Buy my love

There is no standard sex worker. Each woman her her own reasons for working, her own responses of boredom, pleasure, power and/or trauma, her own ideas about the work and her place in it. This work can be oppression or freedom; just another assembly line job; an artistic act that also pays well; comic relief from street realities; healing social work for an alienated culture. What is at work within each woman that lets her accommodate this situation? Intense denial, infallible sense of humor, co-dependency, incredible strength, a liquid sense of self? The only safe thing to say is that we’re all in it for the money.

—Vicky, peep show worker: “Whores and other feminists”, ed. J. Nagel. Pg 28. (via shitsexworkerssay)

For many years, sex work was a solution. I could work and go to school. I could travel, live and work all over the world, participating in unpaid internships taken for granted as part of the undergraduate experience. As an undergraduate, I worked at two domestic violence shelters and as a rape crisis counselor. I went on to work in nonprofit development, grant-writing for a Somali women’s health organization in London, UK and, later, for a nonprofit that ran after-school programs for disadvantaged girls here in New York City, where I eventually made my home. In graduate school, I worked as a consultant for a high-profile feminist organization while also working as a research assistant in the Pediatrics Department of a public hospital. During this same time, I sold sex.

Sex work defines the people who do it like no other occupation. Associated with deviance, drug use, mental illness and disease, to be labelled a “prostitute” is to be cast as the lowest of the low. No matter the realities of our experiences, we are thought of as victims and as inherently damaged, either before or as a result of our profession. Sex workers are considered a danger to society, unfit for serious public service. Worst of all: once a sex worker, always a whore.

Eventually, for me, it proved to be too much. Despite all it had afforded me, sex work was a far from perfect occupation. The stigma associated with the profession only exacerbated the rigors of the work.

—

I Lost My Job as a Teacher Because I Was Once a Call Girl
Melissa Petro 

As I get older I’m realizing, more and more frequently, that George Carlin was wrong about a lot of things. A lot of things. But he was absolutely right about sex work. Selling is legal. Sex is legal. Why is selling sex not legal?

It doesn’t make you less of a person. It doesn’t change anything about you, other than your current employment situation. It’s filling the gap in a long-existing market, which is supposed to be exactly the sort of thing that capitalists and free-market advocates are all about. How do we live in a country that supports child labor before it shows support for a woman’s right to do what they damn well please with their own bodies?

Melissa Petro has two masters degrees, one of which is in Childhood Education, but she isn’t qualified to teach school children because she used to have sex more than some people? Or is it because she found a way to pay for her education that didn’t involve six-figure debt, thanks to a job without long hours. and didn’t interfere with the number of other projects she filled her life with?

Regardless, I call bullshit.

(via manicchill)

(via manicchill)