For all the fuzzy postmodern cunt-positive rhetoric about how hazardous this business is for women, none of these girls ever seemed to face remotely the same sort of legal hassles and prison time that their employers did. Oregon's legal system tends to overprotect females, even predatory ones. In the two years I worked there, I never saw one girl get busted for prostitution, but their bosses kept getting slapped with one sex-crime charge after the next.
I witnessed one case where a willful, oversexed, violent 16-year-old who wanted to be a "sex worker" so badly that she provided false ID to a jack-shack owner wound up being considered the victim, and the owner, even though he was acting in good faith, went to jail for promoting child prostitution.
So I developed a hearty contempt for all these goddess-artists. I despised the johns, too, but my loathing was tempered with some bemused pity. I didn't pity the girls. I didn't see how sex workers were any more exploited than any other worker. And I sure as fuck couldn't feel sorry for girls who earned in a five-hour shift what I made in a week.
So I'll be the first to admit that I was inappropriate for the job. The magazine became a Trojan horse inside which I crouched, ready to pillage the industry. I was paid a living wage to bite the whore that fed me. I was allowed an almost unconscionable amount of editorial leeway, and I stretched it every time. It was as if a monkey had taken over the controls and was pushing all the red buttons. Like a tomcat playing with cockroaches, I systematically fired one sex-positive columnist after the next, then made a public mockery of them in the following issue.
I replaced them with writers whose abilities I admired, but I still wound up writing more than half of every issue myself. I called my monthly column "The Industry" and designed a logo for it that featured a toxin-belching smokestack. I ended my first column with a joke:
Q: What were "sex workers" called 30 years ago?
A: Whores.
I'm not sure how Webster's defines it, but for me, the word "whore" has two meanings:
Someone who trades their sexuality for cash.
Someone who does something they don't want to do for cash.
I was writing exactly what I wanted to write, so I didn't consider myself a whore. I couldn't write about the sex industry with any degree of honest respect, so I relentlessly lampooned it. The magazine's non-ad cocks became a weird hybrid of Hustler and The Onion.
Titles of some of my feature articles:
"Adult Films Made by Children"
"What's With All the Lesbians?"
"Man Uses Photoshop to Give Himself a Bigger Penis?And it WORKS!"
"Ex-Slaves Sue Dominatrix for Reparations"
"Home Breast-Implant Kits"
"Penis Sizes of World Religious Figures"
"Virgin Mary's Face Appears in Wet Spot"
"A Night at Stinky's?The Strip Club Where Women Are PAID to Get DRESSED"
"What About Us??A Support Group Forms to Address the Unique Emotional Needs of Strippers Who Were Never Abused as Children"
"The Herbal Date-Rape Drug"
"Priest Turns Confession Booth into 'Erotic Lingerie Modeling Booth for Boys'"
I also wrote the story line for a serial comic strip called "Trucker Fags in Denial."