Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up: workshop in Toronto June 12

Co-conspirator Juliet November and I will be co-facilitating a workshop called Building Sexual Consent From the Ground Up on Saturday June 12, 2-4 pm as part of the Trigger Festival in Toronto. You should come! It’s free, accessible and childcare is provided all day. Rad! (More info on Trigger and the day-long workshops being offered.)

Juliet and I are doing this workshop for a couple of reasons. First because both of us have been really affected by violence within the queer community. I am sure you have too, either as a survivor as the friend of one. From times we’ve listened to our friends work through the shame and self-hatred of a drunken encounter that wasn’t entirely consensual, to not feeling like we could say No to sex with a partner indefinitely, to having nowhere to turn to get protection from a violent partner because they’d risk deportation. Don’t we love each other enough to do something about this?

Second because we believe in developing non-state community responses to this violence. We believe in taking care of each other, reducing violence and holding people who’ve caused harm accountable–without inviting in the racist, homophobic, capitalist, sexist, ableist police or social services, for example. Our foundational vision is one where queers and trans people rely on each other–not state systems of control, containment and exploitation–to develop solutions to the problem of violence, understanding that violence as part of, and intimately connected to state and international violence.

Third, we are sex workers and know that our skills and strategies around establishing consent (individually, collectively, verbally, non-verbally) are diverse and fierce. We want to share them with our community!
Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up

Learn from skilled sex workers how to better negotiate sexual consent and make great sex happen. This no-touch workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to gain practical skills in negotiating sex and help us uncover our individual and collective strengths and styles around sexual negotiation. We will talk about how to get the love, sex and intimacy we want, resist stigmas against sex and whores and how to end partner/date violence in our communities! All are welcome!

Saturday June 12, 2010 / 2-4 PM / The Raging Spoon, 761 Queen st West (near Bathurst) / Free!

Posted: June 7th, 2010 under Creative Resistance, Violence - No Comments.

Mourning a client and a dear friend Aaron

Dear friends of the sweet and sexy Aaron,

I wish I could be there with all of you today to celebrate the life and wildness of the best client a hooker could ever have: Aaron S, and of course, his constant companion, little Aaron. Together, they were VERY badly behaved – just the way I liked it!

My name is Lusty Day and for the past two years I had the great privilege of sharing intimacy, friendship, and hot sex with Aaron. I was really nervous when we first met about learning about how to communicate with and please Aaron, but he was the most gentle, patient, appreciative and dirty-minded lover and client I could ask for. I first started working for him when I was still quite new to being a sex worker. At the time, I was really struggling with telling my friends, my family and my community about the work I was doing. Aaron taught me that there was nothing shameful or wrong about buying and selling sexual services. Plus, that guy was so persuasive he was paying me half the rate I charge other clients and we were having twice the fun! We had some great times together rocking his wheel chair around the living room. He taught me so very much about the power of eye contact and a great laugh – both instrumental to having great sex.

More than client and sex worker, Aaron and I also became great friends and allies. He always offered me a place to sleep if I was feeling down, and even though I suspected that he had an ulterior motive in asking me to sleep over, Aaron likewise cared deeply about me and all his friends and was always looking out for us. He was a fierce fighter for people’s freedom. Despite numerous difficulties that the ableist world threw at him, Aaron was always out attending and leading community events and rallies. His legacy will live on in the struggle for rights and respect for people with disabilities, for queer people, and for sex workers, to name but a few.

In honour of Aaron today, I’m wearing the purple lovely g-string panties he once gave me and telling everyone his most important advice: have sex! It meant so much to him and little Aaron that people felt pleasure and happiness. I am sad to miss the gathering but I’m sure that all the love and light you raise will shine for Aaron all the way over to Indonesia where I am sitting here loving him still.

Big love and whorelicious hugs to all of you,

Lusty Day

Posted: April 8th, 2010 under Client Stories, Whore Love - No Comments.

Desiree Alliance Conference, Here Comes Lusty!

I’m so excited, because I’m going to Vegas! Desiree Alliance is holding its annual conference July 25-30, 2010, with the theme “Working Sex: Power, Practice, and Politics.” I’ve always guiltily loved Vegas, and now I can’t think of a better reason to go there than to spend time with a few hundred other sex workers.

My workshop proposal for the business development track was recently accepted. Here is the description, please email me with any comments or ideas you might have to make it even better:

Working It Down Under: How to Escort Successfully in Australia

Interested in working and holidaying in Australia? In some parts of Australia, sex work is decriminalized. Come to this workshop to learn from a fellow traveler how to take advantage of the rare opportunity to escort legally and safely in this beautiful and friendly country. Topics include: how to apply for visas to Australia; best practice tips for maximizing your fun and funds in brothels, including how to score clients, charge for extras, and keep drama to a minimum; how to work within the law; how to access health care for sex workers; managing your income between countries, including income tax restrictions; dealing with advertising guidelines in print and online publications; analysis of racism and transphobia in the Australian sex industry and what it means for your business; negotiating big-money clients; how to turn your perhaps ordinary accent into $$$; introduction to Australian sex worker organizations and cultural groups; doing self-care and dealing with homesickness when traveling especially while working in the industry. The workshop will focus on full service work in brothels as well as independent GFE escorting. Your questions and experience welcome!

Posted: March 24th, 2010 under Selling Sex: Biz Talk - No Comments.

Organizing beyond Facebook against violence to sex workers

The last few weeks have been full of rage and mobilization for sex workers, as a group called “Kill Your Hooker so You Don’t Have to Pay Her” appeared a few weeks back and was quickly gaining members.The group has since been taken down, as somebody tells somebody tells somebody to report the site as offensive and eventually it was taken down. It feels good to have this small victory, but there are many many more similar sites. This kind of whore hatred is everywhere on the internet. One of my clients was once showing me a t-shirt online he wanted to buy that said “I Love My Hooker” but when he searched the apparel company’s website using the search terms “t-shirt” and “hooker” all this awful stuff came up as I watched in horror: Good hookers are dead hookers; Nobody plans to kill a hooker in their hotel room; Dirty Hookers Fishing Team You’ll definitely catch something (and that’s a real sport fishing business, grrr); etc etc I won’t go on. Can you imagine what other group of people you can openly joke about killing? Whose bodies are considered so worthless and not human? Well I can think of a few: people with disabilities, aboriginal women, transpeople… sadly I can think of all sorts of sites and jokes that make light of violence against us and others. I want to make a stand against these overt expressions of violence and the deaths they produce. But we gotta remember that violence against sex workers is not just about “stranger danger” – ie evil and random frat boys joking about our deaths online, or phantom mystery clients who chop us up. Sex workers face intimate partner violence (which has more ramifications if you are used to police violence and criminalization of your work, especially for people of colour), spiritual and psychic violence generated by whorephobia (since we often have to hide our work and we don’t have access to our histories of survival under colonialization, especially for Aboriginal people), state violence at the hands of government, police and the medical establishment, and I could go on and on. But I will save that for a later post on unpacking our ideas about risk for sex workers (but you could start with this amazing piece It’s You I’m Afraid Of by Juliet November.)

It did all feel a bit weird, though, to have everyone in my community mobilizing to send complaints to Facebook. Usually I am getting angry messages about the way that Facebook is censoring breast feeding photos, or gender pronoun options, or sex positive groups, or queer performances, etc. I guess that’s the old chestnut of freedom of speech. How do we want that right served up? Well, the learning and work I have been doing recently about advocating for decriminalization over legalization and regulation, as well as the reading and thinking I have been doing about the Prison Industrial Complex, including the inefficacy of police and state responses to violence in my community is directing me to question, more and more, the amount of time and energy I spend convincing the capitalist and governmental powers that be to hear me, or represent me, or provide services to me. All those things are important, no doubt. But I’m dreaming about other responses that build the sex worker community, that fortify us and that speak to our differences across race, class, gender, and ability, that make it possible for us to confront and transform violence in our lives.

Read more »

Posted: February 16th, 2010 under Anti-racism, Violence - No Comments.

Advertising Discrimination for Sex Workers

Dear advertisers,

I’ve edited my text from “lips” to “L1PS”, suggested explosions and release instead of orgasms, and implied I offer “erotic services” instead of plain ol’ sex. I have done all this, and more, to meet your needs, the needs of online websites and newspaper companies who gladly take my money to run my sex work advertisements (and who often charge me heaps more than any other category of advertisement) but who don’t respond to my needs for responsible and accurate representation of what I offer and what I don’t offer to prospective clients. Partly this is about following the law, but partly it is about you making a buck. “This is not large commercial brothels, this is individual sex workers being charged several times more than other advertisers. There seems to be no reason for this difference.” says Janelle Fawkes, CEO, Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association. It is discrimination because we are sex workers. Plain and simple.

This is about my safety, people. And that has me hopping mad today. You will hear from me again.

Love,
Lusty Day

Does any other businessperson have the difficulty in reaching appropriate clients that sex workers do? I spend a great deal of time crafting my advertisments, researching escort websites, taking accurate photos and ensuring that my business takes place in a discreet manner to protect my clients, minors, and my business (i.e. in areas of the Internet safeguarded by parental controls, and with appropriate adult content warnings, and accessible via iPhones and other mobile devices so clients can access my photos more discreetly). And yet! All forces seem against me when I attempt to reach clients responsibly. Read more »

Posted: January 11th, 2010 under Selling Sex: Biz Talk - No Comments.