A Nod to Kasandra Marin

This is an extremely well written essay from 2004 by Kasandra Marin. I found it on an anti-porn site that I stumbled across when I combined the search terms “stripper” and “depression.”

I enjoy reading about other people’s experiences, and the more honest the writer is, the better I like it. Marin uses gallows humor in the best way possible. She says:

“Ok, let’s cut the shit here. Working in the ‘sex industry’ fucking blows. Suicide Girls get to have hairy armpits, and it’s fun to put your picture up on onlyundiesclub.com, but that’s playacting. Real sex work is about showing up at a millionaire crackhead’s house with a big box of Wet Ones, letting him bang the shit out of you for three days (even though he pulled a gun on you for sitting on the left-hand side of his bed), and then leaving with $1,900. No matter what the empowered academics in San Francisco pretend to believe, whoring—in any form—is hell, and the only reason women do it is to get money for coke NOW! If you want to try it out, be prepared to have nothing to show for years of suffering but a blown-out septum and some lumpy fake tits. It’s like extreme waitressing. You make hundreds of dollars a night licking ass and then you immediately spend it on drugs just to feel normal again.

“If you’re really, truly still interested, please at least do us a kindness and read this A–Z before your first day on the job.”

Yeah. I’m sorry she’s had a lousy time of it. But man! can she write.

For the record, I am not “anti-porn.” Neither am I full-on “pro-porn” — although many activists would have you believe you have to either love porn or hate it, I find the truth about anything is never that simple.

I feel like there’s a lot of pressure these days to be “sex-positive.” And at its roots, that’s a class issue. To say that no one who does sex work has a choice, that we are all trafficked and pimped and owned, well, that’s both ignorant and condescending.

On the other hand, to claim that Belle de Jour / Dr. Brooke Magnanti (an amazing woman, by the way) is the sex worker norm is naïve, and in its way, equally condescending.

The truth is somewhere in between, and everyone’s truth is slightly different.

Hope you all enjoy the essay.

Continue reading:

« Previous: Next: »
Bookmark and Share

Leave a Reply