SEXIS WRONG

you would have others do unto you.”
I was quite surprised when I first heard that healing occurs
here, women healing themselves, each other, and
customers. Describe what you know about this. ~ It’s
profoundly healing for some women, me included, to take
charge of their own eroticism in such a public way. To be able
to say to your self, “Me and my sexiness are going to get in
a box and hang out there for all to see for several hours at a
stretch,” is a profound piece of work, and that real ly is how I
have experienced it.
I do come onstage, and it can be just
from undulating and moving my hips
rather than putting my finger there
and wiggling it.
It has done worlds for my performance anxiety. I’ve learned
to be sexually spontaneous in a way that I never was before.
I’ve learned to come through visual stimulus, talking dirty,
and humping the air. It’s made me more orgas mic, which is
always healing. None of us know what it would be like to
have as much sex as we ever wanted because we don’t have
time, we don’t have permission. I get a lot more time and permission
in the booth than I get any where else. That’s been
real healing. Good sex is healing.
Any woman who steps across the line to do overt sex-industry
work has got ten shit from somebody about it. Most probably
from herself. We do a lot of “staffing” about that, as
therapists would say. We help each other feel good about it.
I don’t know what we’re all going to think twenty years down
the line, but right now we can be together and give each other
support for being nontraditional women, for being women
outlaws truly. This culture has always thought of women who
sell it and women who are slutty and women who want it all
the time as not really okay. They idolize us and they want to
chase our ass, but we are not okay.
Often women who come here have never been in a space
that’s so female before. We’re surrounded by hard dicks, but
we’re onstage together and it’s about tits and pussies and girl
smell and women being erotic. It’s funny to watch women
who aren’t accustomed to female sexuality start to get a clue.
[Laughs.] There’s a lot of lesbian fantasy that gets brought a
lot closer to reali ty ’cause we are being sexual together, and
how could you not notice? [Laughs.]
I think men come to places like the theater more than anything
else to be in an environment where someone will tell them
it’s okay to have a hard-on. To want to look at it, and to want
it. And there’s no place in the world out there, including a lot
of marriages and primary relationships, where people get the
signal it’s okay to want it. It’s okay to want it in the middle of
the morning when you’ve got your business suit on, damn it.
It’s okay to want it when you just got done painting a Victorian
and you’re taking your lunch break. It’s okay to want it when
you’re wearing your rubber slicker and you just got off a boat
down at the Wharf and you stumbled in in your thigh boots.
I had this fucking guy come in in his rubber slicker and thigh
boots—I’m going, “Whoa, I’m jackin’ off with Captain Ahab.
This is amazing!” [Laughs.] “Hey, did you catch Moby Dick or
what?” And so often what they want is not just orgasm, is not
just jackin’ off. It’s not just to get their dick hard—it’s to talk
about eroticism and sex and feelings. To talk about the fuckin’
weather, to just talk to somebody.
What are they in there for, if it’s not about some kind of healing?
Some kind that I probably can’t even put my finger on.
Something about just inter acting with a woman, a person. A
lot of guys come in to do just what the sign says, to talk to a
live, nude girl. And I think all of that is healing.
This culture doesn’t let us have our sexuality,
and whether it’s because of culture or hormone
surges, guys get reminded of theirs a
whole lot and feel like they have to get put
down and shut down around their sex in order
to be productive members of society and good husbands
and not pester their wives too much, and, damn it, they want
a place where they can go and just have it. And more than
anything else, that’s what the theater and places like it are
about. That’s what it’s about for me. That’s especially true
of guys who have divergent sexual interests, who want to
show off their lacy panties and garter belt to somebody. My
favorite guy can stick his dick up his own ass. He wants to
show off to somebody. He wears a wedding ring, and I bet
his wife doesn’t know he can do that. Just imagine bursting
into the bathroom one morning to get your nylons drying
on the towel rack and going, “Honey, uh, what are you doing?”
[Laughs.] The guys who want you to watch them suck
themselves off. The guys who want to play with submission
and age-play and incest-play and want to call me Mommy.
And women, too; occasionally, we get a woman who is there
for the eroticism. Sometimes couples share that. All those
people get told by our culture, their partners, by everybody
that it’s not real okay to be sexy and turned on the way they
are, and so they’ve got to find a place where they can have
that, where people won’t turn them away and shut ’em down
and tell them they’re wrong and bad and sick and evil. I really
think that these people use peep shows for a kind of healing,
a kind of affir mation.
And I in turn, because I am obviously a sexually divergent
woman, both in my exhibitionism and the fact that I am really
turned on doing this stuff, because I’m a sex worker, be-
192 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG