CALICO LANE

I came out of Saturday’s Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker with one simple, sweeping revelation: I am in charge of my message.

A couple months ago Audacia Ray, one of the day’s two trainers, spoke at KinkForAll and said something that made me sit right up: “Damn right I have an agenda.” Of course I have an agenda, too: everyone has one, especially the media. An agenda is not a bad thing, and what’s more, it’s necessary.

Our first exercise: How do we get from this powerful, inarticulate drive we all share to messages we can express? From there, we could move on the core of Speak Up: what can we do to make sure our messages stand up to disinterested, distorting, or actively destructive media interactions?

It was an emotional day for me, not least because we did our first ‘message’ exercise on the recent murder of a masseuse in Boston. I am a decent persuasive writer, but I started to realize my ignorance as we sorted through supporting arguments. (Would mentioning “arrests” arouse sympathy, or would “violence” be a better choice? Can you back up the statement “Sex work is like any other job”? Is the word “screening” insider jargon?)

The toughest part for me was when we ran mock interviews with an antagonistic “reporter”. I didn’t do so well. My mood nosedived as I pushed back against questions like “Why do you think women feel the need to prostitute themselves like this on Craigslist?”  There was palpable frustration as we slumped back in our seats to review the videos.  After a morning of pre-interview prep, I wasn’t feeling particularly “empowered” — more like “despondent”.

“Did anyone interrupt the reporter, or ask her a question?” Audacia asked. Holy shit. One woman had, and while we listened to her tape, I grew increasingly excited. I had been fending off the “reporter”’s rude and prying inquiries about whether I was a prostitute (I’m not, at least for these purposes, and neither was the victim), how much money I made (I’m not a prostitute!), how I would screen my clients (Don’t you see, it’s not about watching our drinks and the length of our skirts, it’s about men not killing women!).

And I’d been waiting those endless three minutes for my reporter to ask the question, waiting for the one that would let me tell her everything I thought about this woman’s death and the insulting tragedy of the media coverage: waiting for permission. But this was a conversation. Conversations went two ways. I could ask her questions, instead of just defending myself! I don’t need anyone’s permission to speak, any more than I need to answer them when they ask. Oh my God, I could have vibrated right out of my seat.

We even talked about image. As much thought as I had put into dressing carefully (as if you were going to an interview, we’d been told, and so I obeyed it to the letter, with the possible dress-rehearsal concession of purple nail polish) it had never occurred to me that it could be best to not meet a reporter in person. Why give them a paragraph describing your appearance, when that ink could be better spent transcribing what you said?

The section on earned media and new media galvanized me in an entirely different way. Never mind waiting for the call that follows disaster, scandal or newsroom boredom. Here were new-to-me possibilities for action. Did you know you — yes, you — can actually pitch a story to a reporter? Issue a press advisory, a press release, or a public service announcement?  And new media (which I already use, albeit without a great deal of direction) gives us the ability to form and maintain relationships and communicate directly with our audience, without an intermediary.

The workshop was everything I wanted, except that I wanted more, more, more. I left feeling for the first time that I could be in control of my message.

And that is both the point and the problem: I’m not yet. I’m still finding the words for what I want to say.  I only have the resources to find the tools to make the actions, etc. This is clearly going to be a work of slow progress and many mistakes.

To that end, I really hope some poor biased shmuck hails me in a bar in the next week. Finesse will come, but for now, the sheer force of my positivity might bowl them over.

There was talk of taking Speak Up! to San Francisco and Chicago and a couple of cities in Canada. I hope they can. I also would love to see this as a larger, longer, even more intensive program — perhaps twenty or thirty sex workers, really buckling down for a weekend. If you can donate, or know a potential donor, SWA wants to hear from you.

I want to give a world of thanks to Audacia Ray and Eliyanna Kaiser of Sex Work Awareness for creating this workshop, leading it, and doing the work to make it happen. And in equal measure, I want to thank the women of the NYC Sex Bloggers Calendar who raised the money that made it all possible.

I’m going to be pretty busy in the next couple of weeks as I go to San Francisco, Boston, DC and upstate — oh, and take my finals. But my new video camera will be traveling with me; I’ve done very little but shoot and edit video since I woke up this morning. When I travel, I meet a lot of people with amazing things to say, and I hope from here on out, I’ll be able to share more of those conversations with you.