Subtitle: More FAQs Double-Published as a Blog Entry
11. Are you a sex worker? What kind?
I’ve actually been wondering that myself. Right now my primary job is being a full-time student, and since I have disabilities which affect my performance, it’s actually more of a full-time job plus overtime. As of January 2011, I’m in the first semester of my senior year (I took a semester off), and so I’ve dropped most of the extra-curriculars I had leadership roles in on-campus so I can devote my free time to making contacts in the real-world for my life post-graduation. What I want to do after I finish school has changed dramatically over the past three-and-a-half years as I’ve come to terms with the permanence and significance of my disabilities. I can no longer see myself in research or academia, though the prospect of a full-time job at a non-profit or NGO is still a possibility— I’d especially like to work at a charity that uses theatre as a form of social activism. At the moment, however, I want to focus on my health, and being employed by a non-profit is frequently as stressful as it is rewarding. So for the immediate future I see myself as a freelance writer and performer who can determine her own schedule and makes ends meet through the stress-relieving venture of professional dog-walking (I find it stress-relieving, anyway.)
Part of my goal as a performer will be to use my sexuality to create non-oppressive erotica, and so (as you may have noticed) those post-graduation contacts I’m making in my free hours are mostly photographers and directors who are helping me build a portfolio of still media. At this stage it’s rare for a model or performer to take on a lot of paid work, and I’m no exception. I’m doing time-for and the occasional paid shoot, the meagre profits from which are going towards materials for my burlesque act and a fund for investing in a future porn production. So I’m not really making money from the ‘sex work’ I do, but I am using it to hopefully further my future career. Whether or not that makes me a sex worker is something I’ll let you decide. Personally, until modeling and performing are a bigger part of my life—whether or not I’m being paid— I’ll consider ‘sex worker’ to be a descriptor that fits me but is only a minor part of my identity. If I had gotten into roleplay work, I’d feel more comfortable using that self-descriptor, but as we all know that fell through, and it was probably for the best.
12. Are you ‘out’ about any of this?
I’m putting ‘out’ in quotes because I feel a bit uneasy as a straight cis woman using a term that’s almost exclusively associated with being queer. At first glance it strikes me as appropriation, but I’m still working through the the logic of that (see my upcoming post: “How Being Kinky is Like Being Queer, and How it Totally Isn’t”)
I’m out to my sexual partners, which may seem like a given for those of you who aren’t kinky or who have always felt comfortable with your kink, but it was something of a process for me. After all, you can’t tell other people what you’re into if you aren’t even being honest with yourself. In the past year, however, I’ve started being open with everyone I sleep with about what I’m into and what I want. It was a huge step for me to tell a non-kinky guy I was hooking up with that “I’m probably not going to come, because I’m actually into that BDSM shit. Regular sex is still enjoyable for me though, so don’t feel like you have to to spank me if you don’t want to.” (He did gamely try to spank me, and his complete inability to hit me with any real force proved my protestation right in an almost heart-warming sort of way.)
I’m not out to my friends or family about being kinky. Part of what is stopping me is that being kinky (by my definition) is all about what one likes to do in the bedroom, and that’s not something I’d feel comfortable talking about with my little brother or my childhood best friend even if I were into the most vanilla of things. Kinkiness (again, the way I define it) doesn’t affect one’s romantic relationships outside of the bedroom the way being queer does and so introducing a boyfriend who ties me up in private is just introducing a boyfriend.
There are, however, a few close friends with whom I’d like to discuss the philosophical struggle I’ve gone through as a kinky feminist. I really want to tell my roommate in particular. She’s possibly even more progressive and radical than I am, though, and so I want to be able to explain this to her properly; unlike her coming out as bi, me revealing my sexual preferences for being bound and hit is not something that can be expected to be received positively by a traditionally progressive person. It’s going to require some explanation, and I want to wait until this blog is further along so I can offer it to her as a resource for understanding.
So that’s where I am in regards to being open about my private kink. I’m also kinky in public, however, as a(n aspiring) sex worker, and that’s a whole different thing to be ‘out’ about. Well… it’s not entirely different. It originates in and intersects with my identity as a kinkster in private. It complicates being ‘out’ about what I do in the bedroom, because, while I wouldn’t tell my little brother or my childhood best friend about what I do with the door closed, I would tell them about what I do as a career, and the two are very much linked. Eventually, I want like to be completely ‘out’ about the sex work I do, because I think it has artistic and social merit, and I’m proud of it. This means I also have to aspire to being completely open about being kinky in private. I’m not afraid of their censure, but I’m just not sure how to be so open without crossing the ‘TMI’ line with those I love in completely non-sexual ways. I’ve decided to wait until I’ve really launched my career to ‘come out’ to everyone. That will give me time to figure out what is and isn’t appropriate to share and will also afford me something positive to show— art, and (hopefully) the acclaim that comes with it— for being a pervert.
13. Are you worried that someone you know will find this blog?
Let’s put it this way: it doesn’t keep me up at night. The sheer size of the internet pretty much guarantees that my mom isn’t going to stumble across this site by accident. If I’m ever a big enough deal for that to be a possibility, I’ll have told her by then anyway. And if, in the meantime, someone were to publicly link this persona to my vanilla self? Even if the possibility of that weren’t vanishingly small (there are few who know both my real name and my pseudonym and all of them are in the kink community, so they’d risk being outed themselves or ostracized from other perverts if they told), it wouldn’t worry me. As I said in response to question 12, being completely open about what I do is an eventual goal of mine. If I have to ‘come out’ earlier because someone finds this blog, it wouldn’t be a terrible thing.
So let’s pretend my mother does see this site tomorrow. I wouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed— I stand behind everything I’m doing here— and I don’t think she or my father would either. They would, however, repeatedly give me the ‘you’re ruining your future [as a normal person with a normal job]‘ talk, before finally coming to the crushing realization that I’m not going to be successful in the American middle-class, suburban, office-job kind of way. But they’ll have to deal with that sooner or later.
I can already hear some obnoxious commenter chiming in with the follow-up question, “Well why don’t you use your real name then?!,” so I’ll go ahead and answer that pre-emptively. First of all, the pseudonym has some redeeming artistic value (please refer back to question one). Secondly— well, fuck, I don’t exactly want to make it easy for my grandmother to see naked pictures of me. I also don’t want every schmo I’m ‘friends’ with on facebook to know the details of my sex life, because it’s not Johnny-from-the-fifth-grade’s fucking business (though if he comes to know it twenty years from now because I’m a superstar, well, awesome). Most importantly, though, I want to protect myself from the stalkers that will inevitably come with being sexual in the public eye.
