving says, here, look at what I am willing to do: I am offering myself to you, to be beaten. Will you please attack me so I feel whole again? Here, look, I will shove you again. That is my request. The shove says, “I want you. I want you to beat me.” I beat up a guy and now I feel guilty (Salon) (via melissa)

The dance of violence between men and men is one that men who grow up are very familiar with.  Most men have gotten into at least one fight.  most men fear violence as much as women do but express it through posturing, homophobia, rape, pre-emptive ass kickings..

But women have that desire in them too.  We are raised in a violent culture, where fighting and war are the ultimate symbol of triumph, conquer and revenge: power.  I always move to want to fight with men.   My ex and I got into some screaming raging public fights, and I have even thrown lite objects at him and punched his chest like the powerless little girl that I am.  I loved him, so I trusted him enough to have further outbursts of rage like I had never done with anyone else before…this is the secret language of Domestic Violence that they don’t teach you and that the survivors aren’t allowed to really express.  But when we went to couples counseling once, and the counselor asked me if I had ever hit him and I said yes, then I became the batterer and HE was the victim and we were not allowed to receive services because we did not match their criteria.  Neither he nor I were the perfect enough victim.

but i never have done more than really close posturing and running away from angry gorillas.

My last 3 years as an agency escort was about my dance with sexual violence and misogyny.  I would act and re-enact scenes which begged the collaboration of the dance of violence and gang rape, male privilege and power.  I was literally asking for it or the system in place set us up to have to fight our way our of some ugly negotiations.  I WANTED to have the LAURA CROFT BARB WIRE ending to my next attempted rape.  Whatever it was that they were going to give me was going to be given to me in a clear cut blow.  I would feel their fist connect with my face.  I would fall to the ground.  I would be the perfect victim.  Except that i was a whore and my “friend” had just stolen $300 from him.  I thought for some reason, that I would be okay in a houseful of 5 guys who had just gotten ripped off.  I even told her she could go!  Older brother started screaming through the house like an ape banging on his chest.  He came for me.  “YOU ARE NOT LEAVING THIS HOUSE UNTIL YOU GIVE US THAT MONEY.”  I handed my stack of cash out of my purse and headed straight for the door.  He chased me out the house, yelling at me the whole time to continue his little war dance over me as I drove away..

I survived that.  I drove back home from Chatsworth, shook up.  Sat at my desk while the sun came up, while I watched the Latin workers start their rounds on Metro to start their work shift…smoking my post traumatic stress disorder into a soothing enough calm that I will be able to go to sleep for at least 6 hours during the day.

I have worked very long and hard hours on my recovery and wellness from sexual trauma, and for years before I identified as a prostitute I was very focused on sexual assault awareness activism as a platform for my mission to leverage male privilege once and for all!  I did not plan to engage in this dance for 3 years, nor do I regret some of the amazing experiences that I did recreate.  I did educate and empower men, I did provide and satisfy for them and they did tip me excessively on top of the agency fee MOST of the time, and that was why I did it for so long.  I met my sugar daddy by stealing him from my agency, they don’t expect repeat business of course, and that is how the system is designed.  So if I am able to appease their egos enough so they don’t chase me out of the house yelling then we have a great time and everyone is happy for a while..

When people pretend to care or understand it urks me.  I ran from Candy the elderly Skid Row sex worker that I mentored to save my sanity.  I am too unstable to deal so closely with someone else that is more unstable and self destructive than me.  When people say “You aren’t suffering, if you were REALLY suffering you would be like THIS, or THIS or live HERE or look like THIS.  And Candy was all of those things and more.  And also she wasn’t.  She was more capable than most people thought.  She had an apartment and disability income.  Streetwork was her “side job.”  She used drugs to escape the pain and sex work to recreate and seek safety through the validation that sex work provides sometimes.  I don’t think it was about the money.  When I walked side by side with her, I would notice that people either cared for her or they looked at her with disdain and wanted her out of their business.  She was the worker that the rapist in West Virginia would prey on.  She looks “expendible” because her face and body show signs of drug abuse and self destruction, so therefore it would be fine to just off her.  We would be doing her a favor..I came to know why she used drugs to escape and I felt scared of her.  I felt like she was a reflection of who I could be if I changed from marijuana to crystal meth like her.  And if I started to escape with meth for 30 years like her…but without blaming her, I blame others first.  And I think of her when people say I don’t have it so bad because I know her and people don’t rush to help her either, and that was how she came to me, and because she was too engulfed in her pain and her addiction, I couldn’t hang on..Or else soon, we’d be sitting on the sidewalk scantily clad and fucked up, smoking crack out of the same lightbulb and spitting insults at passerbys in the park…

I got the other driver to pay $340 cash on the spot.  I didn’t lose my drivers license.  I didn’t fight him.  I didn’t go to jail with an assault charge.  I came out ahead.  Unfortunately, the money has to go towards the rent instead of the repair of the car or even the acquisition of insurance but I am usually stressing about rent at this time of the month.  Frantic and desperately waiting for the next call to come through.  If I had dealt with it any other way, I would not have gotten paid.  I had thought that money and emotional confrontations with strange men only happened in sex work, but apparently it happens in other situations too.  I am thinking a lot about survival lately.  People are confused with me because I am confused with me.  I have survived a lot.  But not as much as HER or HIM OR HER OR HER!!!!!! Everyone wants to play trauma Olympics or Oppression olympics because they are so wounded…but believe me my pain is as valid in my world as their is in their world.  I pulled over after I pulled out of the parking lot and freaked out in tears.  It was very difficult to keep my cool in that situation even though I felt like he was instigating me to lose it, even though he was completely oblivious.  He was never admitting fault  Even after he paid me, he was saying some “Next time you should…” sentence and I told him to stop talking and go back into his car.  “Even as your paying me, you are not admitting fault.”I said,”that alone can make me want to kill you!”  I’m sure they thought I was crazy.

I am working on touring and doing some events specifically around sex work and sexual violence.  My story is very common for a lot of workers and I find that it is so challenging to not want to talk about the glaring negatives in our profession while we push towards decriminalization.  I also find it interesting that I have never painted my work as all happy hooker or all victim of rape and serial murder but that both are simultanously true.  This blog is part of the way that I survive the violence that I am asked to hold and not speak about.  People do NOT want to hear about your pain.  And if your pain is not as bad as their pain, then they will be sure to let you know and cause you more pain.

My self esteem is very low and I am having trouble believing that anything matters or that I will live to see any major changes in how sex workers are treated, or how many sexual assaults occur.

I am also interested in the emotional finnancial connection that many women and sex workers have around money and men.  Most people have a very intimate relationship with money and ideology but many women who gained economic empowerment and perhaps surviving violence (from home or relationships) because they were able to not only survive against the odds, but also acquire above their projected or expected means can feel like they are going to DIE when it is SLOW.

I am in this book with 2 other sex workers..It’s exciting to have something to tour with and it was fortunate that Susan invited me to be a part of this proejct without me actually submitting.  And now I am peddling it wherever I perform as part of my SURVIVAL INCOME.  And would you believe that if I dare use that word like that people are all up in my Facebook!

I’m sorry sir, you must have thought that GFE meant STD!

The GFE acronym in the escort world has come to be known as the “Girl Friend Experience” which is another one of those lovely ambiguous codes for one or many multiple sex acts that occur with prostitutes and their clients have sex for money but are trying to mask their real intentions by using codes like GFE, “full service” and more. Some of them are really explicit as seen in this email between potential client Lance and I, as he lays out all of his expectations for a 2 hour appointment for $500.

after I emailed him my standard discreet reply about how $500 includes a massage with a full service experience of some kind..LANCE: Let’s see Not interested in a massage… waste of time. Full service should include:

• GFE- Girlfriend Experience
• DFK- Deep French Kissing
• DATY- Dine at the Y
• BBBJTCIM- Bareback Blowjob to Completion In MouthMultiples ((he means I should allow him to cum several times for the price of once))
• Greek ((ANAL SEX…probably without a condom for Mr.Lance, but Greek itself just means Anal))

I think the above could interest me for a 2 hour appointment. Let me know if it scares you away.Thanks.  MP: i don’t exchange fluids with strangers.sorry.L: That’s cool. I was only able to find one luke warm review on TER. ((NOT TRUE! it’s a fucking 8/10, which is great, even though I hate the review system))  I guess Porn Star Experience(PSE) isn’t on the menu. Oh well good luck with business.MP: that’s EXACTLY it. That’s a great acronym. I’m going to write about it on a blog! Ha. How can you imagine that someone that you don’t know would allow you to cum in her mouth? Of course there are people that WILL always do it. But you aren’t monogamous to ME, as I am not to YOU, nor are we going to get tested together and stay monogamous…so essentially you are asking me to risk my life. It’s like playing russian roulette with semen. Are YOU willing to do that, if I give YOU $500? Okay, then if so, I will let you drink a vial of someone else’s semen and then we’ll be at an even risk.

L: How ironic you fuck for a living and paranoid about diseases?

I’ve heard everything. Take up a different line of work. Oh, with one review on TER and you sell pussy… give me a break. Business must be slow or not worth the price of admission.You have probably been out there a lot longer than your reviews. Under different identifications I guess. Reviews must be badddddddddd!!!!! You’re so special and want $500. I guess the piano lessons didn’t pay off. You keep your fluids and I’ll keep my $500.I could decontruct the power and race dynamics evident in his assumption that because I’m Asian and smarter than him, I must have taken piano lessons, because I “sell pussy” I should give him whatever the fuck he wants, “multiple” times, and kiss him with tongue after he fucks my ass without a condom and cums in my mouth! Yay! And the scary thing like the fucking rest of the pathetic hobbyists on review boards like The Erotic Review who only rank girls a 10 if they are “really bi”, kiss clients on the mouth and of course, my favorite “BBBJTCIM”- Bareback Blowjob to Completion In Mouth…just like you saw in the movies, boys!!Too many men think that the “PSE”-porn star experience that Lance was fantasizing about, is on the menu with their girlfriends, dates, and hired whores! But it’s NOT! And don’t be surprised or offended if it’s NOT! Be thankful that your whore is paranoid about diseases! The Erotic Review encourages the spread of STDs by creating a ranking system that essentially rewards you for putting yourself (as the receiver) at risk, and punishes you by allowing clients to rate you poorly for not participating in unsafe activities. And then we get attitudes like old Lance here, who seems to be completely surprised that sex workers could even possibly be paranoid about STD’s?  ((And if you dear reader are trying to look me up in these review boards to sabotage me, Mariko Passion is not my working girl name, silly trick..)) I determine what is on the menu, when and if I get together with you, I have a right to maintain my boundaries and make those explicit with you …OR NOT. So what, if I put a condom in my mouth and slide it on at the last minute without telling you??LESSON 1 for those of you that didn’t know:Sex workers create FANTASIES. Porn portrays sexual fantasy.  Fucking without a condom, is a FANTASY for most.  Even oral fucking.  And there is some debate in the porn industry right now about using the 30 day STD test as a substitute for condoms. If you assume that everything should be on on the menu because you have paid me, you will soon learn an expensive lesson.  And if you think that YOU run the show as the client…and I should have some sort of corporate customer service attitude about you always being right or something, then I have a big dildo waiting to stick in your ass.I just can’t help but think about the girl who will finally allow him to live out his fantasy. Optimistically, I’d like to think that most of the girls out there will just laugh at him. But we never know..It’s always assumed that someone will allow more than you always. This is where the strength of our movement is crucial and peer education and sex worker empowerment programs not prevention and pity programs are more effective than anything…I realize with men like Lance why sex workers ARE the leaders or potential leaders in HIV/STD prevention OR how they could potentially be the catalyst for male privilege, sexism and the spread of disease, even though the spreading of the disease will disproportionately fall on that of the sex worker and continue to uphold the same stigma of being disease vectors that we have been fighting since the beginning of this old profession.