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How Everyone Has It Wrong On Blac Chyna
Jay St. James
Blac Chyna. (Via Youtube)
Recently, Blac Chyna has been relegated to being nothing more than a sex worker by opponents and supporters alike, people who reference her "finesse" and gloss over the abuse she's suffered, reinforcing a dangerous narrative. Her humanity and her role as a mother are edited out of the persona people are now creating for her, as if being a sex worker makes those things less authentically part of her.
Blac Chyna is a mother who left her abusive partner Rob Kardashian several times in the last few months, and had his abuse of her play out in the court of public opinion. She happens to have been a stripper, a model, a sought-out video vixen, and a business owner of multiple companies not related to sex work, so to reduce her to a one-dimensional caricature of a sex worker strips her of every bit of her life off the pole.
Men are resources regardless of your occupation. Cis men come with access to respect, personal safety, often a degree of financial stability, and societal power that women are so often denied. To comment on what Blac Chyna was or wasn't given during her relationship with Kardashian and cite it as the only reason she stayed exhibits a myopic and biased view of a person who engages in sex work. All people can benefit from proximity to men, proximity to whiteness, and the combined resources of both identities. That's not exclusive to sex workers. Furthermore, financial abuse is often a tactic used by abusers, especially ones of Rob Kardashian's means, and we can't ignore that he got even more generous with his gifting once she started leaving him. We can't blame her for being pulled into a cycle of abuse, and we shouldn't keep running score of what women and femmes receive in a relationship as a ledger of emotional and physical debt they owe to the provider, regardless of their occupation.
I first became aware of Blac Chyna when friends would tag me in posts of a trailer video for Kardshian and Chyna's then-upcoming reality show, Rob and Chyna, in which Chyna screamed into her phone at Kardashian: "Are you still texting bitches, yes or no?!" It was supposed to illustrate how possessive and mentally unstable she was. All I saw was someone responding to a deep lack of trust in their relationship and obviously being emotionally tormented by their partner's actions. I felt her pain and empathized with her reactive search for reassurance from the one causing it. Sis knew he was talking to other women as sexual interests and she had just lost her first child's father, Tyga, to his pedophilic interest in her current partner's teenage sister, Kendall Jenner. I didn't see anything funny to laugh at in that trailer video.
Lily Fury, a former Tits and Sass contributor, who fabricated several sex working women of color personas for her personal gain. (Still via Youtube)
Editor's note: All references to "Bambi" and "#FreeBambi" below only refer to Lily Fury's fictitious and stolen persona. There is a real Bambi out there who deserves our respect and consideration.
It's 3:45 PM Eastern Standard Time and, thankfully, I'm off work from my job at a grocery store—this means, just like on any given, average day off, I'd be able to enjoy my day how I would like: writing, playing X Box, binge watching Netflix, whatever floats my boat, really. That was my plan today—until I clicked around online to find out more about #FreeBambi and if we had enough extra money in our checking account to be able to donate today.
Listen: for over 15 years now, I've been involved in the sex trades in one way or another. For the last three years, although I've been officially retired from sex work, I still write, think, and talk about it often. I donate quietly and as often as I can to whatever crowdfund or offering plate passing I see on social media or hear about from friends. I send and receive plenty of love from friends who are or have been in the business. In short, it's very much still a part of my life and, if I were to have talked to you yesterday, "it will always be a part of my life," is absolutely something I would have said—with no trace of irony present.
I loved sex work. I loved how I was able, while living with PTSD and depression, to provide for myself and have a life. I loved how I was able to choose when I could work and not worry about being terminated or written up if I called in sick—hell, there's no calling in sick in sex work, there's just… not working today. I loved being able to work as far as my energy would take me while still honoring my body and spirit—and also knowing if I didn't have it in me, it was ok. I loved it—and still some days miss it. I miss working hard, making my own rules, setting my own boundaries, and using the tool of my desirability (as perceived by others) to craft a life for myself. It feels funny now, to say "I loved sex work." I never thought I would say that, but here at 37 years old, it rings true and authentic for me—and it's an important part of what I'm about to say next, because I did truly love the work of it.
What I never loved and have never made bones about is, well, pretty much everything else. I never loved the sex of it, the struggle and poverty, the sexism, the weight (and fat) shame and abuse, the open and safe space for pedophiles and predators, the lies and lying, the homophobia and discrimination, or the racism, gaslighting about racism, and justification of racism of it. I never loved being part of an industry where I knew that, simply because of the arbitrary, human notion of race, I would never be able to live the full life I'd dreamed of in that space. I figured out through talking with other Black and Latina sex working friends—this wasn't an imaginary ship I was sailing, and I wasn't alone in it. We were all together in it: full service girls who were turned away from brothels because "We already have a Black girl," or dancers who, no matter how high they flew in tricks or how hard they twerked on the floor, could rarely (unless they were in a predominantly urban space and a wealthy party showed up—which is once in a very blue moon) make enough money to afford paying nightly/weekly fees to work at the clubs. Full service outside girls who dealt with rapes and sexual assaults by cops—knowing they could never report because they would never be believed (or worse, they'd be targeted later) because Black women are often considered both hypersexual and undesirable and, thus, un-rape-able. I never loved those parts of it, and today, while we talk about racism, the sex industry, and Black women who are sex workers, we need to talk about how #FreeBambi has a role in it.
Big Little Lies Protecting White Virginity
anna saini
"A 16-year old-white girl from Monterey? Wolf Blitzer is gonna saddle that up." Abigail (Kathryn Newton) contemplates auctioning off her virginity for charity in Big Little Lies.
[Content warning: this piece includes general discussion of rape and domestic violence.]
Maybe every rich little white girl should auction off her virginity in support of Amnesty International, the way Abigail Carlson (Kathryn Newton), teenage daughter of HBO's Big Little Lies protagonist Madeline Mackenzie, proposes to do.
Abigail's plot line gained little more than an eye-roll in popular analysis lauding the mini-series as a vision of female solidarity telling a vital story about abuse. Initially, I would tend to agree that Abigail's pursuit of justice for child sex slaves is nothing more than a pulpy side-line trotted out for shock value. After all, Big Little Lies is famed prime time soap opera producer David E. Kelley's project. And, as the perennially popular Law & Order: SVU franchise demonstrates, narratives exploiting child sex trafficking victims are reliable fodder for ratings.
But Big Little Lies deserves a more subtle read. Everything about it is meticulously intentional, from the melancholy pop soundtrack to the pristine landscape of the surf, suggesting sinister undercurrents to all that is pretty on the surface of the idyllic Monterrey community setting. The show was adapted from a book of the same name by Liane Moriarty published in 2014. Kelley was necessarily selective about which elements from the 460-page novel made it to television. Notably, Bonnie Carlson's backstory 1 was not included in the series, nor was there a broader exploration of her character development as there was in the book. Her identity was also changed from a white woman in the novel to a Black woman in the series—the only significant Black character in the series—and the setting was relocated from Australia in the book to the upper-class U.S. coastal community of Monterey on-screen. Rather than treating these as auteurial afterthoughts, these changes are better understood as instrumental choices in adapting the central point of the work for television.
[Spoilers after the jump]
Tits and Sass Supports Black Lives Matter
suzyhooker
(Photo by Flickr user nixerKG)
Fundraisers for Black sex workers
Sharmus Outlaw's memorial fund
Fund for Latesha Clay
Fund for Alisha Walker
Memorial fundraisers for Black and Latinx people killed by the police
Scholarship fund for Alton Sterling's children
Memorial fund for Essence Bowman, a Black woman diagnosed with mental illness who died in police custody in June
Fund to support Philando Castile's partner and her daughter
Memorial fund for Melissa Ventura, a Latinx woman shot by police on July 5th
Bail funds for Black Lives Matter protesters
Bail fund for Baton Rouge BLM protesters
Bail and legal support fund for BLM Minneapolis
Please add any additional fundraisers in the comments and share this list far and wide.