Big Ed's Place

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.

When I first reviewed Joymii.com back in March, I wrote “I found it enjoyable and classy, but still not as arousing as I perhaps would have liked.”

Well, things have changed. Wow.

The technical quality of the photography and videos remains high. The models are of course gorgeous. But now it’s not just solo scenes and girl-girl that seems more posed than hot. Now they’ve got boy-girl about every other week, along with hotter girl-girl scenes. I’ve included some samples below (one is a sample video). Some of the solo scenes are interviews, where the models talk about sex before masturbating for the camera (way way hotter than just doing it, in my opinion). Finally updates are now every other day.

I have to move the site from three to four stars out of four. I’m impressed and I definitely recommend it. They addressed everything I said they needed to in order for it to be arousing as well as artistic. Check it out yourself by clicking on any of the images below.

Recently, I downloaded a girl-girl video from Joymii.com and was surprised to realize that one of the women (Simona) was wearing a ring on her left hand ring finger. The simple band of gold wasn’t necessarily a wedding ring, particularly due to the lack of diamonds that would be almost required in the USA. However, it was stylish and since Simona is Czech, who knows?

It was unusual to see the ring, because porn typically removes all hints of relationships outside the ones on the screen. It doesn’t want to disrupt the fantasy that “I could be there doing that with her” and a reminder of another relationship certainly takes one out of that fantasy a bit. The obvious exception is porn aimed at cheating or cuckolding or wives out of control, but those fantasies are a separate post.

However, if one steps back, it’s not hard to realize that it’s extremely unlikely that all the actors in porn are unattached. I’m sure the serious relationships and marriages are pretty close to what’s normal for the age demographic. Lots of singles and boyfriend/girlfriend relationships when the actors are in their early twenties, with more serious relationships and marriages as they move into their thirties. Of course, porn does tend to be dominated by the young. A porn producer/director I met once lamented that his was the only industry in which everyone was twenty forever. People either got out and moved on, or started faking their age to be younger.

So while there are likely to be a good number of attached porn stars, the industry conspires to hide that detail of their lives.

I do know second-hand of two married women who worked in brothels in Nevada. Both of their husbands knew of their work and one even patronized other courtesans. It was basically an open marriage with money involved. I also met a Nevada courtesan who had a boyfriend while she worked. He’d been a client and so knew about her job, but I never found out how that worked long term. Strippers often have trouble with boyfriends long term when either the guy gets jealous or, often, she wakes up and realizes he’s sponging off of her. It takes more than the usual maturity to accept one’s significant other being sexual with other people night after night.

So I was actually surprised at my own surprise upon seeing the ring. Kind of “Oh! Well, why not?” Which kind of reflects on how well the sex industry sells the fantasy that the performers are unattached and available.

This past week, the news carried a story of a major prostitution ring bust that caught a former president of the University of New Mexico. The full story is here. Basically, he and a few others were involved in running a site that was designed to help johns find prostitutes and evade arrest. They had a discussion board and reviews and such, which is actually pretty common for prostitution related customer sites (such as SF Redbook, The Erotic Review, and dozens others if you want to google for them). They thought they were secure, though, because the only way you could become a member was to have a referral from an escort. They had almost 1,400 members in the process. They believed they were ‘safe’ because that screening requirement meant that only men who’d seen escorts would be part of the community (thus excluding law enforcement).

What arrogance.

Let’s discuss a few ‘laws’ of conspiracies according to Big Ed. First, there’s no such thing as a large truly secret conspiracy. Someone always talks for whatever personal reasons. Even the Mafia, which killed people who talked, had leaks. So if you’re running a site, people will know about it. Law enforcement knows all about The Erotic Review and all of the local escort related websites. They’re not stupid.

Second, there’s no such thing as a hyper-competent large group. Someone will make a mistake and do something silly like leave themselves logged onto the site and then let other people get onto their computer. Someone will ‘loan’ their login to a friend who hasn’t met the screening requirements. Regular discipline is tough. Regular discipline among a large group is damn near impossible, particularly over time. Just consider the fact that the most competent terrorist organization in recent history still lost its leader. Also consider how often ‘military secrets’ leak. Stupid stuff happens and the best large organizations who protect secrets have ways of keeping them that an online prostitution community doesn’t. I.e., the online guys can’t kill people for revealing secrets.

Third, there’s no such thing as a secret online. Unless you happen to be the best hacker to ever come along, you can’t keep the guy who’s better than you out (and if you are the best hacker to ever come along, email me offline, okay? I’ve got some questions….). Anyone setting up an online community has to assume that their security can be breached and undesirable folks can read the community’s messages.

This is where I have to shake my head at the arrogance of these guys. You have to assume that if law enforcement wants into your little club, they’ll get in. There are only two protections: a) have no reason for law enforcement to want in; or b) keep it legal.

Law enforcement disinterest is one of the dirty little secrets of our Western society. Cops have finite time and energy. They have to pick which crimes they’re going to pursue as a result. So do prosecutors. As a rule, prostitution doesn’t make the cut.

There are exceptions, of course. Complaints from citizens require some sort of action, however token. Also, if the prostitution is related to something else like human trafficking or drug smuggling, the police may get interested. There are also politically motivated prosecutions from time to time. I’m always amused when a high end escort agency gets taken down and high profile clients turn up on their phone lists. I sometimes suspect that the cops or the DA had a pretty good idea that those names were there first. And of course, there’s the occasional moralist who gets into play. They’re usually a DA (who’s elected) with a strong religious conservative backing and they can play to their backers by going after those immoral folks.

But as a rule? The cops know the prostitution boards exist. I’m pretty confident they monitor them. If something gets out of line, they’ll go in and deal with it but otherwise ignore it. The Craigslist ads are a good example–law enforcement knew about them long before the Craigslist Killer, but it took that case and a crusading religious minority to cause anyone to try to change how Craigslist operated.

Aside–one of the reasons that I believe cops ignore the boards is exactly *because* it lets them monitor the transactions. Getting Craigslist to ban ads only shoves the effort underground where it’s harder to monitor (for hints like child prostitution, trafficking, rapists, etc). I continue to be confounded by the religious right’s belief that if they stop Craigslist or bust agencies that the world’s oldest profession is somehow going to stop existing. That’s just arrogance of another sort.

So back to the guys running the escort board. The first way to avoid problems is to give the cops no reason to want in. How do you do this?

Keep it small. It’s not worth a lot of effort to bust a single independent escort if there aren’t any complaints.

Keep it humble. Anyone who’s sure they’ve got a foolproof security system is daring people to prove them wrong.

Or better, keep it legal.

Now this is option b) so many words above. Obviously, I believe that prostitution itself should be legal, since what one or more consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom is no one else’s business. Why does it matter if money changed hands?

Most escorts understand that. Money is for time and companionship, not sex. Or money is for a sensual massage that may or may not include ‘more.’ The successful prostitution boards understand that too. They keep it clear that their role is an advertising forum and distance the board owners from the content. Some even police the content and make sure it stays vague enough to avoid problems. The point is to give themselves a layer of deniability if they do get some heat.

These guys didn’t do that. They had the arrogance to be recruiting members. They had the arrogance to insist that the ‘recruits’ have actually committed a crime. They got big. No wonder they got busted. I just have to shake my head in disbelief.

Recently, I came across a blog written by a former strip club manager, Strip Club Hound. I’ve been enjoying it and one of his posts dovetailed neatly into last week’s post on objectification. In it, he talks about a customer who said, “what do I have to do to get one of these bitches to go out with me?”

Err, you can’t.

As Strip Club Hound discusses, even though the customer was being nice to the dancers on the outside, they could sense his attitude anyway. Strip Club Hound says

Dancers in a club are very sensitive to how men view them. They know they’re sex objects to the customers who come in. If they’re going to relate to a man in any other way than to just sell him lap dances, they want to believe he thinks of them as more than just sex objects.

Now I happen to think this applies to women in general and not just strippers. Strippers may just be more conscious that they’re being objectified and reduced to bodies on display.

The thing is, the objectification is then usually mutual. The customer who sees a dancer as just tits and ass is most likely viewed as just a wallet to the dancer. The problem comes when the customer wants to pretend he’s more than a wallet, but won’t (or doesn’t know how) to stop objectifying the dancer and see her as a human being. There’s a fundamental hypocrisy there that the customer often doesn’t see.

The thing is, it’s this hypocrisy that’s causing him the pain. Want to be someone who is seen as dateable? Desirable? More than a wallet? That’s what the customer asking the dancers out wants, right? Because if it’s just to get laid by a beautiful woman, I’m pretty confident that enough money would get him some dancer at the club. It’s not a huge enough step to go from lapdances for pay to sex for pay if the money’s right. So either the customer is being cheap or stupid.

Aside–I’m quite serious about “some dancer.” Sure, a specific dancer may say “no” no matter what the offer, but the odds of getting some stripper to agree to sex are pretty good if the money is high enough. For example, $10,000 for one night would probably get a taker. Heck, for $1 Million, most women, stripper or not, would probably stop and think about it. If a guy can be honest that all he’s interested in is sex with an objectified body, the rest is just price and shopping around.

But if a guy wants an interaction with a person instead of an object, the currency isn’t money. It’s, at a minimum, respect. Interest, appreciation, and even simply liking the other person all come into play too. It’s treating the other person like a person instead of an object. Ultimately, it’s proof that you get what you give.

It doesn’t even matter what the woman does. When I was a regular at strip clubs, I quickly figured out that if I treated the dancers as people as with respect, they returned the niceness. Sometimes that was just attitude. Sometimes it was small favors, like extending a private dance another song for free.

There’s a place for objectification, like I wrote previously. There’s not a place for hypocrisy. So part of our ‘growing up’ is learning to spot and eliminate such hypocrisy in ourselves. It’s not easy, but always worth it.

Okay, I stole the title of this post from Avenue Q’s song, “The Internet is for Porn,” which I saw last weekend during its Denver tour stop. In many ways, the song was so hilarious because it’s true. Porn has driven much of the internet for some time.

But that’s well trod ground. Instead, I want to muse about one of the uncomfortable realities of being an erotica writer. If I’m doing my job right, somewhere there’s a guy grabbing his dick as he reads my stories.

It can be a mildly disturbing image. I’m heterosexual and I admit that I kinda like the image of a hot woman reaching for her vibrator when she pulls up my stories (and it has happened), but the world does not consist solely of hot women, even if your definition of hot, like mine, is reasonably broad (yes, GF, you qualify). So the visual of a guy taking care of business in front of his computer screen is not one I particularly want in front of my eyeballs.

But the reality is that most consumers of online porn and erotica are men. Most of my audience is men. I’m not exactly writing lesbian romance stories here. Which brings me back to the reality–if I’m doing my job right, I’m going to inspire some guys to “doubleclick.”

Now, obviously, that’s not my only “job” when I write. Primarily, I intend to entertain. I also like to inspire thought, which at least for me is entertaining. Yes, there are times I want something mindless for my entertainment, but Hollywood and TV do a great job of providing that. So I write what I want to read. There are some stories on this site that barely rise above stroke. There are some that have so little sexual content as to barely qualify as erotica. After all, one of my personal favorites is Eye of the Hurricane, which is neither happy nor erotic.

I repeat. I write what I want to read.

This has meant that I’ve passed up some professional calls for submission because while I’ve got the skill, the topics don’t particularly grab me. I’m going to read the story myself a dozen times before the main audience sees it so I’d better like it.

It also means, for an erotic scene, it has to have appeal to me. Now I’m not going to be doing any doubleclicking to my own story–any residual arousal gets squashed when I’m fumbling for a way to avoid writing ‘thrust’ for the third time in a single paragraph. But it has to get my pulse up. If it doesn’t, then I’m not doing it well.

And that’s the dirty little secret of erotica, particularly of the internet variety. The writer isn’t supposed to admit, “I wrote this because I found it hot.” The reader isn’t supposed to admit, “I found this so hot that I did something about it.”

One of the things that makes Avenue Q so much fun (and that’ll have to be a separate post) is that it dares to say what we don’t normally openly admit. The internet is for porn, and that’s ultimately kinda cool.

Often, erotica is shoved into a ‘taboo’ corner where it’s unacceptable to be openly consumed or created. Magazines and books don’t come in plain brown wrappers any more, but erotica and porn companies still use neutral sounding monikers for billing and shipping. Due to the opprobrium, most erotica writers use pen names. Additionally, both porn and erotica exploded when it became easy to consume them in the privacy of one’s home. VCR’s meant that people didn’t have to get caught going into adult movie theaters, or endure an unpleasant environment while they were there. Similarly, the internet dramatically increased porn consumption, with porn leading the way in many developments.

One unintended side effect of the disdain and marginalization of porn, however, was that it created a world with almost no limits. It has been like the traditional Japanese concept of shame. Once a Samurai brought shame on himself, well, it didn’t matter how much shame. There wasn’t a gradation going from “bad” to “worse” to “awful.” The line had been crossed and that was it.

But if the line has been crossed and it doesn’t matter, why not take it to the limit? What difference does it make, really, to cheat on your wife twenty times instead of five? Or to spend three days on a drug induced binge instead of one? There are obviously some celebrities in the news recently who’ve made that calculation.

Similarly, porn saw the rabid push to the limits. Rule 34 is proof of that. So is the explosion of some of the most tasteless boundary pushing porn imaginable. If being taboo or being shocking is all you have to differentiate yourself, and there’s no social penalty for being shocking because you’re already across the line, why not go for it?

So… cue the problem with where the line gets drawn. There is a movement in many quarters to bring quality erotica out from behind the line. Or to move the line so that “erotica” doesn’t have the disdain in popular culture. Of course, that’s much of the basis for the erotica vs. porn definition fight. Erotica is on the “acceptable” side of the line and porn is on the other.

Now rather than wade into that fight in this particular musing, I want to go back to my original metaphor and ask–is there really only one line? Or is there more than one? Or is there really a gradient?

And I’ve come to believe there are really two lines. The first is when something gets looked down on socially. The second is when it motivates a section of the population to actively go after the producers.

That second line, in porn, is clearly child pornography. I’ve discussed my views on it previously and don’t wish to repeat myself about how it should be treated. Instead, I’d like to steer into the area of fictional child porn.

In written erotica, or cartoon erotica, there are no actual child victims. It all comes from the creator’s imagination. As such, I believe it should be harmless and, in America, protected under the First Amendment.

But what I think doesn’t matter. I know of several erotica authors who have run into legal difficulties as a result of using pre-teen characters. Red Rose accepted a plea deal after facing criminal charges for obscenity. Frank McCoy chose to fight his, even though it meant traveling from Minnesota to Florida to defend himself. Dorsai was contacted by authorities and warned but not charged. I know of a handful of other cases that have other complications as well (like the authorities actually finding child porn on the author’s computer). All it takes is a prosecutor out to make a headline or acting out of personal moral revulsion to make someone’s life hell. It’s not necessarily a consolation to win the legal case if you’ve been dragged through the mud along the way.

This is, surprisingly, not purely academic for me. I recently had an opportunity to do graphic novel scripts for a new website for pay. Anyone who’s followed my Deep Dish discussions here knows that I would love to do more graphic novels, but having to pay an artist is holding me back. However, the website was going to allow comics that had pre-teen characters involved in sexual situations. Even if I was willing to be associated with a site that allowed that from a personal taste and morals standpoint, the legal jeopardy is too much to risk.

That’s what made me aware of this second line. Post-puberty teenagers–okay, that’s a grey area since the age of consent varies so much. Pre-puberty? Line. Big Red and flashing, for those who see it. And for me–I’m not going to cross it, even by second hand association.

For some time, the site FEMJOY has published high quality nude photos and videos of very attractive models. However, other than the nudity, their site is fairly chaste. None of the poses or activities of the models cross the line from modeling into sex. No licking, sucking, masturbation, or penetration.

I happen to appreciate that. It’s far too easy to let the quality degrade, or for the photos and film to become crude, once the line between nude modeling and actual sex has been crossed. We certainly see that in a great deal of the sex industry. “Class” seems to be hard to maintain, when the lowest common denominator will still sell. You’ll never go broke appealing to man’s more basic and coarser urges. Similarly, you’ll never go broke selling something that can be addictive for a fraction of the population, but that’s a different post some day.

So recently, the FEMJOY folks launched a new site, Joymii.com, that attempts to capture the quality of FEMJOY’s main site, while loosening up the limits on what happens. I figured it was worth a look.

Well, I’m pleased to say that the photography and video production quality remains top notch. I’ve included two examples below (click on the images to get the full associated promo gallery). Two new galleries and two new videos show up each week, usually in pairs (two photoshoots with a gallery and video for each).

The content is a little harder. The galleries to date are all girl-girl or solo girl masturbation. Many of them involve dildos and other toys. Some of the girl-girl scenes (like Karlie and Riley below) are particularly hot because it’s clear the girls are really getting into it. Others don’t rise to that level and feel more like friends putting on a show. There’s no male-female content so far.

As a result, I found it enjoyable and classy, but still not as arousing as I perhaps would have liked. I think it’s definitely a nice addition to the FEMJOY catalog, and also a nice addition to what’s out on the web. More class is good. And of course, seeing one of my favorite models, Ariel, in action is also good. So I recommend it, but at the 3 out of 4 star level. More frequent updates or more chemistry in the girl-girl scenes would push that higher.

UPDATE
Joymii has released their first boy-girl video and photo set, Miela and Tom. There’s an example below. Video and production quality are high. The enthusiasm and interaction between the two is good. It doesn’t come across as acting. Hopefully we’ll see more like it in the future.

You can see more of Joymii by clicking on the images below.

I once had lunch with a man who produced porn films in Southern California. It was a fascinating conversation, particularly about STD management within the industry, but he did make a snarky comment that stuck with me. He said his was the only industry where no one aged. They were always 20.

Now he was in part referring to how “official” ages were always adjusted down. But he was also referring to the turnover within the industry. And the snark came in because he said that he didn’t mind 20 year old bodies, but he was sick of 20 year old minds.

I kind of know what he means. There’s something to maturity that makes a woman more attractive than merely firm flesh can do.

A friend of mine once said that it was the confidence. An older woman knows what she wants and knows how to ask for it, he said. He recalled college girls getting out of bed after sex and taking the sheets with them. Err… he just finished screwing you–why the modesty now? Older women were more confident.

I happen to agree. I’ve had some wonderful younger lovers, but there’s always a special place in my memories for my older lovers. By that, I mean a decade or two older.

One of those women just moved back into town, which brought back a slew of delightful memories. We had a strong sexual chemistry and only discovered midway through our first date that we also have a 19 year age difference. It didn’t stop her from taking me to bed a few dates later, nor me from inviting her into mine after that. We eventually ended it because we knew it was unsustainable–I wanted kids and hers were in college and she was done. Nonetheless, we stayed friends, though our connection faded with distance (after she moved) and time.

At the time, and later when I was involved with other older women, it seemed natural and fun and playful. The term ‘cougar’ hadn’t entered popular vocabulary and when it finally did, I just had to giggle. The term implies a predatory woman, stalking helpless younger men. In reality, it was as much me as them. I knew a good thing when it happened and wasn’t shy about going for it.

Aside–it does surprise me how many older women I know who have difficulty finding decent similar age single men. Have the good men started dying off? Or have they just given up on trying to be good and retreated into their foibles and quirks? I dunno–I’m taken. But I do wonder sometimes.

Because, honestly, older women beat their younger sisters in overall sexuality hands down. And there are a lot of guys out there that just don’t know what they’re missing.

I knew a woman once who had a successful phone sex career. She did well in part because she took her calls at her computer wearing a headset, which allowed her to take notes during the conversation. Then, when the client called back, she could quickly remind herself what they’d talked about and whatever personal details he’d shared. Her clients felt they were special to her, when in fact they were little more that a well-organized tickler file.

The other major contributor to her success was that she was a masterful story teller. She knew how to drop the little details into a story so that it rang true, even when it was completely made up. She also often included little vignettes that showed her embarrassing herself or in other unflattering light. After all, why would anyone lie about things that don’t make them look good? Her confessional stories rang ‘true’ and garnered a quick large following.

For me, it was just one more data point on how much men (or at least many men) crave authentic voracious feminine sexual energy in their lives. Skim any Penthouse Letters book or free stories site aimed at men and you’ll see that most of the women in them are high libido, highly sexual women with low inhibitions. That’s what enough male readers want to be able to sustain those publications and sites. That’s the draw for many fantasies such as wife-watching. And yes, there’s probably a longer post in here somewhere, since I didn’t address this head on in my Power of the Feminine post. But the point for this post is that I wasn’t surprised that a successful phone sex operator was able to tap into that craving.

Unfortunately, she made a mistake. It was early October a few years back and had recently snowed here in Denver. So in one call, she mentioned that she was going to take a break and go skiing. Unfortunately, the client she was talking with knew that the Colorado ski areas weren’t open and so caught her in a falsehood. He was furious. She told me that he flew into a rage and called her all sorts of names before hanging up.

She was shocked, but ultimately dismissed it as a minor loss in her customer base. It wasn’t exactly a Crying Game surprise, after all. She also didn’t understand why he was so upset. She kind of understood, but she really didn’t get it.

I did.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to read about the takedown of Alexa, the blogger of The Real Princess Diaries. Her blog was highly rated and followed, but she turned out to (probably) not be a high priced call girl in San Francisco, and instead appears to have been a man living on the other side of the country. I say ‘appears’ because the blogosphere is still humming with possibilities and accusations and I frankly can’t keep up, much less intelligently comment.

Now, I’d found Alexa’s blog a while back and enjoyed reading it from time to time–maybe once or twice a month. The writing was solid and it included all those little details that made it ring true. I recall one story where she described joining the mile high club on a cross-country flight with a couple of marines she’d met in the back of the plane. She devoted a couple of paragraphs to describing the difficulty of finding a position that worked in the lavatory, and what they were bumping into as they fucked. There was humor in it, as well as the sheer hotness factor.

At the same time, there were posts that made me go, “this is, at a minimum, exaggerated.” One of the stories, for example, was about putting on a sex show at a private party in a rich section of San Francisco. The details of how she got to the party sounded like they were straight out of Eyes Wide Shut (review coming soon). She had a story of being a weekly morning office blowjob for a regular, which besides being an amazing risk that not one of the pros I know would ever willingly take (too much risk of getting caught), the details themselves rang as contrived (walking there, the blowjob always on the same day of the week just before his secretary arrived but never actually getting caught, etc.). Finally, too many of Alexa’s stories were just plain hot, whereas the sex workers I know would say that the majority of their memorable encounters were just weird. “Hot” was a rarity when they were doing it for pay. It was a job with its good days and its bad days, and how many of us truly remember the specifics about our average or slightly average days?

But while I doubted the veracity of many or all of Alexa’s posts, I didn’t spend much time on it because this is, after all the internet. Isn’t there a famous New Yorker cartoon that says, “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog?” I read her posts firmly aware that they could be complete bullshit, but it entertained me from time to time and that was the whole point.

Obviously, it wasn’t for someone else. It could be a simple case of mental instability on the part of the person who outed him (Remittance Girl has some scary examples in her comments section, including one from me about an author friend I know that was cyberstalked). However, having read the original screed, I don’t think it was.

The person who did the outing was pissed. They did a lot of work, fueled by anger that was more than casual, in order to do the attack. While several sordid details of possible other improprieties have come out since then, few were included in the original post. This was personal, and whether it was because of some flame war that spiraled out of control or something else is currently unknown.

But I couldn’t help thinking of the phone sex worker I knew, by analogy and extension.

Because we, as an aggregate and often as individuals, want more from the internet than mere entertainment. Sometimes we want accurate information. Often we want community in ways that the physical world cannot easily provide. And sometimes we want connection.

I’ve been there. I celebrated my 25th birthday alone in an apartment with a pizza, a rented VCR, and some movies, trying to pretend I wasn’t desperately lonely. I had a year in which I went months when my only physical touch with another person beyond a handshake was a lapdance. The internet, still in its infancy, was a fucking godsend.

The internet allowed me to maintain some semblance of human connection. It allowed me to be emotionally honest in ways that I just couldn’t with those I spent my time with face to face on a daily basis (as most were coworkers). It allowed me space to sort out more of who I was and what I thought–trying on personas and growing from the experience. In some ways, it helped me stay sane.

And I think it’s that sense of connection that is at the heart of both the sense of betrayal and some of the reaction to it. “Alexa” apparently was false in some of her personal connections with others on the web. They felt betrayed. In response, there was a take down, which betrayed “her” in personal ways. It’s in that sense that Remittance Girl’s comments about the vibrancy of the web strike home with me.

I think a lot of the vibrancy of the web is in the connections. We can meet and relate with people all over the world with whom we might not otherwise ever become aware of. We can find support and friendship and community and the occasional good idea. Which just makes it sad when it’s perturbed by something like this.

Which is ultimately where I end up. There are plenty of places debating the particulars of Alexa and in the end, those particulars won’t matter much to most of us. It’s not like we’re the person that’s been destroyed, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad for the rest of us that it happened.