Chronologically,
this should probably have been the first post on this blog, being a
reflection on the origins of the current stream of research. But that
would have required some desire to present the ongoing narrative in a
strict, orderly timeline – as it stands, this is simply a
repository of thoughts, ideas, reflections and connections. The
research is only weeks old. Order and sequencing will come later.
Coronavirus
in the summer of 2020 changed a lot of things – not least of which,
my job prospects for earning essential money over the break between
my graduating with BA Hons. from DJCAD in May and commencing the MFA
course at the same institution (originally to have been September,
but later postponed to October). With no degree shows to hire me in
my usual role as tour guide (and of course I wouldn’t have been
able to work my own graduate show anyway), I had to think – and act
– quickly to pursue an alternative line of employment – one that
would be stable and regular, but also involve minimal setup costs and
travel.
Internet
sex work wasn’t exactly the top of my preferred list of options,
but a number of contributing factors made it so, chief among which
were those listed above, as well as the assurances from a couple of
close online friends that, as a genderqueer performance artist with
few personal inhibitions, a very long-standing interest in
traditional striptease, burlesque and exotic performance (from about
the age of seven or so, the same age at which I began to discover my
own feminine identity) and who had read my one
professionally-published novel which relates the memoirs of a 1970s
female stripper,
I should find it easy and untroubling.
I
was recommended to try my hand with Xhamster.com – a huge internet
pornographic outfit whose main public face is free, user-uploaded
content – video and photographic – but also caters to live,
streaming interactive webcam performance. Camera broadcasts may be
viewed for free by registered users, but they are encouraged to spend
dollars with the site on tokens, which may be used to ‘tip’
performers, as in traditional nightclub acts, request specific
actions (or interactions) and pay for special treats like private
time with the performer. The site exchanges dollars for a number of
tokens, whilst taking a cut from each transaction. Signing up as a
performer cost nothing but required photographic ID to be submitted.
I was sceptical about this, but in the end overcame my fears and
reservations by weighing up the worst-case scenario of a massive
online data breach and possible ID theft (cf. Sony 2012) against the
likelihood of being singled out from the millions of other users
subscribed to the site. It was the internet, and the sense of ‘being
someone else’ online from as early as 1992 which gradually fostered
my alternative persona as a genuine being in the world, rather than
an inner construct and projection, and ultimately nourished the
confidence which allowed me to step out in public.
It took me a week to have my personal documents validated and by the
end of April, Ms Lilith was born.
Within
a week, I was feeling the effects of my new job as tangibly as the
fictional heroine I had created seven years before in my novel:
working four, five nights a week left me fatigued, craving R & R,
and occasionally having to do exactly what she did on her days off:
soak my feet in salted bowls of hot water to relieve the callouses
caused by hours of dancing and posing in 5” heels. By going live at
around 10pm and working through to 4, 5 a.m or later, I was able to
cross two calendar days in one session which would allow me the rest
of the day off (assuming I had made some tokens from the experience)
without affecting my potential score on the performers leaderboard -
which in the early days was something I cared about. (My highest
point was being raked number 31 within my first few days - no doubt
due to me being flagged as a ‘new’ performer and therefore highly
visible. Once I became ‘old hat’, that rating plunged, as I was
unable to maintain the peak interest shown in me.) Working five
calendar days a week, whilst preparing for my Honours assessment
during evening times, pushed my physical/mental stamina to its limit,
and during daylight hours I would often take advantage of sunshine by
working in the garden, too.
Like
any kind of sex work, good results can be down to luck as much as any
particular effort on the part of the operator: one can spend over an
hour getting primped and dressed in the most glamorous fashion,
carefully matching styles and accessories, only to sit in an empty
room for half the night with little or no interest – whilst
conversely, a hasty grab-bag of minimal garments from the bottom
drawer elicit ecstasies in those who just happen to admire the cheap,
trashy look, and fling batches of tokens around like confetti in
response. Or the layers of carefully-applied glamour may be literally
stripped off in a moment, as by one of my first ever ‘private’
clients who exhorted, “Strip off. Everything...”
The
ontological experience of cramming oneself into a 640x480 pixel
window is strange in many ways, for other than disparities in actual
monitor size at the client end, what we see of ourselves in that
window is exactly what others see as well. It is a mirror, but one
which does not present us with a reflected image – it is the
image of the self as seen by the Other, and as the Other is invited
to seek sexual pleasure in that image, so we may also, ourselves,
entertain that notion, as we become linked to that Lacanian object of
fascination, desire, and ego-building. In fact, any exotic dancer,
stripper or burlesque performer needs to carry a healthy amount of
narcissism to look as if they are enjoying the experience. The
dynamics of performer/audience in traditional hetero-normative work
such as this is well documented – what is less so, is the
marginalised area of gay, trans and queer generally performance. The
image which links viewer (or voyeur) and webcam performer – becomes
the shared object of attention, that to which the viewer reacts and
through which we also construct our own performative self,
continually adjusting movements, expressions, poses based upon the
ongoing visual feedback, and – as I have often found in the past
via my mainstream video and performative work – viewing this image
of the Self as Other, making the webcam interaction a triangular
symbiosis between performer – performative image – viewer. The
true notion of Self can become somewhat detached as if, in an
infantile Lacanaian way, we invest and immerse ourselves in the image
on-screen rather than the experience of being, expressing unity of
visual with interiority – the stage where surface overcomes depth
and we reduce ourselves to mere Object status, the common
anti-pornographic complaint of 1960s feminists. Dressed in seductive
clothing, especially various forms of lingerie, is a rather
uncomfortable experience (we can assume that most such items were
designed by men for women to wear), which is why I rarely have
entertained it, but the visual
and aesthetic charge
is powerful enough to make it worthwhile, as in the manner of birds’
plumage and other animals’ sexually attractive performances and
displays of colour and form. Certain designs of boots, for example,
are commonly described as “only for the bedroom” - meaning that
their practical function can barely venture beyond that of sexual
arousal.
Working
online in this manner, with my self literally in focus at all times,
reminded me of the paradox inherent in Foucault’s socio-cultural
construction of ‘man’ - as a subject which views itself in the
world and experiences direct relationship with
the world (in my case, through the interface of the website), and
simultaneously as an object of study and knowledge within
the world and hence, Janus-like,
looks inward and outward simultaneously. The Sartrian model of the
Other as the sculptor of the Self was also, I found, given tangible
credence: viewers who advised me that I was “sexy”, “gorgeous”
or any number of other preposterous (so I thought) adjectives quickly
began to convince me that I was – at any rate, to them,
even if I myself knew how sketchy the makeup really was, how tangled
the showgirl wig was at the back, or how insecure the showgirl
themselves was inside. Those who deemed me sexy very often proved
the veracity of their claims by spending their tokens on me,
sometimes for quite simple and unrevealing gestures or requests.
“Wish I was with you right now,” was a common trope. My answer
was originally, “If you were, you’d lose your illusion,” -
finding honesty easier than acceptance of blind praise. Before long
though, I realised that it was easiest – and kinder, too – to
simply accept the wild flattery and play the part they wanted me to
play. In this sense, also, I felt the subtle presence of Barthes’
use of language as a skin – where the mere words of others,
linguistic notation on a screen, helped to move me in the manner in
which their writers desired, and which I myself therefore found
desirable, by being able to respond in kind – which, in turn, would
then inspire further eloquence on the part of the viewer. Using their
“words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of [their]
words”,
I found myself moved, inspired and often aroused – creating a
mutual feedback loop of call and response.
When
one is on a stage, in front of an audience, one doesn’t know how
the performance looks from the viewer’s point of view, and only
rehearsals can assure one that the movements can well approximate
how we want the event to be perceived. But we cannot imagine how the
performance may be seen from every possible angle – how views from
the gallery differ from those at the front of the stage, or in the
wings. Certain gestures may be more discernible from some angles
rather than others. In a live webcam environment, there is only one
flat view which we control, and only by moving the camera itself can
shift the angle of perception. In this situation the viewer is often
the director, critic and audience in one. We might enjoy a greater or
lesser degree of autonomy during what I tend to call the “attract
mode” (striking poses or instigating a sequence or scene for the
benefit of viewer traffic passing through the room, in the hope some
will be attracted enough to stay and engage in conversation, or more)
– the “trailer”, “advert” or “teaser”. But with
sufficient interest (and arousal) on the part of the viewer, they may
then feel inclined to suggest modify or derail the performer’s
current mode of performance. “Why don’t you show this”, “Stand
up”, “I want to see you full length”, “Let’s see you do...”
etc., thereby creating an interactive, improvisational experience in
which neither the performer nor the audience knows entirely what may
happen next – whether the outcome, or its method of formation.
My
own personal rules for what would constitute a successful striptease
or sex scene might run as follows: It must not look cheap, or tacky
(or if it does then it had better at least be funny – on purpose);
it must build a discernible curve of tension and relief, ideally
starting out with performers fully-clothed and ending with inevitable
full nudity; appropriate music should set the scene and help to build
the suspense, as well as fuel the performer’s movements and
interest in the performance (I.e no inappropriate dubbing after the
fact); a good variety of camera angles and shots should be employed,
from full-length long shots to close-ups, facial shots (to carry the
details of the performer’s emotion to the viewer, and to help make
eye-contact – a vital component of any kind of live performance
that requires audience connection). As a film-maker, I had to bear
all of this in mind as I also went about the business of trying to be
so sexually alluring and entertaining for audiences, that they were
willing to spend good money on the experience to see more of me, as
well as ensure a continuing soundtrack to keep myself motivated and
raise my game when required (the site requires all performers to have
a working microphone on at all times).
I am completely removed from the common fetishistic obsession with the materiality of lingerie
and other items, and sensations provided to the wearer (usually with
fantasies – or realities – of extreme submissiveness) without
consideration of the emancipatory nature of such gear – cf.
Paglia’s assertion that a “woman’s most powerful weapon is a
stiletto heel”. This, to me, suggests a patriarchal construction of
how the idealized female ought to be, and they themselves inhabit
that form in pursuit of their own sexualized agenda. Materiality of
clothing is irrelevant to me (other than, for example, certain
substances I simply can’t wear – e.g latex, PVC, which have
terrible tactile sensations to me, and look cheap too) – it’s the
outer look, not the inner sensation, which interests me, the
self-as-other – objectifying myself not to the level of a sexually
repressive fetishistic figure but to the female – not ‘feminized’
in the fetishistic sense – within me which felt connected more as
the ‘other half’ of my male side and hence embodied or completed
my androgyny of being/spirit. For myself, a certain primal aggression
is at work – channelled through a dialectically opposed conduit of
archetypal figures which recur eternally within my own work (both
written, visual and performative) – the Amazon, the valkyrie, the
witch, in all her dark and worrying aspects – the challenging,
blatant, openness of female sexuality, inviting, yet also ultimately
devouring and destroying, embodying the pagan Goddess in my own way.
As
Foucault noted elsewhere: “BDSM is sexualized power”, and the
dominance/submission dynamic soon became very clear and obvious in
the public room as well as in private sessions. Some men assumed me
to be dominant from the word go, perhaps due in part to my imposing
stature and enthusiasm for leather boots, and requested I act as such
upon them (“topping from the bottom”, as it were – or, not
knowing your role in the D/s relationship); others were equally keen
to assert their
dominance on me,
attitudes which might as readily make me produce the riding crop and
segue the current music into ‘Venus in Furs’, as make me actually
seek to comply (depending on my mood, and the status of the user –
might they be likely to pay for more of the same?). As just stated,
there soon developed a miniature cultural trichotomy within my
relationships with users, one already put in place by the site.
Grey-coloured users are registered but have never bought tokens with
which to buy media or tip performers; green users have tokens which
can be spent (but will eventually be used up, and revert their
status to grey, but with the ‘ex-green’ status); and gold users,
the élite, pay a monthly membership fee to enjoy varied benefits.
This description alone ought to clearly illustrate the pyramid
structure of the online membership, and the colour status of a user
is, of course, a determinant in how much attention the performer
ought to pay to them when tips are at stake. Personally, I find it
mannerly to return compliments with gratitude no matter who they may
be from, but rudeness or demands will find my attention quickly
diverting elsewhere – no matter what the status of the user. Greys
issuing curt commands (“Show your -”, “Do this, do that”)
would just be ignored, whereas those with actual funds would be told,
“All things come to those who tip” or, one occasion which saw the
recipient head straight for the exit after a tedious barrage of
requests, “If you ain’t tipping, I ain’t stripping”.
Occasionally, some would put their money where their demands were,
and a proftable exchange would open up – more often than not, they
would get the hump and leave, obviously upset at having been made to
look cheap in public (or else deeming me, to misquote Dr. Johnson,
“Worth seeing, but not worth paying to see”). Greens and golds
entering the room would elicit the online equivalent of the
streetwalker flashing her coat open at the sight of an approaching
Porsche or Ferrari – which might often screech past her to the
younger, or prettier, colleague three hudred yards down the road.
I soon tried not to make my reactions look too transparant, like
jumping up from a reclined pose to immediately start strutting the
floor like a Las Vegas showgirl (and huffing to an abrupt stop as the
Green or Gold disappeared as swiftly as they arrived). Once the
novelty of being out in public in a live, paying erotic environment
had become normalized in my psyche, I began to use the experience as
an exercise in psychology - studying the actions of users and
figuring out their potential intentions (usually when nobody was
chatting, or saying anything of interest). Sometimes a green would
sit in the room, silent, lurking; as though hoping for another green
or gold to enter and drop some tips which they were themselves not so
willing to part with. Often, the same green would leave and then
return five, ten, minutes later, seemingly to check if anything had
changed – most of my tip ‘goals’ (a certain action being
performed publicly when a set number of tips had been received)
involved removing items of clothing in a very protracted striptease,
on an escalating pay scale – a skirt might be worth 8 or 10, a
G-string 30 (or even 50 if I wasn’t wearing that much to begin
with) – so I understood their psychology for wanting to be around
to see only the later adult-rated ‘good stuff’ rather than having
to pay to get me through the PG-rated underwear level first.
Understanding, however, does not equate with appreciation.
The
bulk of my earnings came from private sessions, which I had fixed at
16 tokens/minute (a token being worth $0.05) – half of the default
value. I cared for quantity and customer retention over extortion. My
longest session ran almost two hours one night, and almost
single-handedly took my balance from $0 to $100 (the magical
threshold for triggering automatic wire payments) in the space of an
evening. Rather like being in a hotel room with a client, one is, to
an extent, rather at their mercy – they are paying after all, and
unless they’re asking for something illegal (either to the site
hosts, or in actual law) then I found it easiest just to comply –
as long as it didn’t involve crossing any of my personal lines,
making a mess of good clothing or compromising my own safety. I had
it clearly stated on my profile which actions I do publicly, and
which I do in private, so anything outwith that range would therefore
need to be at least discussed. Quitting from a private session for
any reason other than verbal abuse or illegal intent would probably
be frowned upon, as users can vote the performer afterwards, and a
negative vote would upset the performer’s overall ranking (it took
me from May until mid-September to get enough votes on my private
shows to actually show up – but when it finally came, it was a
perfect 5/5 from 10 votes). I much preferred speaking in privates
than public – if only because in a public room you cannot tell who
can hear – and the erotic potential of live talk cannot be
underestimated, to those who appreciate such. Americans especially
found my identifiable Scottish accent ‘sexy’, which I found
highly entertaining – given my long-standing hatred of hearing my
own voice until very recent times, when I first started public spoken
word performances (in September 2019) and as a result, began to
modulate my speech patterns and focus on clarity of pronunciation.
The
analogy of striptease to my own work was found to be misleading, if
not entirely false. While it is the one activity (along with
dancing, whether erotic or otherwise) in which I would most gladly
participate for an adult audience (for many reasons), it was
something I was able to perform less than I would have liked. The
advantage of a club is that the audience is static – they are
there, you are on stage, and the only variables are how many are
interested enough in you at any time to throw money your way to see
more. In a webcam room, nobody pays for entry, so traffic can be
busy, dead, or non-existent. Before long, a performative paradox
arose in my mind whenever the population of the room dwindled to
zero: “Is nobody coming in because I’m not doing anything
interesting? But, I’m not doing anything interesting, because
there’s nobody coming in...” The idea of parading around the room
in mad self-absorption, with no actual viewership to see, felt
antithetical, if not farcical. Sometimes I did anyway when a
particular favourite song came on, and I was in the mood anyway. Too
often than not I found myself reclined in the chair, trying not to
look as if I was paying too
much attention to the screen, whilst still also exhibiting some layer
of enticement for those who might
wander by at a moment’s notice.
 |
| As time went on, my profile text became more pushy against the kind of liberties often taken by non-paying viewers |
In
Barthes’ essay on Striptease,
“Striptease...is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at
the very moment when she is stripped naked”. In my case, I began to
find exactly the opposite: disclosing the male anatomy to the viewing
public increased the
tension between viewer and viewed. Unlike the apotropaic stare of
Medusa,
which Freud saw reflected in an infantile view of the mother’s
genitals, my unveiling animated
and galvanised those watching, liberating them from the potential
fear of what they might
see, only to be confronted with what they already knew well to
expect: the sight of that they possessed themselves, the comforting,
assuring promise that not all women had been castrated, that a
sexually available and desirable feminine
form may still hold no terror for the child-within by revealing ‘her’
secret: ‘she’ is just like ‘him’ - literally echoing Kipnis’
observation that pornography is a genre with “two genders but only
one sex” - wherein both sets of performers yield completely and
uneqivocally to each other’s needs and demands, finding total,
almost divine (if not pre-Lapsarian) unity. In this case, her
statement is literally true.
Barthes:
“The classic props of the music hall...make the unveiled body more
remote, and force it back into the all-pervading ease of a well-known
rite...”
One
of the advantages which the digital revolution has brought to the
industry is, of course, the autonomy of the individual performer –
who, no longer needing a sleazebag producer to ‘make her a star’,
or even a stripclub venue to dance in, can take total control of her
own career and do it her way, on her terms, at times that suit her
and with – this, I believe, being the most crucial – total
personal safety, and 100% of the profits. If websites such as
Xhamster can offer anybody (Male, Female or Trans) a guaranteed 100%
cut of the token tips spent on their live broadcasts (as well as
passive revenue earned from any additional digital content, such as
explicit or specialized videos which cost a set number of tokens to
view and download), all in the safety of their own homes – then
anyone with photographic ID and a stable internet connection can
become not just a performer but a paid
performer. We might do well to remember that in the last days of the
20th
Century, the first internet-specific business model to turn a profit
was the pornography industry – before Amazon ever made a cent and
before ‘social media’ was even a phrase. At the age of 47
(and biologically male), finding myself to be praised as not only
desirable but sexually interesting left me rather bemused at first. Being
physically fit helped a great deal – comments on the “killer abs”
and “amazing legs” helped get me off on the right foot, and I
realised quickly that the limited resolution of the camera helped to
mitigate surface blemishes (body stubble, sketchy makeup) and present
a much cleaner image than I knew was actually in front of that
camera. Of course, viewers also saw what they wanted to see - if
their initial perception was of a 25-year old knockout 6-foot blonde
in 5” heels, then no amount of self-deprecating honesty from my
direction (“I’m actually old enough to be your parent”) would
be likely to dislodge those hooks of sexual desire, once embedded in
the Id of the captivated viewer. Self-appointed ‘straight guys’
told me on various occasions I had forced them to reconsider their
sexuality – I didn’t dare ask what they were doing trawling
through the ‘Trans’ section of a very popular website when there
were hundreds of perfectly fine cisgendered female broadcasters
presenting themselves in the default broadcasters’ screen
at the time, for their alleged straightness. As I have said
elsewhere,
“any inclusion is better than exclusion” and if a person like me
can go some way towards normalizing an alternative object of desire
– whether it be a non-binary body, or in the case of others,
coloured, Latino, disabled or other marginalized bodies and beings –
then my work is worth more than the hundreds of pounds it brought me
over the summer – it has helped to sow the very seeds of the
purpose of almost all of my academic and creative work since 2017,
that of raising awareness and recognition of the non-élite form, the
marginalised body, the Bakhtinian grotesuque, through my own
post-modernist levelling of the high-low cultural dichotomy. To
interrupt, interrogate the bastion of heteronormativity, pornography
– albeit couched in the ‘Trans’ section of a specific website –
was a project more than worthy, especially as I did so on my terms –
refuting the full-on hardcore activities of many others (often
Latins, with Colombians featuring in at least half of the top ten
trans performers at any time). That many no doubt viewed me as a
fetishized curio was inevitable; but I brought my own standards, my
own personal rules to the game, and played them with those willing to
participate with me. My strength of personality occasionally pushed a
little far – but if I were ever in any danger of think for a
moment that some guys can just be too stupid, too insensitive, too -
for words, I only had to consider how much more trans and cisgendered
women would have to put up with (and throughout normal life as well).
That I might have denigrated, debased myself for money, never once
entered my mind – such moral accusations tend to be the domain of
those for whom morality is an absolute, an immovable standard set
apart from the needs of life and earning a wage (for example, would
trans women of colour in the United States and elsewhere put
themselves at critical risk of assault, abuse and murder if they had
another option to earn a wage?). ‘Sex work’
itself is mere work, as valid as any other form, and I have strongly
supported (for years) those brave people who undertake it, subject
as they are to the threat of violence.
As Angela carter notes in The Sadeian Woman, “Violence,
the convulsive form of the active, male principle, is a matter for
men, whose sex gives them the right to inflict pain as a sign of
mastery and the masters have the right to wound one another because
that only makes us fear them more...” (pp. 25 – 26). Pornography,
them being socially relegated to the lowest
stratum of culture, is therefore irredeemable by default –
unclassifiable as art, worthless to any but the lowest, without
any consideration of those who not only choose to – but those who
have to – earn a
living from it. By joining
that community I felt, in a small way, proud at having shared a lived
experience which is a way of life for millions around the world. If
anything, I felt that, occasionally, I was the one denigrating others
– appealing to their lowest instincts in order to prise from them a
desirable amount of tips in order to call the session ‘satisfactory’
or ‘profitable’ - the spectre of the neoliberalist nightmare of
the 1980s was not far from my shoulder, a skeletal Gordon Gekko
whispering that “greed is good” and encouraging me to empty the
latest user’s token account for all I was worth, by doing, or
saying, whatever it was they wanted from me. Exploitation, especially
in a free-market environment as on the Internet, can cut both ways.
But if I could give a paying user a good time, “a night’s worth
of great dreams” as I was sometimes told, or just a worthwhile way
to let off sexual energy for that night, then my work was done, and
it was good – for all concerned, insofar as the position of people
like me is a consequence of the global neoliberal agenda of the 80s
in the first place. The user is given a safe and guilt-free
environment in which to release pent-up desire; the performer is
equally safe in her house, often hundreds if not thousands of miles
away; the financial transaction is clean and automatic; nobody is
hurt and nobody has to freeze or get soaked in the street, or risk
verbal or other abuse from strangers. If things get too much we
simply hit the ‘block’ button or stop broadcasting (or viewing).
