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Old In Art School

(FluxFactory/Getty)

Nell Painter | Old In Art School | Counterpoint | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,906 words)

Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon to be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hyper-saturated, Technicolor — no, RBG color-coded — artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.

Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple — too simple by far.

I said, because I wanted to.

Because I could.

I knew from my mother I could do it.

My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more, in my mother, who starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as an older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman, she cast off the strictures of a lifetime — well, some of them — and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.

My mother had never written a book before 65. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable “Donna.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.

Always a terrific writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found steel within to pull it off.

She devoted ten years to research and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.

It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmering of your doubts.

Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.

It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor she needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.

I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.

People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.

In her memoir, she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, but with much more to her than race. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior — the usual adultery and betrayal — but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.

Looking at her, identifying with her when I was 64, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter-century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.

***

I had been a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s. These three drawings, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.

Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful, but a eucalyptus gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.

In Ghana, I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was red, the trees and grass blue-green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Red-orange bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions that barricaded the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.

In Ghana, I taught French in the language school and gave the news in French on Ghana Radio for a year. I can still hear the drums

Boom boom boom      Boom  Boom

announcing “Ghana calling!” I began graduate study in pre-colonial African history at the Institute of African Studies before a coup d’état deposing Kwame Nkrumah ended his nascent African socialism and sent us Afro-Americans, including Maya Make (later Maya Angelou) to Egypt, to Europe, and for us Irvins, home to California.

I completed my MA in African history at UCLA, having previously discovered a love of history during my junior year abroad at the University of Bordeaux. After UCLA a year of rattlebrained, youthful follies too embarrassing to mention, I ended up at Harvard for a Ph.D. in history. I quit smoking. I wrote a dissertation that became my first book, published by — ahem — Alfred A. Knopf. Many books and professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University followed.

I was a whiz kid, tenured and promoted at Penn in three years and promoted to full professor at Chapel Hill in another three. In the early days of my career, I never questioned my ability to do well in my field. I loved history, loved research, loved writing — I still love history, love research, love writing. I published books at a regular pace: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1986), Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996), Southern History Across the Color Line (2002), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2006), and the Penguin Classic Editions of Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And there were fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, &c.), scholarly societies (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, &c.), and honorary doctorates (Dartmouth, Yale, &c.).

I don’t want this to sound effortless, for it was all a lot of work, a hell of a lot of dedicated work. Good work, I mean, work that felt good to me, for writing history gave me enormous pleasure. If you want to see the whole panoply of achievement, check out my website, www.nellpainter.com or look at my Facebook page. Over the years, though, images made their way into my writing of history.

Visual art’s gravitational field had renewed its pull decades before my mother had reinvented herself as a writer. Still, I cannot shrug off my change of field as simply a matter of time. It took place step by step, as I was writing history.

My history writing tugged me toward art over the years. I used a photograph I had taken as the frontispiece of my second book, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and I wrote about the photograph as a meaningful image, not merely an illustration. Then came the “Truth in Photographs” chapter in my fourth book, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, on Truth’s self-fashioning through photographs. I spent hour after hour preparing that chapter in the abundance of Princeton’s Marquand Art History Library, where the art books fill four levels and you can sit comfortably for hours, with the history and theory of photography. In Marquand I learned the rhetoric of the image and critical seeing.

I illustrated Creating Black Americans with fine art. Though it’s a narrative history, Creating Black Americans gave me an introductory course in African American art history. There was, I discovered, more good art by black artists than I could ever cram into one book, even limiting the art to subjects bearing on history. None — okay, very few — of those artists figured in the art history I would study in art school.

The books I wrote weren’t art history, but each one took me beyond text into new visual archives. I loved working with images; I loved learning new history and new artists. This was not like my first undergraduate experience in art.

***

Back in the 1960s I had studied art at Berkeley, had been an art major and drawn a couple of covers for the campus humor magazine. My art major ended with a C in sculpture, a C I earned by not doing any work. Why should I have to work at sculpture, I reckoned like the kid I was, because talent should insure success. I saw talent as everything, therefore exerting myself would make no difference. What kind of reasoning is that? Dumb kid reasoning. I didn’t know how to work on learning sculpture, and I didn’t know any professional artists to show me a way. On the other hand, my academic family applauded my writing. There ended my story in art for decades. Except for occasional sketching and knitting, I put down the visual and wrote a very great deal of text. Eventually, my books returned me to art, and once back in images, I concluded, Yes, I think I could stay in the world of pictures. Let me test this out.

During my last year teaching at Princeton I took two introductory painting classes. Introductory painting came after my regular teaching and kept me in Princeton to 10 PM. After that, I’d get home to Newark in the middle of the night. My generous Princeton colleague Valerie Smith let me stay over at her house and sweetly bought one of my first drawings. At first, I didn’t know to photograph my work, so Valerie’s drawing has disappeared from my files. The office of another Princeton colleague, Edmund White, was next to my painting studio. He bought my very first painting, my attempt to depict a set-up in various surfaces and shades of red and yellow, shiny, matte, opaque and translucent, saturated and toned down. The reflective red hat contrasted with two drapes, one also reflective but mixed with blue, the other with a pattern that fractured in the folds of the cloth. The bright yellow shopping bag in front combined a shiny surface and a broken pattern.

In this first Princeton class I painted gray scales and figures and landscapes and learned light sources and perspective, as in two other early paintings. The gray scale began simply as that, a gray scale, where you alter hue and saturation between black and white. I liked that exercise and added mountains in the distance. It still looks like a gray scale, but with something else going on. The blue painting came from an exercise in creating depth through perspective, shadow, and luminosity. I made both these paintings on manufactured canvases 24 x 18”. I still have a whole pile of these canvases, which I consider beneath me now. My second Princeton painting class taught me how to make my own stretcher bars and to stretch and gesso my canvases, thoroughly enjoyable manual labor.

My Princeton painting classes took me to museums, to Philip Guston’s cadmium red, ivory black, and titanium white cigar-smoking Klansmen and John Currin’s skinny, huge breasted naked white women the color of supermarket peach flesh. I joined the throng of Guston admirers, but never acquired a taste for Currin’s virtuoso painting. I still stumble over his skinny, big-breasted women and wonder why his famously rendered Thanksgiving turkey is raw.

***

Even before art school and with what I look back on as incredible hubris, I toyed with the idea of myself as a professional artist, not a mere Sunday painter. I might want to go to art school, not just to undergraduate art school, but to graduate art school as well. I might want to work professionally. I might want to be as professional a painter as I was a historian. Well, within reason. Why would that pose a problem?

As I poke into the crevices of memory, I touch another motive for leaving history, a motive that wants to stay beneath the surface, pulling back into deeper obscurity like a darkness-dwelling troglobite I’m dragging into the light for you. It is not a nice feeling to acknowledge, but candor demands acknowledgment, for otherwise I just might have remained in the grooves of academe. For there was, as always, much more history yet for me to write. Any sentiment other than gratitude strikes me as most unbecoming in one whose achievements have been honored with a Princeton professorship, honorary doctorates from the Ivy League and beyond, and the presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. What could be more annoying (a word I learned to employ in art school) than a person of privilege whining about what hasn’t been bestowed? Nonetheless. Nonetheless, let me whine a little. There was some sour sense of limits reached, of disappointment over book prizes not won and books not reviewed. It was as though I had assumed I’d be exempt from the rules of the world, where people who looked like me or who didn’t fit an image of how they were supposed to be were never fully seen or acknowledged. For all my lovely recognition, I seemed not properly to fit in.

I’ve never been a black person easily captured in the idea of a black person—come to think of it, no one is. No person, no black or otherwise person fits a racial mold. The idea of a black person is a stereotype that shifts its shape in order never to fit anyone real. I’ve hardly suffered or overcome hardship, can’t talk ghetto, won’t don a mask of black authenticity or speak for black people as a whole. Too many disparate themes reside in me for coherent recognition: images, phrases, people, and things from the multiple worlds I live in and have lived in over many years of life. The freedom I treasure in art reminds me of walking in Bordeaux in the 1960s and inclining toward the study of history. My mother’s dismay at the appearance of aging triggers scattered associations, from the biography of a French theorist to older women artists. Driving down I-95 from Providence calls up a memory of skidding my beetle across a snow-covered bridge over the Connecticut River when I was a graduate student at Harvard. This jumble is not smooth, but its disorderliness is what makes me me.

When I sniveled to friends that I had never received a book prize of import, they pulled me up short, and not just by recalling my honors. They reminded me of the world we live in and the off-kilter nature of my writing. What on earth did I expect? I had enough, I really did have enough in many meanings of the word. Enough in hand, I left history, in the sense of no longer writing scholarly history books as I used to, with honor and fulfillment. History remains a part of me, naturally, and it remains in me even though my relation to history became uneasy in art school.

***

After my two toe-dipping Princeton painting classes, I took the summer drawing and painting marathon at the New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan. The Studio School started at 9 a.m., ended at 6, with crits stretching past 9 p.m. Okay. For me that meant get up at 6 a.m. walk across the park, take Newark light rail to Newark Penn Station. New Jersey Transit to New York Penn Station, that hell of thank-you-for-your-patience dysfunction. The 2 or 3 subway downtown, get off at 4th Street, walk to 8th Street, and arrive before everyone else.

Then the pay-off. Stand up and draw and paint for eight hours. I loved it.

I L O V E D IT.

The paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the set-ups, the model, the space, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell. Concentrating hard, I did it wrong, and I did it right. I painted a still life in red and blue that taught me that you can’t mix cerulean blue from ultramarine and white oil paints as they come from a tube. A figure painting asked for warm but light browns for skin and an indefinite darker shade for light skin in shadow. This shade has no name, so you mix it out of the leavings on your palette.

Here’s the best lesson of all from the Studio School marathon: Staple a 5’ x 4’ piece of tough watercolor paper to the wall; cover it with a charcoal drawing of the model in the set-up, the very best drawing you can make. Cover the entire paper. This takes hours standing up, drawing in the heat. Sweating. Now rub out your drawing with a chamois. Owwww!! All that work for nothing! Draw it again, only 10” to the right. Okay. Concentrate. Draw. Sweat. Fill up the paper. Rub it out. Erase it again? Yes. Rub it out. Draw the model and set-up 1/3 smaller. Draw draw draw. Rub it out. Again.

Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.

I loved it. Even though I was the oldest by far, I stood up and painted right up until 6. Some of the kids came late, farted around, took two-hour lunch breaks, and left before dinner without washing their brushes. Crit came after dinner break. To accommodate Newark light rail’s evening schedule, I would leave crit around 9 PM. Start all over the next morning, five days a week. Okay, I could do it! Let’s go!

I applied to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from Princeton and the Studio School marathon. Rutgers admitted me. What a thrill! What an accomplishment! My knowing Friend Bill hinted later that undergraduate art school isn’t all that hard to get into. Be that as it may, my admission puffed me up as a worthy achievement. I affiliated with Douglass College, the (sort-of formerly) all-women’s college, for its feminist tradition, of course, also for its quiet.

***

In the summer before I started at Mason Gross, Dear Husband Glenn and I attended an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. You will only hear of Glenn occasionally, when absolutely necessary because Glenn doesn’t want a role in this story. We were together in Paris, where the Grand Palais had installed a huge show of stirring paintings, abstract and figurative, witty videos ironic and silly, sculpture bright and colorless, and perfectly gorgeous drawings: a feast for the eyes of color and movement and sound. Wait a minute. What in creation was spilling over several folding tables—used ball-point pens, foil, torn newspaper, doodles, bits of paper, the contents of a wastepaper basket held together with cardboard and brown packing tape. A shapeless mass of faded color and haphazard images. Too-muchness splayed out from one section to another without any composition, without coherent color that I could see, as though a drunken Do-It-Yourselfer had turned over his trash barrel in the lofty Grand Palais. Hunh? An art enigma. A mistake, surely. But what did I know? I did not know this was art.

This piece by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn had won the show’s first prize, and Hirschhorn was installation art’s shining international star. I hadn’t yet heard of installation art and didn’t know that in the twenty-first century this was more than any old art; it was good art, excellent art. The best art. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Walker Art Center, Hirschhorn had hit all The Art World’s high notes and strutted off with its prizes.[1] Clearly, this was art, and Hirschhorn was a major artist. Hirshhorn’s work raised the oldest questions in the world of art, questions that followed me for a very long time afterward. What counts as art? Who is an artist? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.

***

From Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter, published by Counterpoint.

***

[1] By “The Art World” I mean the important museums and galleries that bestow visibility and money on selected artists, virtually all white men. Without caps, the world mans everything in and around art, regardless of sex and race and wealth and wide recognition. 

A Beginner’s Guide to Fly Fishing With Your Father

Illustration by Steven Weinberg

Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)

In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist.

I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass.

Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché — the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.

As we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Fly-fishing is a gentleman’s sport. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. Read more…

Sex Workers vs. The Internet

Illustration by Erin McCluskey

Rick Paulas | Longreads | June 2018 | 24 minutes (6,543 words)

 

Lauren couldn’t afford any more canceled dates.

A “combination of beauty and brains, exclusively available for adventures,” according to her website, she’d spent untold time and energy building her brand on the back of a modeling résumé that included portraiture in Penthouse. She’d spent thousands on website maintenance and professional photos, and another $250 to $800 a month on ads on the Eros Guide. And she’d worked damn hard for those glowing reviews — over 70 in all — posted by clients online at the Erotic Review (TER).

It allowed Lauren to charge “discerning and professional gentlemen” $500 for an hour of her time, $750 for 90 minutes of it, or $5,000 for an overnight. But like roughly half of the United States, Lauren was still living paycheck to paycheck.

There was the high cost of living in New York City, a necessary expenditure that came with the gig; unlike cam girls, she had to physically be with clients. The more pressing hit to her pocketbook, however, was the result of a serious autoimmune illness that necessitated eight surgeries over a six-year period, an out-of-pocket cost of $240,000. It was this enormous bill that had shifted her career from modeling into sex work in the first place.

“All the money I ever made [modeling] is gone,” Lauren says. “All I want to do is buy a home in the country where I don’t fucking see people. Just me and my dog.”

A stream of last-minute cancellations and no-shows, then, was extremely troubling. Not only did they leave her without the income she was expecting, but also hours she could’ve used to earn money were stolen from her. “I didn’t know why people were booking and not showing up,” she says. But a quick Google search of her name revealed the reason: a negative review posted on Ripoff Report.

“When you look up [my name], it’s the first thing that comes up,” she says.

A privately owned, for-profit website, Ripoff Report publishes anonymous complaints about products, businesses, and individuals, from multinational corporations like Walmart to self-employed freelancers like Lauren. “The evening was unpleasent [sic] to say the least,” the pseudonymous reviewer wrote. “She tried upselling me the entire evening offering a wide range of unsafe activities. I ended up cutting the date short and let her keep the 2k.” (Companies and individuals can rebut accusations — Lauren did — but the original complaint remains. “We DO NOT remove any reports,” a spokesperson for the site wrote me in an email.)

“I couldn’t tell you how much business I’ve lost due to this,” Lauren says.

Lauren deduced the reviewer’s identity almost immediately; the former client gave himself away with the same dialectical misspellings that littered previous negative reviews on other review websites. He was an hour-long date she’d had the previous year in Houston. “These hour motherfuckers can go one of two ways,” she says. “And when it goes bad, it goes really bad.”


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According to Lauren, the man paid for an hour of her time, but stayed for an hour-and-a-half, during which he “had his dinner and had it twice.” He left without giving her a tip. Three months later, he contacted Lauren to get her to “verify” him on Preferred411 (P411), a website used by sex workers and clients to “connect with others in a safe and secure way.” (On P411, clients pay $99 for a “basic” six-month membership, which can be upgraded to “basic plus” with an OK from a worker; essentially a way for workers to know the client is legit.) She said yes, and since everything in the industry is an exchange of money for time, she asked for something in return: a 10/10 review on the Erotic Review. He agreed.

She saw that while he gave her the agreed-upon 10 in the “performance” category, he’d only given her a seven in “looks.” She contacted him about the betrayal.

“I said, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says. “And he lost his fucking mind.”

The man told her she was lucky he gave her a score that high, then threatened to write another TER review about “how fucking ugly” she was. He soon made good on that threat, falsely claiming that he’d gone on another date with Lauren, giving her a 3 for “looks” and a 4 for “performance.” Lauren contacted TER with screenshots of their electronic exchanges, and they took down the new review. But the time it took for TER to process her complaint was costly; she’d lost $1,000 that night from someone who read the review and canceled. (The client’s 7/10 review, meanwhile, remained up.)

Still, it didn’t sink her business. That 7 for “looks” dragged down her average, but she’d banked enough 10/10 scores over the years that this outlier didn’t tank her score. For the next year, everything went smoothly until the “hour motherfucker” resurfaced with the aforementioned negative review on Ripoff Report and the great cancellation of dates began anew.

“Your reputation can be ruined in a heartbeat,” says Lauren, who’s since added a range of cancellation fees to her listing. “These reviews could ruin your entire business.”

* * *

Maxine Doogan remembers getting the call that revealed the future.

It was in ’98, or maybe ’99, and it came in on her landline, or maybe her cell. It was from her friend Melanie, a fellow sex worker with 25 years of experience in the field.

Melanie told Maxine to go to her computer and visit SFRedBook.com. She warned Maxine, “This is what’s coming.”

“I got on there and said, ‘Oh my fucking god, this is going to be a disaster,’” says Doogan, a Bay Area–based sex worker, activist, and founder of the Erotic Service Providers Union. “And I was right.”

RedBook was launched in 1999 by Mountain View programmer Eric “Red” Omuro. Similar to Craigslist, it was a bare-bones website composed of classified ads, but RedBook focused primarily on rating sex work. These posts, written by customers, were intended to mitigate some of the risks associated with the lack of legal protections in these business transactions. “There are women that make ads, make appointments, walk in, take the money, and walk out,” says Doogan. “And clients have no recourse.”

These rip-offs frustrated workers like Doogan, because their negative effects cultivated a general atmosphere of distrust, which then rippled into her own workplace. “Clients were treating us with suspicion, asking a lot of questions, and wanting [illegal] verbal commitments,” she says. “It made for a very difficult customer base.”

But beyond the growing concern of client rip-offs in this uncharted virtual world, Doogan saw that sex workers faced a new vulnerability. Previously, in the the street or massage parlor, workers could get a visceral sense of a potential client before choosing how to proceed. In fact, before industry norms shifted to faceless online greets before private meets, workers had ways to sleuth whether the client was on the level, a cop, or just plain bad news.

“Remember the old Thomas Guide maps?” asks Doogan. “You could use those to see if the house was their real address. And when AT&T came out with Caller ID, that helped a whole lot.”

The rise of the free online classifieds — where “everybody and her mother, aunt, brother, and grandma could put up an ad,” says Doogan, “and with no experience!” — also changed how workers spent money. Initially, this meant withdrawing the cash spent on ads in local newspapers and alt-weeklies, a shift exacerbated by some publishers’ own newfound ethical codes which led them to refuse accepting ads from sex workers. “That’s what happens when you start being the tool of moral enforcement in advertising,” says Doogan. “You lose your ass.”

That’s what happens when you start being the tool of moral enforcement in advertising,” says Doogan. “You lose your ass.

New laws targeting sex workers also aided the pull away from print as an advertising expenditure. “We all used to have ads in the Yellow Pages. They were making thousands of dollars off us,” says Doogan. “But police threatened [Yellow Pages publishers] PacBell or U.S. West with felonies, and that prompted the change.”

One way around these laws was the “personal escort” loophole, where workers sold “time” and avoided terms like “sex” in ads. It allowed Yellow Pages to continue listing escort agencies, a move that prompted independent workers to license themselves as official agencies, sometimes more than one when they could afford it. “We’d have multiple mobile phones with multiple names, so we could get listings through the alphabet,” says Doogan. “Something that began with an A, something in the middle like an M, something at the bottom.”

As print avenues dried up through stricter laws and as publishers went bankrupt, digital options filled the empty space. Eliminating physical distances and national boundaries, they offered a perceived freedom and a potential reach that print never could. But there was a catch with this new frontier. Rather than a competitive marketplace, the sites that invested in offshore servers to avoid the law’s arm and, more importantly, hired the right programmers to win the search engine optimization game, developed a near-monopoly in short order.

“Fucking Google,” says Doogan. “They’ve cut the ability to search by our name, phone number, or geographical location. It’s given Eros a lot of power.”

The Eros Guide is a classic “ad mall,” that is, simply a place to post ads. The site was founded in Oakland, California, in 2000 by Byron Mayo as a relatively obvious way to capture profits in an as-yet-unregulated market. “[The internet now] makes it possible to economically present far more information in a much more accessible fashion than ever existed before,” Mayo told the Jamaica Observer in 2001.

Doogan had one of the early ads on the site, first for free, then for “30 to 40 dollars a month.” Now, due to its paramount nature in the market, Eros makes millions of dollars a year; in 2010, Washington, D.C.–based dominatrix Jenny DeMilo estimated that the website brings in somewhere between 8 and 10 million a year. “They’re number one, so they can command what they can command,” says one sex worker, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from Eros. “[To them], one thousand a month [for a single ad] isn’t unreasonable.”

From a worker’s perspective, it’s hard to say that money used on Eros isn’t spent well. Google “escort” plus wherever you live, and odds are good you’ll see an Eros listing. (Anecdotally, every worker I interviewed for this piece said that most of the traffic to their personal websites came from Eros.) This dominance over a worker’s ability to find clients has given Eros unchecked power over the industry; they decide who can use them and who can be banned without warning or explanation.

“They can’t give us an explanation, because it would implicate them,” says the anonymous worker. “Imagine you’re trying to work at a company, and there’s a bunch of rules in a book that you’re not allowed to see.”

Imagine you’re trying to work at a company, and there’s a bunch of rules in a book that you’re not allowed to see.

With that power comes editorial control. Unlike during the print era, when workers chose what to put in their ads, the information that workers can present is restricted by Eros’s’ legal team, limiting how they can distinguish themselves from one another. “You can’t use certain words. You have to put in your height, your weight, your hair color,” says Doogan. “They’re like, ‘The customers want to see that.’ The customers aren’t paying you! I’m paying you! I’m your customer, dumb bitch!”

In November 2017, the Department of Homeland Security raided Eros’s North Carolina call center. The raid sent a shock wave through the community after DHS obtained access to their personal information, but Eros remains active.

This creeping power of a lone, dominant ad mall wasn’t what was on Maxine Doogan’s mind when she received that phone call about RedBook back in the late ’90s. And the harrowing “disaster” on the horizon wasn’t necessarily the free-for-all ads or the rip-off-exposing message boards either. It was RedBook’s most innovative feature: the reviews section.

As described in a 2015 Wired feature about the site:

You could pay $13 a month for access to the section, where VIP customers shared detailed write-ups of their experiences with escorts, BDSM providers, and erotic masseuses. As part of their reviews, users listed the services they received, as well as details about the provider’s physical attributes.

On RedBook, clients rated workers on a scale of 1 to 10 in services, body, and face categories. Reviews was the most popular section of RedBook, and to Doogan, it represented an epochal industry shift that tilted power from workers to customers.

“Men had custody of the internet by the time Prostitution Nation got there. We were already on the internet, but we didn’t know we were on the internet,” says Doogan. “The domination of the customer over the business started on the internet.”

* * *

“I was getting ripped off,” David Elms, a frequent sex work “hobbyist” told MSNBC in 2006. “There was no way to hold people accountable.”

Elms’s solution to the claim that he was being ripped off — which could mean that a worker took his money and left without providing any services, or that they didn’t look exactly like their photographs, or that they weren’t willing to consent to every type of sexual request — was, in 1999, to develop The Erotic Review, a website where clients review their dates with sex workers. “Our reviews serve as powerful barometers that keep an otherwise illegal business honest,” reads its general FAQ section. It was RedBook’s review section hopped up on a cocktail of amphetamines and Viagra.

“Outside of America, people don’t really use it,” says Scarlett St. Clair, a sex worker based in New York and London. “But in America, they are the biggest, and they wield unfortunately a huge amount of influence.”

That “unfortunately” from the worker’s mindset makes sense. Elms’s own personal experiences, whatever they were, steered the site into a “customer is always right” ideology that persists. It’s a questionable viewpoint in an industry where, according to Sex Workers Outreach Project, its workers are 400 times more likely to be murdered on their job than workers in any other career. (To further illustrate the point, note Elms’s own record following TER’s creation: After a slew of accusations about him using his position of power to extort sex from workers, he was arrested in 2009 on several charges, including an attempt to hire a hitman to kill a sex worker; Elms and TER reportedly cut ties after the arrest.)

And yet sex workers, particularly new ones, feel compelled to use TER’s system.

“It gave me a kind of legitimacy,” says St. Clair, who joined in mid-2016. “It signaled to others that I am who I say I am and good at what I do.”

The signals of integrity, credibility, and trustworthiness are broadcast because the reviews aren’t contained in a closed, private network that only an exclusive few can examine. The low cost of entry and accessibility make TER similar to Yelp, but one where the worker-customer interaction takes place behind closed doors. “The guys who post on TER and the guys who lurk on TER are not the same set of people,” says Missy Mariposa, a worker at a legal brothel in Nevada.

TER users have two choices on the site. Basic Membership is free and allows users access to the worker’s contact information, appearance characteristics, and broad details of their reviews. A VIP Account, available for $30 a month — or free for clients who write the equivalent of one review every 15 days — gives users access to every review, a list of services offered, and more. There are forums too, where one can “hang with your favorite Hobbyists and catch up on the latest news,” but like RedBook, the reviews are the draw.

Also like RedBook, reviews use 10-point rating scales, but only for two categories. There’s “Looks,” ranging from “she was one in a million” to “I was really scared,” and there’s “Performance,” which can be rated from “it was one in a million” to “a total rip-off.” Reviews must describe encounters within the past three months and must offer “juicy” details.

As described on the site:

The Juicy Details section should be used to describe the provider, the experience, and whether or not you enjoyed the session in graphic emotional and sexual terms. Don’t make this space a recap of the General section. Instead, go for a blow-by-blow tell-all of your session with the provider from your own unique point of view.

These “Juicy Details” are a key aspect of the site used to justify the cost of a VIP membership, and thus, the site’s revenue stream. In fact, according to multiple interviews with sex workers who have used TER, reviews are often rejected by editors for not being salacious or detailed enough. As you’d expect, this focus on “blow-by-blow tell-all” leads to heavily embellished tales.

Mariposa recalls a date with a client who’d recently hurt his back. Despite being barely able to move, he wanted to keep his appointment, and so after Mariposa slowly brought him over to the bed, they had a very gentle session. “You can’t be bouncing up and down with your back broken,” she says. But when she read the date review, she couldn’t stop laughing.

“He didn’t write about how we had a lovely, intimate time,” she says. “It had to be, ‘I had her bent over. My balls were slapping everything.’ What do they call it, locker-room talk?”

TER’s FAQ section maintains that reviews are verified for authenticity, where the reviewer bears “the burden of proof.” Based on interviews with nearly a dozen workers, system checks are lax enough that a sub-industry of fake reviews has sprouted. For a fee, workers can purchase 10/10 ratings for themselves, or more insidiously, pay to take down their competitors. “You can go to a review-writing service and say, ‘I want to buy three negative reviews for so-and-so,’” says Mariposa. “You think they’re going to turn down your $175? What do they care?”

More commonly, according to workers, clients are too busy or uninterested to write reviews, so they let workers write their own. This is positive for workers; they can control how they’re perceived, but there’s an opportunity cost to spending unpaid hours writing copy hoping it will attract future clients.

There are other, more dangerous ramifications for workers reviewed on websites like TER. Whereas negative Yelp reviews may get a restaurant worker a stern talking-to from their boss, a sex worker has no real advocate other than themselves. Workers can contact TER about reviews and theoretically have them removed, but according to workers, such complaints are rarely heard or acted upon. “This company does not care about what happens to [workers],” says St. Clair. This has given TER’s reviewers — that is, the customer class — overwhelming power over the industry.

“TER’s purpose was always to push the standards of what the industry should be,” says Mariposa.

One shift in standards has reviewers dictating rates for services. This can work through a kind of rumor-based osmosis (St. Clair offers the example of a reviewer falsely claiming to have paid $150 for a service that a worker actually charges $200 for, then another worker, lurking on TER, reacting to that falsified price by adjusting their own), or it can be through a concerted effort by organized reviewers to fix prices. “There’s talk on the forums about trying to enforce lower prices by refusing to see certain women,” says St. Clair, “or by trying to make women feel guilty or bad by charging as much as they do.”

This pressure can get workers, particularly those new to the industry, to lower their prices enough that the income no longer sustains them. “The new workforce doesn’t know what to charge, so they’re chronically undercharging, and they can’t support themselves with these low rates,” says Doogan. “The turnover is higher than in the past.” But as workers accrue experience, they often learn that pricing is truly their decision.

“There was a point where I wanted to stop offering anal, so I marked it up, and people still absolutely paid,” says Mariposa, who then marked the service up again. “Guess what? They paid.”

The logical question to Mariposa’s price change is, well, if you really wanted to stop offering a service like anal intercourse, why mark it up? Why not simply refuse to offer the service? The answer? Dual pressure from customers.

First is pressure from “hobbyist” reviewers. “There were gangs of customers on RedBook who’d review a girl and falsely say she provided these services for low rates,” says Doogan. “So, the girl’s getting customers expecting these services and putting her in a bad position. That’s customers using technology over a divorced workforce to get them to provide services they don’t provide.” The second level of pressure comes from the system itself.

In December 2016, TER made a seemingly subtle change to its review system. Previously, a reviewer could score a worker anywhere between 1 and 10 in the “Looks” and “Performance” categories. But after the change, workers could only earn up to a 7 out of 10, unless they were “willing to perform one or some of the following during a session.” (With each new offering, the worker’s max score increases by one point.)

“There was no announcement, no one’s opinion was taken into account,” says St. Clair. “It just happened, and we all had to adapt.”

The four situations that allow for additional points: A “bareback blowjob” (that is, oral sex without a condom), kissing with tongue, anal intercourse, and “really bi,” which means having sex with “more than one guy.” Keep in mind, it’s irrelevant if the client wants, requests, or participates in any of these acts. If the worker doesn’t offer these services, during the review approval process, TER can lower the points of, or outright reject, the review.

The implications of the new system are obviously biased against workers. A worker who doesn’t want to participate in anal sex is now compelled to in order to score a better review. Same for a worker who doesn’t feel safe with having sex with two men at once. The change in the system also exacerbates one of the ever-present dangers of the industry: the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

“After the AIDS scare, most people use condoms for everything,” says Mariposa. “But now TER comes around and says, ‘Girls do bareback blowjobs.’ Well, now bareback blowjobs are the new standard.”

But this time, some workers fought back.

* * *

The first time Vanessa read a review of her date with a client, she felt embarrassed and ashamed.

“Not because of what I do, but because of how it’s so public and so graphic,” she says. “It was really an invasion of my privacy.”

But Vanessa, like many other workers, felt it was just part of the business. She played the review game. It was a way to feel legitimate, despite how it eroded her own power in the workplace. “Your typical TER member is like, ‘If you do this for this amount I’ll give you a really good review,’ which is really saying, ‘If you don’t, I’m giving you a shitty review,’” says Vanessa. “Everyone knows how to read between those lines.”

The first time Vanessa read a review of her date with a client, she felt embarrassed and ashamed. “Not because of what I do, but because of how it’s so public and so graphic,” she says. “It was really an invasion of my privacy.

Now and then she’d have bad experiences with TER. Like the U.K. client who gave her a 5-6 review (“5” for Looks, “6” for Performance) and said she was 90 pounds overweight. She fought that one, proving her looks to some faceless TER rep by jumping through their hoops, including taking photos in the same clothes that she donned on her personal site, while holding up hostage-like notes with the date, time, and “TER” scrawled on them. After all that, they took down the review.

Ironically, it was a relatively innocent review — her 36th, she recalls, where she received a 10/9 — that led to her leadership role in a burgeoning movement of sex workers choosing to leave TER for good.

“This guy said we did anal and he came on my face, all this bullshit that didn’t happen,” Vanessa says. “It was a great review, but none of the services I provide.” But the bigger headache was how this fake review caused friction with a longtime regular. He had wanted to book time with her, and she told him, truthfully, that she was out of town and unavailable. However, this false review suggested she was actually in town with another client at the requested time, so her longtime client felt that she was lying to him.

“It sounds immature and silly, but I have special relationships with [clients],” she says. “They want to think I’m not seeing anyone else, and that’s how I communicate with them. It’s part of the fantasy.”

To stem this, Vanessa contacted TER to tell them it was a false review. They contacted the reviewer, who doubled down on his claim that they’d met at a hotel. Vanessa asked TER to have the reviewer send a copy of their email correspondence, or anything else to prove that they’d met. The reviewer refused, citing privacy reasons. TER ultimately decided to keep the review up.

This did not please Vanessa.

“You’re not holding me hostage,” she says she told them. “You’re not my pimp, you’re not my manager!”

Vanessa went to her TER profile, copied the reviews, and pasted them on her own website. She began posting about the incident on her personal Twitter account, along with a call for other workers to copy and paste their own reviews as well. Shortly thereafter, she received a letter from TER’s attorney threatening to sue for copyright infringement. But it was something else in the letter that irked Vanessa.

“That letter was cc’d to my legal name and to an old address I was living at previous,” says Vanessa, who read these actions as threats. “They threatened to expose my legal name on the internet if I didn’t stop talking about them on social media.”

Vanessa questioned the legalities of TER’s business, musing about whether this attorney knew the amount of taxes TER paid, openly suggesting that if he didn’t maybe the IRS might. She followed these inquiries with a request for TER to remove all of her information from their website.

“Everything was gone within 24 hours,” she says.

This was Vanessa’s opening salvo against the web giant. In March 2016, she started the Twitter account @FCK_TER_, which, according to its bio, is “exposing exploitation, cyberpimping, bullying, harassment, & profiteering of sexworkers by the establishment racket known as TER.” The feed is a mix of commentary about the industry, warnings about dangerous clients, mocking quips about disgusting reviewers (known in industry parlance as “slobbyists”), and retweets from workers who are interested in or have removed their listing from TER.

There’s even a hashtag: #delisted.

While the @FCK_TER_ account currently has a relatively modest follower count around 3,600, Vanessa says that, based on her active direct messages, that number is nothing compared to those who read her feed. Often, workers will contact her privately with questions about delisting, mostly asking how to do it. Workers say TER won’t simply remove accounts upon request, using the excuse that published reviews exist for the public good. To counter that argument, Vanessa suggests legally worded threats or posting private client information, actions that seem to get TER to expedite the deletion process.

Vanessa’s DMs aren’t just about logistical concerns, but also jammed by emotional workers worried that delisting will kill their business. “Will this hurt my business? Where else should I advertise? How did you do it without TER?” she says. “It’s a whole slew of things.”

Scarlett St. Clair shared these reservations. “This is my full-time income,” she says. She spent months asking other women for tips on how to leave, trying to estimate how her business would be negatively affected if she decided to go. “There’s a lot of men who want to keep [TER] alive,” says St. Clair. “They say things like, ‘If she doesn’t have reviews she’s not legit, she’s gonna steal your money.’” Ultimately, it was an experience with a prospective client who boasted about being a “Top 50 TER reviewer” that shifted the fuzzy stressors into focus. “I don’t know them, they don’t know me, and they want to control my reputation in this industry?” she says. “I really enjoy my job and look forward to seeing clients, and this was preventing me from doing that.”

She says that she “essentially threatened legal action,” and her TER listing was removed in October 2017. “Provider information is no longer available on TER,” reads the page for her locked account.

“My dream is for TER to disappear and not have them control the careers of young women who are vulnerable,” says St. Clair. “There’s that saying, and I know I’m going to get it wrong: ‘If I see far, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.’ That’s how I feel about the women of Twitter and providers online who have been a huge support.”

In fact, Twitter has become an important resource for workers educating themselves on their industry. @FCK_TER_ is merely one account devoted to recovering worker power. @FCK_ECCIE takes on a similar review forum, while @FCKP411 exposes the “exorbitant ad prices” of Preferred411.com. Laura Cohen (@ProviderSafety), a “retired escort” and “deep background screening specialist,” runs one of dozens of accounts that share tips on how workers can stay safe in this profession. Combined, their retweets, responses, and private back-and-forths compose an expanding network where workers can organize and reclaim power from client-driven websites.

“It’s snowballed,” says Vanessa. “Twitter is becoming a huge platform for sex workers.”

Twitter also doubles as a return to the era when workers wrote their own ad copy. The social media platform’s lax content restrictions allow workers the same self-determined censorship they have on their personal websites, while giving potential clients a glimpse at another selling point: their unique personalities. “It’s a wonderful resource to watch conversations, to be kind of a voyeur,” says St. Clair. “To watch these interactions and see if this is someone you want to spend time with.”

But not everyone’s buying Twitter as the savior. For some, it’s another symptom of the tech-driven work-hour creep that’s infected nearly all of employment. “It’s a waste of our unpaid labor,” says Doogan. “There’s the expectation that you have to spend unpaid time talking on Twitter to turn a prospective customer into a paying one.” Similarly the act of delisting from TER isn’t a reality for many workers who are active on the platform. “There’s a level of privilege to talk about [in delisting],” says Mariposa. “A person who gets 100 percent of their business from TER? They can’t afford that.”

Perhaps more blatantly problematic is that relying on Twitter as panacea ignores the lessons from the long history of American law enforcement’s continual and relentless clampdown on sex worker advertising, as proven by recent events.

In April 2018, President Trump signed into law FOSTA/SESTA, a bill that seeks to “clarify” the Communications Act of 1934 in a way that many sex workers believe will have a chilling effect on their ability to communicate with one another about dangerous clients. These worries have proven accurate mere weeks after the law’s passage, with many of the largest tech platforms preemptively shutting down certain elements of their sites, if not their entire operations. Most recently, those signing into Backpage.com, the popular ad-listings website, were met with a notice that the domain “has been seized” by an alphabet soup of government enforcement agencies.

No one knows how far this attempt to blockade sex workers from tech will go. But if workers are ultimately forced off even places like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and yes, Twitter, well, what’s left besides simply going back out onto the streets?

* * *

“This is a very simple concept that requires very little start-up capital, relatively little in the way of operating expenses, and will turn a profit because the concept will be embraced,” reads a boldly worded 2012 blog post by Amanda Brooks, author of The Internet Escort’s Handbook.

The post detailed a simple website that eschews the popular review-based model for one that embraces the basics. “Verification without incrimination,” writes Brooks in the post, before describing simple ways to develop a system that would allow workers to prove who they are without publicly outing themselves, while incentivizing clients to prove they’re not law enforcement, to show up for appointments clean, and to be safe on dates. Meanwhile, the problems that have previously plagued websites would be inoculated its bare-bones construction: no forums, no private messages, no reviews, no membership fees, and no explicit photos or details of the services provided.

Rather than retelling “juicy” details, a date would complete a questionnaire of simple yes-or-no questions, for example, “Did they arrive on time?” and “Would you recommend them to another person?”. A “yes” to all questions by both parties, and they’re both verified. The website would then keep a public running tally of positive and negative verifications, to be viewed by clients and workers before deciding to see someone.

“Can’t wait for someone to run with this idea,” Brooks closed her post.

“I was in my pj’s lounging when I read Amanda’s blog post,” writes Ella, owner of The Verification Guide, to me in a chat message. “I went, ‘Well, that’s fucking brilliant’ and got to work.”

Ella had spent the previous decade as a sex worker based in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. During that time, she listed her services in the usual client-driven alphabet soup that workers are forced onto. “P411, ECCIE, TER, TOB, BestGFE, Slixa, you name it,” she writes. “Oh, TRB before it was raided.”

She remembers the 2009 murder of Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old model and internet masseuse who answered an ad on Craigslist and was shot dead in a Boston hotel room. Even with all of those systems out there, “we had nothing reliable,” she writes.

But with Brooks’s brainstorm, Ella found a blueprint that she felt could deliver. “I can’t call TVG my idea,” she writes. “We used that framework as a core foundation for our site and branched out from there.”

Despite the site’s simplistic design, Ella quickly hit a major roadblock. After months of design work, her first developer, a close friend, was struck and seriously injured by a car. “I had to start all over again with someone new, which set me back pretty significantly,” she writes. But finally, after the plodding process of redoing much of the work, the Verification Guide launched in February 2017.

“We are coming up on 1,000 users, and I’m beaming with pride,” she writes.

One worker who bought into the new possibility is Missy Mariposa, whose ads now blanket the site. “I wanted to pay their server bills,” she says. “I love the site. I would love nothing else than for it to get traffic.” For Mariposa, it’s a chance for a website that stabilizes the power dynamic between client and worker.

She walked me through a beta test that Ella conducted to counter one of the most common problems with online verification: the client falsely claiming a date had occurred. After Mariposa and a friend input their information in the system, Ella contacted the “client.” In her review, Ella asked them for a parking receipt, or a receipt for anything purchased on the same block, or an ATM receipt with the private information blurred out — anything at all to verify the story. “Guys who got ripped off wouldn’t have a problem with that,” Mariposa says. “They’d say, ‘Fuck yeah, here’s my receipt.’”

While this level of worker protection seems simple — even obvious — it’s an important ideological shift from the pure market-based approach of Eros and the customer-is-always-right ethos of TER and other review sites. Yet despite that focus, TVG has an uphill battle to relevancy; it will only be as useful as the number of clients and workers that buy into it. Like any industry shift, that necessitates disrupting strongholds that currently control the trade.

All of the above, of course, doesn’t even consider how the passage of FOSTA/SESTA has disrupted how workers communicate with one another and with their clientele.

Since I began reporting this piece, TER has blocked access from U.S. addresses until “such time as the courts have enjoined enforcement of the law, the law has been repealed or amended, or TER has found a way to sufficiently address any legal concerns created by the new law.” The response to this news has been predictably mixed, with the anti-TER contingent full of gloating glee, while those relying on it for business have promoted work-arounds and struggled with what to do next. As Christina Parriera, a sex worker in Nevada, summed up: “No ability to screen = coming into contact with dangerous clients. Predators. = Rape. Assault. Murder.”

Meanwhile, TVG’s site has also been taken down, although Ella assures me they’re “making big changes to protect ourselves as well as our members, but we will not being going anywhere.” She tells me that they’ll be moving to a new site called Have We Met?, which will function in much the same way as the original TVG, but now, because of FOSTA/SESTA, only accessible to those who register. It’s a big change.

“In reality, having aspects of the site public will still put our members at risk of being easily found and having their ads misconstrued by overzealous law enforcement,” Ella writes. “The goal in this situation is to not be the low-hanging fruit.”

Sex workers, as always, move forward into the murky ether of constantly shifting laws, hoping that this time they’ll claim more control than they had before. One new development has been the creation of Switter by a collective of sex workers, which anticipates a crackdown on Twitter by developing a “sex work–friendly alternative to mainstream social media.” To remain active in the United States, they’ve set servers up in Australia, where sex work is legal, and developed their system using “a decentralized, open-source network.” It attracted 20,000 members in less than two weeks of operation.

But even that seems like fighting for scraps against the forever game of U.S. taxpayer–funded whack-a-mole.

With each site’s closure in this latest generation of communication crackdown, sex workers, already unprotected as a workforce, will be left further vulnerable to dangerous clients as they wait for the next online portal to fill the current power vacuum. And if the internet’s long relationship with sex workers is any indication of the future, there’s no reason to expect that the next dominant website, whatever it may be, will have that class’ best interests in mind.

“There would be no market for such a shoddy online platform as Backpage was if sex work wasn’t a crime. No one need defend that,” the journalist, Melissa Gira Grant, wrote in response to Backpage.com’s seizure. “There are no martyrs here, just increasingly poorer sex workers.”

* * *

Rick Paulas has written plenty of things, some of them serious, many of them not. He lives in Berkeley, is a White Sox fan, and is working on his second novel. He can be found at rickpaulas.com.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Illustrator: Erin McCluskey
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

How Amazon Exploits Chinese Workers to Crank Out Its Products

Imaginechina via AP Images

Cheap disposable labor is an essential part of too many lucrative businesses, and it’s currently an integral part of Amazon’s business model. For The Guardian, Gethin Chamberlain examines the enormous physical and psychological toll that Kindle and speaker production takes on low-wage Chinese workers.

In the Foxconn factory in the city of Hengyang, Amazon and Foxconn can pay their temporary workers a minimum wage that’s lower than in other Chinese cities. Factory supervisors make workers ask for permission to use the toilet. But when they pay workers their standard $2 hourly rate for overtime, the factory is clearly violating Chinese labor law. The good news is that US-based labor rights investigator China Labor Watch sent an undercover agent inside the factory to document conditions. While this undercover worker cleaned dust from 1,400 Echo Dot speakers with a toothbrush in one day, she made careful observations about life inside Amazon’s factory, and CLW used her findings to try to pressure Amazon to improve conditions.

Another worker tells her she, too, is suffering: “While working at the same work position and doing the same motions over and over again each day, she felt exhausted and her back was sore and her neck, back and arms could barely take it any more.”

Alexa’s diary makes no happier reading the following day. A woman of about 45 tells her how she has been scolded because she is not fast enough: “It might be because she was getting older so her speed was slower and her reactions were slower. When the line leader was telling her off, she started crying. After I returned to the dorm, an older woman … said that last time the line leader told her off, she also cried.”

She describes long nights of repetitive and relentless work, with fellow workers close to falling asleep on their feet. During a break about midnight she sees that “many people were resting on the assembly line and sleeping, while others had pushed together some chairs and were sleeping on those. Some had even stacked together some foam boards and slept on top of them.”

Read the story

The Menace and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,419 words)

In Tempe, Arizona, on the cool late-winter night of March 18, Elaine Herzberg, a 49-year-old homeless woman, stepped out onto Mill Avenue. A new moon hung in the sky, providing little illumination. Mill Avenue is a multi-lane road, and Herzberg was walking a bike across; plastic bags with some of her few possessions were dangling from the handlebars. Out of the darkness, an Uber-owned Volvo XC90 SUV, traveling northbound, approached at 39 miles per hour, and struck Herzberg. The Uber came to an unceremonious stop, an ambulance was called, and she died later in a hospital. The car had been in autonomous mode.
Read more…

Brain in a Bucket

Longreads Pick

A Dallas doctor’s cutting-edge technique to identify brain matter helped convict an alleged axe murderer. But where exactly did the doctor get the brains?

Source: D Magazine
Published: Jun 11, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,191 words)

TPS Reports All Day Long

Simon & Schuster

Existentialists with agita, rejoice. We now have an anthropologist’s confirmation that what we do means nothing. At the New YorkerNathan Heller writes about David Greaber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a book that examines our current work economy and how we attribute meaning to our lives with possibly (probably?) meaningless tasks.

[Bullshit] jobs are endemic even to creative industries. Content curators, creatives—these and other intermediary non-roles crop up in everything from journalism to art. Hollywood is notoriously mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be almost pure bullshit.

In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard Keynes projected that, a century on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be so great, and prosperity so assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy from leisure and boredom. Maybe, Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a day, just to feel useful.

Is it possible that bullshit jobs are useful? In Graeber’s view, they simply reinforce their premises. “We have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—‘a life,’” he writes. 

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Drought In Post-Apartheid Cape Town: An Interview with Eve Fairbanks

(Morgana Wingard/Getty Images)

Cape Town, South Africa has been suffering a three-year drought. Despite government intervention, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, tapping springs and modifying their homes and behavior. Their innovations prove the necessity of civic involvement and DIY innovation to endure the kind of natural disasters that will increasingly plague civilization due to climate change.

United in a common struggle, the drought has also leveled the racially divided city’s physical and social barriers in profound ways. At HuffPost Highline, Johannesburg-based journalist Eve Fairbanks examines the way Cape Town residents of different classes are using the opportunity to help and learn from each other—with white privileged residents expanding their concept of “community” to include the black South Africans previously known as “them.”

The drought has dissolved what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” luxuries like pools, gardens and long showers, as well as a sense of security.  Some people in Cape Town view the drought as the inevitable reckoning with apartheid. But is this new camaraderie also a fantasy?

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In your piece, you report on the aquifer of meaning below the story’s surface, examining the surprising psychological and social dimensions of the city’s relationship to its resources.  At what point during your reporting did these layers of meaning emerge?

I love your word “aquifer.” Table Mountain, the crag that lords over Cape Town, has unusual aquifers whose depth and abundance of water are still unplumbed. Cape Town was designed for a relatively small white population, and for centuries it relied, unlike other cities, only on surface dams. Some scientists believe that tapping the Cape Flats aquifer — a vein of water that runs from the mountain to the sea ─ would solve the city’s water issues, at least in the medium term. The problem is the aquifer runs straight through several of the largest townships in the city. So to tap the aquifer would mean displacing a population. Experts said that they had to be kicked out of their homes. So these people have very good reasons not to trust experts.

It struck me that no technocratic solution to a problem like drought or climate change, or exists in a vacuum. You can’t sit in an office — as the Cape Town government has tried to do make their drought plan as neutral as possible — and diagram a solution. People have feelings and commitments about things like water that are many, many-layered.

I also really love science. I often find metaphors for social life buried in apparently technical scientific aspects of the stories I cover — the geology of the landscape of a political piece, the weather, the biome, and so on. Scientists still don’t know the contours of the Table Mountain aquifer, or what outcome tapping it would have; it parallels the profound psychological disconnect between the experts and the people they serve.

Are there other reporters or science writers whose work inspires you?

I kind of wish there wasn’t the category of science writing! So much great classical writing didn’t see itself as separate from science, since science is how we interpret the world, and we’re in the world.

One of my favorite Shakespeare passages is Mercutio’s monologue where he mentions the atom to make more vivid a riff on blame and responsibility. My favorite John Donne poems use the compass and map as visual metaphors for vague things like love or the soul. In Donne, tying those things to objects of scientific inquiry is part of the argument that they’re real.

Every writer needs science, even novelists. Once you’re making any kind of description of a landscape, or even reflecting on human motivations in politics or love, you’re entering the territories of geology, botany, physics, and psychology. I think people are sometimes scared of science, though, because it’s become a specialty. Some of the most vivid, moving conversations I’ve had related to my writing were with scientists who told me about uncertainty in physics, about botany, or about the way objects’ behavior changes according to their size.  These relate to deep questions about the scalability of projects, the singularity of truth, and so on, and give me a different way to think about abstractions like relationships or class, to make them real as forces.

Science writing today, in some cases, seems pretty specialized, and the presumption is that the science writer in a magazine is responsible for transmitting the findings of studies to the layman. This can remove the writer from the story. In some science writing, I don’t see a lot of confidence on the part of the author to ask, “Does this accord with my experience? Could this finding be wrong?” My favorite writers who incorporate science are working with science over the longer term, and they tend to be really interested in the essence of science — the history, the scientific method — rather than super excited by what it can prove.

I love Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks because they incorporate their own journeys and doubts into their science writing. They aren’t making proofs or touting answers to social problems offered by a hot new study. Simon Schama, the historian, actually uses science obliquely but wonderfully in his writings on how landscape formed cultures. I was inspired by Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. She invested years in understanding the science, but at heart it was a story about science’s limits. I also love Ben Adler at City & State. He’s doing what used to just be called geography. He writes things like landscape and infrastructure in a scientific way, but he’s deeply interested in how these things influence politics and vice versa.

It’s interesting how your story suggests that technology won’t necessarily solve all of humanity’s resource problems — that a change in simple civilian behavior is necessary. Doesn’t that contradict the ongoing fantasy of industrial civilization?

I think most of us feel the limits of the industrial fantasy now. But we’ve also built our civilization on it to the extent that we don’t know what we would do without it. The solutions we’ve imagined tend towards a rewinding of the tape back to a purer, more natural innocence. But that isn’t possible. In my own life, change has often come through some unintended break in the plan: a breakup or a firing or whatever, something that throws things into disarray and makes me live a different way. That was what I hoped to suggest with the Highline piece: that accelerating climate change, in some ways, may force its own solutions by making certain ways of life literally untenable.

I do foresee a growing conflict between government and its citizens. Governments, including in Cape Town, are tired of “politics.” They want to get away from criticisms by becoming increasingly technocratic, in the hopes that technocratic solutions will be perceived as neutral. In Cape Town, though, this desire translated into dictatorial, smug, and detached behavior, a deep distrust, and even rejection, of solutions that came from the public.

After I published the piece, the government closed the spring I highlighted in it, cementing the whole thing over, a real “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” move. It amazed me, because the spring was so small, but it was such a symbol of people’s capacities to rise above social divisions and entitlement. It amazed me the government couldn’t see how important that would be to people in the city. But I think the possibility that citizens could create their own solutions to social problems, however much governments play lip service to this ideal, really threatened the Cape Town government insofar as it suggested it might be dispensable.

You grew up in Virginia, a region still imprinted by slavery and segregation. Thinking of Cape Town’s drought, do you see any analogs in America for the way natural disaster can help build community relationships or dismantle racial divisions?

I’ve lived in South Africa for nine years. After a few years, I began to get the impression that whites here are really uncomfortable with their rarefied position in society. They know that it is both unsustainable and unjust. We tend to think of elites as evil, selfish automatons. But they’re also human, with innate moral intuitions.

In South Africa this moral intuition has tussled with a powerful fear of loss. So I was surprised by the explosion of joy in Cape Town when the drought forced elites into a somewhat less privileged position. I also wasn’t surprised. It was like disaster freed people to do what they had longed to do but, in the reigning political language and interpretation of human self-interest, could barely articulate to themselves that they wanted, which was to be more equal, and closer to everyone in their community.

It’s hard to imagine such a scenario in America. We’re such a lucky country, and we’ve managed to insulate ourselves so much from all kinds of bad fortune. In the 1980s, before white rule in South Africa ended, the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote a book called Waiting for the Barbarians. I think that’s how we feel in America ─ we’re waiting for some kind of extraordinary shift or upending of inequality and subtle segregations; we’re in a state of terrified hypervigiliance. I can’t imagine what exactly will break it. But I do think that more people will be happy with a sea change in the American way of life than currently expect themselves to be.

Do you think the Cape Town’s reclaimed sense of self — and the changed norms drought has brought — will stick?

I talked to a middle-aged Californian recently who grew up during a drought in the state, and he told me he still feels a visceral horror when he sees a tap running and implores his wife and children not to flush every time. I think we should also recognize the more drastic attitudinal shifts probably take work to maintain — public messaging, continual nudges from the more ardent citizens to their family and friends. I worry more about the permanence of the social changes, partly because the government is set against social flux it doesn’t control.

You’re writing a book about post-apartheid South Africa. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I think there are really strong parallels between South Africa and America — between the conflict some people in the West feel between maintaining their society and letting newcomers in. Post-apartheid South Africa is that tension in miniature. For decades, a physical barrier was erected between white and non-white South Africa and that barrier has fallen. It’s an incredible place to witness some of the tensions and changes that face the whole world, but in a contained environment, it’s almost like an experiment.

My book is about two people — a black former freedom fighter and a white lawyer who fought for the apartheid regime in the most elite army unit — confronting those changes. It doesn’t really make an argument rather but tries to show us, like a play would, what happens when people try to leave their pasts behind while living in a world that offers constant reminders, nostalgic and painful, of those pasts.

The physical environment of South Africa becomes a ghost that can’t be exorcised: the informal segregation that still exists with housing and the neighborhoods people live in; the sense of nonbelonging and alienation in the cities — new in demographics, old in visual symbols and patterns of human association — that haunts both blacks and whites alike. Both blacks and whites here feel that the other group holds the real power in society, which is so reminiscent of America right now. I’m hoping the book will leave a lasting image of a particular country, but also hold a mirror up to America and Europe.

Anthony Bourdain: 1956-2018

American Chef Anthony Bourdain in the Liberdade area of Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Paulo Fridman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Forget about four-star hotels or luxury spa treatments: Bourdain is on a mission to illuminate underappreciated and misunderstood cultures, whether it’s Myanmar or Detroit. He regularly takes viewers to the sorts of places–Libya, Gaza, Congo–that most Americans know only from grim headlines about political strife and body counts. Bourdain does all of this with vivid narrative reporting, stunning visuals, palpable empathy, and a relentlessly open mind.

As with Bourdain’s previous programs, A Cook’s Tour and the long-running No Reservations, the premise is simple: he goes somewhere interesting and hangs out with the locals. “We show up and say, ‘What’s to eat? What makes you happy?’” Bourdain says. “You’re going to get very Technicolor, very deep, very complicated answers to those questions. I’m not a Middle East expert. I’m not an Africa expert. I’m not a foreign-policy wonk. But I see aspects of these countries that regular journalists don’t. If we have a role, it’s to put a face on people who you might not otherwise have seen or cared about.”

— “Anthony Bourdain Has Become The Future Of Cable News, And He Couldn’t Care Less,” by Rob Brunner, Fast Company, September 24, 2014.

What do I like to eat after hours? Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage.

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese, Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”

— “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by Anthony Bourdain, The New Yorker, April 19, 1999.

Anthony Bourdain, an influential American chef, author, and television host, died in Strasbourg, France, on Friday June 8, at age 61. Bourdain, whose rise to fame started with his book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, used his influence to campaign for kitchen workers’ rights and for the marginalized communities he encountered as part of his television show travels. While he was best known for his nonfiction, Bourdain also wrote crime and graphic novels.

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‘I Love What Human Voices Do Together’: An Interview with Neko Case

AP Photo/Tony Avelar, Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Hermes | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (3,994 words)

 

Neko Case’s powerhouse voice often seems like it might level buildings. But during a 20-plus-year career, she’s put it to more constructive use, both as singular solo act and poster child for collective creativity. She formed the ultra-meta power-pop band The New Pornographers with kindred singer-songwriters Carl Newman and Dan Bejar in 1997, the same year she released her own debut LP, The Virginian, an eclectic, country-rock-leaning set of originals and deep-catalog covers: Everly Brothers, Loretta Lynn, hard-rock-era Queen. Since then she’s worked alternately with the Pornographers and under her own name, with occasional side projects like The Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and Case/Lang/Viers (a low-key supergroup with k.d. lang and Laura Viers).

Hell-On, Case’s new solo album, is as gorgeous, imaginative, and potent as any she’s made, and for a lyricist given to imagistic fables and emotional meditations, it responds to the cultural-environmental moment vividly. Songs address nature’s ruthlessness (it’s worth noting Case’s Vermont home was destroyed in a fire when she was out of the country recording songs), along with the vagaries and tyrannies of gender, the endless negotiations of love, and even the attributes of the Almighty. “God is not a contract or a guy,” she sings on the title track, a faintly hallucinatory waltz that tilts into an empowered come-on (“I am not a mess/I’m a wilderness, yes/The undiscovered continent/For you to undress/But you’ll not be my master/You’re barely my guest,” she instructs). Another standout, “Halls of Sarah,” casts a #metoo side-eye at the trope of woman-as-muse (“Our poets do an odious business loving womankind/As lions love Christians”). At the same time, “Sleep All Summer,” a song by ex-bandmate Eric Bachmann, is a heartbreaker about faded love that feels like a forgotten classic.

The recording sessions enlisted a busload of other fellow travelers: Viers and lang, punk/pop/queer/ feminist/fashion icon Beth Ditto, veteran grunge crooner Mark Lanegan, Swedish indie-pop scientist Bjorn Yttling, various Pornographers and other long-time associates, a squadron of whom are on the road with her this year. At a tour stop in Brooklyn in May, bandmates Rachel Flotard and Shelly Short formed a powerhouse frontline with Case at the club Littlefield, delivering new songs like a trio of wisecracking Valkyries.

I spoke to Case on the phone some days later, as she was idling in San Diego before another show. She spoke about the album, the fire that recently destroyed her house, and the 2016 WOMANPRODUCER conference, which she described as “the highlight of my professional career.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(You can listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast here:

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