An interesting breakdown of the TER rating scheme, laid out in a way I’d never seen before: 

“The highest score a provider can receive is a 7, unless they: 1) kiss with tongue 2) offer oral without a condom 3) are bisexual 4) offer anal sex, or 5) participate with more than one man (assuming that the client is a man) at the same time. For each service, a provider can earn one point. In some cases, earning a full 10 points is impossible without crossing personal boundaries, and often confusing when the provider doesn’t identify as a cis woman; furthermore, ratings are not selected by clients, but by TER administrators who read a client’s description of the meeting.

That means that a less verbose client may have had a 10/10 meeting, but the TER staff (who are anonymous, but presumably all straight men) may read it as a 7/10 experience, or some lower designation. For a provider who isn’t a cis woman, it’s easy to imagine that higher ratings are regularly unattainable under this specific male gaze, and especially in a place where ads for transgender sex workers are listed separately under a “Transsexual” category (here and on Eros). As a result of this unpredictable rating system, many high-class providers have removed their listings from TER or adopted a “no review” policy, which effectively bans you from advertising on the site. For those providers, it’s no big deal; for survival sex workers, it’s self-destruction.”

Stop bitching about what people are doing/thinking/controlling at the top

&

She cannot seem to make a post without referring to herself as “very upscale” or “high-end” in her posts. She does FBSM and tantric healing stuff I won't pretend to understand.

I am all for being self confident and being into yourself but this is a community where sex workers regularly discuss feelings of lack of worth based on their pricing, having specials, etc, and SWs who identify as addicts openly discuss struggling because they spent rent on drugs, and people talk about having to do calls that make them feel violated to feed themselves.

We also are a community that celebrates each other’s gratitudes, successes, and good months.

But everytime this particular member posts, it’s something like, “As a very high end worker….” (this is never phrased as “as a very privileged worker, btw, in case anyone is wondering, though this is a skinny white woman who named herself as an Egyptian goddess as a stripper)

Anyway, she posted today, and I was reading through the post, waiting for her to tell us how fancy she is, surrounded by all the posts about people making rent…

She told a story about meeting a sex therapist and talking to her, and THE WHOLE STORY WAS A LEAD UP TO HER QUOTING THE SEX THERAPIST CALLING HER AN "EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN.”

She just wanted to let us know that a sex therapist thinks she’s extraordinary. Good for you and your full body tantric healing.

I think that you’re weird and ill-informed for seeing these two groups as a) somehow inherently in opposition with one another and b) two distinct groups with fixed identities. 

The lie that people either fall into a group of privileged, wealthy side-gig sex workers and people being forced to trade sex (and can only ever be one of those things) is a lie that only serves the people who persecute sex workers. Law enforcement benefits from that lie — they can arrest and assault us without consequence, they can take our money and our earning power ‘for our own good’, and abolitionists can cement their lucrative, decades-long careers on the bases of this lie.