Beautiful Dead Women

I was going through my old stand up and I found this clip of me doing a set directly after the memorial of a friend that had killed herself. I don’t want to say unalive or completed suicide, because what she did, she did with teeth. I did this set trying to process something, without thinking I would ever use it on stage. When I found it, I heard it with new ears. I can hear my voice catching, when I want to cry, then powering through. I realized that I had inadvertently caught something real, which is rare for me, so I decided to share it.

Last week, both Jesse Jane and Masuimi Max passed away. I don’t know how Masuimi died, but Jesse Jane overdosed. I wasn’t sure about writing about it, because why make it about me? It was just so surreal, two icons, gone on the same day, at the same age. The news came on the heels of me finding the stand up eulogy that I gave for my friend. It felt like a sign or something. I didn’t know Jesse Jane or Masuimi Max any better than any other fan, although we were in the same industry, so it’s not place to eulogize either of them.

Two years ago I sold a TV pilot about my life. A scripted comedy series, that opens with the suicide of a stand up comic. I was intent on including the suicide in the story because as a sex worker and stand up, suicide seems to be an omnipresent pox. This is the writer’s note that I attached to the script when I sent it out. I think it speaks to the loss of these beautiful dead women better than any hot take I could make. 

When I got into the sex industry, I was surprised that almost everyone was incredibly normal.  Most performers were married or in committed relationships.  People still had milestones they wanted to reach: homeownership, family, and financial freedom.  But they were also very different, they referred to people outside the industry as civilians, a connotation I didn’t understand until I’d become a veteran of the industry myself. 

We live in two different worlds. 

Civilians live their lives without much awareness of the war going on around them.  Sex workers are soldiers that have been dropped in the The Shit.  While I was a college graduate when I entered the industry, I could’ve never comprehended the impact the stigma of sex work would have on my life, from banking to rental agreements to travel, but especially my own sense of self and what was possible for me in a world that constantly dismisses and doubts you, invalidates and legislates against you. Being a sex worker makes you untouchable, which means that those that interact with us, confess any and everything about themselves. Their darkest desires, greatest fears and shames, and most authentic truths, become small talk, because they view us as small people. Confessors without consequence.  Being untouchable lifts society like a rock, exposing the teeming chaos of competing oppressions and demands hiding underneath. 

Stigma is a great teacher.

It has taught me this: our culture is more permissive when it comes to sexuality, gender, and identity than it has ever been, and yet, people feel more isolated, constrained, and anxious.  Hook up culture and dating apps have created a landscape in which everyone thinks they have unlimited choices and they are paralyzed. Streaming porn has turned men into voracious and demanding sexual partners.  Social media has radicalized people, #MeToo left men feeling devalued, vilified, and decentered, resulting in a kind of rage against women that I thought had been left behind in the fifties. And the pop feminism of podcasts like Call Me Daddy has encouraged a mercenary sexual capitalism in women, asking them to view themselves as commodities in a hostile marketplace, but without giving them the naked transactional language of sex work.  While my experience in sex work offered some relief; I was able to walk out into the world and see the binary code running through these social interactions like The Matrix, I watched my civilian friends becoming endlessly frustrated.  They were being flogged just as hard by life but were unable to see that they were even being hit.

When I started doing stand up, I got a front row seat to the mainstream side of entertainment and influencer culture; comedians, writers, and actors struggling to make it. Social media has become an integral part of building a career or a brand, and the superficiality of IG as well as the need to maintain an audience on platforms like YouTube and Twitter, profoundly shaped the way my generation sees the world and their value in it.  A person’s life can shift overnight with a single tweet, canceled by a mob, or blessed with fame and fortune, not because of talent or ability, but because of invisible algorithms, steeped in mystery.  When everyone is a public person, and privacy is treated with suspicion, people feel like they’re being held hostage to exist and still, most people dream of being famous, even if it’s for nothing.

These two problems have entwined into the Gordian Knot at the center of the current Culture Wars.

Everyone wants to make the definitive show or documentary about sex work, or porn, or lately, OnlyFans.  Every day, writers and producers approach those of us that have been in the industry, wanting to “pick our brains” to reinforce their own thesis about the perils of sex and sex work or the pornification of the culture.  It would be easy to say the end products always get it wrong because they either glamorize the industry, or focus on the prurient strangeness of the work, or turn into moral crusades against sex. More often they fail because they fail to turn the camera on the society that has created these demands and these solutions.  They rarely account for the lived experiences of those that have toiled in and out of these industries, or to see the value in our perspectives.  They fail to ask: “What has sex work taught you about what it means to be human? What has it taught you about normal people? What has it revealed to you about the way society is structured and how those structures impact our ability to find happiness and meaning?”  Those questions would yield much more interesting answers than “What’s your favorite sexual position?”

Take care of yourself. Eat the rich. Stay alive for spite, if nothing else.

SOV.