Big Ed's Place

This post was largely written before PayPal reversed course on what it was going to censor. However, the arguments remain valid so I figured they needed to be presented, despite the immediate crisis passing.

PayPal’s now partially rescinded ban of erotic fiction they consider on the edge has garnered limited outrage and some backlash. Most of the backlash that I’ve read comes in two flavors: 1) they’re banning stuff that should be banned anyway, and 2) they’re a private company and can do what they want.

For #2. Sure, they can do what they want. That doesn’t make it right, does it? Because if it does, they’d be just as justified announcing that they wouldn’t process payments for anyone selling bibles or other Christian material, or anyone who voted Democratic. Somehow I think the howls about ‘that’s not right’ would be louder and more widespread. As a result, #2 just reduces to #1: the supporter of the ban is judging the material being banned and saying it’s okay to ban it.

Now, unfortunately for them, most folks who say it’s okay to ban edgy sexual work are making their arguments on the ‘ick’ factor. Bestiality or rape or incest are distasteful to them, so they want them banned. I haven’t seen any coherent arguments beyond that. So… let me step into the breach.

I’m going to take the Devil’s Advocate position for a moment. Banning this type of writing can be justified for any one of four reasons. Note that I, as the Devil here, only have to win one of the four arguments in order for a ban to be justified.

Reason 1: To help people resist temptation.
Humans are by nature weak at resisting temptation and at self-control. If you show them something that is pleasurable but bad for them, a significant number will be unable to resist doing it. So you have to ban it so they can’t see it.

This is, of course, a justification based on both sound Biblical traditions (Eve and the Apple) and the known fact that men cannot control their sexual responses around women (a standard rape defense and common cultural meme brilliantly explored here).

This is also especially true of anything detailed enough to serve as a de facto manual. We wouldn’t allow someone to publish a ‘fictional’ account of how to build an atomic bomb or culture anthrax, would we? Putting that knowledge out into the world would certainly lead to some disaffected soul or terrorist destroying a major city. Do we really want to put the knowledge of how to accept a dog’s knot into a woman’s pussy out into the world, and then glorify the act?

Rape, incest, and bestiality are all bad for people in the real world due to consent and power issues. We don’t need to make acting on them more tempting to people.

Reason 2: To Prevent Desensitization
Studies with violence have shown that regular exposure to violence decreases the viewer’s sensitivity to it and increases their willingness to engage in it and condone it in others. Sexuality is similar enough that exposure to extreme sex will desensitize people and increase their willingness to engage in sexual acts that are harmful to themselves and others.

Over the past fifty years, we’ve seen oral and anal sex rise along with the rise of pornography depicting these acts. We’re currently seeing an increase in pressure on women to have shaved pubic hair and accept facials to mimic the porn young men are watching. Do we want this trend to continue into the taboo areas?

Even if we grant that individuals may be able to resist temptation (Reason #1 above), desensitization effectively lowers the bar so there is little temptation. If “everyone’s” screwing their little sister, why not do it too? And if she resists, it’s just because she doesn’t get it, not because it’s wrong.

Again, we can agree that rape, incest, and bestiality are all bad things in the real world. Why should we make those acts more acceptable via desensitization in fiction?

Reason 3: To Preserve Social Merit
The core philosophy of the Miller Test, which allows obscene materials to be banned in the United States, is the argument that obscene materials have no social merit. They may therefore be banned.

If we examine this argument closely, we see one major implication: items without social merit do not belong in the public sphere. The specific content does not matter as long as it has no social merit. If we allow items without social merit into the public sphere, we coarsen and degrade the public dialogue.

The challenge for many items without social merit is proving their lack of merit. Tabloid newspapers, reality TV, and various internet memes may indeed lack social merit and therefore be deserving of a ban, but practical hurdles prevent implementing that ban. These hurdles are lower for porn involving animals, family, and non-consent and so they represent a reasonable first step. Once they are successfully driven from the public sphere, we can move on to other items lacking social merit.

Reason 4: To maintain Cultural and Political Cohesion
Our society falls apart under anarchy. In order to avoid chaos, we have established political and cultural norms for our society. This political and cultural order relies on individuals fulfilling the roles assigned to them. Failure to fulfill these roles destabilizes society and threatens us with cultural disintegration and chaos. Writing or reading material of this type encourages people to step outside of their assigned roles and therefore must be stopped.

So–have I, as the Devil, persuaded you that any one of these arguments is a good one?

Next week I’ll tackled the Angel’s counter-arguments to these Devil’s Advocate justifications.

This past week, I basically doubled my recent weekly totals and knocked out 1331 words on Blown, bringing it to 5,032. This is in part due to me taking a couple of 1.5 hour lunches. This is also due to the fact that I’m close to the end and the words flow faster for some reason when the end is in sight. I’m less than a thousand words from finishing so the odds are good that I’ll do so this next week. I’d lay odds for sooner than that, but some health issues have laid me out for a bit (nothing serious, just not in the mood to write sex scenes).

I’ve noticed this “end in sight” phenomena before. I know that part of the late rush is that I get more enthusiastic when I can see the finish line for a particular story. But it also seems that the words flow easier as well. They tend to tumble through my cortex faster. This may be in part because I don’t have any plot issues yet to work out or it may simply be that by then I’ve internalized the story to a sufficient degree that my subconscious has already decided what comes next. Regardless, I’ll take it.

Why is it okay to be turned on by members of the opposite gender, but not the same gender?

Why is it okay to be turned on by women in silk and lace but not rubber?

Why is it okay to be turned on by members of the same ethnic group, but not other groups?

Why is it okay to be turned on by drinking champagne from a woman’s navel but not piss?

Why is it okay to be turned on by playmates with 36-22-36 hourglass figures, but not fat women?

Why is it okay to be turned on by werewolves but not real wolves?

Why is it okay for a forty year old man to be turned on by twenty year old women but not seventy year old women? (oh, Sophia Loren is 77 right now)

Why is it okay to be turned on by the undead (vampires) but not the actual dead (necrophilia)?

Why is it okay to be turned on by a cheerleader, but not if that cheerleader’s your sister?

Why is it okay to fantasize about being swept away, but not being taken forcefully?

We’re talking about emotional responses and what happens in people’s heads. As a result, there are only three ways to draw a line between what is okay and what isn’t. The first is to declare everything’s okay. The second is to declare nothing’s okay. The third is to be arbitrary.

There are some who want to declare that nothing’s okay when it comes to sexual desire. They don’t want people to feel it or have it. That way lies madness. Sexual desire is a fundamental part of who we are biologically. End desire, and we end the species. My personal belief is that those who declare that nothing’s okay are attempting a draconian solution to deal with their discomfort about their own sexuality. But it’s not their place to project their own demons onto me and make me responsible for what I desire and don’t desire.

There’s a greater number who want to draw a line in the middle. Whatever line they draw is definitionally arbitrary, but they will try to justify that it’s not. They’ll say that they don’t want people turned on by what’s illegal, as if the law hasn’t changed over time or isn’t equally arbitrary (why is 18 the age of consent and not 14 or 22?). They’ll claim “community standards” but what does that mean in a world with unlimited connectedness via the internet?

They’ll often fall back on particulars of the act being fantasized about. Are we so immature as humans that we believe that desiring something automatically leads to acting it out? That’s certainly a common rape defense. “She was so sexy I couldn’t help myself.” Well, you were so stupid, I couldn’t help myself from putting a bullet in your brain. Can I use that defense? The logic is identical.

That leaves only one place to draw the line: it’s okay to feel turned on about anything.

Arousal is a form of desire and Desire is just an emotion. Emotions are. Period. They’re forces of nature like the wind or the flu. We feel what we feel. We can’t control what wells up inside of us, despite heavy cultural conditioning. We can only control how we express those emotions (how many kids have been told they’re not allowed to feel angry? Instead of “that’s not an appropriate way to express your anger?).

And if we’re all allowed to feel what we feel, what justification is there for preventing us from reading or writing about what we feel? Imagine telling people, “you’re not allowed to read books that scare you” or “you’re not allowed to read books that inspire you.” It sound silly, but it’s logically equivalent to PayPal telling people they’re not allows to read books that might turn them on.

Why is it okay to be turned on by X but not Y? Because X turns me on and Y doesn’t. And for you, X and Y can be completely different things, and it’s still okay. And for someone else, X and Y can even be way out there and it’s still okay. It’s an individual decision. And it’s not for anyone else to tell the individual how to choose.

I managed 637 words on Blown this past week, bringing it to 3,701. In the process, I discovered how much I missed my old work schedule that allowed for 1.5 hour long lunches several times a week. By the time I get to the food (sorry–not going to eat at my desk for a variety of reasons), get settled, and allow myself enough time to get back to the office, there’s only 20 minutes of good writing time in an hour break. If I have to run an errand, like I usually do a few times a week, there’s even less. Fifty minutes is far more relaxed for writing and improves my creativity.

Now I realize that this complaining isn’t particularly attractive, especially since I know authors who have, ahem, too much time to write, due to not having employment. So I’m going to try to not do it much, but it is clear that I’m going to just have to accept a lower output for a while as a result.

That said, I did spend some words on non-fiction in the form of a guest blog post on Oh, Get a Grip!. I’m happy with the result, so please check it out.

Many years ago, I attended a lecture and demonstration on erotic humiliation at a bdsm club. The Dom who was presenting said (paraphrasing):

So why does this turn us on? I’m sure we can get the psychologists to tell us, but why does it matter? All that matters is that it does.

With the hubbub about PayPal’s censorship, Remittance Girl wrote a post on Defending the Indefensible (bestiality here, others maybe to come on other topics). She’s taking a strong literary approach, which I appreciate. This post drops attempts the same defense at a much simpler level.

“Because it turns me on” should be enough justification for being able to read and write anything.

When we ban something “because it turns me on,” no matter how icky, we’re turning it into thoughtcrime. Why can’t an individual think about things that arouse them? Or things they might want to do that are illegal, like fantasizing killing the person who cut them off in traffic or daydreaming about getting high? It’s in my head, it’s private, it’s mine.

That should be enough. Society and the law have no place in my head.

Society only has the right to get involved when my thoughts transition from the private realm to the public realm. That requires action. That is the transition from the realm of ideas to the realm of the physical. Society can get involved when I stop fantasizing about killing politicians and attempt to do so. Not before.

This transition from the private realm to the public realm has two grey areas. The first is a classic once in many spheres of life–when is action public and when is it private? If I have a private club where we have dogs fight each other to the death, is it a public action or a private action? If a bunch of adults get together to discuss the best ways to tie people up and flog them, is it a public action or a private action? My personal example is prostitution–why does an exchange of money move something from the private sphere to the public sphere? We aren’t clear about when actions are public or not. (my original post on the privacy of sex is here).

The second grey area is communication. If I sit around with a bunch of friends discussing how we could blow up airplanes, am I committing a public action (conspiracy) or a private action (just talking smack with friends)? If I provide a manual on how to build a bomb, am I still in the realm of ideas or have I moved to the realm of action? Again, the line isn’t always clear.

However, these grey areas aren’t clear due to general historical confusion and not because they can’t be made clear. The communication line is when we move from exchanging ideas to attempting to incite action. That’s why yelling fire in a crowded theater is illegal. It’s not that any of the communication itself is–it’s the attempt to incite dangerous behavior in others. It’s just rarely framed this way (and I could argue that even “attempt to incite” should be legal, but that’s a different argument).

Fiction fails this test. While great fiction can be inspirational and insightful, it’s very difficult to argue that it’s inciting action. Even Ayn Rand’s polemics can’t be clearly linked to a call for action. At most, fiction can say, “hey, this could be a good experience if you give it a try.”

I’ll extend this argument to memoirs and many other forms of written and verbal communication. The communication stays in the realm of ideas and not actions except for a very very narrow slice.

So bringing it back to “icky” erotica. Why is it anybody’s business if something icky turns me on, if I never act on it? Why is it anybody’s business if I read something that turns me on? Why is it anybody’s business if I write something that turns me on? Why is it anybody’s business if I pass those written words onto another person if it falls short of the “incitement to action” test?

And yes, I’m extending this even to pedophilia. There is no victim until a child is involved. Why is it a crime before then? (more on that topic here). We want Humbert Humbert’s thoughts in Lolita to be a crime, but there was no crime until he actually touched her. And Nabokov committed no crime in describing his thoughts.

Aside–if anything, Nabokov helped reduce pedophiliac crimes by making society as a whole more aware of them. Freud just couldn’t believe the number of his female clients who talked about being sexually assaulted by their fathers, because it was inconceivable. Well, it was really happening, and now it’s conceivable. How many more kids would be raped behind closed doors if Nabokov hadn’t written?

Back to the topic. So why should I not have the right to be turned on, even by “icky” things? Because that’s what PayPal is saying by its topic ban. This is not the Pedophile Handbook, which as a “how to” manual fell up against the “incitement” line. They’re saying, by banning certain types of fiction, that I don’t have the right to be turned on by them.

They want fantasizing about incest, bestiality, or rape to be thoughtcrime. This is unacceptable.

Interestingly, I can only think of two other types of thoughtcrime that are common in our world today. Those are blasphemy in the Islamic world and and political opposition to the ruling regime in many countries. Is this the company we want to keep in the West?

I believe “Because it turns me on” is sufficient justification for ‘icky’ erotica. “Because it turns me on” says it’s okay to be human, to feel what we feel, and to be who we are. “Because it turns me on” says we have a right to our private thoughts a feelings. “Because it turns me on” says that the realm of ideas is boundless and that all ideas are allowed, and only actions are controlled.

That’s the world we need to live in. No defense beyond that should be required.

Last week, I wrote about how PayPal had put the squeeze on Bookstrand to eliminate erotica subjects they didn’t like, despite them being legal. This past week, they did the same to All Romance Ebooks and Smashwords. They gave little notice and refused to negotiate with the site owners, which made it clear that this is a bully tactic.

As I wrote last week, I’m not surprised that this has happened. It was just when and who was going to do it. There’s plenty of angry rhetoric elsewhere on the web about it, which I don’t need to repeat here other than to nod my head in agreement. Yes, this sucks, and yes, it’s censorship, and yes, it should be resisted if it can be.

However, rather than rally about free speech issues and the right to our basic human sexuality (which was the topic of one of my very first blog posts), I want to explain a different reason that PayPal’s move is a bad idea. That reason is simple pragmatism and economics.

In his letter explaining Smashwords’ policy changes due to PayPal’s pressure, Mark Coker wrote (emphasis mine):

*Incest:* Until now, we didn’t have a policy prohibiting incest between consenting
adults, or its non-biological variation commonly known as “Pseudo-incest.” Neither did our retailer partners. We’ve noticed a surge of PI books over the last few months, and many of them have “Daddy” in the title. I wouldn’t be surprised if the surge in “Daddy” titles prompted PayPal to pursue this purge (I don’t know). PI usually explores sexual relations between consenting adult stepchildren
with their step parents, or between step-siblings. Effectively immediately, we no longer allow incest of any variety in erotica.

That surge occurred because it was profitable. I know of several authors who were making thousands of dollars a month because they wrote pseudo-incest stories with Daddy in the title. Many of those stories were crappily written and offered at high prices. But they sold, and they sold well enough to make a lot of money. That, of course, drew other writers into the game and I myself seriously considered it. I, like Mark, wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of why PayPal got into the game, but I bring it up for a different point.

It wouldn’t be so profitable if there wasn’t a huge demand.

Now let’s look for a moment at the topics that PayPal is banning: incest (and pseudo-incest), erotica with characters under 18, bestiality, and rape for titillation. I know the first has a huge demand, and the second certainly seems to. Bestiality has a strong solid niche, if I follow storiesonline codes correctly. I know a lot of women fantasize about rape and probably a lot of men, but I can’t speak to the demand.

But what’s not on the list? Necrophilia, for one. Scat and watersports. A handful of other kinks that could be considered equally objectionable, but just don’t have the popularity (and I’ll have to explore the popularity of those big kinks in a future post, but my post on taboo erotica is a good place to start).

It leads me to conclude that PayPal is going after these subjects in part because they’re popular, which will, I think hurt them, and the rest of us as a society, in the long run.

This is because the economics pretty much ensure those topics aren’t going away. Many moralists have this mistaken belief that if they restrict the supply of something, it’ll go away. Given how well this worked with Prohibition and the War on Drugs, and the on-going saga of prostitution in most of America, you’d think the moralists would have figured out that trying to restrict the supply doesn’t work. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

In fact, I happen to believe that most moralists are incapable of seeing that their restrictions and bans don’t work. Their views are idealistic rather than pragmatic. In their ideal world, people follow the rules and the law. If it’s out of sight, it’s not happening. It’s a nice world to live in, but it’s not this one.

As long as there is strong demand, all that bans do is drive the price and the risk up. Those risks are not always borne by the consumer either. How much of the cost of cocaine these days is what the users pay to the dealers and how much is what the rest of us pay for the ineffective DEA efforts?

The kicker is, economics also provides the pragmatic answer to getting rid of things we find distasteful. It’s called lowering the demand. Remember how necrophilia erotica isn’t viewed as a problem? Or better, consider tobacco. I don’t recall seeing any tobacco smugglers around these parts, and the supply at least in my neck of the woods is drying up. It seems there just aren’t as many customers as there used to be…

So… how do we, as a culture/society, reduce the demand for this type of erotica? If the attraction is that it’s taboo, making it more taboo by banning it would seem to defeat the point. One could go for humiliation or punishment for the consumers, but child porn shows this isn’t a successful strategy either (and my solution for child porn is here).

I don’t have a good answer, other than to grow up as a society. That’s going to require it’s own post some day.

I do know that PayPal is guaranteeing itself some lost revenue. Amazon will certainly pick up the slack, and any adult financial processors worth their salt will find a way to get into the game. There might be some long term gain that we don’t know about (fex: a quid pro quo that they’ll help presidential candidate Santorum go after ‘filth on the internet’ in exchange for regulatory breaks should he win), but otherwise they don’t seem to come out ahead financially.

Which leads me to my last point: there’s no guarantee this will last. Greed all too often wins out over morality, even within a corporation. Maybe the next eBay/PayPal board of directors won’t care, and will quietly look the other way. Maybe people will find a way to run under the radar. I certainly am (the donate button on my Tip Jar page could be yanked at any time if PayPal actually noticed what I write here). Or maybe they’ll reverse themselves.

That happened locally. Several years ago, the weekly free independent newspaper made a big hullabaloo about how they weren’t going to accept ads from escorts, massage parlors, and other semi-obvious fronts for prostitution. They were lauded for their moral stance, particularly because they admitted that they charged those advertisers much more than other businesses. Well, all those ads are back. There was never an open admission of the change in policy either. I’m guessing they just needed the revenue too much to put morality ahead of pragmatism.

Maybe PayPal will do the same. If not, well, I wish them the enjoyment of the lost profits their stance will bring.

The online world I belong to as an erotica author is exploding due to PayPal’s continued pressure on ebook publishers and distributors. They managed to get Smashwords to cave on Friday and begin yanking books with content that PayPal finds objectionable.

My last blog post was about this, as will be my next one. There’s also plenty out there in other places and, frankly, just keeping up has been challenging this weekend. I’d like to blame my slow writing on that, but I really can’t. It’s a necessary distraction and there are plenty of other ways my writing has continued to trudge along.

I did write 543 words on Blown, bringing it to 2964 words. I’m close enough to know it will finish between 4000 and 5000 words. So, two weeks, probably. I’d like to pick up the pace a bit, but that looks like what it will be for a while. However, I figured I could offer a small tease of what’s to come:

FYI
–Takes place in March 1983. Will be released after Nick gets done reviewing/editing. Teaser: Gina’s home for Spring Break. The illustration is up on the Summer Camp stories page too.
Blown
–Takes place January 1982, during a major Atlanta blizzard. Teaser: think about the title a minute.
Need to Know
–Takes place April 1983. Teaser: Involves a trip to Florida. Note that this story and all subsequent ones cannot be released prior to Nick releasing Ch20.
Burst
–Takes place May 1983. Teaser: Involves Erin’s car breaking down and her shirt getting dirty.
CNN
–Takes place early June 1983. Teaser: CNN stands for “Coulter News Network.”
Baptized
–Takes place late June 1983. Teaser: Takes place at Camp, involving a very large party.

If you recall the previous titles (Bent, TMI, Broken) you might spot a pattern as well.

Recently, PayPal informed Bookstrand.com that they had to remove books with certain sexually explicit topics or PayPal would cut off payments. As a private company PayPal can certainly choose who they do business with, but it’s also pretty clearly censorship at work. PayPal’s list of forbidden topics are not just those that would be illegal if engaged in, but those which are quite legal but generally taboo. The full details can be found here.

This is of course not the first pass at censorship of ebooks. Amazon insisted that actual incest titles be removed but maintained the fig-leaf that pseudo-incest was okay (my post on it here). And if we look past ebooks, censorship efforts against erotic and sexual material have been going on for centuries. It’s still going on in a majority of the world. Open, explicit conversations about sex and sexuality are the exception in human history and not the rule.

Those of us who do talk and write about sex are living at the edge.

I think sometimes we forget that. It’s easy, because people who talk openly about sex tend to talk with other people who talk openly about sex. It’s rather hard to have a meaningful one-sided conversation and people who don’t want to talk about sex have a habit of avoiding those of us who do. It’s not quite an echo chamber, but it is a self-selected society that is not representative of the world as a whole.

It’s also easy because, for many of us, the sexual revolution has been a mainstay of our entire lives. The median age of the U.S. population is 36.8 years. Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking book My Secret Garden, in which women uncomfortably admitted to having sexual fantasies, is 39 years old. Today, with hundreds of thousands if not millions of blog posts on the internet where women discuss their sexual fantasies, it’s hard to realize that the sexual revolution is that young. Merely 40 or 50 years. It’s older than most of us, though not so old that we’re beyond the counterrevolution.

But the fact is, as much as we want to decry PayPal’s censorship, what they’re doing is normal. We’re the radicals for daring to publish this stuff that’s out on the edge.

Furthermore, in many cases, we deliberately push the edge. We go into taboo subjects and we put racy covers on our ebooks. We’ve learned that pushing the edge even further is profitable. This, of course, has always been true. It was most amusingly proven with Naked Came the Stranger, where a deliberately poorly written book became a best seller because of its explicit sex. It’s also proven anytime one peruses storiesonline or literotica–the most popular stories are not the best written by literary standards, but simply the ones with certain codes. Want readers or buyers? Push the edge, hard.

Now at some point, I’ll post more on how I find that to be both sad and understandable. For the purposes of this post, I’ll simply point out that there are serious benefits to living at the edge, from profits to having more fun. The bridge night doesn’t quite stack up to the orgy in the ‘fun’ category, after all. The edge is also, in my opinion, more alive. We confront deeper truths about ourselves and have greater growth and greater experiences of life when we live at the edge. It doesn’t have to be sexual. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it’s pretty damn pathetic. Eleanor Rigby played by the rules and stayed away from the boundaries. Not John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

And with those benefits, comes the risks. The center can easily lash out at the edge and damage it but good. PayPal’s demonstrating that right now, as it cuts off income for many writers and possibly an entire ebookstore because they don’t like what the edge is doing. And because they can.

So does this mean we shouldn’t live at the edge? Hell, no. Does this mean we should be quieter? I’m not sure that’s a great idea either. As much as the near-naked drag queens in gay pride parades drew vilification by mainstream culture, I believe they were just as much responsible for moving the debate toward gay rights as the normal looking barely out of the closet guy next door gays. I fully expect “Daddy’s Slut” with the naked butt on the cover to get slapped down and banned, though possibly not before the author makes some serious cash. But maybe in the process, it’ll make it easier for Tentacle Dreams to exist in the world.

We live at the edge. We’re going to take our lumps for doing so. But we, and the world, are still better off for us living where we do.

One of the constant challenges for me these days is learning curves. I don’t have the time to just learn for the sake of learning like I did back in my single-and-bored days. I need something solved and I need it solved now, so I can do other things (like write). Of course, even the writing requires learning curves–html, WordPress, Photoshoppe, epub formatting, and so on. As much as I’d like to farm them out, there are some things that don’t make sense to be farmed out.

This was one of those weeks. My home network went down. In the past, I’ve paid computer consultants way too much money to set it up and maintain it. So this time I’ve been fighting the learning curve to do it myself. I’ve made progress and I can now get to the internet, though there are still some issues left to fix. Needless to say, it’s been a non-writing distraction.

I did manage to write during my lunch hours, though. I completed 870 words on Blown, bringing it to 2,421. I’m also revamping some stories further down the road in the Chris Coulter series and also trying to edit some of my science fiction. It’s all good, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to learn everything I need to learn.

Recently, I had a private conversation with someone about sex workers. He wondered if they had self-esteem issues, as commonly portrayed in the culture, or by being strippers etc. they’d become pretty hardened. Not knowing of any studies, I decided to see what I knew personally.

Of the three women I knew who did or had done phone sex, all were in it for the money first. One explicitly said that she did phone sex because the hourly wage was higher than anything else she was qualified for. That one had serious self-esteem issues. Neither of the other two did (though they did have “can’t manage money wisely” issues).

Of the two strippers I got to know socially and not in a strip club, one clearly had self-esteem issues. The other was putting herself through college. I didn’t get to know her well enough to know about the self-esteem issues. The women I met in clubs often had self-esteem issues poorly disguised.

The three women I know who did erotic massage got into it due to a mix of curiosity, money needs, and feeling empowered by the role. I’m not sure how to separate out the esteem issues from the money needs, but none of them did it for more than a year or two, so I’m guessing self-esteem had to be part of it, because that’s curable.

I’ve socially known a half dozen former prostitutes, but that sampling is skewed. Women who drift from prostitution into tantra or bdsm (which are the two communities where I met most of these former sex workers) are generally highly sexual and don’t have obvious low self-esteem, but also clearly get a kick out of the adoration they receive. I suspect prostitutes and former prostitutes with low self-esteem wouldn’t migrate over into the tantra or bdsm communities.

Oh, and the one pro Domme I got to know–not a self-esteem issue in her body. She just realized how much she truly enjoyed dominating men (and women), got good at it socially, and then discovered she could make 3x her day job doing it, with fewer hours per week. Bye bye day job. She was… impressive. She was the epitome of quiet forcefulness. I watched her play a couple of times and she never raised her voice and never frowned, but carried a presence that made subs in the vicinity go weak at the knees.

Which leads me to believe there’s a wide range and conclusions probably can’t be drawn. Of course, that’s why I write the Compassionate Courtesan Universe–because conclusions can’t be drawn for sex workers as a group. They’re just as varied of individuals as the general public.