these stories sell themselves!

Apparently there is a reporter from Channel 9's A Current Affair ringing around to various sex worker organisations, possibly others as well, wanting to do a story on the horror of sex work and the poor, broken, traumatised whores trying to leave it.

A Current Affair is basically The National Enquirer, sans Aliens, on television - but it's a popular show and engages the most sordid mentality of the average devoted television viewer.

She's been pitching the story in various ways but seems to be most attached to the idea of exit and retraining for battered whores and has been disregarding the advice of the most awesome sex worker orgs that have informed her exit and retraining in not "up there" on the average whore's list of priorities. She's flat-out not interested in hearing, because apparently these stories just sell themselves! The hook is the personal stories.

But not the personal stories of freedom and autonomy, and certainly not the personal stories that discuss the fact of it being just a job and certainly not the personal stories criticising the stigma of society making the sex worker's life difficult, as opposed to the industry itself.

No, if you want your voice heard as a sex worker, you better make sure you are broken so you can be exploited and exposed on national television! Of course they'll darken the lights and blur your face but they'll also wheedle out in exquisite detail all the horror and pain of your life and cut and edit to make sure it's as garish and exploitative as possible. Oh, and you have to be an ex-whore, or one desperately wanting to leave, just to be sure that the audience can actually sympathise with you.

One major sex worker org revealed that after all the workshops they do, they have the attendees fill out an evaluation form, which includes queries about what services they'd like. One option is support to leave the industry. The org believes only one or two out of a hundred have ever ticked that option.

Another worker, who'd been doing a research project, stated that the only person they met who expressed a desire to do retraining during an interview she met at a organisation focused on exit and retraining and who later confessed in private that she had only said that because she felt she had to for the org to support her to do further upskilling. She wanted the upskilling because her real issues as a mature worker was finding other ways - like the internet, which computer skills would help her with - to advertise, rather than compete with younger girls in parlours.

So apart from the fact that this would suggest an actual exit and retraining project created shame and stigma for workers accessing the service - not really the objective, is it? If you don't fit the little retraining box by being duly ashamed and humbled by your past and wanting so desperately to escape it then no upskilling for you! - it would seem that once again, as is so bloody typical with the industry, we're encountering a straight dichotomy. You either want to stay in the industry, or you want desperately to leave, and there's no inbetween or overlap at all.
Furthermore, the idea of specific exit and retraining for sex workers creates and reinforces the misbelief that sex workers are uneducated, disempowered, weak, unskilled and pathetic and desperately need help because the only thing involved in sex work is lying on your back and spreading your legs.

It's reflective of the general and widespread misunderstanding of what the industry even involves. My capacity to engage with people and socialise increased hugely through the industry, which I entered quite shy and insecure. I'm also sensitive to other people's shyness and capable of far more assertiveness. These aren't, by a long shot, the only skills that I have gained as worker, nor the only skills I have to self-define and specify to others who ask stupid questions and certainly not the only skills that are transferable to other industries and work forces.

I'm at that point now where all the skills involved in sex work seem so bloody obvious to me I'm amazed other people can't see them off the bat. Everything from handling money to negotiating services to advertising to managing clients - a huge range of practical skills are routinely utterly disregarded and denied. You can only be a whore if you're a victim, apparently. This insistence on reducing our jobs to passive activity is one of the contributing factors that keep whores down. Our work gets no respect, just as we don't. It's far more than sex simply being a skill - and really, considering the way sex is marketed as a skill in books and other tools designed for the average folk, the blindspot folks seem to have when it comes to the industry really is a shocker and speaks volumes about the stigma focused at it - it's everything else that's organised around the sex.

What pisses me off most of all is these people who do these stories claim they want to represent us, to take our actual stories out there - but they're not interested in talking to us unless we fit whatever preconception they're bringing with them.

Quite frankly, as someone who works both in the mainstream business industry and the sex industry, the most horrible thing about entering the average workforce is having to lie about my sex work experience and conceal it. There are gaps in my resume and I have to conceal significant parts of my life - which I hate - as well as let all the fantastic skills and experience I've gained simply remain unstated, as though they don't exist. That's disempowering. And that's not an experience created by the industry, but by all the puritanical fucktards who dare still to judge sex workers.