Nudity Content Must Be Over 18

What’s the $pread?

By Peter Landau

Sex workers of the world unite! That's the unofficial motto of $pread, a new glossy magazine made for and by sex workers. While stories focus on the trials and tribulations of the business, this is no trade publication and invites laymen to join in on the fun--though it's more of a cerebral kick, as the text-heavy, cultural, and political editorial proves.

Rachel Aimee, co-editor and co-founder of $pread, took time from her busy schedule of editing to chat with Sex Wrecks about the definition of a sex worker, what readers can expect between the pages of $pread, and what she thinks of the growing feminist backlash against sexually explicit culture.

Why publish a trade magazine for sex workers?
Basically because there isn’t anything like it out there at the moment; mainstream media coverage of the sex industry tends to be sensationalistic or moralistic or both. There’s some interesting academic writing about sex work out there, but it’s not really accessible to the general reader or sex worker. We thought a magazine would be a good way to provide a place for sex workers to discuss their experiences of the industry in an accessible format that would appeal to a wide readership.

But $pread’s not just a trade magazine--it’s for anyone who’s curious about the sex industry: clients, academics, feminists, activists, etc. We want to educate the public about the realities of the sex industry--positive, negative, and everything in between--as well as building a sense of community among sex workers and providing useful resources.

How do you define “sex worker”; does it include strippers, dominatrixes, etc.?
I guess I’d define it as a person who exchanges a sexual service for money: prostitutes, strippers, pro-dommes, peepshow workers, porn actors, etc. Although not all those types of workers define themselves as sex workers. I know a lot of strippers, for example, who hate to be called sex workers and would never describe their profession that way.

Unfortunately there’s not that much solidarity between workers in different sectors of the industry. Most sex workers who don’t actually have sex with their customers “justify” their work by defining themselves against prostitutes, like “I may be doing this work that other people think is bad, but at least I’m not a prostitute.” Topless dancers look down on nude dancers because they “show everything”; peepshow workers look down on lap dancers because they let the customers touch; indoor escorts look down on street prostitutes, etc.

Through $pread we’re hoping to build more of a sense of community among different types of sex-industry workers, to encourage the idea that, although we all work in different ways and set different limitations, we all face stigma as sex workers to some degree and we’re going to get further by sticking together and demanding acceptance and rights as a group rather than setting up more boundaries.

What is your inspiration, and is there any precedent out there in publishing?
There was a magazine called Danzine that was published out of Portland for a while. It was mainly just for dancers, though, rather than all types of sex workers, and it’s not being printed anymore, so $pread’s the only one of its kind in this country at the moment.

There are sex workers’ trade magazines that I know of in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK, and I’m sure there must be others too, but it seems like $pread is the first one to try and reach out to non-sex workers as well and to be more of a glossy magazine than a straight-forward trade publication.

Is there anyone out there who may pick up $pread in hopes of getting off, and if so will they be pleased or disappointed?
Yes, in fact there are a lot of people who see the title and assume it's porn. Even after looking through the text-filled pages and political articles, they still don’t seem to get that it’s not intended to titillate. I’m amazed how often guys ask if there are going to be more pictures in the next issue. It’s like they think we’re trying to make porn but we’re just not very good at it or something!

The other day I was looking through our latest issue on the subway and some guy was reading it over my shoulder. After a while he asked what it was and where he could buy a copy. I offered to sell him the copy I was reading, but he said he was too embarrassed to buy it on the train. He said, “There are lots of guys who want to buy magazines like this, but we don’t want to be seen with them in public, where there are children around.” I tried to explain that it’s mainly a political and cultural magazine, but he didn’t really seem to get it.

We’re totally happy to play up to that, though. If people buy the magazine hoping to get off and accidentally end up getting educated about sex workers’ rights, that’s fine by us!

What are some of the regular features in $pread?
There’s “Indecent Proposals”, where sex workers recount the funniest or weirdest requests that clients have made of them. I love this feature, because every sex worker has so many of those stories that are difficult to tell to friends or family who haven’t worked in the industry, so it’s great to have a place to share them and laugh at each other’s weird customers! In issue two, one escort wrote about her experience with an investment banker who had a fetish for anarchist protesters. He asked her to wear a hoodie and then spanked her and called her a naughty girl for “smashing the Starbucks.”

We also have “Intercourses”, where we interview a representative of a group or organization that we feel should be supporting sex workers’ rights. So far we’ve done a john and a lawmaker, and some ideas for the future include unions, feminists, socialists, and parents.

But my favorite regular feature has to be “On the Street”, where we go up to random people on the street and ask them a sex work-related question. In the most recent issue it was “Do you think prostitution should be a crime? Why or why not?” We got some really crazy answers, from a girl who attributed the need for sex workers to “karma,” to a guy wearing a bucket-like hat who launched into a speech about prostitution’s “Native American roots.” It’s always the most entertaining page of the magazine!

Senior Editor Mary Christmas has a regular advice column; what are some of the more unusual questions posed?
We haven’t had anything that unusual yet--mostly people asking for STD prevention advice and things like that. In the first issue, Mary answered a question from a dancer who wanted to find out about the legalities of doing “double dances” in strip clubs, because her boss kept telling her she could get arrested for “that lesbian stuff.” I guess that’s probably the most interesting one so far.

Do you have a favorite article from the magazine?
Actually one of my favorite articles sort of got buried at the back of the first issue, before we really knew what we were doing in terms of graphics and layout and before we had very good distribution. It was by Jo Doezema, a Dutch sex worker and academic, and it was about the harmful effects that anti-trafficking “raid and rescue” practices can have on global sex workers.

I also liked our issue two feature on British strip pubs a lot. It was really well written and did a great job of exposing some of the ways that strip-club managers exploit their workers.

My favorite article in the most recent issue has to be “The Coldest Profession”, by our Senior Editor Eliyanna Kaiser, which describes how a certain species of female penguins have sex with males in exchange for stones, which they use to protect their nests from the snow. It’s like a satire of the way people are always using examples from the animal kingdom to prove how “natural” something is. I especially love that piece because it allowed us to have a headline on the cover saying “Commercial Sex in the Animal Kingdom”, which just makes people think, “What the hell…?” and hopefully pick up the magazine!

The magazine is made for and by sex workers; so what aspect of sex work are you involved in? Are you still active or is $pread your fulltime work now?
$pread’s editorial team is made up of current and former sex workers and allies, but most of us prefer not to publicly disclose that information about ourselves. As for fulltime work, I wish! $pread doesn’t even cover its own costs yet, let alone pay us--all the staff are volunteers, so we all have day (or night!) jobs. We’re hoping that might change one day, though.

How about a little background on yourself and what brought you to become editor-in-chief of $pread?
I’m originally from the UK and I started to get involved in sex workers’ rights when I was studying in London a few years ago. I joined the IUSW (International Union of Sex Workers) and briefly worked on their trade bulletin, RESPECT.

I moved to New York in January 2004 and met $pread’s co-founders, Rebecca and Raven, soon after that. We were organizing a benefit for PONY (Prostitutes of New York) and started talking about how cool it would be to start a sex workers’ magazine. None of us had any experience in publishing or editing, so it seemed like an exciting daydream when we started out, but step by step it started coming together and we launched our first issue in March of this year. We’ve managed to teach ourselves a lot in just over a year, but there’s still a long way to go.

You’ve been quoted as saying that the sex industry is a "vast, misunderstood industry." What's the biggest misconception?
Wow, I don’t know where to start with that one. Maybe the biggest misconception is that sex workers must have some motivation other than money for going to work. Most people don’t love their jobs, but if a sex worker complains about a bad day, people assume they’re being psychologically damaged by the work and need to get out quick. On the other hand, if a sex worker enjoys--or doesn’t hate--her work, she’s often either seen as morally bankrupt or assumed to have some sort of pathological compulsion to do that work.

It’s difficult for a lot of people to see sex work as just a job. To accept that a person can make a rational choice to be a prostitute not because she enjoys it but because it’s preferable to working sixty hours a week at a minimum-wage job with two weeks vacation a year.

Another misconception is that sex work is an easy profession and that it doesn’t take any sort of skill to do this work. Sex workers don’t just get money thrown at them for standing (or lying) around looking pretty. Most types of sex work are incredibly emotionally draining. It requires a ton of patience and psychological investment to be whoever the customer wants you to be, all the time--on top of the energy it takes to defend your work to friends and family, or hide it from them, as many have to do.

Sex work is by no means an easy option, although for a lot of people the sex industry provides the best or only means of earning a decent wage and supporting themselves and their families.

It’s also a misconception that sex workers are somehow different from the rest of the world--an exotic species. Sex work is such a taboo thing to do that a lot of industry workers hide it from people they’re close to, which means that most people probably know a lot more sex workers than they realize. There’s this idea that sex workers look or act a certain way, but anyone who’s ever worked in the industry knows that’s a myth. If you think you don’t know any sex workers, you’re almost certainly wrong!

Do you think there's a higher percentage of drug, alcohol, and sexual abuse in the history of a sex worker than, say, a steel worker?
I don’t actually have statistics to answer that question. There are substance abusers and sexual-abuse survivors in a lot of professions, but when it’s a sex worker, people assume it’s inextricably connected to the work and use this as a reason to argue that sex work causes or is caused by social problems. I guess this is because a lot of people find it hard to imagine that someone could make a rational, sober decision to do sex work, or that it’s possible to be a sex worker and maintain a healthy, happy lifestyle.

There's been a backlash against the overtly sexual nature of mass media and our culture recently, with several books published bemoaning the "pornogrification" of America, some from a conservative slant, but many from a feminist point of view saying that dressing like a stripper or praising Jenna Jameson as a symbol of sexual freedom is at best misguided and at worst reactionary and dangerous. Do you have an opinion on this tempest?
Most of the editors at $pread describe ourselves as feminists, but there are certainly sex-work activists who see feminists as their enemies, and feminists who can’t accept sex work as legitimate work.

I too find it depressing that the mainstream media is so focused on the way women look and so limited in the body types that are presented as desirable, but I don’t think that getting all moralistic about how women should and shouldn’t dress is doing us any favors either. Instead of trying to repress aspects of culture that we don’t like, I think it’s more important to work on subverting traditional gender and sexual norms. Creating a space for sex workers--who are often portrayed by the media as passive objects--to speak for themselves is certainly one way of moving towards that.

In fact there’s a lot more diversity--both in the types of bodies that are appreciated as sexy and in the sexual variety that’s permitted--in parts of the sex industry than in mainstream pop culture.

One of the founding principles of the feminist movement is that the personal is political and that experience is a valuable teacher, so I don’t really have time for feminists who refuse to listen to what actual sex workers are saying and claim to know what’s good for all women. You don’t have to like the idea of the sex industry in order to support a person’s right to choose her profession and to seek better working conditions.

Finally, any words of advice for the Sex Wrecks readers out there?
Um . . . subscribe to $pread! And don’t forget to tip sex workers!