The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Opinion

The issue with creating a first blog that I am feeling quite proud of, is that I am now a little concerned that this, my second post, will be significantly worse, the entire internet will make fun of me, and I will retreat into a small, sad ball, my brief stint as a blogger a decided failure.

Lucky, then, that my time in the adult industry has given me a metaphorical skin as tough as sun-dried rhino hide, allowing me to shrug off the spears of insult, judgement and general hilarity at my career choice, and go back to munching the tall grass of post (paid) orgasm contentment.

Labored metaphors aside, this industry has, truly,  made me bulletproof. You may leave me fuming with the assumption that I must be walking around with more g-strings than brain cells, you may get me worked up into a fury defending my loving and not-at-all-absent father, but you will never insult me.

I would love to say that this is because I have spent the past seven years being worshiped and fawned over until I am incapable of believing any less-than-flattering commentary. That working in an environment that requires you to be beautiful, witty, and charming has internalized my perception of myself as such.

But sadly, the opposite is true. There is nothing that you can say to hurt me anymore, because there is nothing you can say that has not already been said. Repeatedly.

The self-hatred that an unpopular high school girl lavishes over herself pales in comparison to the years of constant and casual abuse that sex workers suffer. Our pudgy teen may berate herself for every perceived flaw, but a strip club crowd will go one further, and tear you apart for flaws that you wouldn't have found were you searching for them. Some will even point out flaws that simply do not exist! I have had many an argument over my "bad nose job" "over-collagened lips" and "obvious fake boobs" (never mind that my boobs are a B cup on a good day). For the official record, I have never had any surgical work, ever, but after a while, it gets easier to look chagrined, and listen, rapt, as the customer explains exactly how he knew, and how to choose a better surgeon next time.

I have been called ugly, fat, boring, plain, dumb, pasty, spotty, greasy, lumpy, and smelly.
I have suffered insults about my weight, height, skin color, eye color, hair color, shoe size, dress size, and bra size.
I have been accused of being a slut, whore, bitch, skank, tease, liar, cheater, thief and addict.
I have heard every possible variation, synonym, simile, metaphor for and combination of the above.

I have been insulted so many times, that I started mentally awarding points for really interesting or well-thought out insults, like the guy who told me that my skin felt like "wet, day-old dough", or that my hair looked like I had "dragged a dead animal through it. Probably one that I killed with my perfume". Those insults actually made me happier, because they were just so darned amusing!

I also enjoyed pretending not to notice the people who like to insult me in various, less direct ways - it lets them feel superior for slipping that thinly veiled jab past me, and men feeling superior are wonderfully easy to sell lap dances to. The men who tell me that they come to me because their wife is "too good a person" to give them a striptease, or that I am clearly "too good for this". Maybe they could "save me" from this terrible fate....

The female customer is a whole other ballgame - one that deserves a blog of its own. Suffice to say, women don't limit themselves to the physical, mental and behavioral flaws, but start going for the moral, religious, and political evils that we represent. There is no topic that is off-topic for them (family, sex life, husbands, children (real or imagined)). After a while, simply being told that I am no good because Joe Patron "don't like em meaty" seems infinitely preferable to a long discussion on how I am the ultimate betrayer of womanhood. Insulting men want me to go to the gym, but insulting women want me to go to the gallows.

The best part of all of this (at least in terms of becoming impervious to verbal hatred) is that I do not only listen to this, I do so with a smile! I have nodded and agreed (and made some mental grammatical corrections) while men have told me how not everyone can be smart, but at least I'm pretty. I have grinned at a comment about the size of my stomach, and replied that if I didn't have a little fat, my ass wouldn't be so damn spankable! (Followed up with a spank, just to make the point.) I have coyly smiled while spinning like a top and listened to a group of men discuss whether my boobs are big enough to be worth the price.(With a side discussion as to whether seeing the nipples might make all the difference, in case they are really ugly)

And those times where I was just too stomach-turningly hideous to make the sale, did I go home and dig into a pint of chunky monkey while my girlfriends told me that all men are jerks and that I was beautiful? Nope. I skipped off in lucite platforms to hope that the next guy over would find me slightly less repulsive.

Thankfully, I have been complimented in far more detail and depth, and with more regularity than I have been insulted. But I feel that this is an appropriate second-blog topic, because I am not a virgin to this whole internet-thing. I'm betting that I get a goodly amount of angry and insulting comments, if I keep this up. So if you decide that I am a despicable excuse for a human being, and you would really quite like to hurt my feelings via that comment box down there, just bear in mind a couple things.

1. Calling me a "whore" or any variation of that term is no more insulting than calling me a "redhead" or a "Caucasian". Or calling you a "commenter" or "blog-reader". Kiss your mother with that accurate and factual mouth?
2. Any standard, straightforward, day-to-day insults will barely register. They are white noise at this point. Don't waste your time.
3. If you really want to waste your time, put some effort in. Really, really well-crafted and ingenious insults still won't offend me, but they will amuse me, and you will look much cooler to your friends, when you tweet them your quoted comment. You go with your bad self!
4. You are competing against the guys who truly get off on upsetting women, and so have made it their life mission to go into strip clubs and cam rooms and be cruel until they get a reaction. When it comes to insults, I have gone up against Olympians, and you, dear reader, are Little League in comparison.

And most importantly of all:

5. After the first five years, I just stopped giving a fuck.

Why "The Magdalene Perspective"?

I finally decided to start a blog for several reasons. 

First off, it seems to be the thing to do if you are a savvy camgirl who wants to make fans happy. Fans love blogs, right? 

But secondly, for years, I have been writing down snippets and snatches of prose (and occasional unintentional poetry) and having long involved debates with myself in the shower whenever I hear something that gets my mind spinning. After a particularly complex discussion over where the lines are drawn when it comes to sex work and cheating, I realized that I had to start a blog or find some explanation to give the man-beast as to why there was never any hot water...

So here I am. Blogging. And yes, at some point, I will get around to transcribing my sex-work-and-cheating conversation...as soon as I finish having it!

As I'm popping my blog-cherry, it seemed appropriate to start with something a little gentler, a little simpler, a little less likely to incite hate-mail...a candlelit, petal-strewn kind of topic, such as why I chose this title. 

There is the obvious reason, of course. Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. I am a prostitute. The word "prostitute" isn't one that many people feel too comfortable with, but lets be honest here, I perform sexual acts for money. I may do it via miles of cable and acres of server-farms, and much of it may be acts that the average person does many times a day without any sexual connotation whatsoever (brushing your hair, for example) but when stripped down to the essentials, its still sex acts for money. Mary Magdalene just didn't have access to a webcam. 

But it goes beyond drawing a parallel between myself and a famous historical whore. 

Books have been written about Mary Magdalene, and theories abound as to who, exactly, this woman was. Was she just a prostitute? A wonderful example of the depths to which Jesus would sink in his efforts to love the entire world? Was she his lover? As books like The Da Vinci Code suggest, was she his wife? The mother of his child? Or, as many pagan alternative historians suggest, was she in fact a priestess of the older faiths, and represented as a prostitute in an effort by biblical scholars to discredit the practices of those who worshipped other gods - and (heaven forbid) goddesses? As I read in several books by alternative biblical scholars, is she a symbol, a representation - part of a feminine holy trinity, along with the Virgin Mary, and other Marys that are present in that holy book?

Who was Mary Magdalene?

She was both Madonna and Whore; the Priestess of  the Goddess, and the betrayer of womanhood. She represents the lost and the rescued, the exalted and the debased. She is complex, mysterious; the subject of debate and conspiracy, hatred and fascination in equal measure. 

And that, to me, is how this industry makes you feel.