First off, let me say that there could not have been a worse week for a prostitution/politician scandal. I was non-stop busy with other projects all week and then I spilled tea all over my keyboard, which prevented me from blogging about this Elliot Spitzer thing until today, after I had to purchase a new keyboard for $50 at the Apple store. My brain has been racing 100 mph for the past week with this information overload and as a member of the SWOP Media team, I've been bombarded with messages and links to articles about this every day, all day. I'm just feeling really bad for all my sex work sisters in NYC who have to field calls from the media all day. Stop the insanity!!!!
Normally, I would say, hey Spitzer is just like the millions of men who use escorts every day, many of them more higher profile than he, and to just brush this off as normalcy. I mean he's just one who got caught...there's a lot more who never will. However, Spitzer was responsible for busting up a few "prostitution rings" (what does this mean?) himself when he was attorney general, which makes him a total hypocrite. After all, this man is rumored to have been a regular users of escorts for over ten years and one would assume he was using them at the same time he was probably busting up those prostitution rings. As far as violating the Mann Act, well the Mann Act is an outdated and often racist piece of legislation that needs to be overturned. I have friends that violate the Mann Act almost every week.
So the real question that should be addressed here is why, in this day of terrorism, war, and extreme outbursts of violence, is the FBI wasting taxpayers money to set up wiretraps on escort services? Yeah, I know...it's illegal activity and money laundering, etc., but would the world have been in danger had this fucking scandal never been exposed? I think not. Are the Republicans really that desperate in their attempts to make Democrats look bad? It's always the sex scandal. Whereas the scandals they're responsible for are much, much more evil and dangerous than some governor who likes to see high-end call girls. So fucking what. Are the American people starting to realize that
everybody's doing it now. It's your husbands, your brothers, your sons, your governors. They're using escort services.
And the escorts themselves? they;re your sisters, your daughters, your mothers. They're choosing this line of work because they can make a lot of money. More money than being a secretary, waiting tables, or whatever ridiculously banal options they might have. The crime in this scandal is really how the media is treating the girl at the center of it all...I'll call her "Kristen" out out respect for her anonymity, though we all know her real name now. Printing the words "Bad girl" on the cover of the NY Post along with unauthorized nude photos of her and -
gasp!- her family who have nothing to do with this mess. It's the most shameless, horrible thing I've ever seen. She did nothing different than what myself and thousands of other sex workers do every day and now she's had her whole life exposed to the public so they wag a finger at her and say "
shame on you!" No, shame on you, NY Post... you're the real criminals here, along with all your counterparts.
So now every escort and sex worker in the country it seems is being interviewed by the print and television media. All these sources want to uncover the workings of how these "prostitution rings" and escort services work, as if this stuff is all brand new. It's really horrible for all the workers I know. Apparently services in New York and Boston have completely closed up shop for the time being and business is slow for the rest of us. Who knows what the feds will do next? I mean, what do these guys think they're doing.? Do they actually feel like they can stop prostitution from happening? I'd like to think Americans are more concerned about the war in Iraq and hunting down terrorists, but shit, I could be wrong here.
Hopefully the one message clients can get out of this whole situation is that it's better to use the independent providers than the escort services these days. Before I had a computer, I used to work for escort agencies and a lot of them were run by greedy guys who wanted to be big shots herding a stable of sexy girls. They were vindictive, paranoid, downright crazy and usually took a 50% cut. So for a $300 call, I'd get $150. And more often than not, they rarely did anything other than field a phone call to earn that money. With the age of the Internet, girls can work independently, keep all their earnings, and not have to deal with the headache of a pain-in-the ass agency owner. Clients can mostly be assured that an independent provider isn't going to have a federal wiretap on her phone and some money laundering operation looming in the background. Independents are a much safer bet.
This scandal has turned into quite the monster and our little underground world of sex work has been exposed for all the world to see. Maybe people will start to understand why men, specifically married men, use the services of sex workers such as ourselves, and that all this hoo-haw isn't going to do a damn thing to stop it. Maybe people will be outraged that their tax dollars are being wasted on such useless operations. Maybe "Kristen" will finally make a bold statement to the public championing the rights of all sex workers and how viable an option the sex industry is for struggling artists. Hopefully she'll make a lot of money off this mess and pursue her dream of music. Maybe Elliot Spitzer will get away from this mess unscathed. Until then, my head is literally spinning.
Now, when is the next mass shooting scheduled to happen?
Labels: Elliot Spitzer, escorts, prostitution, scandal
