“I Hate Feeling Like Someone’s Sensitivity Trip”

Charlotte: Where to start?!

Melissa: I could express empathy about the postal service.

Charlotte: Ha.

Melissa: That’s major! Publishers really provide a vital service, doing the mailing part, among other great things. I’m having (very nice) flashbacks to standing in my old kitchen in Clinton Hill with Meaghan, the stacks of envelopes way taller than us.

Charlotte: You two were pioneers. You did so much by yourselves and Kickstarter was still so new.

Melissa: What I’m saying is, we are short people committed to pushing the limits of the bulk mail processing facility across from Penn Station. And once was enough!

Charlotte: Someone from USPS called and yelled at me for scheduling a pick up for media mail and threatened to never come pick up mail from the address again. I was like, lol, that would be fine, I don’t even care, just let me die buried under a mountain of books.

Melissa: You got PL out into shops with far greater efficiency. Which I love, that it’s out there for handling, because it contrasts so sharply with how totally ephemeral they first were.

Charlotte: I don’t know why I’m so determined to get them into bookstores. It’s not like I imagine people browsing will be drawn in. But maybe? When I email stores about stocking them, I get a lot of non-responses and a few “Ew, self-published? Why don’t you just come take a shit in one of our aisles.”

Melissa: Well, those aren’t your people anyway. Really.

Charlotte: But the bookstores that write back positively are so, so affirming and excited, it just makes me melt. Book power!

Melissa: It looks very good right now in Bluestockings. And McNally. Publishing stops being so mysterious after you have to send these emails to strangers.

Charlotte: Ok so: writing in the shadow of a sex work past. Should we go there?

Melissa: Sure, let’s go. I woke up today thinking about it. I wondered actually how many days I wake up thinking about it. And then just kind of kick it away like the covers and get on with the day.

Yesterday, that was absolutely why I decided to add “quite scary” — that thing the fairly clueless Telegraph writer sent to profile me in London wrote, and then had to back off of when the internet got mad on my behalf — to my twitter bio. I’m charmed now by how dim people are about this stuff, how transparent their ideas about degradation and terror are, honestly. It’s the more politely controlled stuff that I try not to think about. The things people are just slightly compassionate enough to only whisper. Fuck that half-consideration.

Charlotte: I remember when they called you “scary” because it was so ridiculous, it struck me as purely hilarious. Not to diminish the cruelty and dishonesty behind it. It just felt like, is this really where you’re at right now? With your “arguments”? Afraid of the slight blonde woman making you justify your attitude?

Melissa: I’d rather they just straight up ask about “my soul” or “can I have a boyfriend” or all the other stuff reporters have asked me, in front of other people, who then just make that face like the cat with its mouth open? You know the one that later we found out it was because the cat was actually sick?

I was so not scary, either. Jetlagged, yes. What was scary is, I was dazed enough from having done a lot of press that I just segued from the interview to asking her questions about her own reporting. I’m sure that was terrifying!

Charlotte: Your sphere is so different from mine because you’re overtly political, you’re making critiques and publicly connecting dots that make a lot of awful people angry.

Melissa: The Shocking Truth About How Your Sex Work Story Is Already Garbage. I learned it from watching you!

Charlotte: I feel like because I’m mostly in the literary world, everyone actually treats me very gently—perhaps too gently. It’s sweet, and I know it’s coming from a good place, but it also seems entrenched in their (wrong) ideas about sex work, still. Not from paying attention to my non-memoir writing or how I am in public dialogues. Which is cantankerous, surly.

Melissa: Your media criticism back at Tits and Sass definitely emboldened me.

Charlotte: That’s so hard to believe, but thank you. I love being strident. I love a well-deserved rant.

Melissa: Do you ever wish people had more to say about the actual writing, less about what it means to them? People do say plenty to you about how beautiful your actual writing is, but I feel like we’re still in this moment where anything about sex work is already getting processed through the readers’ limited exposure. We have a lot of slack to pick up for the reader, let alone just getting published and getting the opportunity to.

I’m thinking of stuff Morgan Page and Casey Plett have said about how trans writers are read, also. How in a relative void, that effects how you are read. And I think that’s something we both face, even if the work we do is quite different.

Charlotte: I get feedback sometimes from readers who say they really relate to me and then stipulate that they’re not sex workers, like a disclaimer. It’s done in a way that feels very respectful and kind, not like they’re distancing themselves from something gross, but — why wouldn’t I be relatable? Why wouldn’t we have similar experiences?

Melissa: That reaction is why I get very prickly about this idea of “humanizing” sex workers. It feels like a defensive crouch.

Charlotte: Yes! I know the concerted effort to be careful about how an interviewer talks to me or how a piece describes me is preferable to general callowness or carelessness. But the real end goal, of course, is that it’s basically a non-consideration, not that I’m babied.

Melissa: I have a slight affection for all these very Donna Haraway-like ideas of the monstrous — like, there is a reason why sex work is challenging for people. It’s sometimes entirely reasonable to be, or be read as, dangerous.

Charlotte: Right. I’m irritated more by the assumption that I’m fragile and vulnerable than that I’m corrupted and threatening.

Melissa: It can be a survival strategy. It’s also real. This stuff is hard. It’s false to pretend it doesn’t shake people up. The kid-glove thing, then. Two sides of the same shitty coin.

Charlotte: But it’s almost as if people who engage with my work don’t want or need me to talk about sex work anymore because I’ve convinced them, I paid my dues: I’ve written about it enough, and now I’m retired, so I can be safely folded back into “writer.” Whereas with you, they will not stop trying to shake you down for specifics.

Melissa: They have stopped, really. The last year was the last straw, though. I took a razed earth approach and it worked. I’ve finally got back that space in my head to do other work. After I posted that strike notice, it really did stop.

You’ve been pressed a little, though—with that one profile’s line about “which she didn’t want to disclose”? Why would you? I told someone who interviewed me for NBC’s website that one huge reason I wasn’t going to tell her stories about my own experiences is that I am a writer, and so is she, and could she understand why a writer might want to write that herself, rather than tell it to another writer on a tight deadline who is just going to give it a line or two in her story?

Charlotte: I’ve had a writer tell me their editors specified I shouldn’t be stigmatized or other-ed in some way, and I was sort of touched by that, and very much amused, but I wish it weren’t necessary. And in some ways it reads as, “make sure you treat her like she’s a real person!” Which is exactly what comes off as false and offensive — a self-concious, concerted effort to “pretend” I’m not different/sullied/etc.

Melissa: Ha, I was just about to say, I hate feeling like someone’s sensitivity trip. It’s strange to be a fly on the wall in these editorial convos, where you are finding out (because the writer shared it) that there had to be some kind of plan. Rather than just, doing. their. jobs.

Charlotte: I was bothered by an interviewer’s question about my parents recently, because it was so invasive and irrelevant. Would you ask that of another writer who was using a pseudonym? “Do your parents know you’re writing under a different name?” Come on, no. You wouldn’t.

Melissa: That’s such a cop kind of question.

Charlotte: Johnalism is real. And I know that the people who engage in it will never understand. They’ll never even remotely fathom how exactly like the most clueless and invasive clients they are.

Melissa: It’s like, the voluntourism branch of johnalism. I would so much rather do johnalism on cops. “Tell me your curious ways. How did you get into this.”

It’s all objectification. Which you know is a word I hate using. And [very Camille Paglia voice] that’s what art is I guess. But the point is, what do we get out of it? If it’s inescapable, and I am pretty sure it is, then I want to fight for what I can control.

Charlotte: I feel like the Jezebel piece was misread a lot, and that’s part of why some interviewers have treated me so delicately. The problem isn’t/wasn’t that I can’t bear to write about sex work anymore. Writing about sex work is fine. It’s a worthwhile, interesting topic. I don’t have PTSD, I’m not shrinking back from something that hurt me. I’m simply sick of feeling like I have to write about it in a reactionary way, because, yet again, someone smug smeared their misogyny and self-loathing and bad politics all over the pages of a major publication, and it’s not ok to let that go without comment.

The tone of the Jezebel piece was weariness and sorrow because of the political and social reality around sex work, because we’re always on the defensive and sometimes the attacks pile up in a particularly acute way. Not because sex work itself fatigues and distresses me.

Melissa: I jut had to sit here in silence for a second, in observation of the horror of that piece you are talking about.

Charlotte: It was so bad. It was the worst thing I read last year. And I’ll never forget seeing so many people embrace it, celebrate it, laud it as fun and funny and harmless and justified.

Melissa: That piece just reminded me of how few women in this business will ever have my back, and I’m fine saying that on the record. Really.

Charlotte: Because it was all right there! She didn’t hide anything. “This teenager used a very specific form of sex work to try to get an education while living in a homeless shelter. She’s pathetic trash.” Haha, brilliant! Really incisive commentary!

By the way, I was JUST reminiscing early this morning about the editor who conspiratorially told me that if someone raped me, he should have to pay me what my escort rates were. As if I would say, “finally, someone gets it.”

Melissa: The fact that it was a hateful piece, that I reacted that way, is not evidence of my shit. It’s every editor who let that thing get a pass.

Charlotte: Right! My despair is about living and working in the climate where that piece passes for something valuable and worthy. Not just that it was published at all, and that she got paid well, but that then it’s widely circulated and praised instead of received with the bafflement and opprobrium it deserved.

Melissa: It was very easy for me to look at the piece and make a list of everyone I should never pitch, never share my work with, never hit up for advice. And the fucked thing is, I bet many of them don’t understand that. They are at the point where it’s almost cool to have read something about sex work once, maybe even commission someone to write something for them, and they don’t understand how these things cannot co-exist.

And the answer wasn’t, have former sex workers write about sugar babies so we can have a more “sensitive” piece for people to hur-hur about. It was to write about almost anything else. I’m glad I decided not to take up the offer from an editor to do a sugar baby story. It would’ve been a mistake.

I’m so mad.

Charlotte: I took us to a dark place, I’m sorry.

Melissa: It is a dark place, but it’s one that’s always there at the edge of my vision, anyway. It’s more the reality of the media than it isn’t.

Charlotte: Which is why it was so hurtful and yet unsurprising that Jezebel had that huge sex work fuck up like, a month after running my piece. I really learned a lot last year from freelancing full time.

Melissa: I’m more comfortable in my cynicism, honestly. I feel ill-at-ease when I start trusting the media too much!

Charlotte: I like that angle. I feel much better equipped now than I did last year, certainly. Clearer eyed.

Melissa: What’s honestly wonderful is how there is something opening up, I think. Mostly because we are more organized behind the scenes, we have more knowledge about how to work in a compromised media.

Charlotte: I’ve also come to terms with the fact that if an editorial staff has no integrity or loyalty, and I made the mistake of working with them, I get a pass on the loyalty front too. I’m not going to protect them by not talking about how unrepentantly bad they are out of a sense of propriety. Or let them tacitly use my byline to excuse them even acknowledging when they misstep.

Melissa: I think we’re really strong, in the indie/freelance media anyway. There are strong cadres of people within that committed to not accepting the bare minimum anymore. So I feel very bullish about that, even though I have no idea what the media or publishing will look like in five years. That’s okay. I know we’ll both still be writing.

Charlotte: You’re right. I trust our resiliency and that we have audiences who are growing and who get it. Which is the best feeling (for me) — to know there are more people reading me who get it than people who don’t. Even if that means my audience stays small-ish, forever.

Melissa: I feel really positive about the legacy all of this might leave. Like walking into a used bookstore and seeing copies of PL marked up with notes. Being in circulation. This is all just the beginning.

Charlotte: Your picture of us on the shelf together was very #lifegoals. Like forget squads or covens or whatever: just continually trying to earn a place among the people I respect. That’s a good life to live.