I got the following email from Lux Alptraum, who these days is the editor of Fleshbot but once upon a time was an alt porn impresario at That Strange Girl:
About two and a half years ago, Wendy Shalit did a phone interview with me for a book she was working on. I was nervous about talking to her–for, I should think, obvious reasons–but did it anyway, and was surprised by how good a conversation we had, and how Wendy actually seemed interested in understanding my side of the story.
Yeah, that was naive.
Long story short: I learned last night that the book (“Good Girl Revolution”) came out last summer, and my thoughtful conversation with Wendy had been completely ignored in favor of taking a few quotes from my blog out of context in order to portray me as a little girl lost, an attention whore who did porn to feel love.
Lux writes about the experience in more detail here.
This is a big part of the reason why Sex Work Awareness is doing the Speak Up!, but the reality is that there isn’t really a guarantee about how someone will represent you in their writing. Or at least, there’s that whole fact-checkable journalistic ethics thing – but if you are being interviewed about sex and particularly about working in the sex industry, all bets are off.
In general, it seems that many journalists have their thesis all mapped out in their heads before they write their piece. They essentially “cast” people in different quotable roles so that they can prove their point. However, a good writer in the process of writing a book should allow the people she interviews to shape her thoughts about the subject. Letting your own pre-conceived notions of reality completely color your take on a particular person/idea is sloppy.
Particularly when it comes to reporting about sexuality and the sex business, lots of writers let their own personal shit take over – writing about sex can be emotional and triggering, and many people don’t recognize and confront this. Or they do, and they just apply their personal reactions across the swath of human experience, which is so so wrong.
But maybe these are ways of excusing the way Shalit portrayed Lux, and the real core of the problem is just that writers like her do not actually see sex industry workers as fully actualized human beings. Instead, she sees us as people who are deluding ourselves, searching for something (something other than money), and scared/hurt girls who limp away from the business scarred for life.
But like Lux says in her post, moving on from something doesn’t mean that it’s bad, just that it’s done. She uses the examples of college and roller derby – both are things that, like making porn, she is done with. Why does this mean something else entirely when its about the sex industry?
1:58 pm
While not nearly a comparable scale, a very similar thing happened to me when I became the subject of a journalist student’s thesis paper. Thankfully the article was so poorly written it saw zero air-time, and I insisted on receiving copies of the tape recording so I could prove context to the conversation, but it was still a very upsetting situation.
In the end, I took the “lessons learned” approach and I’m better for it, but it’s still shitty to see it when it happens to somebody else.
2:10 pm
I think this is applicable to other aspects of “alt culture” and has been my experience in writing about tattoos and having my words either manipulated or taken out of context.
Further to what Mayma said, I actually tape every interview myself or do email interviews. Helps keep interviewers honest.