I was just reading an article by the lovely Penny Barber over at the Good Vibrations blog. It's an article about a sex worker's greatest fear- that the work you do or have done in the past will have legal consequences, like hurting you in legal proceedings, getting your child taken away from you, or making it difficult or impossible to get another job down the line.

I'm particularly... touched? appalled? by this story about Kendra Holliday, the Missouri-based author of The Beautiful Kind blog. To be clear- she's not a sex worker. She hasn't done anything illegal. She's just a bisexual, polyamorous, joyously partnered divorced mother discussing her experiences, answering questions and offering advice to people via her blog. But blogging about her sexual experiences has cost her a job in April, and now, potentially, custody of her child. 


It's not the first time. Dominatrix model Mz. Berlin suffered a similar situation in 2009. It started with her being (fairly, I think) pissed off and responding to an article Matt Smith (not the Doctor) wrote for SF Weekly about the action going on at kink.com, equating consensual BDSM with non consensual torture. After being bitchslapped by the BDSM community in SF, he wrote a piece whinging about how these kinky people are just TOO SENSITIVE, geez. In writing that article, he outed the real name of Mz. Berlin, despite her ACTIVELY COMMUNICATED desire for him not to do so. Because of that, her ex-husband used the story to bring a court case against Mz. Berlin for visitation rights of her son, She lost the right to see her child- even though the work she did was legal and not a reflection of her parenting skills at all. And Matt Smith was trying to bash kink.com for their treatment of women..? He doesn't seem to be the best to debate consent, considering.


The scariest parallel to me is that on both cases, this came about from media outing of the sex workers in question. In Mz. Berlin's case, it was a non consensual outing, an abuse of trust by a journalist.  But Kendra came out of her own accord, on National Coming Out Day, October 11th. "For every sex negative email I received this week, I got 10 or 20 positive emails. You know what this means? The human race is on my side. People have been overwhelmingly supportive - so far," she said... unfortunate foreshadowing, as she then gets told she can't be around her daughter's friends (prompting a funny Midwest version of her coming out article) and has her custody contested by her ex-husband. She was so proud to be out... and then was slapped down by a society that wishes to shame and punish her for having a sexual life. Hell, the article that was published about her starts off with the provocative and unnecessary "Kendra Holliday is a total slut. Go right ahead and say it — she does". Way to slut-shame while seeming edgy!


It's truly repulsive.


Then I think about Girl With a One-Track Mind blogger Zoe Margolis, and her outing by the press. She, too, lost her job in the film industry because of being outed- again, despite not having done anything wrong. Zoe wrote about how violated she felt, how angry- "It’s like I am living in some alternate dimension where nothing seems real, and I am stuck in a kind of nightmare," she writes a week afterwards, and I have to ask myself- how is that ok? How is it ok to out someone like this? How is it ok to make a woman feel shitty for talking about her sexuality? How has this not changed in four years?


Or there is, of course, Belle de Jour's Diary, written by ex-escort Brooke Magnanti. However, here, there's some hope, at least for UK based sex bloggers and workers- Brooke didn't deal with the same issues at her workplace. There wasn't the same slut-shaming- in fact, Bristol University said "This aspect of Dr Magnanti's past is not relevant to her current role at the university," which is basically amazing. BUT IT SHOULDN'T BE. That should be the norm!


I know it's been a big deal for me to have my face out there as a middle class indoor-working sex worker. I do keep certain aspects of my life shrouded in some mystery, just to keep myself safe, but I will totally fucking fight anyone trying to take my life away from me for being a sexual being. And I think that should be true for all people, though my heart especially goes out to the women caught up in this. It's ridiculous that women are subject to objectification and the gaze and male privilege all the fucking time, and when we speak up and say "actually, we're sexual creatures too", we lose jobs, relationships, children.


FUCK THAT NOISE.


If you want to help do something about it, may I suggest starting by supporting Kendra Holliday's legal battle, because how this turns out can and will affect any other sexually open woman (and man, actually). Or you can donate to the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund in her name. Or make yourself aware of kink-aware professionals in your area and support them/use them when you can or need to. Or support Backlash, out in the UK, who is also working to fight this sort of absurdity. 


I used to have a shirt that said "sluts unite". If there was ever a time... it's now.