Have you ever gotten bored with something you loved?

Not because you stopped loving it, no – but because it stopped being new, stopped having something new to tell you for a while. Something to figure out. You stopped even having interesting thoughts about it, or feeling interested. You missed its touch, but just like trying to fuck an old lover you’re going through a rough patch with, you couldn’t make yourself feel that fire.

I’m the kind of person that needs fire.

So after a while of being shiftless and aimless, starting a hundred somethings and not having the oomph to push them through (or perhaps being distracted by that other, more immediate sputtering fire… which one do I see every day, after all?), I realized a few things.

One: I hate the city I’m in, truthfully. I’ll be out in a year.

Two: I really don’t have any desire to be a hack, mostly because I don’t have the heart for it. I admire the balls on marketers and hustlers – but I’m not one. That’s not my gift. I can do one thing, and that’s tell the truth, as hard as I can. I can use lies to tell that truth, sure. I’ve never flinched at that.

But I can’t spin lipstick and promises, and I’m not really into making anything I can’t look back on and be proud of. There are thousands of people in this world who can make pure straight-up smut better than I can. I say this as someone who happens to like straight-up smut.

I’m not someone to come to if you want it – which is strange given that it’s something I enjoy and participate in – I’m someone to come to if you want that strangely uncomfortable feeling that “she knows.”

I think I’d like my multimedia to be rare and excellent, and I think I’ll spend some time this year improving my visual and audio skills accordingly. But it’s the exchanges that fuel me the most.

I lust after the interaction and the dynamic of live, full-on phone sex and cam. I savor the tango of face to face, instinct to instinct… sadist to masochist, dominant to submissive. And that’s why I’ve made the move to traveling more, living more, continuing to spend time with my cherished phone and email pets, and now: real-time sessions.

Take a peek at my new fetish escort website, and keep watch for tweaks to my phone site (including new photos and an availability indicator for my direct dial line) as well as more here on this blog.

I’ve missed you. Thank you for reading.

(Many thanks to the wonderful Sarah Sloane for pointing out that stagnation and boredom can lead to burnout, and that depression hates change. Words to live by… And thanks to my wonderful clients and to all those at Desiree Alliance this year who both reminded me that it’s the connections we form with clients and fellow sex workers, the energy we exchange and the ways that we give back to each other that make this work worth doing, always.)

As tired as I get of the looks and the questions, though, I have to remember: What I do is not illegal in Massachusetts, or indeed, in most of the United States. I am not going to have my door busted down for my work. (Although I did almost lose my room last summer over it…) I am not endangering my life every time I sit down in my easy chair for a cosy little 10-minute erotic chat.

This all puts me in a special category of sex worker: someone who can be really open about my work, but also has the option of not talking about it, of not thinking about it, of ignoring the other people in the allied sex trades who HAVE to go face to face with their clients, who are constantly harassed by law enforcement, who bear the brunt of the stigma (all those hooker and whore jokes still get laughs!), who are beaten and robbed and raped and murdered because our culture is so fucked-up about sex that selling it makes you a negligible, disposable quantity.

Today is December 17th, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. For every dead hooker joke I’ve heard this year told to me by friends I was out as a sex worker to, for every time one of my sex work friends has had to fudge on the “what do you do?” question because s/he was afraid for their own safety if they came out, for every sex worker of every gender who screens their clients, guards their basic personal information, sets up safe calls and knows that one day it still might not be enough to stop someone from killing them because of the job they do – a job which is based on giving others pleasure – I’m telling someone outside of my little bubble what this day means, and why it means so much to me.

Today I’ll advocate for my sisters and brothers in sex work, all my far-flung colleagues across the globe. Tonight I’ll light a candle and whisper to Ishtar for all the ones it was too late for. And I’ll take phone fetish calls, and cam, and make my porn in my safe warm apartment because in a world that tries its best to snuff us out, sometimes the most powerful thing sex workers can do is exist, and keep working, and be happy.

P.S. – The uber cool Renegade Evolution and Jill Brenneman are doing a live radio show today. Listen with me. If you’re a sex worker’s client, tip your favorite a little extra today in tribute. It’ll let her (or him) know that you’re remembering, too.

Or, how to pick the easy way out.

I got a straight job. I got a monogamous relationship with a straight boy – not necessarily a problem, but this is not how I thought my life would look. This isn’t what I signed up for.

I get up at seven to leave by eight to be there at nine. I go to a real office, I wear real clothes, I use my legal name. I’m still freelance – so, no benefits of the straight life come attached, except one: acceptance.

When I started caring about that little thing, I’m not sure.

If I’d been terribly big on acceptance I wouldn’t have been topless on the internet. Or an ordained Pagan minister. Or any of the other hundred and one things I’ve been, and am, openly.

I’ve wasted so much time pretending to be someone else’s normal.

It’s just that I got tired of dodging when asked what I do for a living. (Now people dodge me, in fear of my at-the-ready business cards.) When my friends griped about work I said nothing, because I was afraid of revealing what I did – of how that would reflect on my lover.

I thought of all the public advocacy work I wanted to do and decided I didn’t want to attract that kind of attention, because then his parents would realize, and what would that mean?

I was a coward.

He’s a good one – he never had a problem with my chosen work. I was working off my own decisions, my own assumptions. The pressure was internal – or where external, not from him. But I had a problem with self-censoring. I had a problem with living a lie. And I was too much of a coward – I called it being discreet – to be out with it where reasonable, for fear of who it’d get back to.

Only, someday I’ll be older, and I’ll wish I’d done it all fearlessly like I started out, when I was young enough to get away with it.

There’ll be time enough for pretending…

Only I don’t want to pretend.

I’ve always gotten bored with discretion. I’ve got a restless instinct to shake off all the bullshit.

But here I am, sunk cost fallacy at the ready: “I’ve already invested all this time and money.”

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and frankly I’m buried in debt and I want to die.

Not for any reason but that I just don’t see any point in doing this another day. Things don’t seem to ever get better.

I wish it wasn’t important to me, what I did; or, no, I wish it was more important to me, so that I would have pushed myself more, been more successful, compromised less on the things that drove me.

Instead I have to go off tomorrow to a job I’m unfortunately very good at and smile and pretend I didn’t wish I was in my home office, in my lingerie, taking calls from my favorites.

It’s silly and it’s whining – everyone wishes they were at home in their underwear getting paid to be sexual; nobody likes going off to their boring job. And of course there were times I didn’t want to log in…

…but I didn’t hate it. I just hated not being able to tell. Or, no, I hated not feeling honest.

j: what do you want me to have for the call?
me: mm, well what do you have? and do you have any toys?
j: i’m at home, you tell me
me: right, because I live next door and can peek into your window and see what you’ve got.

That call ended with me forcing him to spank his balls with a wooden spoon, calling him my bitch, and making him shove ice cubes up his greedy ass. Then… well. I made him cry, you see. It turns me on when they cry.

That night I actually made a man masturbate with his own tears.

That’s one life goal checked off…

n: so those are his guitars over Your shoulder in the piccy
n: and yes, isn’t it weird about NF boundries
n: !
n: which we should nonetheless respect (and do, don’t we)
Sabrina Morgan: yes, you’ve been an absolute gentleman
Sabrina Morgan: sticky fingered maybe, but nonetheless endearing in your own way

And to prove the point, he bought me breakfast. After I made him worship my luscious round ass.

Have I mentioned my callers rock?

Ladies (and gents, and everyone in between) – if we keep talking, our words will be heard and eventually repeated. The dialogue will be re-framed. And, mind by mind, people will gradually see sex workers as humans doing a job, not as members of some untouchable caste.

Hell, it worked for the Republicans…

Sorry… I was busy getting my tease on. You guys make it too easy sometimes and I just can’t resist taking full advantage. A little flirting and men become physically, mentally, and financially weak.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the strip club. The South is known for ladies with big smiles and long tanned legs… women who know how to work a man. The real show wasn’t the gyration on the couches but in the subtleties: the blonde with the knee-high black boots who moved like a snake, the vixen who dragged her chestnut hair over Mr. Aging Jock’s torso, knelt, and smiled up at him so sweetly before taking his money. Hands at his sides – no touching. These men were paying for nothing but a well-executed tease, knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to place their hands on one inch of tanned skin, knowing the only satisfaction they’d get would be at their own hands, hours later, thinking back on the way she’d moved as she straddled his thighs.

It was inspiring.

I’ve talked about strip clubs before with one of my favorite callers and he was quick to admit that the highlight of his experience was the dynamic of the tease, that undercurrent of control. She had it; he didn’t. Money did not equal power, except in that he was surrendering both. He knew he wasn’t supposed to come; if he came it would probably be prematurely. And she would know, and laugh.

I’ll be back on the phones tonight. Lap dance anyone?

It’s funny, because I was trying to avoid having the “Yes, I tell strange men how to stroke it over the phone” conversation with some new friends. Instead I’m finding I get very strange looks from my peers when I introduce myself as… a salesperson.

Go figure.

So this girl on Salon.com was asking whether or not she should do fetish videos. And the other vagaries of her letter aside, I found myself thinking (again – you do this constantly as a sex workaholic) about the social ramifications of my sex work. (My bank account is telling me I need to spend less time thinking and more time phone boning. My logic is telling me if I’d written this 24 hours ago I could’ve made the deadline for the next Black Heart Magazine.)

I wrote her a response, and it got me thinking:

This is high-intensity work; don’t be mistaken. If you’d shy away from nursing, counseling, or police work then you might want to think again. Sex work is rewarding, and not only financially, but it is demanding. It’s emotionally draining, financially uncertain, socially unacceptable, and very hard to explain to your friends, family, and significant others. Don’t fall into it if your heart’s not in it. It won’t be worth it for you.

If the money’s the only reward for you then it won’t be enough to compensate. If money’s not the only reward for you then all those hurdles might not be enough to hold you back.

(Read the rest of my response here.)

For me, the rewards outweigh the issues. There are issues; I can’t deny that. It’s hard to deny that if I asked 20 strangers about my job, 15 of them would assume I’d been abused.

My mother was abused. That’s why she’s a consultant.

My sister was abused. That’s why she’s a college student.

My best friend from high school was abused. That’s why she’s an editor.

I’d say a third of the women in my straight workplace have been abused – that I know of. I don’t know what the numbers are for sex work, but the numbers for mainstream are pretty staggering.

Of those 20, two would assume I’m a nympho.

Sex work, for me, is a sexual outlet. I’ll admit it. I’ve had to come to terms with the idea that I can either have my every last little sexual whim sated, or I can date someone I find fascinating in and out of bed rather than merely keep a stable of exhausted human dildos. I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

(Not that my current human dildo doesn’t blow my mind make me come like a fiend sate my sexual whims. I think my archives will attest to that. But he does require food, sunlight, and sleep from time to time. Which works out – if I had free access to his cock I’d never get anything done.)

I have to do something with this excess energy, so I use it against the perverts of this world. This keeps me out of trouble, keeps my sweetie in nice dinners, and keeps the perverts happy. It’s a win-win.

Of the remaining three individuals, two would think I’m going to Hell and one would think I’m awesome.

Three of these 20 would, after knowing me for a while, decide it’s just a job, albeit a weird one, and they don’t really care so long as I’m fine.

Good for them.

So, I suppose the question should be asked: Because I take my clothing off for a living, am I worthy of being respected? Am I allowed that much? Or is it right for me to be disrespected because I show myself in provocative photos?

I suppose I’m a little stunned. I take off my clothing for a living, and because of that, I’m not worthy of respect. I knew that I had to pay for my profession with my privacy, but I didn’t know it would also cost me respect.

I mean, I’m not saying that you have to take me seriously 100% of the time. I’m not saying you can’t even view me as sexy – I’m flattered that anyone does. But I do think that I’m entitled to at least a trace amount of respect here. My opinions and views shouldn’t be any less valuable just because I have a website where I take my top off.

-In Theory: The Dissection of the Allowance of Respect and Whether Erotica Models are Deserving of Such, DamnJezebel.com

And I left a comment that turned into a post:

It’s just the old Madonna/Whore thing again. We’re told that anyone who’s publicly sexual or in any other way pushes sexual boundaries not only isn’t worthy of respect, and isn’t even a real person, but doesn’t respect theirself. Usually herself. I guess that comes from the “loose women sleep around due to low self esteem and aren’t picky about who they boink” theory but what that has to do with making smut, I don’t know…

I say, if you can’t respect me naked, you can’t respect me clothed and probably never respected me to begin with. My opinions and character don’t change depending on what I’m wearing and whether or not it shows too much cleavage.

I’m tempted to blow it off and say some people are just paleolithic backwards dicks, the kind of people who are so retro they’re also racist and homophobic… but plenty of guys and girls keep on perpetuating this idea, that a woman’s value is in the (perceived, in this case) scarcity of her crotch, not in her mind or as a whole person.

That’s probably one of the least feminist sentiments I can hear someone express, right up there with “Why are you wearing shoes and what are you doing out of the kitchen?” (And that one’s usually a joke.)

This is some of the especially fun stuff sex workers get to deal with when we date. We have to wonder if we’re still good enough to take home to Mom. We have to lie about what we do – or tell a very slanted version of the truth. We have to deal with not only his or her conflicting feelings about whether or not it’s okay for a girlfriend to do this, but our own conflicting feelings about the same. On top of all that whenever you start having sex with somebody or get into any kind of romantic relationship, your mental and emotional boundaries get nudged, and this can affect your sex work boundaries or even interests. (This was true for me: I started off as a sub, got into fetish stuff when I was single, and now that I’m in a relationship again, I’m craving mostly fetish and domme sessions to balance out the bottoming I do “at home.”)

Dating’s easier because you’re coming in as you are, expecting to a degree to be taken as you are. When things get more serious you start to wonder how what you do is going to affect his work, his life, your sex, whether or not you’ve got a future…

If he has some of those old attitutes regarding respect and publicly sexual women you worry he thinks of you as lesser because of what you do – or because you love to do it. I don’t want to change my job. I love my job, even when it’s slow and I’m having to ponder hawking stuff on eBay. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

Not even a professional sales job with millionaire potential. Not even something respectable that I could brag to somebody’s mom about.

I couldn’t brag to myself about it. I’d know it was a compromise. Not a compromise between two people; a compromise of myself. And that, to me, would show a lack of self-respect.

It’s impractical but I know no way in hell am I going to go in there and work my ass off doing something I hate just for money. If I’m going to work my ass off it’s going to be figuring out how to be comfortable doing what I love. If that means working part time temporarily at something I’m not crazy about, so be it. But I believe in following your passions.

I might not be the girl you take home to Mom because you’re afraid that I might get excited and talk about whatever X-rated business venture I’ve got up my sleeve. I’ll be the girl sitting there in my pretty lacy panties counting the money I earned with my creativity, my perseverance, and my dirty mind knowing that the little girl who used to dream of owning her own business and living with passion and integrity, even if that meant living alone, would be proud of me.

And yeah – anyone worth having me would be proud of me too.

(They’d get bonus points for helping me brainstorm on marketing.)

That’s the kind of self-respect sex workers supposedly don’t have, isn’t it? The kind that means not compromising who you are and your values for every Tom, Dick, and Mary that come around.

Real friends don’t care if you show your tits on the internet.

It’s been almost a year since I started phone sex as a part-time gig to get me through college. I needed a job, and it was tech support or phone sex. Easy decision, right? If I want people screaming in my ear, I want them screaming in pleasure.

I was at a weird point in my life, trying to figure out where to go, considering politics, tech, ordination, the Navy… Phone sex didn’t seem like much more than a strange detour at the time. I’m a very lusty girl, climbing-the-walls horny to the point of distraction. I’m always thinking about sex even when I have no intention of having any – it just endlessly fascinates me, always has. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I liked the job, even though I was phone sexing in secret around my roommates’ schedules. I liked servicing men around the world on demand, I loved playing along with them on the phone, and I needed the orgasms three times a day, the constant marination in sexual energy that sex work provided. I’d come home from classes, go up to my room, turn on my phone and spend an hour with my fingers jammed up my cunt, flexing and curling in deep, a pervert the match of me breathing in my ear in tandem with my moans, and I’d end the evening sweaty and dripping and utterly worn out. I felt fucking great.

I’ve always been the world’s flakiest, most indecisive person. I can’t commit to anything – a deity (I’m Pagan), a gender (bi), a D/s role (switch), a major… it’s ridiculous. I’m greedy and I want a taste of everything.

I was in a 7-year long monogamous relationship when I started my phone sex gig.

I’m poly, always have been.

And I wasn’t getting any.

…

That is the sound of my head hitting a wall for 7 years straight.

I found work that suited me, work I was good at. He’d come home and I’d be on my knees whipping my back uttering sacreligious prayers to a religion I haven’t followed in 10 years, and crying, and smiling, and laughing while my thumb stroked over my clit. He’d get freaked out and leave the room.

It was everything that clashed about us amplified. I ended it, but that’s not important.

I have this drive inside me to seek out intensity, to find the weirdest fucking experiences and crawl right up inside them and experience joy in them. I don’t play around with cynicism. I’m sarcastic, I’m pessimistic, but I want passion in my life more than I want comfort or stagnation. Being overwhelmed with feelings, with rich electric energy… that’s what I need out of life.

I think too much, all day long, all night long. I can’t sleep because my brain keeps going all the time. Overanalysis, ranting, symbolism, sheer useless crap. When I work I want to shut the chatter off and use instinct.

I was looking for work that meant something, that filled an actual need. I needed to know I wasn’t doing something imaginary that would vanish without the internet. I love history and traditions (even when I break them with glee) and wanted a connection to something older than myself.

Like the oldest profession! Yeah. There ya go.

All right. So I’m doing phone sex, I’m loving it, I’m… not getting any sex outside of work and my own hands for months on end. Very sane way to live, when the thing that makes sex and talking both more interesting with someone else is the fact that it’s just not an interesting conversation with yourself. There are no surprises, there’s nothing new. I’m a pervert, I’m a kinky freaky bastard who has some bizarre sick fantasies, so I take those calls from other people. It doesn’t bother me.

I take those calls almost exclusively.

It only bothers me a little.

I go out and the shy professor types who gravitate towards me when they think I look 16, the ones who have that hidden dominant streak, start to creep me out. I was never a fearful gal before. Frankly I’m crazy and a good shot… nobody bothers me.

But this is after almost a year of hardcore humiliation almost uninterrupted by vanilla sex calls. I think of them cornering me and telling me things involving pee that I’m not allowed to talk about on the phone and really don’t want to think about before dinner, of them looking at me or at other girls and thinking of assrape with little lube and no mercy, of beatings and men with no concept of how to hit a masochist and make them beg for more. I’m scared and sickened and reluctantly turned on by things that never did it for me before.

The fear and the queasiness are new, very new. My sadistic streak has taken a darker turn and I’ve found the submissive streak this painslut masochist never had before.

I think some non-work sex would clear my head, but I’m afraid of scaring somebody off.

Vanilla sexuality took some twists. Power dynamics are sexier and they’re in everything. Feet and legs and clothes and nylon and saying yes and no are so much more interesting than they ever were before. My love for sexual torture with no implements other than some bondage and my own body (or someone else’s) is sharpened, refined. I love being the victim and the initiator.

I want to make them think “Yes” and then say “No,” I want to make them beg, because I hate it love it when it’s done to me. I want to give and to receive and take this into my sex work.

I’m out there now, physically, my image and my face, and it doesn’t freak me out now. I’m comfortable with it and the explicit compliments make me smile. Strangers orgasm looking at my panty-clad ass and thinking about giving me a spanking and I enjoy this and I give compliments by coming hard to pictures and words I think are worth it, my little orgiastic tribute, or blessing, or anointing with holy cum-nectar.

Heh. Holy cum-nectar. I said cum!

I still laugh when I say cum. (Heehee. Cum!) Now instead of having sex with myself and a lover or strangers online I have sex with everyone, and with you specifically, one at a time, with the door locked and your wrists or mine bound together and tied to the headboard.

The people are amazing. Work still makes me smile. I thought if I got on this path I’d wind up getting more into the sexual spiritual side of things but I’ve tried to use porn and sex work to distance myself from the otherworld and that was, well, pretty retarded of me. It’s not going away anymore than I can ignore the cars on the highway by sticking my fingers in my ears and singing, “Lalalala, I can’t HEAR YOU!” while I’m driving. I might wind up going off the road and into a field where I don’t see any cars any more but that doesn’t mean I succeeded, it just means I’m a freaking moron.

So, sex is a magical experience. It’s all kinds of goodness. It relaxes us, turns us on and makes us smile and connect or disconnect and I do this for a living? That is still pretty cool.

This is the most personal entry I’ll ever write on this blog. I probably won’t do this here ever again, but it needed to be done after the semi-absence, and I’m not going to regret doing it. I’m totally in the mood to write a ton of erotic flashfic tonight so I’ll flip a coin and decide if I’m giving or receiving the erotic torture in tonight’s scene, but there will be a tonight’s scene, and I’m not changing the focus of this blog: I’m launching back into it with a fucking stiletto-heeled, topless vengeance.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

I have told you that to choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition. The desire to learn is not ambition. It is our lot as men to want to know.

The path without a heart will turn against men and destroy them. It does not take much to die, and to seek death is to seek nothing.

-The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda