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It has been exactly one year since I outed myself as a sex worker to my shitty former mentor. Some thoughts~
I’m still an adjunct, and I’m still a sex worker. Covid has obviously impacted both, which had made the class stratification and learning curves in academia vs. sex work even more apparent.
Pre-covid, I fully expected to survive this summer on sex work. (I sometimes teach summers but don’t depend on it.) Once the pandemic hit, I expected to depend on anti-eviction laws to survive the summer. Miraculously, I managed to work (findom, primarily) enough to cover rent.
At no point did I waste my time deluding myself with the idea that academia or academics would help me with any of this—covid, that is. Obviously they don’t give a fuck about my summer lol
Sex workers and our communities (including clients) have been organizing, planning, giving mutual aid and support. Academics—especially tenured faculty—have mostly hunkered down to protect their own, e.g. their funding, their families, their tenure, their power.
The most successful sex workers I know have been spending their free time on activist work and resource building. The most successful academics I know are spending it...chilling with their families. Academics’ support comes from within the home, sex workers’ from the community.
The most successful sex workers I know depended on older colleagues to support them, teach them the ropes, and connect them with opportunities. The most successful academics I know depended on their parents.
This is obviously a generalization: I know successful sex workers with supportive families and academics without them. The difference is that sex workers invest in the community while academics invest in, like, the stock market.
Academia does not give a single shit if you live or die unless it has already invested in you, rather than the other way around. This doesn’t make academia ~ruthless~ but means academia is full of shit. The academy doesn’t exist to ~produce knowledge~ but to reproduce power.
Sex work, as with most criminalized labor, exists in direct opposition to power. There’s a reason sex workers have better leftist politics than mArXiSt ScHoLaRs (which, to be clear, I also am lol), and it’s because it’s not just theory for us; it’s praxis, too.
So this past year, if nothing else, has taught me who’s the real deal and who’s a fraud. And most academics who purport to be champions of women, queer people, BIPOC, and poor people are in the latter category—which should be clear by their vocal insistence to the contrary.
Anyway, that heinous bitch did me a favor. Her abusive nonsense has whittled my research interests down to a very sharp point, which I’ll be using to skewer each and every asshole who tries me again. So cheers, Anne. I hope you’re having a terrible fucking day!
