00:04:51.880And I, you know, I wrote about it in complicated ways.
00:04:55.320It wasn't an entirely empowering experience, but it wasn't, it wasn't, I didn't consider myself a victim or a victim of, you know, I wasn't a victim of trafficking.
00:05:07.320I wasn't beholden to a pimp. I didn't have any, I wasn't working for survival. It was,
00:05:14.200it was more complicated than that. And I was seeking to understand that experience through,
00:05:18.320through writing. And isn't it so interesting? I mean, it's, I think about this a lot. My new
00:05:27.320novel that I'm working on right now, several of the characters are working as sex workers,
00:05:33.580both in the modern day and 100 years ago. And it just amazes me how much shame we still attach
00:05:42.620to this economy that has existed since the beginning of humans. You know, it's honestly
00:05:49.760kind of boring, my story. Oh, I'm sure. You know, there's so many women, especially in academia,
00:05:58.520who who'd who've dipped into different aspects of sex work like it's not that unique at all it's
00:06:06.160and people know people do for lots of different reasons but i actually felt very unique i was
00:06:10.860you know i'm in recovery or was in recovery and um there's a term that people use in in program
00:06:17.000um i felt terminally unique like my is it a good thing or a bad thing it's a bad thing
00:06:34.640And then no one else is, you know, another phrase is like piece of shit in the center of the universe.0.99
00:06:40.420Like, all eyes are on me and I'm catastrophically wrong.0.99
00:06:47.160You know, I just felt like it was just so scandalous.
00:06:50.740Like, I should be on Jerry Springer, my experience.
00:06:54.160And, you know, it was complicated. I'll say that. Like, there was deception and, you know, partners who didn't know that I was working. You know, I kept my job a secret from people who I thought wouldn't approve and they wouldn't have.
00:07:07.360Of course they wouldn't have. No. Yeah.
00:07:08.460And the reason the reasons why we especially sex workers keep that secret, it's very it's a rational decision, but it didn't feel nothing felt rational when you when you can't really talk about an experience.
00:07:22.940It just becomes so distorted. And my my my understanding of what happened and what what I'd lived through was so murky.
00:07:31.460and and by writing about it i was starting to make sense of it uh and you know we i kind of
00:07:37.300traded the sex worker identity for this pride identity of writer and like i wanted someday to
00:07:43.440be an author which just felt so fantastical like that was just a dream um and at that point it
00:07:49.940really was like i wasn't i didn't have a book or anything like that i just had a you know pages of
00:07:54.940of confession. Right. But I did. I was taught and at the new school that if you did want to become
00:08:02.040a writer, you wanted to publish your writing. So I one of the very first pieces that I'd ever sent
00:08:07.040off that I was so proud to have gotten published was a 900 word essay on the Huffington Post
00:08:13.820Thoughts from a Craigslist Call Girl, I think was the title. It was just a very short op-ed
00:08:21.420in defense of the then called it was called the erotic services section of craigslist it was
00:08:28.080how i had gotten in and out of uh prostitution and it was just in defense of that the existence
00:08:35.340of that platform which was being shut down um due to calls of you know that it was um
00:08:43.740a just a breeding ground for exploitation and there is a lot of exploitation in sex work that
00:08:51.260there's a spectrum between there's a spectrum in every career absolutely and there's there's
00:08:57.980exploitation of many employees including sex workers and especially when something is
00:09:04.460criminalized and stigmatized it's hard to regulate there's no regulation it's just all
00:09:10.080again secretive so murky so murky so murky and i was um you know i i wanted to step out of the
00:09:18.880shadows and just be honest and truthful about my experience. And I just boldly put my byline and I
00:09:24.580published this little declaration that I had had this experience and I wasn't a victim. No one had
00:09:32.920compelled me to do it. I got in and out of the industry just as easily as I could. And I think
00:09:43.740it started people have sex for different reasons and for some of us one one reason is money
00:09:48.460just to kind of the normalize and de-pathologize that experience and to
00:09:55.940to um just be seen heard and understood yeah yeah this which is which is something that a lot of us
00:10:04.880want to be seen heard and understood as as us without shame as us like just the full us like
00:10:13.520the good the bad the ugly the untidy all the bits right and that's really that's what attracted me to
00:10:20.060to memoir writing and and that's what i really discovered in writing the book that ultimate that
00:10:24.220i ultimately did publish shame on you um everybody's got a story everybody's got that thing that they
00:10:31.000just know if you knew you might look at them differently because it's just an unheard or i
00:10:40.640should say underheard truth about a human experience you know there's like i say lots
00:10:45.620of people who've who've done sex work but we don't really see them step out and speak about
00:10:50.260it very often and i i didn't want to live that way so um you know i had just written this like
00:10:56.360pretty unimportant op-ed that um some weeks later a reporter from the new york post discovered
00:11:07.500They Googled my name and put it together with another piece of information online that said I was a public school teacher at that time.
00:11:18.100I had been working in the South Bronx for about three years after transitioning out of sex work.
00:11:24.760And they decided to create a headline about that.
00:11:29.580Bronx teacher admits I'm an ex-hooker.
00:11:33.100Yeah, that's super New York Post, man.0.96
00:11:35.460that is yeah i look and i am i'm also a person who fucking loves the new york post headlines okay i0.77
00:11:41.740have a framed copy of uh headless body topless bar best headline of all time but yeah i mean if0.96
00:11:53.840but when you're the person behind that headline that sucks it was so surreal honestly i think i
00:12:00.880was so naive i'm from the midwest i'd only been in new york for you know however long um0.97
00:12:07.840not a decade i mean maybe at you know five six years and um i i almost thought of the new york
00:12:17.120post as satire because it was so outrageous and i think this is this is an experience we often have
00:12:23.220as bystanders we just we don't realize that there is a person behind that humiliating headline
00:12:31.340that there's a human being um who is not resourced i think another misconception people have is that
00:12:38.380if your picture well maybe we don't have this so much anymore because um it's social media has made
00:12:43.680it so ubiquitous we're all the main character all the time but there was a there was a time when like
00:12:49.140real people had just started getting like plucked out of um their you know obscure real lives and
00:12:58.080totally put on blast and that and and and when you see someone like the octamom or you know some
00:13:04.800of these other characters that um a lot of us came up kind of making fun of you know being
00:13:11.260entertained by we think that oh you know they're they're profiting in some way or they're they're
00:13:16.240controlling the narrative. There were headlines written about me like, oh, it's just a diabolical
00:13:20.780plot to publish my book. Like I was I was not so powerful as to control New York media and get
00:13:28.180and get them to just like start manufacturing headline after headline. But they were relentless
00:13:33.980for for weeks. They just humiliated me publicly that anyone would even dare to
00:13:41.720have had this experience but but more so to have to have spoken publicly about it to have to have
00:13:48.660admitted yeah that i was now a public school teacher and um was was then a was once a sex
00:13:56.960worker was just unheard of right right of course of course i mean how well i'm i think about this
00:14:04.140a lot because we we did an episode a while ago about teachers who are also on social media
00:14:11.400and just how I mean what what is a teacher even allowed to do right anymore and then the conversation
00:14:18.060had begun and you know like I I'd seen stories of teachers who'd gotten fired because of posting a
00:14:25.720photo of drinking a beer right or um there was one story of a like just these these people living
00:14:34.620their lives and kind of getting caught and there's this conflict between the personal and the
00:14:39.760professional we'd started having those conversations like what were you allowed to do and be publicly
00:14:44.900if you were also um an employee and a public servant and i and we i'd always noticed it came
00:14:53.240down we came down hard on women right much of course of course nobody was men men can go out0.99
00:14:59.440and drink 19 beers sure sure and obviously that like men were a part of my story but they remain
00:15:06.200anonymous on and and and to be fair you know I had outed myself before the New York Post had outed
00:15:13.920me and that was partly why people were so outraged that I had chosen to write and speak publicly
00:15:21.780about this experience but for me I really felt like I had had no choice like I said it had been
00:15:26.860complicated and I was trying to make meaning of that experience and really understand what it
00:15:33.720said about me because I did carry even though intellectually I knew better I
00:15:41.040I felt ashamed or I questioned what kind of woman would make these choices and why did I make the
00:15:52.480choice that I did and I had actually began very young I was only 19 when I started working as
00:15:58.800a stripper a dancer so it was a decision that i had made very young that um i really
00:16:05.540lived with and that had haunted me well actually i want i want to take a quick break here and when
00:16:13.220we get back i have a lot more questions i think we all have a lot more questions right
00:16:17.640okay we are back my first question and i mean this is the one that i'm sure you've been asked
00:16:31.000a thousand times before is were you worried going into this you used your real name you knew where
00:16:37.620you knew that you were in a field where people are concerned you know about what people do or
00:16:45.520did with their private lives did you think about it before you hit publish you know like i said i
00:16:51.320was so naive yeah yeah i never thought in my greatest fears or fantasies it i never never
00:17:02.640would have thought that it would create such an effect uh and i was so i think one of the one of
00:17:12.720The hardest things to live with after experiencing mass media humiliation was accepting my naivete.
00:17:24.920And it's interesting because in researching the book, I looked into Amanda Knox and in her writings, she talked about her experiences when she was convicted of killing her roommate.
00:17:42.720Yes. And she's since been exonerated. But she she made a series of missteps. She was very young and she was dealing with these forces that were just so much greater than her, the criminal justice systems. And she made a lot of mistakes. Yeah. And she was so when I read her writings about that experience and looking back, she was so hard on herself.
00:18:10.120I mean, Amanda Knox's story, one of my girlfriends was the producer who spent practically a year over there living right outside the prison covering this.
00:33:22.480So to resist that, to feel the awareness of this is a thing people don't talk about, and I'm choosing to speak it out loud, that's how we grow stronger.
00:33:36.500I think that's how we grow stronger individually, and that's how we grow stronger as a culture, just by admitting things publicly, confessing.
00:33:44.420And you and I, I think we're about the same age.
00:34:47.600And there is some truth to that, you know, to speak out shamelessly.
00:34:51.360But I like to, you know, one thing you, the question, you know, what had I learned writing this book is that there really, it's not that you like speak shamelessly.
00:34:59.860Like there really is some some acknowledgement or an awareness, a feeling of of of of like a scrutiny.
00:35:09.760I have one last question for you. How how do you plan on talking to your kids about all of your experiences, your whole life, this book and and all of the fallout from it?
00:35:46.600You know, how do you how do you account for your life and the mistakes we've made or the choices we've made that are societally unbecoming?
00:35:58.220I think that I I don't think anything will surprise my children because as they grow, they're taught in age appropriate ways to be themselves and to love themselves.
00:36:08.980And that when we make mistakes, we turn those mistakes into things that are beautiful and that everything can be repaired and learned from, which is not to say that my history is entirely a mistake.
00:36:25.720um but but parts of it i was wrong and and and i was wronged and no matter what we live through
00:36:36.560so long as we keep living and learning um it becomes you know a part of our beautiful experience
00:36:43.580and it ultimately connects us to others i don't think my children will ever judge me
00:36:49.080hopefully because i mean i think my children will judge me for things0.99
00:36:58.380But hopefully they'll never have felt judged by me.
00:37:02.220So they'll know how it feels to just, like, love and be loved.
00:37:09.900Like, that's so much more fun than, like, this culture of shame that we're perpetuating where we just, like, criticize and judge so that we feel better about ourselves.
00:37:19.760and um you know i i want to maybe our maybe the next generation will begin to free themselves
00:37:26.140from that oh i don't think the next generation has any shame and they're certainly more open
00:37:31.780and and just just earnest in a way that i always felt like again i wanted to be cool but they don't
00:37:39.280they want to be real and that's really beautiful yeah no i love that i love that tell everyone
00:37:46.920where they can find you and this wonderful book of yours which i learned i learned so much from
00:37:52.380so thank you for putting it into the world oh well thank you for reading and for having me on
00:37:56.920i'm um i you get instagram you can see pictures of me and my awesome kids and my real life super
00:38:03.720cute they're like thinking it yeah no i totally i totally checked you out on the gram yeah yeah
00:38:09.500yep well there i am super cute kids yeah what's your instagram handle for everyone0.97
00:38:49.280I thought when they started attacking Kamala Harris for being a childless cat lady and we all laughed because it just seemed so outdated and outrageous.
00:39:00.260And we were so beyond it, but apparently we weren't.