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Watching me
August 20, 2006
When I got my package of DVDs from Benny Profane on Tuesday, I checked out the covers, got cracking on my Fleshbot post on Psychocandy 4, and promptly didn’t watch the DVD.
It made me nervous. Yes, I’ve seen myself doing it moving-image style in, er, private home movies, but it was weird thinking about this video hitting the shelves now – a video of a scene I shot a year and a half ago. The scene was shot on a weekend trip to LA – a weekend in which I was supposed to also shoot a scene for Eon McKai’s “Kill Girl Kill” but didn’t because I didn’t want to do sex without a condom, and VCA is condom optional, which in the parlance of porn times means “no condom or no scene.”
So I went to LA and had the first dose of sex I’d had in 2005. Why, yes, it was more than two weeks into January. And why yes, I did have both a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the time. And yes, I was immersed in weird self-doubt, struggles with my sexuality, and wanting to be wanted.
Not just that, but Rachel Kramer Bussel had just given me my first major bit of press, in a column of hers entitled “Whore Pride,” in which I’m quoted as saying, “It’s important to me to be outspoken because I’m putting my cunt where my sex-positive mouth is. The combination of talking, writing, and doing is really the only way to destigmatize sex work and diverse sexualities generally.”
When I came back from the scene-shooting in LA, I came back to an onslaught of nastiness in the comments on a post at Feministing - a conversation that has recently been resurrected by Iamcuriousblue and Bitch|Lab after a comment I made about feminism in Bitch magazine:
I’ve always identified as a feminist, and to deal with feminism from the perspective of being a sex worker has been really jarring to me. Right when I started working on $pread, the Village Voice had a piece about me and someone else, about our lives as sex workers, and it got picked up by the blog Feministing. The comments that people left about us almost made me cry. It was awful because I read that site religiously – I mean, these are my people. And getting these reactions made me realize these are not my people; they hate me.
Still following me?
(Sometimes I look back, or I look at this moment or that, and I think – bitchgoddamn, I have a lot going on. It’s hard to keep track of it all - thank goodness for the twin vices of blogging and journaling.)
The thing that has shifted most in the past year and a half - since I shot that scene, had my heart broken this way and that by people who never should’ve had access to my heart in the first place, quit all sex work but occasional modeling and constant blabbermouthing/advocacy work, came out to my family, got (in)famous (cough gag), went into therapy, and fell hopelessly in love with the right person – is that I’ve allowed myself to doubt, to question, to worry about my choices in a different and ambivalent way. It’s a wondering much more healthy, less defensive and more honest – but infinitely scarier than plunging ahead into the unknown, flying my Sex Workers Unite flag bravely/stupidly. Scarier because I wonder – was this (grand gesture) a good idea? And – what am I doing? And – do I always love and honor myself? And – what do I want to do with myself?
And I’m afraid to question these choices I’ve made, not because it brings out the “I told you so” worms, the ones who say mean things and sometimes I believe them, but also because I worry that I will eventually conclude that yes, this-all was a terrible idea. And then what? But also, I think it’s important that I don’t walk around with the fauxface on, the bravado with the empty doubts inside. So whatever, I’m tough and I can handle the flak, and it’s good to talk fear and doubt, balanced with the forward thrust of my life. And I’m thinking about it all. * It’s five in the morning, and we are drinking 40s, eating sandwiches, watching me fuck on screen and talking about our feelings.
“Do you hate me now?” I ask his armpit as my scene concludes on screen, my head snuggled into the crook of his arm, my arms wrapped tight, our bodies fit like magic together
“What? No, of course not – I think you’re amazing and strong and sexy and you’re my beautiful curly-haired girl.” He pauses and asks the tough question, “Do you hate yourself?”
“Sometimes. More often I’m confused – there’s no road map for my life, and I’m not always sure whether or not I’m fucking up.”
“Did watching upset you?”
No. I thought it might, but it didn’t. I looked better than I expected, it didn’t make me feel like I was fat then or that I look worse now (I know these are delusional thoughts, I’m not fishing for compliments). It didn’t take me to a bad place, because that shoot was definitely a good place. But it’s all so goddamn complicated.
So complicated that it appears my favorite retired alt porn brain/body has got some shit to say. So complicated that I’m risking the ugly stuff and writing anyway, because I think its important.
Posted by Dacia at August 20, 2006 01:34 AM
Comments
I know what you mean about feeling like a new choice, or decision, or perspective you have will validate all the assholes who’ve been sitting around quietly (or not so quietly) judging you. It has made me almost physically ill to imagine the nay-sayers with smug grins of satisfaction, saying, “I told you so, you dumb bitch!!” But, you know what? It doesn’t matter what you do or say, or whether anyone who’s an asshole turns out to be right about something at some point - they’re still assholes. Whereas you are doing something few people dare to do - examining what is right for you, and always allowing that definition to be, um, redefined. At a certain level, the fact that it’s sex work you’re talking about doesn’t matter; what really scares people is that you are determined to follow your own path and that ultimately, nothing they say or do is going to change that. That’s scary shit for a lot of people, because they wouldn’t dare to live that way themselves - it’s too raw, honest, open, and potentially painful. Better to stay insulated in a nice little comfortable den of passing judgement on others. And if something you say/do/decide ends up dovetailing with something the assholes have said, it’s nothing but a coincidence. The all-important difference between you and them is that you’ve arrived at Conclusion X because of you, not anyone else.
Posted by: Amber at August 20, 2006 12:57 PM
Um, I’m sure you know, but something is fucked up in this post… looks like an unclosed tag or something.
Posted by: Amber at August 20, 2006 12:59 PM
Reading your post, my first reaction is “Don’t worry about it so much, Audacia!” But then maybe you’re the kind of person who needs to “process” things a lot.
In any event, keep in mind that you haven’t done anything that could be held against you by anyone who’s opinion matters.
Posted by: Iamcuriousblue at August 21, 2006 11:57 PM
i’m not crazy about my boobs floating around the internet - even the most blase nudity can make a girl uneasy. i can’t begin to imagine how vulnerable it might feel to have deeply explicit images of one’s body for the world to see.
i’m damn proud of you for putting your cunt where your sex-positive mouth is.
that you indulged this wild hair and tried porn on for size makes me respect you immensely more than most of us sex-positive ladies who just talk, talk, talk.
BRAVO!
Posted by: charges at August 22, 2006 03:20 PM
From a movie:
“I know that people get confused in this life about what they want and what they’ve done and what they think they should have because of it.
Everything they think they are or did takes hold so hard that it won’t let them see what they can be.”
It will be OK.
Posted by: PugDuster at August 22, 2006 07:03 PM
