December 30, 2006
Posted by Dacia at 10:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Quiet tinkering
December 28, 2006
Forgive me if I ride out the rest of the week - uh, year - without posting. I’m putting the finishing touches on my manuscript and have no energy left for more writing (I’m even taking a break from Fleshbot this week).
I’ll be back next week with posts galore, plus the re-launch of WakingVixen.com.
Happy New Year and all that garbage!
Posted by Dacia at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
Other ways to help $pread
December 22, 2006
I’ve gotten a lot of comments and emails from people who don’t have money to spare for $pread, but would like to help in some other way.
Though we’re always looking for volunteers (volunteer publicist anyone?), at the moment there’s just no way of getting around the fact that we need cold hard cash to print the magazine and deal with operating expenses. Volunteering to help us stuff envelopes, etc, is lovely but not so much if we have no magazine to put in those envelopes or money to pay shipping costs. There are of course many services we can beg, borrow and get donated to us, but printing and shipping are not among them.
But here’s one way you can help if - as many of you do - you have organizational skills and the desire to cut your teeth on some event planning. $pread plans several fundraisers a year, and the upcoming ones include a reading and our second annual art show, which will have small events across the country leading up to it (that’s all I’ll say about that right now). Most of our events are in New York, with the exception of a party we did in Philly in October and a launch party in San Francisco in March 2005. So - if you’re not in NYC and want to give it a whirl, let me know.
Some ideas for events include: parties/burlesque shows, readings, fashion shows, panel discussions… all of which we’ve produced before, so I can help walk you through the logistics if one of these ideas strikes you and you need help getting started. You can also donate a portion of proceeds from an event you’re already planning if you like.
Another way to help $pread is to help get us into your local bookstore. A while back Melissa Gira wrote a really awesome tutorial about how to make this happen.
Posted by Dacia at 07:00 PM | Comments (2)
The writing is done!
Well, the bulk of it anyway, though I have yet to write the conclusion and the note on methodology.
Holy fuckballs kids, I wrote a book.
Granted, I still have a week and a half of hardcore editing ahead of me, but dudes, the horrendous part is over. Not so horrendous even - unless I’m practicing selective amnesia. There are probably people in better positions than me to recall how well I’ve handled this-all, namely the people I call/email/whine at on a daily basis.
One of the things I do when I write, to keep myself amused, is that I write phrases that crack me up - like, I’m a serious dork and I laugh at them for five minutes and then call my boyfriend and read them and laugh some more and then see if my editors at either Fleshbot or Seal cut them. My fave I-can’t-believe-that-flew phrase this week on Fleshbot was “unholy lockdown of the clit leech from hell” in my last Marital Aid Test Kitchen review. In my final chapter of the book, I have two section titles that I think are goddamn hilarious, but we’ll see what my editor says: “Dude, Its Virtual Reality” and “The Machine Ate My Soul and Stole My Partner.” I applied similar tactics to my making of my porno movie, and answered the question “Why is she wearing a cape and a tool belt full of dildos?” from one of my crew members with: “Because its my movie and I say so! Plus I own a variety of capes.”
Most of the time, I’m more than half incredulous that people let me get away with this shit, but haha. HA. Its part of my charm, I say. I’m, like, pushing the envelope. I know I work my ass off and don’t sleep and haven’t seen my friends in months and all, but sometimes its hard to believe I really made all this go. (and I’m going to try to roll with the good times for at least a day before I deal with the stuff that made me cry two days ago)
Whyyyy am I writing? No more writing, I should be masturbating and eating cake and drinking scotch and dancing around in knee high socks and undies.
Posted by Dacia at 02:03 AM | Comments (5)
I'm a Top Ten
December 21, 2006
The ever-lovely and gracious Violet Blue named me to her Top Ten Sexiest Geeks of 2006 list.
And that’s a lift I needed so badly this week: I’m really feeling like so much of the work I’m doing is teetering on the edge between totally awesome and total disaster. If things go according to plan (checks arrive on time, technology operates properly, people meet their deadlines) all is well, but if things are a little off (they are), I have days like yesterday, where I spend most of my day sobbing and trying to figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to do.
Its these times when I think about that line from 1984, “freedom is slavery.” This isn’t a hole as deep as the one I hit in September, and I have (some) confidence that things can turn around really quickly and be awesome, but… damn, sometimes freelancing doesn’t feel free at all.
I feel more focused today and ready to shut out all the crummy stuff and hone in on this book o’mine, due in a week and a half. Exhausting, but doable. I am determined, I am a top ten sexiest geek, and I’m gonna make this shit happen. And then I’ll sort out the other stuff later, even though that might qualify as a bad idea, I just can’t. Maybe I should ask my tech support department or my assistant to take care of some stuff. Oh wait. It’s just me. Eep.
Posted by Dacia at 09:38 AM | Comments (2)
$pread needs your help
December 19, 2006
This past weekend, $pread got some very bad news. The company that runs our online store for subscriptions and merch is going under, effective immediately, which presents problems like: we don’t have a store. This is entirely fixable, and it looks like we’re going to start using Google shop, though we’re experiencing a few days without an online store while that gets sorted out.
What’s not fixable is this: part of the reason the company shut down is because they owed their bank a lot of money, so the bank has seized everything in their accounts, including several thousand dollars of money that was due to $pread and was to be used to print our next issue.
So - though I’ve never asked my readers for money, I would love it if you could donate whatever you can to help sustain this important project that means the world not just to me, but to the sex workers who feel supported and encouraged by reading a magazine made by and for them. $pread is a unique venture that needs to exist in this world, and we need help regaining our foothold.
You can paypal us money using the email address info@spreadmagazine.org or if you prefer to write a check, it can be made out to $pread Magazine and sent to PO Box 305, Cooper Station, NY, NY 10276
Here is our page with further information about donations.
If you enjoy and have been educated by what I do here and at $pread, I’d really appreciate it if you help us out. And feel free to repost this elsewhere.
Posted by Dacia at 11:53 AM | Comments (7)
Semantics of sex work: what's in a name?
December 18, 2006
Two really interesting pieces have found their way into my RSS feed and Google alerts in the past few days (ok, more than two, but there’s only so much blogging I have time for):
“The State Department’s office combating human trafficking
issued a directive Friday to US agencies urging them to avoid using terms “sex worker” or “child sex worker” and even advised governments not to use them.” [via Feministing]
and
A discussion in the UK about the use of the word “prostitute” to identify women recently murdered in Ipswich.
The issues raised in the two articles are very different - the State Department is essentially arguing that there is no such thing as “sex workers” because being in the sex industry is not a job, its slavery. In the UK, the discomfort is with prostitute becoming the primary identity of a dead woman (or a living one, presumably), and all other identities not associated with her job - mother, daughter, friend, etc - get subsumed in that one word.
As far as the State Department goes - they make it very difficult to have this conversation at all. Sexual slavery of women and children is a terrible thing, there’s no arguing against that. But treating all women and children as victims (not even potential ones, but straight up victims) takes away any agency they might have and replaces it with a patriarchal “there there,” and the fusion womenandchildren is ridiculous. Women are not children. Furthermore, children are not “sex workers” - because they are underaged and not able to consent to sex work - or any other kind of work, for that matter. Children are potential victims of the sex industry in a different way than women are potential victims of the sex industry. I’m not saying that trafficking/sexual slavery doesn’t exist, and I’m not saying that all (or anywhere near the majority) women go into the sex industry as sexual confidant and autonomous beings - all choices are constrained by something. But sex work is work, and there is a difference between work and slavery. And I know that its horrifying to many people that women (and men) who don’t necessarily want to be doing sex work are doing it, but people do lots of things they’d rather not be doing for money. I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of most work: doing something you’d rather not do, for longer than you’d like to be doing it, because you need to earn a living.
And as far as “prostitute” as primary identity goes - though I like the idea of the media referring to prostitutes as “women who work in the sex industry” or whatever, I’m not holding my breath. “Prostitute” is salacious, it sells papers - that’s really the bottom line. The likelihood of the media respecting dead hookers - especially junky hookers - is not great. Yesterday as my fellow $preadsters read off a long list of names of women and men sex workers murdered just this past year because they were vulnerable, I know this isn’t going to change any time soon. But it doesn’t stop me from waking up every day and fighting that fight.
On one hand: yes, the words are important. On the other: this argument is a smokescreen for the real issue at hand: sex workers’ right to self-determination both in and out of the sex industry. Choosing a language with which we refer to ourselves is part of that work on self-determination, though its only the tip of the iceberg.
Posted by Dacia at 02:04 PM | Comments (2)
Coming soon, to a web browser near you...
December 16, 2006
The new Waking Vixen.
I have been totally weird and top secret about this, but I thought I’d give a little bit of a heads up before it hits ya - the redesign of WakingVixen.com is going to be live good and soon.
Once the site is re-launched I’ll write a bit more about the ideas behind it and everything, but the nugget of the idea is that I’m trying to straddle that personal/professional line a little differently - the blog is no longer going to be the main page of the site (but the blog’s URL and RSS feed won’t change), and I’m generally stepping it up a notch and making the whole thing a wee bit more corporate - well, corporate for me at least. I think you’ll dig it. I dig it lots.
The first big step towards that, of course, is a banging logo for my production company, which exists in real life with a bank account and everything. Mmmmm, logo:
Sexy, but not dirty, right?
The new website is part of my Awesome in ‘07 plan (the name of an actual word document on my desktop) in which I strive to get my shit together and be a real person with a real income and something that vaguely looks like a real schedule, with waking up at roughly the same time every day and working and writing and taking up some sort of non-sex-related activity that won’t break the bank. We’ll see how all those details go, but I’m determined to make 2007 awesome, even more awesome than 2006, which might be a tall order, but its going to be interesting to see what happens after my two big projects of 2006, The Bi Apple and Naked on the Internet actually make their way off my computer and into the world. With an awesome website as backup.
Posted by Dacia at 10:18 AM | Comments (7)
"Deep inside booty juice"
December 15, 2006
That is an actual phrase I uttered in Kirby Ferguson’s “Sex Advice from New York Pornographers” on Nerve Video.
Also, I talk about my affection for she-male porn.
When he was in NYC for CineKink back in October, Kirby interviewed me, Joe Gallant and Candida Royalle after my State of Smut:NYC panel. The night before my voice went on the fritz, and you can hear me get a bit squeaky at a couple of moments.
Seriously, this video is damn entertaining, and you should check it out and laugh at us.
Posted by Dacia at 08:51 PM | Comments (1)
Wakeup Call Radio December 14th @ 8 am
December 13, 2006
On Thursday, December 14, 2006 I’ll be on Wakeup Call Radio on WBAI 99.5 in NYC with fellow $pread executive editor Eliyanna Kaiser, talking about the 4th International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers at 8 a.m. If you’re in the NYC area you can catch us live on the radio at that time, and you can get it streaming live in several different formats from the WBAI website. Failing both of those, check back later in the day at the first link I put up - they post each hour of the show as MP3s. I’ll be on the 8 o’clock hour. update I’m told that we’ll be going on at 8.25
Geez, its been a while since Eliyanna and I have been on the radio together - which is a pity, because we’re a pretty fierce team. I think maybe the last time was also a WBAI show, but the host was trying to lure us into saying that religion is solely to blame for the evils of the world and that sex workers would be better off if religion didn’t exist. I think maybe we swore at him (whoops) and danced brilliant theoretical circles around his tiny brain.
This won’t be like that, we’ll be rocking the social justice radio, and it’ll be worth listening to, I promise.
Update 12/14 You can listen or download an MP3 here. We had a perfectly lovely time - if talking about the rash of sex worker murders lately can be considered lovely. Five sex worker’s bodies have turned up near Atlantic City, NJ. A customer also shot a stripper and then himself in a champagne room in a strip club in Philadelphia, he died but she is in stable condition. And last but not least, a story that I feel has been massively under-reported: a German truck driver who has so far confessed to the murders of five prostitutes and may be linked to many many more all across Europe over a thirty year timespan. He allegedly strangles the women and then takes polaroids of their naked bodies and scrawls insults on the pictures. He is 47 now; at the age of 15 he was jailed for the murder of a prostitute.
Grisly stuff.
Posted by Dacia at 02:50 AM | Comments (5)
4th International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
December 12, 2006
This is from a press release $pread sent out yesterday - there are similar events in cities all over the world. You’ll have to kind of poke around the sex worker support orgs in your area (I write, as if every town has one) to see if anyone’s organizing anything - or organize one yourself!
Update - as I find out about them, I’ll add listings for events in cities other than NYC:
Washington, DC December 18 @ 4pm-6pm
Western Presbyterian Church 2401 Virginia Avenue NW
Sponsored by HIPS and Different Avenues
San Francisco December 17 @ 11:00am, 1323 Polk St.
Pastor Wilfried Glabach has invited people from the sex industry to the 1st Congregational Church, 11:00am in San Francisco, 1323 Polk St. After the church service we will pass out Sex Worker Community Hotline information along Polk St and give out brown bag lunches.
Oakland December 17 @ 10:30am at 2501 Harrison Street
In the East Bay, Pastors Ama Zenya and Lynice Pinkard have also extended an invitation to sex workers to come to their church service at 10:30am at 2501 Harrison Street in Oakland. Bring potluck items to share for a communal meal afterwards with the congregation in Oakland.
Montreal December 17 @ 6 pm
Montreal’s Coalition for the Rights of Sex Workers will be organizing an march on December 17th in front of Papineau métro. We will walk with our red umbrellas westwards to Café Cléopatre.
Las Vegas December 17 @ 5.30
University of Las Vegas, Student Union, room 205. Informational session on violence against sex workers- causes, issues, and policy exploration
NEW YORK CITY.. On Sunday, December 17th, sex workers and their supporters will gather at vigils around the world to mark the annual Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, honoring the sex workers who died as victims of violent crime this year, and raising the issue of violence against sex workers to the public.
In New York City, participants will gather for a candlelight vigil at 5 PM on the steps of the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South in Manhattan. This year..s list of names of murdered sex workers will be read aloud, participants will be encouraged to speak or offer a prayer, and a moment of silence will be observed.
At the event, organizers will read a statement demanding that authorities step up their investigation of the Atlantic City serial killer and officially announce a moratorium on arresting prostitutes to encourage cooperation between local sex workers and police. The statement will also challenge the media to report on the case in a way that respects the humanity of the women who were murdered. Atlantic City is only one example of these sorts of problems. Many more violent crimes against prostitutes remain unaddressed by the justice system, but exploited in the media.
The event is organized by Prostitutes of New York (PONY), $pread Magazine, and the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center. Members of the press and the public are also encouraged to attend.
The Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers was inaugurated in 2003, conceived by the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) based in Berkeley, California after the conviction of Gary Ridgway (the ..Green River Killer..), a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least 48 prostitutes in Washington State. One particular statement in his confession outraged sex workers, and determined the need for a very public memorial that raises issues of violence against sex workers to lawmakers, police, and the media: ..I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
For more information:
PONY
$pread Magazine
Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project
Sex Workers Outreach Project
Posted by Dacia at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)
Female condom woes
December 11, 2006
My dear friend Amber and her boyfriend Rusty run the very awesome Georgia Podcast Network, and one of the things that I think is supercool about them is that they do a good amount of sex-related stuff, though the site isn’t specifically about sex at all. I love how they weave podcasts with interviews about sexuality into the fabric of the site as if sexuality is a normal part of life - oh wait, it is. In some respects, I think that in some respects this gives them a better chance of getting their sex-positive message out to the people who need to hear it than I have, because people who come to their site aren’t already looking for info on sexuality.
Anyway, slight fangirl-ness aside… yesterday I gave a listen to their podcast review of the female condom, for which of course they needed to do hands-on (or genitals-on) research. The podcast is done in a really cute way - they are actually recording from bed, and they take breaks in recording to do the research, adn then come back (winded) to report their findings. I keep hoping they’ll upload a XXX version of the podcast, but it appears they’ve self-censored, and I understand why… plus it gave them the opportunity to use the Jeopardy jingle, always amusing.
You should listen to the very entertaining podcast, but the gist of it is: Rusty and Amber really dislike the female condom. They both say some really funny things about it, but the main thing that Amber said that really got my goat is “Why are they still making this thing?”
Female condoms are often encouraged for use by women who cannot get their male partners to wear a condom. The most obvious solution to the problem of a partner who doesn’t like to use condoms is to get rid of that partner, but this isn’t an easy or realistic solution for lots of women whose lives are entangled with their partner’s in some way. Female condoms put condom use in the power of the woman - though as Amber and Rusty pointed out its fairly easy to have a whoops moment and slide the penis into the vagina outside of the actual condom.
Amber and Rusty snark a bit about the excessive lube that the condom comes with - but in my opinion more lube is better. Lube reduces the friction and stress on the condom and reduces likelihood of breakage - I wish latex male condoms came with this much lube. Also, its polyurethane - good for people with latex allergies, but also an excellent conductor of heat. Though the instructions for using a female condom may say that as soon as you’ve got it installed, you’re rarin’ to go, actually its a better idea to wear it for up to half an hour first - this gives the polyurethane time to warm up and mold to the walls of the vagina, which will not only help keep it in place, but will also (with exception of the external ring bit of it) make it feel less like humping a plastic bag and more like humping a flesh and blood vagina. A female condom is also a pretty awesome way to prepare for a potential quicky - you might not want to walk around with it inside you for the suggested “up to eight hours” but one of the complaints people have about condoms is that it reduces the spontaneity. If a woman puts one of these suckers in in advance, you can kinda capture that spontaneity, all safe-like.
True indeed, the female condom is a little difficult to get used to, and its kind of unwieldy and without lots of lube its a little, uh, squeaky, but it is a good thing as well, though an imperfect solution to a problem.
Posted by Dacia at 04:11 PM | Comments (5)
Blog deaths and name-checking
December 09, 2006
This week’s round of link checking revealed a cover story in the Las Vegas Weekly with my name in it. The piece is kind of eulogy for the blogosphere, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, the name-checking: ” Bl-gs will continue to exist, of course. I’ll continue to post in mine, and my serious bl-gger friends… will no doubt continue to preach to the political choir of our choosing, share happy hour tips or make verbal offerings to the altars of Warren Ellis and Audacia Ray.”
This had me giggling a lot this week and saying things to my boyfriend like, “Oh yeah baby, make offerings to my altar.”
Ok, that’s done with - and now, the meat of the article. The gist is basically that the writer, Geoff Carter, believes that the heyday of blogging culture is over and that the importance of the blog is in decline in no small part due to the rise of other forms of social networking and user-generated content like MySpace, podcasting and the explosion of YouTube and other similar video-uploading services. I definitely agree with him on a lot of his points, but I think this stuff is very different for sex bloggers.
I think that sex blogs will continue to exist in similar numbers that they have been cropping up over the past few years, and that they won’t be replaced by various forms of multimedia, for a variety of reasons. Many sex bloggers are women, and from the research I’ve been doing for my book, it seems that many women who start sex blogs do so as a way of finding their sexual voice. Some say and describe things on their sex blogs that may previously (and may still) have made them very pink in the face to say out loud to another person. Though of course sex blogging is a very public process, often more public than writers realize until they are discovered by someone who they really don’t want reading them, the act of writing is a very private, introspective act. Though sex blogging may for some be a stepping stone to wrangling with other kinds of media in a sexy way, often it is not because blogging is a relatively safe space, and one that (whether this is actually true or not) feels more anonymous than having your voice or your image floating around on the internet.
Just as important as this is the fact that sex blogging is much more discreet than other kinds of media-making. To blog, you don’t need anything other than your computer, and you can do it from anywhere. To podcast or to vlog, you need more stuff, and this stuff is both expensive and conspicuous. A good number of people who write blogs do so in secret, and its tougher to explain a pile of audio visual equipment than it is to explain a slavish devotion to sitting in front of one’s computer. Furthermore, some secret bloggers keep their blogs secret from their live-in partners - a live-in partner would make it pretty challenging to record sexy audio and video missives - a quick click to reduce your browser window to nothing just wouldn’t cut it if you were wearing a headset and microphone or have a video camera pointed at your naked body.
So maybe other blogs will go away, but sex bloggers will probably continue to sit tight in our little sex ghetto corner of the internet, spinning (sometimes tall) tales of exploits and desires.
Posted by Dacia at 01:08 PM | Comments (7)
A few interviews still needed for Naked on the Internet
December 04, 2006
Dude, seriously, its crunch time. My book manuscript is due in a mere month, and I have some serious writing to do. Several of my writer pals have recently made comments to me like, “Ah, whatever, January 1 is a soft deadline anyway, take your time.” But you know what? No. I will finish by January 1 if it makes me crazy and I am an extremely unpleasant person to be around in the meantime. Bring it on.
I could use a handful more interviews on the below topics, so please email me if any of these is you and you’re into talking to me - I am serious about protecting identities in the book, so if that’s a concern please talk to me about it and we’ll work out the best thing for you. I need:
Women who use webcams for fun and/or profit, especially as part of one-on-one chat with friends and lovers, as a member of a cam network, or as a supplement to a website.
Women who have researched health topics on the internet or participated in online communities about health, especially with regards to the topics of abortion, transgender/transsexuality issues, and disability.
Women who have used internet-enabled sex toys (call em cyberdildonics or teledildonics if you like) - stuff you can operate from a distance over the internet.
And that should do it… I am getting close, but a few more interviews would help nudge things along and clarify some issues for me.
And since Amazon has it up, I present to you the front cover of my book, in all its glory:
That ass belongs to Anna Logue of NerdPr0n, who is interviewed in the book as well. Pretty awesome, eh?
Posted by Dacia at 05:04 PM | Comments (3)
Indie mags bite the dirt
In the past several months, the indie publishing world has lost a few significant contributors to the international dialogue about politics: first Altar Magazine ceased to exist, but the editors redirected their attentions to working on Clamor Magazine. LiP, which was an online magazine for far longer than it was a print publication, also closed up shop this fall, and Clamor Magazine has just announced its demise.
I blame capitalism. But it isn’t that simple.
Lefties are notorious bad at figuring out the whole thing with profiting off of their hard work - I think some of it is guilt at wanting to give back to the community instead of reaping financial rewards (speaking for myself: struggling as I am, as soon as I get a chunk of change I’m either figuring out how to put it back into my business or I’m giving it away to someone who needs it more than I do). But the other part of it is just very very driven hope and optimism not backed by a business plan of any kind, combined with the fact that print publications are a nightmare to produce and distribute.
I’m the first one to champion new media, but new media is not a democratic form, because access has been and persists to be an issue. And expensive and headache-making as they can be, producing printed materials is an important endeavor - especially for marginalize communities, the joy and power of being able to hold something in your hands that was made with you in mind is pretty astonishing. I don’t know the answer to this problem, but I’d hate to see more indie publications drop off the map.
Posted by Dacia at 12:10 PM | Comments (2)
$pread & Hot Lunch party Friday night
December 01, 2006
Party with us, benefit-style!
Friday, December 1st, 11pm - 4am The Delancey (downstairs), 168 Delancey Street $7 ($5 for sex workers)
Its been a while since we’ve had a $pread party in New York with the requisite debauchery, drinking, and dirty dancing… almost a whole year! So come on out and hang with us, pick up a copy of the magazine, and put your entertainment dollar forward to support the struggle for sex workers’ rights.
In the early part of the evening I’ll be tending the door - yes, I’m emerging from behind my computer screen! - so stop by and say hi. Just don’t tell me that I look tired - I know! I know!
Posted by Dacia at 12:52 AM | Comments (1)
