$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution
368
$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution
368eBook
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Overview
$pread, an Utne Award–winning magazine by and for sex workers, was independently published from 2005 to 2011. This collection features enduring essays about sex work around the world, first-person stories that range from deeply traumatic to totally hilarious, analysis of media and culture, and fantastic illustrations and photos produced just for the magazine. The book also features the previously untold story of $pread and how it has built a wider audience in its posthumous years. What started as a community tool and trade magazine for the sex industry quickly emerged as the essential guide for people curious about sex work, for independent magazine enthusiasts, and for labor and civil rights activists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558618732 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Eliyanna Kaiser is a former executive editor of $pread magazine. She is currently raising her two children in Manhattan. In her spare time, she writes fiction.
Audacia Ray is the founder and executive director of the Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), a peer-led organization in New York that amplifies the voices of people in the sex trades through media, storytelling, and advocacy programs. At RedUP, she publishes the literary journal Prose & Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work. She is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in On Internet Sexploration and has contributed to many anthologies. She joined the $pread staff in 2004 and was an executive editor from 2005 to 2008.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Lulu
I guess the atmosphere that I've tried to create here is that I'm a friend first and a boss second, and probably an entertainer third.
— Michael Scott, The Office
Our workplaces say a lot about who we are. When you spend every workday in a place, it molds against you and becomes like a second home. In this chapter we are reminded that, just like nine-to-fivers, sex workers experience stupid bosses, arbitrary rules, and tricky relationships with coworkers. Dungeons, brothels, strip clubs, and other sex workplaces may be exoticized by the mainstream media, but in these pages they are tangible, everyday settings.
The legal Nevada brothel industry is the subject of Erin Siegal's stunning photo essay, "American Brothel." In providing a rare and intimate look at everyday life at Donna's Ranch, these striking photos illuminate a segment of the sex industry that intrigues us all.
Like the rest of the United States, the sex workplace is shaped by race, as Mona Salim illustrates in "Stripping While Brown." As one of only a few Indian women working in the New York City strip club scene, she describes how race informs her interactions with bosses, customers, and dancers alike — with consequences that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes upsetting, but always revealing of the racial hierarchies underlying our sexual desires.
Sex workers have a range of opinions about their jobs, as illustrated in $pread's regular point/counterpoint column, "Positions." In "Is Sex Work a Sacred Practice or Just a Job?" two pro-dommes explore whether sex work is spiritual in nature — or not. Meanwhile, in "No Sex in the Champagne Room?" a dancer and a prostitute debate the pros and cons of turning tricks in strip club VIP rooms.
For those sex workers working independently over the Internet, the solitary workplace is not without its challenges. In "Menstruation: Porn's Last Taboo," webcam pro Trixie Fontaine relates the social stigma around menstruation to her battle with camsites and credit card processors around showing menstruation porn.
On a more lighthearted note, in "Fucking the Movement," Eve Ryder describes her encounter with a client who asked her to dress as an anarchist protester. Meanwhile, Sheila McClear's "Diary of a Peep Show Girl" gives us a peek at daily life in the peep show worker's fishbowl "office."
All of these essays remind us that sex workers' lives aren't so alien. Vicariously bare and plainly told, the stories in this chapter reveal the sex workplace for what it is — no smokescreens, no media glitz. Welcome!
LULU worked on $pread during her undergraduate studies on all things related to design and art. Since leaving $pread, she has attempted to learn to cook, started a photographic series of food portraits, and is trying to see the world. When she is not working or in school, she likes European art, looking at cat pictures, and anything tech related.
CHAPTER 2INDECENT PROPOSAL: FUCKING THE MOVEMENT
Eve Ryder
ISSUE 1.2 (2005)
He says he decided to call me because I look like a college student and my ad seems smart. I'm not much into role-playing and it says so in my ad, so I balk a little when he asks if I take clothing requests.
He begins to describe what he's looking for: Would I wear jeans? Of course. How about safety pins on the jeans? Okay. What about a lot of safety pins? Um, okay. Do I have any ripped T-shirts? Sure ... Are any of them political? Wait, come again? What? When he asks me if I own one of "those black sweatshirts, with the attached hat thing," I start to laugh at him. You want me to wear a hoodie?
Then he begins to spill. He's an investment banker and ever since he watched the Seattle riots on TV in 1999, he's had a fantasy of fucking an anarchist protestor girl while she lectures him about being a big, bad capitalist pig. Oh, and would I mind not showering or putting on deodorant before our session? I tell him I was in Seattle for the WTO protests, although I'm not an anarchist, I'm a socialist. He stops me before I explain the difference; this he wants to hear in person.
The next day, I find myself in an office in the financial district, stripping out of some stinky protest ware I slept in the night before. My usual escort-perfected, hushed, fem-bot voice is replaced with tones of authority as I delineate the subtle political variances of the Left. "Socialism," I say, "teaches me that what you do on Wall Street has no use value. You only exist to extract surplus value for the ruling class."
I ask him if he knows what commodity fetishism is. He thinks it sounds dirty but guesses that I'm the commodity and he has a fetish for me. I tell him he is a stupid capitalist and that his freaky little protestor thing is a pathetic manifestation of his patriarchal and class privilege. He moans harder.
The date culminates with a solid round of spankings. "Bad protestor," he teases, "you smashed the Starbucks." He wants me to stay longer, but he hasn't paid for more than an hour and I tell him that, "I just can't rationalize being alienated from my labor. Oh, and by the way," I add, "you got it wrong. I'm not the commodity, but my time is, and it's up."
EVE RYDER is a former streetwalker and call girl who lives in New York City.
FLY has been a Lower East Side squatter since the late 80s. She is a painter and commix artist, illustrator, punk musician, sometimes muralist, and teacher. She is the author of CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM!, a collection of her zines and comics, and PEOPS, a collection of 196 portraits and stories. Fly was a recipient of a 2013 Acker Award for Excellence Within the Avant-Garde. She is currently working on a multi-media project called UnReal Estate; a Late Twentieth Century History of Squatting in the Lower East Side.
CHAPTER 3POSITIONS: IS SEX WORK A SACRED PRACTICE OR JUST A JOB?
Vero Rocks and Tasha Tasticake
ISSUE 3.1 (2007)
These guys come in and they want something they can't ask for. They try, though, each of them awkwardly trying to name the ineffable: "GFE," "sensual," "good personality," "release," "relaxation." They say they want all kinds of things, but we know why they are really here: to connect with genitals. They want to jerk off. Or get jerked off. Or get hard and go jerk off at home. Or fuck to get off. Or get someone else off. It's all about the genitals.
The word "genitals" comes from some old Latin root (gen-) about beginnings, like generate, or genesis. Genitals represent the creation of me, and by extension, they represent everything I could possibly create. Religious impulse originates in the awe we experience when confronted by our own mortality. I could make a million references to ancient practices of sacred prostitution, but that was a million years ago and who knows whether all those ethnocentric anthropologists got anything right anyway. I want to stay in this moment.
Right here is a man whose senses have been sealed off by a lifestyle of eating in steak houses and drinking martinis. Sacred prostitutes are not part of his reality. He thinks she needs to be young, or tall, or clean-shaven, or whatever. That doesn't matter. He doesn't have to know that by visiting a sex worker, he's receiving a sacrament. He is connecting with the origin of his being and his own capacity to be creative.
The more clearly I hold this model for sex work in my mind, and believe that I am a priestess and my clients disciples, the more meaningful and interesting my work becomes. It can be hard to maintain this perspective when there is so much social pressure to see sex as antithetical to the sacred. I work toward a different vision of sex in society. I hold my consciousness as a single point of resistance in the sea of the collective. This is my spiritual practice.
— Tasha Tasticake
Is the pursuit of money sacred? Honey, I'll call anything sacred if you pay me enough, but after our time is up it's up to you to decide if I believe it.
Sex workers, like other workers, expect to be afforded the ability to be cognizant, self-determining, and real. We're not simply the fictitious airbrushed images of the 72 dpi screen, or the anal sluts of video release, or unfortunate creatures destined for every bad thing that happens. We exist as other people who wake up in the morning and ride the train — people you could know.
In my work, I use a Superior Female persona, among others. But I maintain that, since I choose both to work and to construct that identity, I am not somehow naturally predestined for either. My innate self doesn't have to hearken to a higher power to play games for an hour. I can get down and dirty and take the illusion off while on the subway home. I'm happy to keep that balance.
When some of us define their work as "sacred" off the clock, a few things happen:
1. Our regular humanity is compromised by the need for a spiritual dimension. If you have to apply a higher power to make doing sex work OK, that's a problem. It should be OK whether you're getting "blessed" or not.
2. Sex work becomes a calling, not a job. Suddenly, regular girls and guys aren't qualified. I thought half the point was that regular people, not unearthly uber-creatures, but people with a bit of huevos and business sense could go make some scratch.
3. Workers lose their separate, personal identities. It's easy to laugh at someone who, both in and out of work, identifies as a goddess, sacred whore, or chakra-channeling medium, but it's also worrisome. It means that the identity that johns use to read that person manifests outside of work hours, so what the goddess is and what she's selling are sleeping double to a crowded, single bed.
You can argue that the way you deliver sex heals, enlightens, and brings positive change. But so do books, LSD, and a well-received membership to the Church of Scientology. Sure, some sex is sacred some of the time, but all sex can't be sacred all of the time. Claiming to sell a sacred exchange is necessarily selling its illusion.
— Vero Rocks
TASHA TASTICAKE argued that sex work is a sacred practice in the Positions column for Issue 3.1 of $pread.
VERO ROCKS is a New York City-based, professional dildo-wearing ass fucker.
KATIE FRICAS is a cartoonist and illustrator in New York. She drew for $pread from 2007 to 2010. Her comics have appeared in WW3 Illustrated and Juicy Mother. In 2014 her comic Terry + Terry was named best comic by people named Terry.
CHAPTER 4AMERICAN BROTHEL: A PHOTO-ESSAY
Text and photos by Erin Siegal
ISSUE 2.4 (2007)
Donna's Ranch is a brothel in Wells, Nevada, one of about twenty state-sanctioned cathouses across the state. The small whorehouse has become a staple of the rural town's diminishing economy. Although brothels are technically legal in Nevada (in counties with populations of under 400,000, which excludes Carson County, where Las Vegas is located), Wells is one of only eleven counties that have embraced the state's acceptance of the world's oldest profession.
With local industries shifting overseas and the slow demise of Nevada's mining economy, the town of Wells relies heavily on the taxable income it receives from Donna's Ranch. The brothel regularly donates money to local causes such as Little League, girls' soccer, military organizations, and community events. The brothel logo, however, is not displayed alongside those of other sponsors.
Depending on their location, brothels are required to pay anywhere from $200 to $100,000 in annual licensing fees. Each individual prostitute must also register with the government and pay a multitude of fees to the State. Nevada state law requires licensed prostitutes to take weekly STD tests, practice mandatory condom use, and get monthly blood tests for HIV/AIDS, all of which must be paid for by the workers. Prostitutes must also pay for tools of the trade, such as condoms, lube, and baby wipes. "Trick sheets," the plain, white flat sheets that cover the bed during dates, are provided by the brothel, though each prostitute must launder her own bedding. "The washing machine is the most important thing in this house," jokes owner Geoff Arnold. "If it goes down, we go down."
Local governments can establish trade regulations independent from the state, prohibit houses of prostitution in certain areas, and impose restrictions on prostitutes' lives. In many counties, severe rules have been instated to maintain a dramatic separation between the working prostitutes and the general population. Workers from the Wells brothels are banned from being in town after 5 p.m. without a sheriff or brothel manager as an escort. They cannot go to restaurants, bars, grocery stores, pharmacies, or even to the doctor without a chaperone.
After signing up to work for a certain period of time, ranging from a few days to a few weeks, women move into their bedrooms, where they will both work and live for the duration of their shifts. Girls are generally allowed to decorate their rooms as they see fit.
As a smaller brothel with between three and eleven working women, Donna's clientele is made up of roughly 90 percent truckers and 10 percent miners and cowboys from neighboring towns. To attract business, girls utilize CB radios to talk to truckers passing by on the interstates. Donna's also offers free showers, coffee, and tea to truckers, an enticing offer given that most truck stops charge fees for washroom use.
Each girl expresses herself via her clothing, and workers' outfits range from lingerie to tropical sarongs and minidresses. One by one, each woman steps forward, introduces herself simply by stating her name, and tries to maintain eye contact with the john. Any other kind of appeal from the prostitutes — a wink, lick of the lips, or even one additional word outside of the standard greeting — is regarded as "dirty hustling." "Dirty hustling" is deeply frowned on by working girls, and can be cause for infighting. After the john chooses the woman he wants, they retreat to her room to negotiate services and a price agreeable to both parties.
Some brothel workers report feeling little control over their working conditions, and dissatisfaction with the permanent record created for licensed prostitutes by the state of Nevada. The requirement for only prostitutes — and not clients — to undergo background and health tests is also fundamentally discriminatory, making the safety of the johns a higher priority than that of the working girls. While prostitutes set their own prices for services, they are generally required to split their income fifty-fifty with the house. Because of their official status as independent contractors and not employees, brothel prostitutes are unable to receive unemployment, retirement, or health benefits. However, the strict rules imposed by both the brothels and the state inform the argument that working conditions should preclude the women from being legally classified as independent contractors.
ERIN SIEGAL is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and the author of the books Finding Fernanda and The US Embassy Cables: Adoption Fraud in Guatemala, 1987–2010. She was $pread's first art director from 2004 to 2007. She currently lives in Tijuana, Mexico.
CHAPTER 5STRIPPING WHILE BROWN
Mona Salim
ISSUE 5.4 (2011)
When I was first hired to dance, the DJ asked me where I was from. "India," I said. He told me that he would have guessed "South American or Middle Eastern," and that the club had never had an Indian girl before. "You're going to do well. You're exotic and that's going to be an asset for the club."
It's been almost two years since that day, and every day, I am confronted with just how prominent our racial and ethnic identities are on the job. People talk about stripping as a form of sex work. I want to talk about it here as a form of race work.
A gentlemen's club is not just gendered, it's deeply racialized. And classed. Race is an essential dimension of how the strip club is experienced by dancers and customers.
As a woman of color, I've been made hyper-aware (by customers, management, and coworkers) of the fact that my racial identity isn't secondary to my identity as a woman. I'm not even sure I can separate those dimensions of who I am. In the literature I've read on stripping, it seems that all too often race gets "added on" to a larger discussion of gender and sexuality. I have trouble trying to compartmentalize pieces of my identity; now I'm Muslim, now a woman, now middle-class. The reality is, all of those pieces are imbricated, inextricable, and inflect themselves in my work and my life. Bringing race to the center of my analysis is a way to displace the dominance of gender and sex in popular discussions of sex work. It's an exploration of what exactly transnational feminists mean when we talk about intersectionality.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "$pread"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, and Audacia Ray.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: A Short History of $preadRachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, and Audacia Ray
Includes History of $pread timeline with images
WORKPLACE
Introduction by Lulu
Indecent Proposal: Fucking the Movement
Eve Ryder
Illustration by Fly
Positions: Is Sex Work a Sacred Practice or Just a Job?
Vero Rocks and Tasha Tasticake
American Brothel: A Photo Essay Photos and text by Erin Siegal
Stripping While Brown
Mona Salim
Positions: No Sex in the Champagne Room?
Mary Taylor and Carol Leigh
Menstruation: Porn’s Last Taboo
Trixie Fontaine
Includes a photo from the author’s website.
Diary of a Peepshow Girl
Sheila McClear, writing as Chelsea O’Neill
LABOR
Introduction by Radical Vixen
Positions: Can We Justify Working for Pimps?
Anonymous and Eve Ryder
The Sex Workplace: No Day Without an Immigrant
Rachel Aimee
Respite From the Streets: A Place to Rest for Mexico City’s Elderly Prostitutes
An Interview with Carmen Muñoz, by Marisa Brigati
Includes a photo by the author
Black Tale: Women of Color in the Porn Industry
Mireille Miller--Young
Includes a photo courtesy of the author
City of Red Lights: Mumbai’s Boomtown of Migrant Laborers
Svati P. Shah
FAMILY AND RELATIONSHIPS
Introduction by Kevicha Echols
Wives
Jenni Russell
Keeping Her Off the Pole: My Daughter’s Right to Choose
Katherine Frank
Hot Topic: People Who Date Sex Workers
Peter, Natalie, Allen, Bob C., and Fred
I (Heart) Affection, and Other Forms of Emotional Masochism
Hawk Kinkaid
Includes an illustration by the author
The Coldest Profession
Eliyanna Kaiser
Illustration by Cristy C. Road
Hell’s Kitchen: Growing Up Loving a Working Mother
Syd V.
Illustration by Sadie Lune
CLIENTS
Introduction by Sarah Elspeth Patterson
Cher John
Mirha--Soleil Ross
Illustration by Molly Crabapple
Indecent Proposal: Bento Bitch
Miguel
Illustration by Fly
Empower: In Defense of Sex Tourism
Chanelle Gallant
Haikus for Mistress Octavia
Jimmy Bob
Honest John: An Interview with Kaveh Zahedi
Kristie Alshaibi
Photo by Kaveh Zahedi
Hot Topic: Would You Steal From a Client?
Moxy, Violine Verseau, and Jessica
Indecent Proposal: Tiny Town
Audacia Ray
Illustration by Fly
Healthy Hooker: Condoms 101
Dorothy Schwartz and Eliyanna Kaiser
The Last Outcall
Fabulous
Illustration by Cristy C. Road
VIOLENCE
Introduction by Brendan Michael Conner
Paradise Lost, Paradox Found
Cha Cha
Tsunami Report: Sex Workers in South Thailand
Empower Foundation
Epidemic of Neglect: Trans Women Sex Workers and HIV
Mack Friedman
The Unicorn and the Crow
Photos and text by Prin Roussin
Escort Rape Case Causes Uproar in Philadelphia
Catherine Plato
Bodies Across Borders
Juhu Thukral and Melissa Ditmore
RESISTANCE
Introduction by Bhavana Karani
I Have Nothing to Say
Lynne Tansey
Illustration by Star St.Germaine
The Cutting Edge: On Sex Workers, Serial Killers, and Switchblades
Sarah Stillman
Fashion with a Function: The Aphrodite Project
Photo and text by Erin Siegal
2 Young 2B Forgotten
Brendan Michael Conner, writing as Will Rockwell
Healthy Hooker: Cold and Flu Season
Eliyanna Kaiser, with a letter from Tracy Quan
Alphabet Hookers: B is for Bobbi
Morgan Ellis
Illustration by Star St.Germaine
MEDIA AND CULTURE
Introduction by Damien Luxe
Sex Work and the City: An Interview with Tracy Quan
Rachel Aimee
Up in Buck’s Business: An Interview with Buck Angel
Audacia Ray
Includes a photo of Buck Angel.
Intercourses: An Interview with Pro-Choice Activist Joyce Arthur
Eliyanna Kaiser
The “DC Madam” In Her Own Words: An Interview with Deborah Jeanne
Palfrey
Radical Vixen
The Real Media Whores: Uniting Against Sensationalism in the Wake of
Spitzergate
Caroline Andrews
Dirty Words: An Interview with Craig Seymour
Brendan Michael Conner, writing as Will Rockwell