#metoo #ustoo #whorestoo Part 2

As an escort, I met Hollywood producers of films and music. I have always been a musician and multimedia performer since my youth. I was tempted with opportunities and promises to get my music heard or a role in a film. Because of my years in the sex game, I was possibly better at the hustle that some of these A list celebrities might have been. Women in Hollywood are expected to be whores but get docked for taking roles that are too trashy because they will be type cast. Many of them even become outspoken about those of us in the sex industry even as they claim to be sex positive on their shows. So the mouthpiece of oppression against women also wears a dress in order to make things even more complex. Think of the assistants who were complicit in setting up meetings for Weinstein to rape in his hotel suites. This is why these types of men, the same type as my 25 year old boss who took his 15 year old to the night baseball game wanted someone green and naive and willing to please. But, even at 15 I knew better. I told my coworker and he told our supervisor and a whole disciplinary action meeting was called in our office, I quit and went back to school after that summer. He never got what he wanted from me but an arm around me at a game and a few teen sex stories from his office worker.

I feel like what makes Rose McGowan so fierce is because she was, at a young age born into a sexually abusive cult and emancipated herself from it and jumped into a different cult, the Hollywood film industry; and similar to me in my early days of sex work felt empowered and unstoppable until meeting Weinstein. Women like us decided early on: NEVER AGAIN. But, this doesn’t mean that the break is clean. Life, after all is not a Hollywood movie, even and especially if you are fucking with Hollywood people. I’ve met music producers who promised red carpets, who have worked with Rihanna on tracks, men who were musicians with gold records on their studio walls, with pictures of celebrities that I knew and admired. They seemed to definitely talk just like the accounts of actors who have been preyed upon by Weinstein and Louis CK and Kevin Spacey and Cosby and...and...and (insert more names but we will run out of room). I told myself that no opportunity was worth it if I had to be pimped to be in it. For me as an independent escort, being pimped was more than having an agency book clients for me, pimped was the abusive slimy pimp power that looks and hurts the same as relationship violence in prostitution. It is the coercion and fear of losing your mind and body in a way that relationship violence does to all those that are submissive within it. It is the eventual conditioning to love and protect your daddy/abuser/pimp. I know about the hunger to go beyond being a backpage escort into legit fame, I lived in Los Angeles, I worked with these guys Hollywood hotels, roach motels and mansions in the hills. This was my 5 to 9. (am). But, I had in my mind a specific way that it should feel if I were to do it, and the opportunities that were proposed to me never felt like they would carry me to where I wanted to go. Many women don’t know how to say no to golden carrots, and in sex work we learn how to do this quickly because our lives and livelihood depend on it. This morning I get a text from someone asking me “Have I ever been a personal assistant to a millionaire?” and as I start screening him transparently with basic but assertive questions, I tell him,”I am assessing your credibility.” he stops texting. “It seems like you have a problem with me.” Conversation over, but for many of these women who were victims of Weinstein it was where a spark of hope began.

The way that it is told to us how Cosby drugged his victims is luckily something that I never encountered. The drugs I did with clients, we did together, consensually and they were always days more fucked up on substances than the few hours of lines that I was doing. The thing that I believe looking death in the eyes and learning how to smile while saying “Nope, I’m not going with you. Not today, Satan.” is the thing that years of escorting in LA taught me. Over the years, I met famous people who were sweet and kind and wanted not even intercourse from me. They wanted to be seen as regular guys with human needs. This is another thing that escorting in LA taught me. Once, I even walked into the million dollar home of one of the writers of what I consider to be stomach on the floor the funniest movie of all time (and it wasn’t a Louis CK film). I enthusiastically offered to him that I would be his assistant and water his plants and walk his dog if he wanted. We didn’t have sex. And he never called me again. So, while, abuse of power comes as no surprise, not all men with power and connections abuse their power and want to prey on their admirers. Of the nice guys with connections and fame that I met, I never was afforded any opportunities that led to anywhere mainstream. They often say all the players in Hollywood are prostitutes and pimps and since I was an escort I thought I might fit well in the glittering glamour of it all, but the basic business tactics and realness of sex work probably created a wall that protected me from it. I hope it all changes after this shit settles, and I actually have a little bit of hope that it will, because evolution and fall of empire is inevitable.