$pread

The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution

Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, Audacia Ray

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781558618732
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

"A fascinating collection from a group of courageous women who created the first publication to explore sex work in a compelling and intelligent way." —Candida Royalle $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.

WORKPLACE

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.

INDECENT 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.”

Illustration by Fly.

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.

POSITIONS: 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.

Illustration by Katie Fricas.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: The Sex Worker Rights Movement in the Early 2000s—A Primer
• A Short History of $pread
• PART I: WORKPLACE
• PART II: LABOR
• PART III: FAMILY AND RELATIONSHIPS
• PART IV: CLIENTS
• PART V: VIOLENCE
• PART VI: RESISTANCE
• PART VII: MEDIA AND CULTURE
• The History of $pread: A Timeline
• Acknowledgments
• Also Available from Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press