Working Girls and Women's Rights
I got married at age nineteen to another nineteen year old. He was the second guy I slept with and he's the last guy I slept with. I've been celibate for over twenty years.
I've been alone a long time in meat space but during that time I've had online relationships. I'm extremely poor and men hit on me and act like they have money and I need to wait by the phone and prove my worth and be loyal to them while they contemplate leaving their current lady for me and I am supposed to be EAGER to get them to leave her for me.
And my reply was ALWAYS "I'm not looking for a relationship, I'm CELIBATE for medical reasons and may never again get laid in meat space and if you don't belong to me, I don't belong to you."
I don't like sleeping around. I don't like being involved with more than one person. That little speech served to protect myself from being treated like some guy's bitch with no rights while he wasn't even paying my bills.
It generally did not mean I was throwing it every way the wind blows. He was usually the only guy I was involved with and I was just trying to make sure he wasn't being abusive to me.
It was a speech that protected my rights in a world where men make the money and women service them to get access to the good life and, hey, I was a homemaker for a lot of years and mostly liked it. So while that's not always a terrible deal, that is generally how it works and MOST people have a lot of baked in assumptions rooted in that fact.
So I would give that speech to let some guy know he's NOT going to pressure me into meeting his needs in the here and now while he treats me like shit in exchange for empty promises of a better future that's probably never going to happen because I feel guilty about being "the other woman."
I was the victim of incest twice over. I've read a lot of books, articles and research about human sexuality trying to sort my baggage.
I'm probably not REALLY the other woman or even having an affair according to the law with some guy I've NEVER MET in the flesh who is chatting me up online and if HE is pursuing me, no, sorry, I'm not going to feel guilty either.
Those experiences made me keenly aware that a truth most people don't recognize is that conservative, successful men -- the kind who make good money and have a significant relationship to the public -- PLAN things and serious relationships typically die a slow death over a long time. Such men tend to have a sex drive and they typically line up the next lady before giving their current little bitch her walking papers.
I have a long-standing beef with society and its weirdo ideas about "They are in a relationship." to mean it's an intimate, sexual relationship like there's some clear, bright line cut off between that and not that.
This bizarre garbage actively fosters problems where men don't want to really talk to a woman unless they are looking for sex, so any man talking to any woman can be assumed to be hitting on her and similar correlaries that actively undermine women's rights and workplace opportunities.
If I have MET you or spoken with you AT ALL, we have SOME kind of "relationship" and it aggravates me when other people use that word to mean intimate, sexual relationship in part because some men treat women like absolute shit as if how they behave doesn't matter so long as she's not on their radar because she has a boyfriend or she's too plump for their tastes currently and then are SHOCKED when she loses weight, he would hit that and she wants nothing to do with the disrespectful misogynistic bastard who has been offensive to her every step of the way.
Anyway, I've read the research. Contrary to popular opinion that affairs destroy relationships, they usually don't. Cause and effect typically runs the other way: dying relationships foster affairs because someone is looking for another means to meet their needs before cutting this person loose.
So if some guy with money is shacked up with a cute little honey he's NEVER married and they've been together a WHILE, it's probably a polite arrangement and he doesn't really love her and him not loving her and not wanting to marry her has nothing to do with me. That was true before he met me.
If he's chatting me up, I have nothing to feel guilty about and my concern is looking out for my welfare knowing he has money and power and that means he's a threat to me and my independence in a world that mostly treats women like chattel property.
So I would have that conversation to let men know "If you are doing something for me in the here and now, I can do something for you in the here and now. But I'm not your bitch. I have no plans to become your bitch. I'm absolutely certain that agreeing to that makes it LESS likely you will leave her for me, not more. Why in the hell would you give up that sweet deal if I agree to it? AND MY situation means it's not realistic to PLAN on ever getting with a man. Keep it real. Keep it in the here and now. And you're not paying my bills, so if I meet someone, I owe you ZERO loyalty, Mr. Asshole shacked up with someone else and fucking her while wanting a FREE side dish with little or no risk of any kind because I'm not exposing you to an STD and I'm not costing you money and there's no risk of pregnancy here and there's no actual affair so it's highly unlikely this becomes a PR debacle."
I kept that fact on the down low for a lot of years. I have good reason to believe that being open about such a policy is highly likely to be wildly misinterpreted with malice aforethought and get me painted as a whore and do not confuse people with the facts that I'm more conservative than a lot of people wearing conservative labels on their sleeve like "Catholic."
1. I'm for the decriminalization of sex work. I am open about that and have been for a lot of years. It's a well thought out PERSONAL position but it's not some kind of secret. I mostly don't harp on it nor particularly actively promote it as a political position, but in conversations on Hacker News, an overwhelmingly male forum, I was open about that for YEARS.
This piece on Hacker News has 24 points and 11 comments of mostly good quality in spite of it being a sexual subject. Many people on Hacker News are well educated, in positions of power etc.
It never made the front page. It was posted during a period when second page with twenty points or so and a few comments was surprisingly common for my posts to Hacker News and I suspect that means those pieces got read largely because I posted it and because I was respected to some degree by some portion of the people there.
I don't really know if that law passed or not in South Africa. I spent some time looking for a good, neutral journalistic piece on the proposed law in question because I tripped across a piece about how some American feminist was getting thousands of signatures on a petition to oppose a proposed law in South Africa and I didn't want to be perceived as supporting her side. In fact, I hoped to actively oppose her desire to interfere with women's rights in a different country.
Other than that ONE post which had clear political motives and I have no means to verify if it had any impact, "the personal is political" and I spoke for myself as a woman in an overwhelmingly male forum and sometimes men respected my chutzpah in doing that and my evenhandedness on difficult subjects.
vxNsrI just did some profile snooping and I gotta say that your story is both unique and uplifting and I appreciate your willingness to contribute.yesenadamThank you so much for sharing. You are awesome.
2. MOST women are getting MOST of their income by being married to a man or shacked up with a guy or earning a living on sex appeal as models or singers or actresses or getting hired or promoted to anything better than waitressing via the casting couch and even waitresses and secretaries FREQUENTLY end up sleeping with the boss to keep their shit job.
If that weren't true generally, brothels wouldn't exist. The overwhelming majority of sex workers the world over are female and the overwhelming majority of their clients are male.
Divorced single moms FREQUENTLY become strippers or similar because they need a better income than waitressing to support their kids and if they aren't selling sex appeal, they are unlikely to make money like a man.
If all of that weren't true, pimps with a harem of women for sale wouldn't exist.
I've tried to tell people on Hacker News for YEARS "If you are against sex work, then hire and promote women in other kinds of work." And it fell on deaf ears while everyone stepped over MY body in the gutter and told me to quit my bitching and get a real job, writing online doesn't pay while stuffing money in Patrick McKenzie's pockets for writing online.
If you want more information on that detail, see also:
2. HN
I was homeless for years because as the highest ranked woman on Hacker News I couldn't figure out any means to adequately support myself while everyone fell all over themselves desperately trying to help Patrick McKenzie support himself though he's basically a goddamned con artist and this kind of shit is the norm the world over and has been for decades. Single moms get passed over for promotion because some guy with a wife and kids "has a family to support," so they give HIM the promotion she really deserves even though she also has a family to support and they know it.
And it's the norm the world over "and has been for decades" because we now ALLOW women to have bank accounts, get divorced, get jobs etc. When I was 18 or 19 and in college, I had an elderly female classmate who was something like 70 who told me in her youth, a woman couldn't have a bank account in her own name nor get a job without her husband's permission.
LETTING women try to support themselves is progress. Even though we are doing a shitty job of helping women succeed.
3. If you are one of the lucky few who LOVES your job, cool. Most people work because they need a paycheck and they are typically doing something that is unpleasant to them to some degree and not something giving them high social status nor earning them much respect and it typically involves significant health risks.
Even desk jobs can cause serious issues like ruining the tendons in your wrists so bad you are in constant agony and no longer able to type aka WORK.
Most people don't get up everyday and go "I'm SO JAZZED!!!!! I get to go to my cashiering job at WALMART today!!! Huzzah!!!! Life is grand!!!"
If you enjoy your job, you're one of the lucky few.
When I was at Aflac which is the Columbus, Georgia version of "Ooohhh, they work at GOOGLE!!!!":
I would get a haircut and make small talk and they're like "Oooh, she works at AFLAC!!!" I could have been sweeping floors. They still are oohing and aahing.
And people at Aflac would say to someone making a stupid suggestion "I'm not doing that because I NEED MY JOB."
Not it's morally wrong or rude or whatever. But "I NEED my job."
People work for MONEY. Before there was money -- which as a stable thing only goes back about 350 years -- people literally worked to put food on the table and provide other essentials as a survival issue.
There are potentially undesirable outcomes we should guard against if we decriminalize sex work. Someone on Cyburbia once suggested that if they decriminalize sex work and a pimp offers you the glorious opportunity to work for him and you say no, you could potentially lose your unemployment benefits.
So someone who is NOT me should think about shit like that, but my understanding is making sex work illegal both increases the amount of prostitution going on and worsens working conditions for the prostitutes, including making it vastly harder to escape being trafficked.
If you are against prostitution, you should side with me in wanting to decriminalize it in order to protect women's rights and reduce the amount of prostitution happening.
Footnote
Other pieces by me elsewhere:
The Oldest Profession on Feminine Character Works.
The Oldest Profession on Witness to Destruction