$pread Magazine

admin — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:43:00 +0000

There is perhaps no profession as stereotyped, demonized, discriminated against, glamorized, unregulated and controversial as sex work. As a person who lives in a liberal bubble, I was shocked to hear a segment on a local radio station the other day that asked male listeners if they would ever date a stripper. The callers’ responses were appalling; one particularly vicious man called in and proclaimed he’d “rather date a murderer than a stripper.”

This is why $pread Magazine is so important. Created by three women, it lives up to it’s tagline of “illuminating the sex industry” in a smart, realistic and entertaining way. Its content is comprehensive - including stories, news, interviews, film/music/book reviews, art, classifieds, a resource guide, comics, advice and more.

Features in $pread include those giving practical advice, such as “The Healthy Hooker” who, in this issue, was about condom use. The article gives the basics on using male and female condoms, as well as advice on what to do when or if (for a variety of reasons) you do not use one. Strategies include “getting him off quickly” (so as to diminish length of time exposed to risk), “stay wet and relaxed” (to avoid tears, which increase risk of infection) and “get immediate treatment” (from a doctor).

Other features offered insight into specific types of sex work. The cover story, “American Brothel, A Photo Essay," features the working women of a legal Nevada whorehouse. The photographs were candid, and the story was interesting. For instance, did you know that some brothels, by way of earning taxable income, support the economies of several small towns where the mining livelihood has died? Yet, the prostitutes aren’t allowed in the towns after 5pm without a sheriff or brothel manager as an escort. They also can’t go to a doctor, at any time, without an escort.

Diverse, global and down-to-earth, $pread is informative for a wide range of readers: sex workers, feminists, johns, academics, activists and beyond. Whether self-claimed or not, this is a feminist magazine and learning more about the real lives of the women and men in this industry should be a part of every feminist’s mission.

Written by: Amy Miller, June 29th 2007

The Sex Workers' Art Show (3/1/2007)

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:07:00 +0000

Abbey Pub

Chicago, Illinois

The Sex Workers' Art Show performed its last show of the season to a full crowd at Chicago's Abbey Pub on March 1, 2007. The performances I experienced were gorgeous, funny, embarrassing, heart-breaking, hopeful, offensive and affirming. And all in a good way. The burlesque teacher who performed at least 12,000 table dances to work her way through college and grad school taught a woman from the audience to perform a striptease and twirl her tassles. Amber Dawn, the retired prostitute, read another of her short stories based on her experiences. There was a song that explored black masculinities. Annie Oakley, the show's founder, promoter, organizer and den mother, is a gracious host. The Abbey was packed, but she made it feel like a chill house party. Even when she asked the audience to please put their video cameras away already and f**k off, she still came across as laid-back.

In addition to being beautiful and trendy in a sex-radical way, this was a taboo-busting show. One piece in particular stands out for me in its power and horror. A woman wears a scarf on her head with a red cross. She rolls a condom onto a dildo attached to a gun handle and performs fellatio while the Ave Maria plays in the background. Afterwards she strips – doesn't tease – and, when the floor and balcony are silent (the only point in the entire show in which this would happen), she speaks into the microphone: "I will suck your cock all you want if that will end the war." I feel ashamed. I don't know why. In her introduction to the show, Annie Oakley noted that we are a porn consuming – porn glutted – culture, but we prefer that the objects/subjects of our consumption remain silent. This show breaks that taboo, generally. In the performance I just described, it is horrifically apparent that there can be negative aspects to sex work even in a sex-radical appreciation and that enjoying sex does not diminish the danger and pain that accompanies sex and sex work for so many women (and men).

As dangerous and alienating as sex work can be, the performance described above is infused with agency and critique. Annie Oakley pointed out the deep criticism of war, capitalist production, cultural and sexual imperialism at work in this piece. When C. Snatch Z. (the performer of this piece) offers her body for sexual service, Annie Oakely reads this as both a signal of the futility of responses to the war machine as well as a well-aimed jab at the “male ego and need that drive war.” Though not advertised as a necessarily feminist show, these performances provide a level of critique and support that volumes of academic feminist theory cannot so easily and immediately convey.

In our email interview, Annie Oakley asserts that she has been a feminist since she knew the meaning of the term, and this feminism infuses all of her work; she has always been a feminist sex worker, and she defies anyone to challenge that. Further, her relationship to sex work incorporates a capitalist critique that is often overlooked or undertheorized even from within feminism. She reminds me that “In a capitalist system, ALL work is economic coercion.” From there, she explored ways of making sex work less oppressively exploitative for sex workers, and then critiqued the proliferation of pro-pleasure language that too often enters feminist debates about sex work. Sex work is just that, “work” and sex workers do not work for their pleasure, they work for the pay. When the feminist debate surrounding sex work is characterized as a polarity between censorship and pleasure, it cannot accurately account for sex workers’ experiences of the sex industry. There is more "work" in sex work than many feminists recognize, and a capitalist analysis might be more beneficial than one of pleasure.

Both the show and Annie Oakley’s detailed analyses (shared with me by personal communication) were deeply challenging for both feminists and non-feminists and the Sex Workers’ Art Show offers an intellectually engaging, non-‘academic’ perspective vital to discussions of sex, work and sex work itself.

Written by: kristina grob, April 10th 2007

sex radical

$pread Magazine

The Sex Workers' Art Show (3/1/2007)