Dolce Far Niente

TW.

Your unwillingness to hear the word no is more that just your idea of some manly instinct constructed from your bullshit gender essentialist attitude. Your unwillingness to hear the word no hurts me. Your unwillingness to hear the word no makes every no that comes out of my mouth feel more absurd, more meaningless, more irrational, more useless. When you don’t want to hear no because you’ve got a tingling uncomfortable itch down below, you are effectively passing that tingling uncomfortable itch onto me, and I can feel my skin crawl and my heart pound with every no, no, no that escapes from me. It makes my skin crawl when I say no, because this bullshit culture has ingrained in me this idea that I fucking owe you something, that I owe you my body if I dare sit down next to you looking the way I do, if I dare come home from the bar with you wasted off my ass crying in your arms, if I dare wear this red lipstick and enjoy feeling sexy when I’m out in public. Your unwillingness to hear the word no is justified by the fact that it’s hard enough for me to say no in the first place, because I am trying to let the words escape my lips powerfully while being bombarded with years and years of internalized patriarchal ideas: How dare you say no when you’ve already kissed him? How dare you go home from the bar with him if you don’t plan to fuck him? How dare you raise your voice at someone who just thinks you’re beautiful and wants your body? And still I manage it, no no no and each no gets weaker and weaker as the voices take over and the adrenaline rushes through me and I’m finally fucking finished with this skin crawling feeling of guilt for saying no.

“Okay. Fine.”

And somehow…you think you’ve gained my consent this way.

COERCION IS NOT CONSENT.

But that’s not what I tell myself in the following days. You consented. It’s your fault it happened, cause you didn’t keep saying no, over and over and over.

And when you and all of your bros are sitting around a room talking about how But He’s Not A Rapist He’s A Good Guy, all you can say is “But, she could have easily just said no.”

I dare you to live one day in a woman’s shoes and then ask yourself how easy it is to just say no.

Fuck you.

Last night, I was visiting one of my regular clients and he asked me if being a call girl has taught me anything about myself. I thought about it for a minute and then I replied that:

Being a call girl has taught me how to say no to people. More specifically, it’s taught me that I’m capable of saying no to people and that I don’t need to feel guilty about that.

POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING:

On Friday night I was visiting this man at the Royal York hotel. He asked me to explain my boundaries before we got started, so I did. In the midst of getting freaky, he had me in mish position but hadn’t put the condom on yet cause we weren’t yet having sex. He held the tip of his penis near the entrance of my vagina and I blurted out CONDOM!! CONDOM!!!

He replied that he wasn’t going to actually put it in and I said this:

Even if you’re not going to put it in, don’t make it appear as if you might. I don’t know the difference between you (someone who won’t actually do it) and another person who would actually do it. So it scares the girl if you make it appear as if you could potentially do it, because some people do and it’s fucked.

And 2 months ago, I don’t know really if I’d have been capable of being that assertive, and for this I’m glad.

This blog has been off to a slow start, but essentially I am going to be using this tumblr for sex worker related stuff.

My name is Brooklyn (fake) and I’m a call girl based out of Toronto who is new to the industry. I’m also a feminist, so you’ll see lots of sex-positive pro-sex-worker-rights stuff on here!

I want to post something that I found today via twitter. It really speaks to something I’ve been thinking about lately, which is the demonization of sex worker’s clients. Heather Mallick, a Toronto based columnist who considers herself to be a progressive, is for legalization of sex work. But she still thinks that clients are vile, pathetic creatures who just want to Use And Abuse naive prostitutes who clearly are in a terrible, terrible position for having to deal with these scum-of-the-earth men.

Huh?

Funny that she should have so much insight into what our clients are like. Was she a call girl in the past? Nope, she wasn’t. Which explains why she’s…well…just plain wrong. Let’s check her out:

I think a red light district is the only way to go. Brittaney, I would never be unkind to the most vulnerable women in the world. It’s not the prostitutes I object to, it’s their horrible clients, who I think are a danger to pretty much everyone. There has to be an answer to this. No more Picktons.

Uhhh…we’re the most vulnerable women in the world? Really? Yes, I enter the homes and hotels of strange men on a very frequent basis. Typically 3 or 4 times within a 6 hour time frame. And doing this inspires many emotions inside me: anxiety, nervousness, curiosity. But vulnerable? Nope. You know why? Because I work for an agency that actually gives a shit about me and my safety. If one of these men were to EVER try something funny, the agency would know about it in two seconds and the police would be called. Clients know this. Clients are scared SHITLESS of agencies. So guess what? These are regular, regular old guys who just want to spend some time with a pretty young woman who wants to get him off. These are the SAME guys that you would see if you went to a pub on a saturday night. And if any of them were to try to assault a woman, guess where they’re going to do it? At that pub. Where you’re sitting on your ass blabbing to all of your friends about how sex workers are in such vulnerable positions. You are more vulnerable than I am any day of the week, and I am much more vulnerable when I go to Wrongbar on a Friday night for a dubstep show than I am when I’m at work. Yeah, I realize that this isn’t the reality for all sex workers. Many work the streets where there are real, pressing dangers present. But let’s stop pretending that all sex workers work the same way and that we’re all exposed to the same clientelle, because we’re not.

Moreover, way to use Robert Pickton as a symbol for johns. That’s like saying, oh, you know, Osama Bin Laden is the best example of Islam or the KKK is the best example of white supremacy or the Westboro Baptist Church is the best example of Christianity. I think that Sasha from now magazine has the best response to this:

To even call Pickton a sex trade client is a serious misnomer. He is a mur-derer who took advantage of sex-negative attitudes and disgusting police indifference to kill several dozen women. Believe me, the media have made more money off him than any sex worker ever did.

Mallick is permitted to make such slanderous remarks about our clients because the details of our professional exchanges remain, for the most part, discreet and by and large quite ordinary.

See that? Ordinary. Ordinary. Sometimes so ordinary, that I am bored off my skull in the same way that I would be if I was operating a cash register at Loblaw’s. And a lot of the time? The clients are sweet, talkative, interesting, respectful, and just plain lovely. In fact, some of the most wonderful people that I’ve ever met in my life have been clients.

Moral of the story:

Are you a sex worker? If so, please share your experiences regarding the nature of your clientelle.

If not…STFU.