Getting Verified On Twitter If You Are A Sex Worker

Good luck. There are scant few sex workers verified on Twitter even though its the preferred social media outlet for the marginalized group. I was an early adopter and encouraged others if my ilk (at that time i was a hooker) to join me. We called ourselves “Twookers” and i still have a Twitter list of that name. Twitter allowed us to connect in a real way, to support each other, share information and ideas. We were able to create our own social media support support system for a group of people who are often discriminated against, marginalized and often just flat out denied access to the the things everyone else is allowed to participate in.

 

We cant use linkedin, we get chased off Facebook for having stage names, tumblr hides our accounts from public view, instagram deletes us with no warning. You tube kicks is off not because our content violates any TOS  but because of WHO we are, Vimeo does as well. You get the picture we’re a discriminated group. Twitter was different, we were allowed to be there and as a group we thrived. Enter the Twitter Verified Account. It started with the famous, usually actors and the like. Moved on to political figures and people who were generally household names. Then it expanded. As it stands now anyone can “apply” to be verified. Verification has its benefits, if you are often impersonated it helps with that, you get ways to filter content, filter DMs, interactions that the unwashed masses don’t get. This is very helpful to a group of people often targeted for harassment yanno cuz we’re all whores. You need certain things enabled on your profile and you need to provide them links to prove not just who you are (especially if you have a stage name) and why you’re “noteworthy”

I figured id try and report back the process. You don’t see many sex workers verified on Twitter. I see a few international organizations and a had full of high profile porn starts. I wondered if that was because the process was daunting, somehow precluded sex workers from trying of if on a whole the industry didn’t want the blue check mark. Here’s what i leaned.

Its easy to apply but they give you very little direction.

Full out your bio, add your birthday, enable 2 factor authentication, conform your phone and email, send in some links, upload your ID,  write a 500 character essay on why you should be verified. (FYI that’s about 4 tweets)

The thing that was hard to wrap my head around as a sex worker was the ID. I just sent it in. It would have been a much harder decision if i was still a hooker. However im retired and have been for about 6 years. I currently work in the 100% legal business of Erotic Audio. I make and sell erotic hypnosis Mp3s and i’m popular in my field and a top seller. I make a rather tasty living doing what i’m doing.  So I sucked it up and sent in the ID.

Choosing which links to provide

This i had to think about you get 5 links. I decided to turn in 2 major publications that wrote about and interviewed me. This blog, Fairy Whore Mother and my E-Commerce site. The reason being since i was using a stage name, they needed to see i was who i said i was. The links to the media outlets was to show my newsworthiness.

Essay Writing

Okay I misread this at first and though it was 500 words. Its not, Its 500 Characters. So like 4 tweets worth of why you’re so great and should be verified. Its harder then it looks. This is what I wrote. I tried to tell them who I was and why my verification would benefit the Twitter community. I was a very early sex work blogger who blogged under my working name. Which back in 2008, let me tell you NO ONE DID. Not even Belle De Jour who later got a book deal and Showtime made a series about her wasn’t using her working name. BTW she is one of the rare sex work Twitter verified however shes came out publicly as a sex worker/Belle De Jour/ years back and is using her legal name not a stage name.

In any event I had to go back and edit down my Verify me essay to this:  

After that was done. I hit send and waited to be told in email wither Twitter would approve more or not in 6 days. In the meantime while I twiddled my thumbs I learned that MANY sex workers have applied to be verified only to be turned down. Some multiple times.

I waited and got my response this morning. Denied!

So went to the link  in my  you are not good enough email to see where I screwed this up. I read this

  1. Well it does reflect me under my stage name and I gave them links to prove that as well as my legal ID.
  2.  Not a corporation so this one is N/A
  3.  My header is one of my main photos I use in my Hypnosis Branding and my profile photo is if my face. Maybe they were expecting photo of my tits?
  4. My bio says what I do for a living (erotic recording artist) links to my sex work blog and lists and what i do for a hobby (equestrian) .Its also also pretty clear i’m politically active.  My tweets are open and i tweet a lot about current events, sex work and keep my self promotion tweets to under 10 10% of my twitter life. Oh and more then 90% of my followers are real. I have a very low bot follower count.  Maybe I should have it rewritten my bio to use buzz words like “leading” and “renowned” I dunno. I see other profiles of people that are just blank but then we all cant be Chris Evans I suppose and he is soooo much more real then I am.

But wait there’s more… Additional info maybe I screwed up there and that’s why Twitter doesn’t think i’m real or relevant

Okay I gave them Links to Fairy Whore Mother Likely the most impact-full and one of only full of sites that cater to sex workers by sex workers. This blog which has often stirred up controversy for the 10 years its been in existence and links to places Vice, The Quaz, LV Weekly where I was written about or interviewed. Maybe they just didn’t read them, I mean if your job was to wade though bullshit about verifying some boring motivational speaker why would you want to read really compelling interesting stuff by a best Selling NY Times writer or Vice magazine. Oh and just as an aside, im followed and follow more then my fair share of Verified accounts because yanno all us newsworthy and relevant people know each other and have secret handshakes and stuff. I did hear a rumor the more check marks that follow you and vice versa the better your odds. Um ok Twitter, that’s dumb if true.

So in conclusion Twitter doesn’t believe I’m relevant in my field despite over a decade of sex work advocacy for which my peers respect me and or i’m not “newsworthy” even though major media has taken an interest in me. Though you can bet your ass if I somehow spilled my old Washington DC  or Hollywood client lists they’d be all the fuck over me trying to verify me after the wold caught on fire. Cuz yanno Sex workers don’t count unless they are bringing down the demise of powerful men or being dragged though the mud labeled a whore. Right Twitter?

 

Do Not Trust Call Siren

New adult services pop up all the time. Most are fly by night. They think, look at all the free sex worker money! Then they find out how much work is involved and fold. Sex workers actually work their asses off (some literally) to make a living. They can fade away pretty fast. Escort directories linger on the web with no paid ads because they cant bring in the customers, clip sites do little or no business and barely stay a float then shut down. Some take the time to get sex worker allies on their side so that they can show they are legitimate and not there just to make money off them but want to be a member of the community and support them with their new business (see https://www.slixa.com and the now defunct clippette) But they too have trouble navigating the difficult waters of how to make money in an often flooded adult market. As much as people think its free money its not its hard work, very hard work.

Enter Call Siren.

It was brought to my attention by a sex worker pal Pinky Galore. “Hey do you know who Call Siren is? They are re-tweeting all my tweets from NiteFlirt” I had never heard of them before. They had a web page up but it was a squeeze page. (hello 2004 called they want their marketing back) the site had no information  about who they were, how the money would work,what personal info they would need, what the split was, what they were offering other then some kinda phone sex and sex chat phone app that would launch “soon” but they sure wanted your email address. Whois says they have been in existence for only a month.

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The first thought is why would anyone RT auto tweets from NiteFlirt? My colleague asked them via twitter if they were affiliated with Niteflirt?

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What ensued next was nothing short of both hilarious and infuriating. Call Siren spent a good amount of time trying to convince sex workers on twitter that they didn’t need to give them info that said sex workers should just sign up with them no questions asked. Just sign up bitchez and find out later you dumb whores! Okay i’m paraphrasing but thats how it was taken by many including me.

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That didn’t go over very well as sex workers (especially the vocal ones on twitter) don’t really like it when they are patronized and treated like they are dumb whores.  They even “LOL’d” at me in response to a serious question. They might as well called me sweetie cuz theres nothing more professional then calling a prospective customer “sweetie” or LOLing at them in response to questions.

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Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 7.57.21 AMThis went on for a while, until yours truly got frustrated with them and did a little digging. Their trademark that they have a ™ on their twitter profile is not registered with TESS. I pointed that out to them and they not so veiled threated to sue me for slander. Clearly geniuses who don’t know the difference between slander and libel and what cause is in a legal case. Lucky for them i do, so i pointed it out to them.

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It spiraled down hill from there. With Call Siren tweeting that the sex workers questioning them and at this point laughing at their ineptitude, poor business practices and stated that all the bad press they were getting somehow was good PR for them. Yes, they trotted out that old dog.

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 8.16.24 AMPlenty f people had seen all this and it was re-tweeted far and wide. They did plenty of damage to themselves because they just couldn’t stop. They couldn’t stop responding and every time they made themselves look worse and more unprofessional. They refused to answer any questions  which made them look shady. Its all out there. I thought it was done they slinked away hopefully to re-think their approach. Until this morning when 4:30 AM San Francisco time, where they say they are located.. Hello crack-heads! I get this…

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 8.21.05 AMTheir twitter count had jumped from only 25 on the first day of the exchange, to over 4K. Thats 3 days and an amazing return wow who knew my bad PR reach was so long! Oh wait… they bought followers in an attempt to somehow smite the people questioning them. Thats just plain old sad. When you look at their followers list you see dead accounts, bible thumpers, bots. its a plethora of bought followers! The most concise and to the point response to them was one by Fiona Foremost.

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And thats really the bottom line.  All the shenanigans aside, when you are dealing with a sex worker support service you need them to be above board, professional and legit. They will be handling your money, they will have your personal information such as an ID and social security number, they will be able to connect your real identity to your working one. They need to be not just trustworthy but super trust worthy. If they are easily baited into petty arguments, watch out! If they are not upfront in their business practices watch out,  if they wont tell you anything about WHO is running the site really watch out. Sex workers need to be very careful about who they trust with sensitive information. Many live double lives, many can reap heavy repercussions in their lives if ex husbands, clergy, parents, neighborhood busy bodies, the sheriff in Polk county FL find out they are sex workers.

The people that stay in business do support sex workers but are not all perfect. Most if not all protect your information are professional and trustworthy thats WHY they sick around to make money. Call Siren is not one of those business. Call Siren is not trustworthy. I’m going to guess they either never launch and will sell their email list to try to make some money back or when they do they flop. Or they just screw over people royally. Mark …My … Words.

DCHobbyist Idiot DuJour

Not the sharpest tool

Not the sharpest tool

If you work for the President Of The United States and you bang hookers, it’s probably not a good idea to create a secret Twitter account and taunt your bosses at the White House. It’s an even worse idea to also have a second secret Twitter account where you prolifically talk about how you pay for sex. That is however what one person did. Then he got caught. Then he made national media. Like a dumbass.

He created @NatSecWonk  (get it national security wonk..*eyeroll*) and he used that Twitter account to denigrate his bosses and anyone else in the political realm he felt like. I guess people in  national security circles and some journalist followed him. I guess he thought he was being clever but really it was more of a “your fat, fuck you” kinda Twitter stream, not exactly nuanced, it was mean and not clever. Juvenile and stupid. Lets just say he didn’t have a way with words.

The White House didn’t like this and eventually the dude was caught reportedly due to an internal sting and his name was splatted across the national media after he was fired of course because in the capacity he worked in for the US Gov he wasn’t allowed to have any social media let alone a secret Twitter mocking the people he worked for. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this mental giant was also a prolific whore fucker better known as a “hobbyist”. The kind of hobbyist that thinks because he fucks a lot of women for money that it makes him special. He had a board presence on the largest hooker review site in existence, the one that boasts a bizillion reviews of escorts. He thought he was a big man on the whore fucking campus.  He also had a whore fucker Twitter and was known as @DCHobbyist. That’s what several national news outlets reported. Yes, DC Hobbyist the same asshat that so many sex workers had to block on Twitter because he stuck his nose in their business and often tried to peddle his whore fucking knowledge to them.  Was both @NatSecWonk and @DCHobbyist and was so stupid that he got caught. It’s almost like this moron wanted to get caught. He thought he was smarter than everyone else, clearly a moron but in his own mind he was a super genius. Bonus his wife whose name now was splashed in the media  is well-known republican aid. So there’s that.

DCHobbyist is  pompous, arrogant, and self-serving. Hes also rumored to the be the poison pen writer of a blog post that has since been removed on the Slixa blog where he teaches other whore fuckers how to manipulate and connive and lie for a discount for fucking whores. Lovely. He’s that guy, the one that acts likes he’s all rah-rah sex worker but really hes playing a part and has an agenda, hoping that if he perceived as a supporter he’ll get some nookie on the cheap. Oh and he writes reviews, lots of reviews, reviews that are so hyper critical of women that many escorts had declined to meet with him based on what he’s written.

The NatSecWonk Twitter was deleted but the DCHobbyist one was only locked down and recently it came to my attention that he’s tweeting to hookers again (and stupid girls are tweeting back). Maybe hes bored cuz his wife kicked his unbelievably irresponsible ass out, for not just getting caught being a fruit-loop and getting fired but for all the whore fucking he did and all the bragging he did about said whore fucking… in writing. What a prince charming. It seems he’s starving for  attention and clearly he’s deranged and can’t stop. He couldn’t stop mocking the highest office in the land, an office for which he worked. He couldn’t stop himself from being a douche to hookers, he couldn’t keep his whore fucking to himself and he humiliated his family.  He was the subject of a White House investigation which got him fired, named in national media and humiliated for his stupidity but yet he still is trying to be somebody in the hooker scene. He should be shunned,  hes made us all look bad, he brought scrutiny upon us all and he did it because he needed to feel important and special. Anyone who engages with him is taking a major risk and in a such risky business why in the fuck would you want to bring on more than you have to. It’s not like the idiot has any money to spend.. he got fired and i really doubt anyone will be hiring his dumb ass anytime soon.

Resources:

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/10/nsc-aide-admits-twitter-attack-on-white-house-175722.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/natsecwonk-also-dchobbyist-prostitute-expert.html

http://freebeacon.com/sex-lies-and-twitter-accounts/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/23/a-sampling-of-controversial-tweets-from-natsecwonk/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2474909/Jofi-Joseph-tweets-soliciting-prostitutes-Twitter.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/most-offensive-natsecwonk-tweets-about-women.html

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/24/jofi_joseph_anonymous_natsecwonk_handle_revealed_to_be_national_security.html

Ashton Kutcher Vs Village Voice Media

Ok to play a sex worker, not ok to be one?

The Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s anti trafficking campaign “Real men don’t buy girls” has long bothered me. It’s made me so upset that i haven’t been able to write about it because i get too emotional when trying to put my thoughts down in writing. It bothers me for a lot of reasons. Because its the celeb cause of the day, because it’s always felt so completely dishonest, because it conflates sexual slavery of under age children with that of consensual paid sex acts between adults, because it ignores BOYS (as if they are never victims of trafficking) and i could go on and on and on and on and on. It upsets me and bothers me on so many levels that’s it has hard for me to verbalize how it makes me feel. Basically I’ve talked to friends, colleagues and tweeted on occasion but about it but that’s it, until today. Why today? Village Voice Media owners of Backpage wrote a front page story and debunked the child sexual slavery numbersthat both Dude where’s my car and Jules from St Elmo’s Fire and other abolitionist groups  love to throw around to solicit donations for their anti trafficking campaigns. Turns out the numbers are greatly and flagrantly exaggerated like i always FELT they were but now a Pulitzer prize winning paper has done the research and homework and confirmed what i had a hard time putting into words.The numbers are wrong. The facts are wrong, Demi and Ashton are wrong. Look Sexual slavery is a terrible thing, sex workers like myself want to stop it as much if not more then the average Joe. We know first hand the realities of sex work, much more so then an ex soap opera actress and the guy from that 70’s Show. We want to do our part to end child trafficking, that’s very hard to do when Sex work is criminalized and children engaged in prostitution be in by corrosion or choice are branded criminals and offered very little services besides a jail sentence. If we report a crime we’re at risk of being arrested ourselves and were often the ones most able identify a crime. We have access and knowledge others like celebrities and law enforcement dont. Plain and simple.

Both Demi More and Ashton Kutcher have made money portraying sex workers. Demi even famously underwent breast augmentation surgery for the role of a stripper. So what gives with the blatant hostility towards sex workers? Why do they need to use junk science and inflated numbers to further their cause. Why create and exaggerate  problems that doesn’t exist, when you can work to address the problem that does exist. Is it because if there are an average of 1,000 trafficked children a year that its not going to raise the money you don’t funnel down to services for victims, then if you LIE and say 300,000? It’s hard to get the big bucks without the splashy numbers, so they “find” splashy numbers even if they have to make them up or turn a blind eye to the fact that are are made up and inaccurate.

Ashton tweeted just today that “he only played dumb on TV”  as he got into a pissing match with a news outlet because he didn’t like them taking him to task for his inability to get his facts straight. He then went on to try to get advertisers to remove ads from The Village Voice  because VVM owns backpage and sex workers advertise there, which of course revealed all anyone would need to know about Ashton Kutcher’s real agenda. Ashton Kutcher is against sex workers, their rights and possibly their very existences. He’s an abolitionist and he let let his slip show in the midst of his Twitter melt down because he got some bad press.

… yeah he only plays dumb on TV?  I’m not buying that argument.

Related Links:

Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/

NBC: http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/06/30/6982716-kutcher-vs-voice-in-twitter-sex-slave-fight

SWOP-LA: http://swoplosangeles.org/2011/07/01/village-voice-vs-ashton-kutcher/

MaggieMcNeill: http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/village-voice-strikes-again/

Charlie Glickman: http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/07/when-arrogance-meets-activism-ashton-kutcher-and-sex-trafficking/

Gawker: http://gawker.com/5817554/

Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/07/01/ashton-kutcher-bulli.html

Reuters: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/07/02/the-village-voice-looks-at-underage-prostitution-statistics/

The News Junkie: http://thenewsjunkie.com/2011/07/ashton-kutchers-stupid-twitter-war-against-the-village-voice/

Videogum: http://videogum.com/328481/the-village-voice-takes-on-ashton-kutcher-about-child-sex-slavery-or-yikes/psas/

Seattle Weekly: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/07/trevor_neilson_hollywoods_king.php

Tits and Sass: http://titsandsass.com/?p=2941

Village Voic: (follow up) http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-06/news/stuck-in-trafficking/