Forever the optimist I'll always stay bright.

How Sex Work Transed my Gender

(but also it's far more complicated than that I just love a punchy headline)

It’s tricky to have a conversation about the realities of sex work in a world that sees things too profoundly in a binary. Admonishing certain realities of it may be misinterpreted as siding with TERF ideology but romanticizing it ignores the complicated intersection of labor exploitation and bodily autonomy inherent to the industry. Because I want to talk about an ultimately positive experience I took away from my time within the industry, I feel that it’s important to start by saying that when people say sex work is work, we mean that it is labor, and needs the support that all laborers need. The workers need organizing power, ownership of the fruits of their labor, and protection from their clients and employers.  

Recognizing the impacts of sex work on my life has been a delayed reaction because ultimately, it was a traumatic time of survival. I spent nearly a decade in Fight or Flight, with no time to analyze what I was experiencing while it was happening. I’m not even blaming the industry for that, because as problematic as it can be, poverty was the true villain, as insecure living situations, unstable work, and working multiple full-time jobs will keep your nervous system in overdrive 24/7. 

So years later, every so often, I find myself with a new lightbulb appearing cartoonishly over my head, drawing another connection from who I am and how I interact with the world today, and how said behavior ultimately originated in a place called Nite Moves, of all things. Some of those behaviors have resolved with time. How I interacted with all cis-men during those years and for a time afterward was undeniably disordered. I inherently distrusted every single one, yet felt like I needed them around at all times for a feeling of safety and security. I kept dangerous men in my life for no good reason. But that went away with time and therapy. Now I distrust cis-men an appropriate amount. (ba dum-tss)

Other things did not resolve with time. My ire for how club owners (often in tandem with security staff) exploit workers and prioritize clients and profits over the safety of dancers? That ire was justified, and all that’s changed now is that I know more about labor organizing, leftist politics and have more context in my belief system to explain why the system is wrong. The other thing that did not resolve is how it made me view myself on the gender spectrum. 

All sex work involves a bit of gender performance, but stripping as a whole is the most hard-line, binary-adjacent area of the industry I’ve dabbled in. Because everyone in the strip club is performing. The dancers are obvious, but if all a client wanted a hot woman to ogle, pornography is cheaper and easier to access. Cam girls can offer you a completely tailored and personalized experience. And no one is more discrete than a full-service worker. Part of why men go to strip clubs is to be perceived in a strip club by other men. It’s a whole gender ritual, even. Half of the men who get taken to these clubs on their birthday or bachelor party have told me in the privacy behind the curtain that they wished they had gone to play pool, camping, or whatever their friend group’s shared interest is. But outside the champagne room, they’re pinching asses,ordering bottle service and getting high-fives for how good they can play this role. 

So, on the converse side of this gender performance, strip clubs tend to encourage the most rigid portrayal of a culturally-accepted femininity, often to the point of a very bad homogenization. On that topic, the lack of racial and body diversity in strip clubs is something people with a better perspective have talked about before, including the Portland Strippers who recently unionized, and the Black Feminisms blog, check those out for more on that perspective. 

So getting ready to work at the average club is not a matter of dressing down and dolling up. You’re trying to fit a very rigid expression of femininity that, if I were a gambling man, would likely not line up with most of the dancers own personal definition of femininity. And the more “high-end” the club, the stricter and more rigid those rules. I’ve seen clubs have restrictions to what the owner thought were the “most feminine” nail polish colors. Hair length mandates. One manager inspected my midsection to make sure it “passed”; if it hadn’t I would be restricted to wearing corset-tops on the floor. 

But for me, it unlocked something personal that I did not expect. I’ve never felt particularly attached to femininity, even when I identified as a woman. Then, I began to appreciate the ritual of putting femininity on as a costume. Once I did, I instantly had an easier time enjoying it. In my subconscious it was clear that this was not me. It was a role, a gimmick I was playing at, and thereby I felt so comfortable indulging in it. The best part, though, was the other ritual at the end of each shift. Taking off the costume, and tucking it away. The blissful comfort I would feel in my own body for the several hours after a shift - no matter what happened that night, no matter how dreadful or dry - I would be reenergized. I literally got to put femininity on like a costume and then take it off again. 

I also found that it shed a light on something interesting about my relationship to girlhood, not just femininity. There are things about girlhood that have always resonated with me in a homey way, sleepover delirium and bar bathroom camaraderie, but those resonances don’t make me feel like any more of a woman. In the strip club, girlhood feels like having an army of girls meet you in the dressing room without you having to ask because they saw how ‘that guy’ was acting, throwing a separate funeral for your friend because none of you would be allowed in at the real one, boycotting a patron who hurt one of you because security refuses to boot him.

I am not a woman. I am trauma-bonded to girlhood from my time spent in the trenches with it. 

I am not a woman. I am whatever is left is left when society’s vision of femininity is shed and packed away.

So for the next 6 weeks, I will be watching every single Barbie animated movie ever made to get up to speed for the live action movie. At the end of each week I’ll post a mini-review of each film and rank it out of 6. Is this a good idea? No. But someone once told me to get a life and I have spent every moment after that disobeying them.

oh, many.

first of all, i feel like her role as a mentor gets underestimated simply because she is a woman and people are not used to seeing that. many see her as a funny older sister to phoenix who listens to him pining for miles, some straight up ship phoenix and mia, and i rarely see her being recognized for the person who taught phoenix how to be a lawyer despite that part being so heavily emphasized in ace attorney, especially when phoenix and the ghost of mia object at the same time in the aa3 final case. phoenix has her tactics and her mannerisms, and mia is forever in the hearts and minds of many, but at the same time, she was a very interesting separate person.

Because you're entirely correct- she's a lot more independent than one should be. But can you blame her? Mia was ten when her mother vanished, leaving her with her canonically-rather-abusive aunt and her two-year-old sister. All we know about their father is that he died when Maya was young. Mia was ten, and she lost her parents within two years of each other.

She was left with her aunt, who very much did not have her best interests at heart. Mia and Maya were nothing but the competition to Morgan, that's obvious. But we can see from Maya that she took very little from Morgan, if anything at all, even though she was two when her mother left.

Maya's nothing like Morgan, so it begs the question, "If Morgan wasn't raising Maya, and Maya turned out nothing like her, then who was taking care of her?", and the answer is very obviously Mia. Who was ten when her mother walked away.

Mia Fey became a lawyer and gave up being the Master to her sister. She knew pretty well why her mother had left by the time we get her to talk about it at all: Misty left because she believed she dishonoured the Fey name. But Mia, who was absolutely the heir to the most powerful position in the valley (and defacto was the Master, since someone had to fill the role), turned her back on all of it to become a lawyer.

I would argue that Mia's motivations to give Maya the position were a lot less "I didn't want to fight with my sister like my mom did with hers" (the reason she tells us), and a lot more "my mother abandoned me and forced me to parent my two-year-old sister because of your so-called legacy, fuck your legacy, I'm going to be a lawyer and when my sister's old enough to join me, we'll never need to depend on you again".

Because, bluntly speaking, there was absolutely no reason why Misty couldn't have taken her daughters with her when she vanished. Despite the fact she grew up with Morgan and knew exactly how much she sucked - Iris proves that sisters in AA are in fact aware of each other being evil - she still entrusted Mia and Maya to Morgan. From Mia's perspective, given how much Morgan hated them both and the implication Mia raised Maya, Misty abandoned her and her sister the moment she had an excuse to do so.

Mia never got to find her mother, and never got to have a conversation with her. But we do know that she told Maya who Elise Deauxnim was, and didn't seem all that concerned that Maya now had to deal with the surprise that her mother was still around, for like ten seconds, and then died really stupidly trying to protect her.

But we also know that Mia's a reasonably compassionate person, and so we have to ask, what on earth made Mia think Maya was going to take that well? Because if we look at Mia's upbringing, and how she likely feels about the people around her, the answer seems pretty clearly "she doesn't respect Misty very much, because she's proven she doesn't deserve it, and it never occurred to Mia that Maya would be devastated to find out their mother is dead, because to Mia, Misty being gone because she's dead would have been better than Misty being gone because she abandoned them".

The point I'm getting at here, is that if Mia had been able to have a conversation with her mother around BttT, or if she'd survived long enough to find her, it would have gone Incredibly Poorly. Yes, Mia loves her mother, because she's still her mother, but I genuinely cannot see her liking or respecting Misty very much.

Every single person we know of that Mia should have been able to rely on fucked her over in some way. Her mother abandoned her, her aunt abused and likely parentified her, Grossberg sold her mother out for cash, and Diego got poisoned. (Now, admittedly Diego did not choose to go into a coma, but the point is that she needed someone in her corner and he was for a little bit until he suddenly wasn't. It's not that much a reach to think that his poisoning didn't rip off a ton of scabs over Mia's emotions towards her mother, who also left her for no good reason.)

Mia loves, yes, but she doesn't trust, and given her experiences, it's not hard to see why. She learned through trauma that she can't trust anyone. She says to have faith in your client, but faith is different than trust, and she does a great job of not trusting anyone. (Beanix learned from the best, I'm just sayin'.)

I do lastly want to note what Mia says when we take damage or she thinks we're not pushing hard enough. She glares, says Phoenix is too soft, doesn't quite insult him but isn't exactly nice, either. And glorious as it was, her victory speech over Dahlia read a lot less like the heroic monologue of defeating the villain and a lot more smugly taking the opportunity to be cruel against someone who in her mind deserved it. (*Dahlia did, but it wasn't a very 'everyone deserves someone in their corner' defense attorney speech.)

Ultimately, the writing shows that Mia's a lot angrier than she openly expresses, and she's a very distrustful person when not actively doing her job. Of course she's independent. No one ever gave her another option, and she's furious about what happened to her, and there's nothing she can or ever really could do about it.

She did teach Phoenix everything he knew, and she's a very capable lawyer, and she's amazing. She's also a deeply tragic character, and her own trauma - which she either masked or repressed - never really got acknowledged, let alone handled as an active part of the narrative.

So for the next 6 weeks, I will be watching every single Barbie animated movie ever made to get up to speed for the live action movie. At the end of each week I’ll post a mini-review of each film and rank it out of 6. Is this a good idea? No. But someone once told me to get a life and I have spent every moment after that disobeying them.

literally everybody ive talked to: Don't Catch Feelings

me: I'm built different

my fwb:

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.