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Sensitive topics and attempts at sensitive treatments
March 26, 2006
Of course, I am sick. I expected to get sick between the conclusion of Sex Work Matters and the Perverts’ Saloon on next Monday at Galapagos, but it came early. Goddammit. But whatever, it is a manageable sickness I hope, and I was able to spend a leisurely weekend at home with my fellow $preadsters, stuffing envelopes with what is definitely our best-looking issue to date. 
Tomorrow I’m packing up all the art I’ve been framing at my house (so far without slicing my fingers open on plexiglass, a pretty major feat) and heading to the LGBT Center to install it. While I’m at that my good buddy Joe Gallant is bringing by his aforementioned enema painting, freshly done this weekend, and doing a short segment on me and mine for The Screw Show, his public access show tied in with Screw Magazine and devoted to all things smutty in NYC. There’s also going to be a piece (with pictures) in Screw tomorrow on the art show, plus other press stuff I’ll be linking to shortly. A Canadian reader alerted me to a really terrific piece on $pread airing on SexTV that was shot at our last event back in January. The short version of the piece is available on the SexTV website, here.
On Thursday this past week I went to fetch Anne Hanavan’s mini dv of her short film “Paranoid,” which is in Sex Worker Visions (still from the film below). Anne is a former streetwalker who now runs a really hip little boutique on the Lower East Side called Lost Shoe; she’s fantastic because she’s survived some serious shit, lives to tell the tale, and isn’t afraid to share, warts and all. Her video piece is really intensely visceral and sexually explicit. When I took it to get transferred onto DVD, I warned the folks that it’s explicit – I just feel like I don’t want to stun or upset people who don’t want to see sexually explicit material, even if it ostensibly is part of a paid job for them. They wanted to clarify what this meant: “It isn’t porn is it? We don’t do porn.” It is probably fucked up and hypocritical of me to support a business that doesn’t deal with porn, but after calling around they were the place with the best price and fastest turnaround, so… I assured them, “Oh no no no, it’s not porn.”
I hated myself a little bit for the act I put on, like I’m so distant from porn and was surprised they asked the question. They accepted the job and the DVD is done so they didn’t discover that I’d duped them in to dealing with porn, but it still makes me squirm a little. Anne’s film doesn’t really have the intent to arouse that porn does, but the content is on par with the kind of stuff you see in porn – there’s anal sex.
I also did this “sexually explicit” warning at a talk I did at CUNY on Wednesday morning (dudes, this was the week of being cognizant and talking about sex work by 9 am, quite a feat considering my normal bedtime is sometime between 3 and 5 am). I gave people in the class the option to step out of the room while I was showing images from the art show, a few of which show penetration. A couple people graciously took the opportunity to excuse themselves. It’s an interesting thing – while I do definitely think that it is useful for people to be exposed to sexual experiences outside of the norm for them, I don’t want to feel like I’m foisting offensive content on anyone and I certainly don’t want to traumatize anyone. It’s such a fine line to walk: expanding the mind versus making it shut down further.
One of the really interesting dynamics in the classroom in my talk at CUNY was that the men in the room stayed totally silent and didn’t ask any questions. The women who spoke up – and there were many of them – were unabashed in their interest in the politics and personal issues around sex work. The women were unafraid to voice personal opinions and feelings about the industry, many of which were negative. I went home thinking about the silence of the men in the room, and I wonder if anything would be different if the men in the room outnumbered the women, or if the professor was a man instead of a woman. My sorta conclusion is that the men probably were afraid to speak with too much interest in the topic because of the risk of seeming pervy or inappropriate, and it’s possible that they didn’t want to risk outing themselves as consumers in the sex industry to whatever extent that may be true. It’s also possible that they were wary of the ire of the women in the classroom if they reacted with negative thoughts about the sex industry or sex workers – it all made me wonder about the ways that men are and are not allowed to voice their opinions about sexuality in mixed company. Of course, all these assumptions are built around the core assumption that there was a lot of heterosexuality in the classroom, which might not have been true. And of course it’s always possible that the men just weren’t that interested or engaged in the subject.
Posted by Dacia at March 26, 2006 09:43 PM
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Comments
“It’s such a fine line to walk: expanding the mind versus making it shut down further.”
So true. That’s a great quote… I think I’ll have to put it up as my blog header quote.
And while I don’t deal with that question in such a direct manner as you do in my work life (alert, terrible grammar!), it is something I wonder about often. I’m always advocating tolerance - but at what point does that mean being tolerant of ignorance? And when is ignorance really ignorance, rather than a viewpoint I disagree with? Sometimes it makes my head hurt.
Hope you feel better soon!
Posted by: Amber at March 27, 2006 09:49 PM
James and I speak a couple of times of year at universities about our personal experiences in the sex industry. In my experience men’s reactions/comments/silence is defintiely different than women’s and I do think it has to do with them being more likely to have been consumers of sex industry products and services.
Posted by: Seska at March 28, 2006 09:20 AM
