If you have bought a day: I have five or so people to go still, and I PROMISE I will get to you all tomorrow. It’s just too hot in my room right now to take pictures without fainting. For the rest of you, it’s not too late to buy days…
To Ava Amnesia from Jon.
For the Control Enthusiast:
For Emily of Em the Femme:
You can’t really see it, but this is one of the (more successful) shirtdresses I’ve sewed from 1950’s patterns.
For SkyBluePond: Mad d00dling skillz!
Also known as “the reason I am not a graphic artist”.
Today I’m going to finish my backlog. If you bought days, thanks for playing! Pictures coming up! If you didn’t, get your calendar days in now, because I’m not gonna be stupid enough to do this next year.
First, for Arabella of Once Upon Dangerous:
It proved remarkably difficult to take a picture of my own ass. I’ll see if any of the outtakes bear posting.
And while I’m on outtakes, a teaser for the Control Enthusiast:
Damn, you guys are keeping me busy, and I like it.
For the Boston Boy:
For Lolita:
For Siobhan and Princess Phoenix:
Essin’ Em bought three days on the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar. Don’t you want to play?
That window looks out onto a parking lot and two apartment buildings. It’s probably good I’m moving out in a week.
… to buy days on the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar, that is.
Since it’s the last week, I’m offering something extra for those who do. Make sure to read down to my in-no-way-officially-sanctioned offer.
While I was in San Francisco last week, Lochai was generous enough to donate his time to the project. I wore a gorgeous latex outfit, a two-piece cream-colored gown complete with a train, and we went to Golden Gate Park in the middle of the day to get a calendar shot for you.
So, besides the inevitable hotness, why should you donate? The calendar project benefits Sex Work Awareness, an organization that advocates for sex workers as well as running the excellent Speak Up! media training. Your dollars buy confidence and a kick in the ass for sex workers like me to speak out, to blog, to make videos, to talk back to reporters, to school our friends and to stand up to our enemies. I wrote about the last Speak Up! all in a tizzy.
Why else should you donate? To make this extra-juicy, I want to play a game with you during the last week:
Big spenders: we’ll talk. 
If you don’t know what to put on your day, I think it would be great if you bought a day for your favorite blog (not necessarily mine, even!), a sex-positive charity (Scarleteen and NCSF come to mind), an independent pornographer or artist, an inspiring quote, or a friend or lover.
Or just donate! I’ll still get naked for you. Remember, send your receipts (and your message and directions) to misscalico at gmail dot com. I hope you play!
I haven’t had a wink of sleep. It’s seven-thirty in the morning, and I have just stumbled off a red-eye from San Francisco into heat and humidity so thick, I think the sweat collecting between my breasts could actually be condensation.
I know I have returned to true summer in New York because the man in the coffee cart waves off my $20 and tells me to come back when I have change. People are friendly at this hour. We are united by our misery.
Going to work? says a man in an MTA uniform.
It’s that time of day, I reply. Well, it’s true — it is for someone.
I’m back from four days of shooting for Kink.com’s The Training of O. I promise to post some smut about all the beating, begging and shagging — but first, while I’m sleep-depped enough to share, the boring meta stuff.
I’m so relieved that boy/girl boundary is over with. So. Fucking. Relieved. More on that later.
The submission thing was harder to quantify. I definitely got a minute here and there to shut up, stop scoffing at myself, and enjoy — if only in play — an aspect of my sexuality which I treat with a lot of denial and cynicism. (Whoops. You see? You see the denial? Oy.)
It was all reaa-a-lly interesting. I loved shooting the sex. I felt like I ought to be paying for it! I feel like I would like to do more of it, seriously, I would like to do that every week please, but I’m not willing at this time to venture outside the condom-covered safety of Kink.com.
I had never worked with real live penises on set. I am deeply sorry it took me so long. Remember the time Lorelei and Harmony double-teamed me and I couldn’t shut up about how I had been missing out? Like that. Only all week long.
My major dilemma of the week was propriety. No, seriously. I know how shitty it is to feel pressured on the job, whatever your gender. I Twitter about all the hot ass running around the Armory, but I don’t actually, you know, get on my knees in the shower and dive for whatever tasty thing is on the other side of the curtain — even though I frequently want to.
This time I was working with cocks! And oh, so distracting are they. They get hard, they get soft. The entire set hangs on their rise and fall. This leads to the men looking very intent and anxious while they work to get hard so they can fuck me. Hi, huge kink of mine.
Granted, we are about to fuck, but is it rude to ogle one’s hot costar jerking his cock off-camera? Is it rude not to offer to help? Is it rude if I do offer to help? Can I touch myself while I’m doing it or is that weird? I’m not fishing for “any guy would be crazy…” comments; it’s irrelevant and misinformed. This is someone who’s being paid to fuck me. True that I’m being paid to fuck them, too, but it’s the closest I get to the client role…
So, yeah. Fuckin’ propriety! I think I was only so cautious because I wanted it so much.
Come to think of it, that was a theme all week.
TESFest ‘09 was my first big event as a presenter. I’m honored and grateful that TES brought me on board and would love to come back.
The celebrity auction was terrifying! I’m glad I did it, though. All the money raised went to NCSF, one of my favorite charities.
Personally, I was a little mellow. I’ve been traveling an awful lot, and that makes me homesick and lame. Special thanks to the people who made the following possible: sugar free Red Bull. BBQ chicken cold cuts (who knew such a thing existed?). Homemade almond-oil brownies. Massages. Good conversation. My sanity.
As an antidote to con drop, I ended Sunday night with an impromptu cuddle party in my room. So far so good.
Arnica cream
Last summer, I put my body on the line for science: I wanted to test the efficacy of topical arnica montana. We’ve all heard that arnica makes bruises go away faster. I wanted to believe it, because I could really use it, but I am an enormous skeptic when it comes to alternative medicine. Actually, you could end that sentence after “skeptic”.
The effective methods I know are preventative: ice, elevate, and avoid aspirin. Bruises go away on their own, and much faster if you have been bruised repeatedly in the same place. If there were a miracle bruise cure, I’m pretty sure it would be under patent by Pfizer or Merck and cost much more than six or eight dollars a tube. Blindly applying sticky herbal-smelling bruise cream three times a day to no effect was not doing it for me.
I would have just ignored the stuff, save my rampant annoyance at being assured it works and would solve all my problems. Anecdotal evidence, psssh. How do you actually know it works? How do you know your bruises wouldn’t have gone away that fast anyway? Have you heard, by any chance, that homeopathy is an utter crock of shit?
I decided I’d conduct my own experiment: I’d make two identical bruises and use arnica on one. I admit this experiment was, perhaps, lacking in scientific rigor, but not devoid of entertainment value.
arnica experiment, day 2
First, symmetry! I drew 4″ circles on both thighs and instructed my helpers to stay inside them. The resulting thigh-eating blobs are a great illustration in how bruises spread. If you look at the photo, you can sort of see the circle I drew (filled with cane marks), the pad of swelling underneath it, and then the pink-purple edges of the thing bleeding out.
The right bruise was a little smaller, so I decided I’d give the arnica a head start and keep the left leg as my control.
Bruises, of course, are subject to gravity too. Over the course of the next few days, they crept down my legs almost to my knees, preventing me from wearing shorts. Did arnica stop that? Noooooo.
I meant to take photos of the bruises every day, but I couldn’t get adequate light, and the pictures didn’t come out. So you’ll have to take my word for it that after a week of using arnica three times a day, the results were unimpressive. I couldn’t tell any difference at all. They faded out after a week and a half, looking identical to the end.
Ten days is fast for a bruise of that gruesomeness. I’m sure if I’d used arnica on both, I’d have wholly credited the healing time to the stuff.
Technically, this doesn’t prove that arnica doesn’t work. But it fails to prove that it does work, either.
If you conduct your own experiment, please send me a link, or just email me the photos and any narrative! I would be delighted beyond measure to post it here.
SW called me on my dangling tags in the last post: I was writing about The Beautiful Kind’s awesome and yet disgusting post on ass to mouth. She recruited a “sexy microbiologist” (who doesn’t want one of those?) who swabbed his mouth, ass, and genital skin, and cultured what he found…
ass culture. no really.
While I think I am less squicked by bodily fluids than most, this still got to me. Once I got done making faces and shaking my head, I had to post it. (via Figleaf)
Guess what I did the last time I had sex? Yes. Yes, that. In my defense, it was as squeaky clean as ass-to-mouth ever gets. Didn’t even taste like lube. (I don’t care how nice your sheets are, if you put a lube-covered cock in my mouth, spitting on them is totally fair game.)
The other picture I need for this post is me blogging, with the caption “TMI: No Wonder You’re Not Getting Laid”.
I’m actually in bed with my laptop right now, waiting for PD & crew to be ready to shoot. I’m still sick with last week’s headcold. I think whatever I coughed up this morning was alive.
At least Twitter assures me I’m not alone in hating the Celebrator:
DiaZerva @misscalico I’d rather be cattle prodded 100 times than take the Celebrator.. that thing is evil & put me on the verge of tears. OUCH!
The more I read about testing in mainstream porn the more I realize I didn’t know. Dacia, Satine Phoenix, Courtney Trouble, Jiz Lee and others are all weighing in.
With TTOO on my schedule, people have started asking me if I’m finally going to consider mainstream boy/girl porn. No way, unless I can use condoms.
I don’t even know if I’d want to do more porn than I already do. Worrying about bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, unclean fingernails — it takes a toll on my sex life. Add the worry of STDs and I’d never get laid. Not to mention (although this is less of a thing in mainstream porn), more of those vibrators that women just love, all women, don’t I know that women love vibrators? — I don’t even have enough curse words for them.
Right now I am nurturing a special hate for the Celebrator, which feels exactly like having your clit scrubbed with a toothbrush. When I visited the website in preparation for a healthy rant, I found that it actually IS a toothbrush — you remove the brush head and replace it with the special Celebrator tip. My clit is sore in an entirely new way, tender and raw, like it’s been sandpapered. I’d ask who thought this was a good idea, but I know the answer well by now: women love these things. All women. *eyeroll*
You can’t refute that logic. Oh, and no one ever chooses to have sex with a condom.
It’s dry reading material, but in light of an LA porn performer’s recent HIV result (and the resulting panic), I want to do some basic rumor control. I’m simply amazed at the amount of misinformation and hysteria that passes for reporting.
For today’s episode of Rumor vs. Fact, I’ve excerpted from this excellent essay by Ernest Greene.
RUMOR: 16 Hidden HIV Infections! AIM a conspiracy!
FACT: False. Despite much misreporting, it’s one contained case.
… none of Fielding’s cynical machinations sinks to the level of his false assertion, trumpeted by The Times, that AIM has “concealed” an additional 16 HIV infections in the industry since 2004. In fact, eleven of those cases involved male performers in gay porn who are not part of AIM’s client base and who do not test with AIM and four were private citizens not affiliated with porn who sought testing at AIM for personal reasons. As required by law, all HIV infections detected by AIM were reported to Fielding’s department, which is how he comes to know about them, but were not disclosed to AIM’s heterosexual porn industry clients because they did not involve het porn in any way. And yet The Times reported this deliberate and heinous distortion of the truth under the blaring headline: “More Porn HIV Cases Disclosed.” In point of fact, there is no way AIM, Fielding or anyone else can know that the cases involving the gay performers were porn-related, as AIM does not monitor that population.
Relatedly:
RUMOR: The names of the actors need to be released publicly! AIM is not cooperating with authorities by withholding them.
FACT: False. People calling for the names of the infected actors are crazy. Why, to shame them? To ruin their names? I don’t need to know who they are, as long as I’m not working with them. And thanks to AIM, I’m not.
RUMOR: Porn performers are a risk to the public!
FACT: Actually, when it comes to HIV, the public is a risk to porn performers. HIV cases come from outside our pool.
It is still much, much safer to have barrier-free sex with a tested porn performer than with a stranger met in a bar, but porn performers themselves have been known to have barrier-free sex with strangers met in bars. Porn performers do not represent a threat to the health of the citizenry of California as Dr. Fielding would have us believe. It’s the other way around. Outsiders with unknown histories pose a threat to our well-observed community.
This risk is impossible to gauge and impossible to eliminate entirely, short of keeping performers locked up between shoots, an idea that would probably get some traction with Fielding, Kerndt, Fryer, Weinstein and the rest of their gang.
This is what they do in Nevada brothels: lock the women up between tests. Have we mentioned that clients, of course, are neither tested nor quarantined? It denies protection to sex workers that clients are guaranteed. I think it’s inhumane. But I digress.
Also — is it just me, or does an isolated HIV case not only suggest but require that the source was not a performer?
RUMOR: We should just make porn without condoms illegal!
FACT: This is the most complicated bit, but in my opinion, the most interesting. If Greene is right, it can’t be done through law without preventing testing and the privilege of refusal to work with HIV+ performers.
Ernest Greene tells us the trainwreck story of regulation:
… Cal-OSHA’s plan for porn would be the means through which it [condom regulation] would have to be put in place. Cal-OSHA has jurisdiction only over employees. Independent contractors, which is how porn performers not under contract to specific companies, are currently classed under state law, would not be subject to Cal-OSHA supervision unless reclassified as employees.
So what, you might ask, is so bad about that? After all, it would make them eligible for workman’s comp and provide them with a mechanism for reporting unsafe working conditions on the set.
There’s just one little hitch in this plan. It is against the law in California for any employer to require an HIV test, or even to ask about a potential employee’s HIV status, as a condition of employment. Doing so is considered employment discrimination and carries significant penalties to the employer.
In fact, if performers were considered employees rather than contractors, it would be illegal for a producer to hire a performer on the grounds that said performer was, in fact, HIV positive. That’s right. Producers would be required to hire HIV+ performers, and if other performers didn’t like working with them, those performers would be fired while the HIV+ performers would be allowed to remain on the set until partners could be found who would work with them.
Well, fuck. We already have a condom-only, no-testing model in gay porn and it has been much less successful than het porn at preventing HIV. Greene, quoting a gay porn producer, writes: “it’s just assumed that all of our talent is or will be infected and that the use of barriers is a secondary precaution.”
Did you know? I had no idea that condom use in het porn was so rare and so discouraged. I feel … sheltered. Clarisse Thorn writes that my generation may not practice perfect safe sex, but we do believe we should, and I agree. Condom use is one “should” I am willing to live with.
I’m having blogger’s block. 
In actual news:
The NYC Sexblogger Calendar is gearing up for a second year of supporting Sex Work Awareness — the organization that does the Speak Up media training — and I’m going to be in it! While we’re getting sexy for the cause, here’s how you can help:
I leave tomorrow for a few days of shooting upstate. Woo, shooting!
June 20-30th, I’m dancing/vacationing in Las Vegas. If you are interested in shooting, or know someone who might be, please let me know. I will post details about dancing as I know ‘em. Referral slip from the club, work card from the sheriff, Nevada business license… Oy.
July 1-4th, I’m presenting at TESFest.
July 13-17, I’m shooting for The Training of O. I’ve been fantasizing about this site since it opened two years ago, and when I got the booking I might have jumped up and down and squealed a little. It may not be the Marketplace, but it’s close enough for me.
I arrived in Boston to discover I’d been signed for an amateur night contest at the strip club. While I’ve been stripping in New York for months, which might seem unfair to the actual amateurs, I’m not a real stripper — deep do the rivers of denial flow — and I panicked. What do I wear? But I’ve never done floorwork! What if it’s all these supercute college girls with big boobs? You promise they won’t boo me off stage?
In the end, the contest didn’t run. I stayed to audition for a job. A large man with a fetching mustache took me up to the VIP room and asked me to dance two songs. This I could do, and I mounted the platform with confidence unto smugness. Not even a minute later I was putting my clothes back and promising to be back tomorrow at six.
Working at this club would be my first time dancing fully nude. If it were up to me, I would work in panties to save energy on shaving, but I wondered whether working bottomless would be “liberating”. (It wasn’t.)
While waiting for the contest to be called, I sat and watched the dancers. The experienced strippers moved just the same here. There was some kneeling and crawling, which was new to me, as it is largely banned on Manhattan stages. The girls exhibited a familiar “conservation of energy” that led one movement smoothly into the next, without a second’s hesitation or wasted momentum. They, too, had done this before.
The news currently tracking across my (liberal, sex-worker-heavy) Twitter feeds is immensely frustrating: Craigslist is shutting down its Erotic Services section, under orders of Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. This represents a complete lack of awareness and responsibility, and in the place of the action sex workers have been longing to see, it is maddening.
It seems like a response to the recent, highly publicized attacks on sex workers who were advertising through Craigslist. Markoff probably targeted sex workers like Julia Brisbane because they seemed like easy targets: isolated by stigma from friends and family, unlikely to have recourse to the law, and even if they did, unlikely to receive fair and sympathetic treatment. The more press coverage the issue got, the more it seemed like there might be action to help stop this sort of crime. Now, there’s finally action, and it’s being wasted on mistaken and harmful directives.
As a sex worker I’ve rarely advertised on Erotic Services, but I’ve used Craigslist’s Casual Encounters recreationally. I mention it because that came under scrutiny too when news anchor George Weber was murdered. It’s not just a women’s issue. And you know what, it’s not even a sex issue! A Minnesota woman who answered a babysitting ad was murdered through Craigslist too.
Oh my god, it’s a Craigslist issue then! No. It’s a “murdering fuckwad” issue. Craigslist did not kill these people. Murderers killed these people.
It’s true that Craigslist is a major advertising venue, for prostitutes but also sex workers of all kinds: the largest in the nation. Its loss will have a distinct effect on the people who use it. Here’s how it works: we advertise to attract the clients we want, and screen to eliminate the clients we don’t, but the number of clients we need stays the same. Anything that hurts our methods of attracting clients, like the shutdown of Erotic Services, will affect how stringent our screening can afford to be. It’s pretty clear to me that Craigslist has just made its sex workers more marginalized and more at risk.
Now, Craigslist has no responsibility to provide an advertising venue. But if Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is trying to make sex workers safer, he’s going about it all wrong. He doesn’t need to protect us from ourselves, or from our clients. He needs to protect us from criminals.
Julia Brisbane’s death was not her fault.
Seriously. I’d think this was obvious, but apparently it’s not. NO ONE ASKS TO BE MURDERED. No one asks to be assaulted, robbed or raped, either.
It’s like that old question: How can men help stop rape? They can stop raping women. Trite, but true. How do we stop crime against sex workers? We stop criminals from committing crime. We don’t tell people to stop being sex workers.
On the face of it maybe the Attorney General is dumb enough to think this will work. If there are two elements to crime against sex workers — criminals and sex workers — then removing either one will solve it, right? But the problem is that crime against sex workers doesn’t stop there. There are two principles at work here:
Sex work is never, ever going away. It doesn’t matter what you think about its current forms: the ability to decide why to have sex is an inseparable part of reproductive freedom. It will exist as long as people control their bodies and dictate the terms of access.
Sex worker rights are human rights. No matter what you think about the existence of sex work, all sex workers are people and all people — in the eyes of criminals and sometimes even the law — are potential sex workers. Rights denied to sex workers are rights that can be denied to anybody else. As long as people are harming sex workers, “innocent” people are going to fall by the wayside.
I got an upsetting email a few days ago, asking for my “bad date list” contacts (which it turns out are sadly limited). A woman he knew had been brutally raped, and he thought that because the attackers called her a whore, they were targeting sex workers. I doubt it. I think they were probably just calling her a whore because it was their word for a woman they wanted to dehumanize.
Take away the real whores, and you don’t remove the criminals and their hatred, or their search for an easy target. In fact, the darlings of the AG’s theory — the innocents who’ve never traded sex for money — are going to start to get it in our stead. (Not that they don’t already.) Is that what Blumenthal really wants?
There is a solution here: stop telling sex workers not to use the Internet. Stop telling us not to have sex. Stop telling us not to have the nerve to charge for it. And start protecting us. The AG is missing the point, and that is a tragic epitaph to hang on another woman’s death.
EDIT: Some related posts:
Breaking: Craigslist to end Erotic Services << Bound Not Gagged
Waking Vixen: PRESS RELEASE: “Erotic Services” Denied: Craigslist and Attorneys General Are Putting Sex Workers At Risk
Salon: Craigslist Xes Out Sex Ads
From the Sex 2.0 website:
Now that the United States has a new administration, sex workers and their allies are facing different challenges. In this session we ask (and attempt to answer): what should sex worker activists and allies be working toward with the new administration, and how can the average internet sex geek help? This discussion will be a strategy discussion about the messaging we feel the Obama Administration is most receptive to, the various points of entry within the Obama Admin (such as the new White House Council on Women and Girls, etc) and most specifically, map out a viral messaging campaign proposal to bring to the community. This session will plant a seed to advance online and new media collaboration, split up some of the work and identify tasks that can be delegated to various groups/activists who want to be active but aren’t sure what steps to take.
Session leaders: Stacey Swimme & Audacia Ray.
This is the first of the video I recorded at Sex 2.0. This session is in two parts because, due to technical difficulties, it’s missing a chunk in the middle. Sorry Maria! For more, you can see Figleaf’s notes and Maria Diaz’s post about Sex 2.0.
This was too perfect not to share. My top from Atlanta (who I will, hopefully, resist the urge to address in a tight spot as Mr. Snappy Rubber Bands) gave me permission to repost this from an email. Italics and minor editing are mine.
I did find figleaf’s comment a little off the mark. I don’t think it is at all about testing oneself. What is to test? We go to huge lengths to set it up so you don’t have a choice in the matter. You are going to stay tied to the chair and accept whatever I want to do to you. You don’t have to pass the test to do that. You literally cannot fail. Nor is mountain climbing a concept of being without control or surrendering. I would suggest it is exactly the opposite. The climber is doing their best to remain in control. I have not done any climbing of any magnitude, but I don’t think “the thrill” of climbing is anything like the emotional place you go into when I torture you. Neither during nor after, do I think it is the same.
Finally … our psyches provide us with a unique opportunity in SM play. We have the opportunity to experience the “feeling” associated with many extreme activities without risking much at all. I actually think what we simulate is not the thrill of conquering a hard climb as much as the terror associated with falling. We just don’t have to deal with what happens at the end of a fall.
This is my disagreement with the extreme sports = BDSM analogy. If you’re into extreme sports, you will be very disappointed with BDSM. No one actually gets hurt. It’s not terribly risky. And then we want to dress up in strange outfits and have sex afterward.
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