Wednesday, November 15, 2006
well today i looked so good, just like i know i should, my breasts to tempt inside my bra, my face was painted like a movie star:
I once lit candles for Hannuka at my old friend Joanna Angel's home in north Jersey. Joanna invited me and my then-girlfriend over, and it was a lovely time: her parents, especially her mother, and her younger sister were lovely, lovely people. I was about to leave for my first trip to Israel, which raised a lot of questions from people -- it was only a few months after 9/11, the bombs were exploding in Jerusalem every day, why would I do this? Joanna's mother, an Iraqi-born Israeli, understood intuitively. As we lit candles, she guided my ignorant, secularist hand.

Next week I'll be blogging with Opinionista for Jewcy, and today a friend sent along a horrible coincidence: Jewcy has interviewed Joanna's mother. The entire conversation is extremely hard to read. Not only is she extremely ashamed of Joanna's profession, but she's ashamed of Joanna -- she seems to believe that her daughter's slide into perversion is the outgrowth of very deep-seated flaws in Joanna that, as her mother, she tried and failed to correct. I'd be foolish to pretend I knew Joanna better than her mother does, but my heart breaks for her when I read this: Joanna has built quite an impressive business empire for herself, and any mention of her pornography should include that recognition. But consider such awful statements from Joanna's heartsick mother:
How can she not understand that this is a horrible thing for a woman? Look at a suicide bomber.
This is a terrible situation, and I hope Joanna isn't too upset by this interview. Jewcy has taken a very cheap holiday in other people's misery.
--Spencer Ackerman
It can be. You haven't known many sex workers, have you?

That said, it's my secondhand experience that any work for money can be self-destructive. Law, investing, medicine, bending sheet metal, hanging drywall -- they all have their casualties.

But pretending sex work is somehow blessed to avoid them is unrealistic.

FD: my experience is all secondhand, but none of this friend-of-a-friend crap. I am talking about my own friends, neighbors, and party guests.
Blogger wcw | 2:04 PM