The Thread: Look What You Made Me Do
Can a person with some agency ever claim victimization, or are agency and victimhood a binary?
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Posts Tagged: sex work
How Amazon Is Making Sex a Dirty Word
“[A]s long as we retain all of these conflicting ideas of what sex is, and what it means to us, sex will always sell—until it’s inconvenient.”
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The Peep King’s Legacy: A Family Portrait
The day after Hugh Hefner died, I received a text from my sister that our grandfather was starring alongside James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal in HBO’s new series, The Deuce.
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Hooters Chicken
I applied for a job at Hooters on a dare a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday. A shoe salesman who worked across from me at the mall told me he’d pay me twenty dollars to apply.
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STRIPPERDADDY
My thoughts hovered above the scene pondering the reasons why and time felt like the waves of a puddle lapping against cracked asphalt.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
...moreStories about Sex Workers, Written by Sex Workers
Rumpus contributor and BFF Antonia Crane has written an episode for Driven—a web series created by Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott—called “Poppy,” that is centered on authentic representation of sex work. Antonia writes, This episode is our dream episode because it accurately reflects a sex worker’s story of intimacy and the possibility of contentment with a diverse, trans […]
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Multitudes: (Re) Writing Mother
I like to listen to my mother’s voice; the sounds she makes in an English-Korean mashup; we are each the other’s dictionary.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jade Sharma
Jade Sharma discusses her first novel Problems, the complicated feelings that came with debuting to rave reviews, and her writing and editing processes.
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
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Womanly Arts
This is the hearth. This is the knot. This is home. The woman bent over a sewing machine, the steady hum of the motor, the needle rising and sinking.
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The Truth About Lying
My gut is a red, fiery drum, a beacon of rosy light. My instinct to run is a bright radioactive pink arrow, a bloody blade. I was correct.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
...moreFriendless Female Sex Workers
Not only are these characters destined to die in the cautionary tales and to endure marriages to self-congratulatory men in the redemptions tales, they don’t even have anyone to miss them when they succumb to these fates At Hazlitt, Alana Massey writes about the baseless trope in films of the depraved and friendless female sex […]
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Amber Dawn
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?
...moreSummer of Love
Charlotte Shane, best known for her newsletter portraying her life as a sex worker and philosopher, Prostitute Laundry, now has a column at Fusion. Her collected writings are also available in her newest release, N.B.
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Mary Wept over Sex Worker’s Rights
At The Believer, Shannon Tien caught up with Chester Brown, graphic novelist and author of the newly released Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, which Tien describes as “essentially a layman’s interpretation of the Bible.” Mary Wept is a collection of graphic adaptations of Biblical scenes involving prostitution, including Brown’s interpretation of Mary as a […]
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #52: Lauren Wissot in Conversation with Stoya
Edited by queer porn performer and LGBTQ activist Jiz Lee, Coming Out Like a Porn Star is a wide-ranging compilation of answers to questions only sex industry pros seem to get. (And if you guessed, “Does your mother know?” to be at the top of the queries you are correct.) Since the announcement of the […]
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My First Year as a Dominatrix Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Myself
What is a career, and how does it define us?
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Shark’s Teeth
My kink used to be my Deepest Darkest secret, and now it is an integrated part of my everyday life.
...moreThe Art of the Prostitute
Joseph Nechvatal writes for Hyperallergic on the Musée d’Orsay’s “splendid but miserable” collection of art from around Paris’s Belle Époque, a collection that focuses specifically on the representation of prostitutes in the period’s cultural climate.
...moreFringe Benefits
A pervasive, and frustrating, myth is that dancing pays enough for us to stop complaining—that we get paid enough to be cool with however we’re treated. But that’s not true. For the Times, Rumpus friend and contributor Antonia Crane details the discrimination and exploitation professional strippers often encounter in the workplace.
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It Hurts Too Much: The Emotional Reality of Trans Murders in 2015
Are you sad? I hope so. Are you angry? You need to be. We need you to share this work.
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My Daughter at the Blue Venus
My daughter has finished experimenting with chemicals. Now she is experimenting with life.
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Lessons I Learned as a Dominatrix: 10 Things That Don’t Exist
They say you can take the girl out of the dungeon, but you can’t take the dungeon out of the girl.
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Beautiful Things That Happen in the Dark: A Conversation with Eon McKai
Antonia Crane talks to Vivid Alt’s Eon McKai about stigma, sex, and becoming a porn auteur.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
On this weekend in 1652, a law was passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies. Turns out that particular law didn’t cause much of a stir. Unfortunately, some of today’s legislation intended to protect marginalized groups isn’t faring much better. See Stephen Elliott’s, “Eden Alexander, Crowd Funding, and Discrimination Against Sex Workers”, for a […]
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Antonia Crane, The Dirty Dozenth
And this is precisely why I was so entirely blown away by Antonia Crane’s new memoir, Spent, which chronicles her dark and twisted path through the above horrors with remarkable elegance and restraint.
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The Rumpus Interview with Scot Sothern
LA-based photographer Scot Sothern talks about his decades-long career taking photos on the streets, and how his portraits of sex workers advocate on behalf of an often marginalized and misunderstood community.
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