Redefining Sex Work

East Bay Express ^ | October 17, 2012 | Ellen Cushing

[AmericanSamurai]

The East Bay is home to a new — and growing — group of sex workers who are educated, empowered, and open about what they do for a living. But Prop 35 would force them back underground.

Jolene Parton is a ho. She's also a Berkeley native, a comic-book fanatic, a Dolly Parton aficionado (hence the name, which is fake), an NPR listener, and a big fan of Vietnamese food. She wears big round glasses rimmed in translucent pink plastic, and, in her ears, jade-green plugs. She's redheaded and rosy-skinned and pretty in the kind of way that would be at home in a J. Crew catalog, but for the pierced septum and stylishly half-shaved head and aforementioned plugs; as is, she's probably more like American Apparel material. And she's been working in the sex industry, broadly defined, for about four years, first doing odd jobs at what she describes as the "entry-level" end of the sex-work spectrum — foot fetish stuff, artsy nude photography, one night during which she "cuddled with a guy in his apartment for money" — and then in porn and at various peepshows and strip clubs; a bit over a year ago, she started escorting. And when she says she loves her job — which she does, often and unbidden — she does so with the kind of steady-eyed enthusiasm that's hard to fake.

"It's been great, honestly," she told me a couple weeks ago at an Oakland Chinatown lunch spot, steam rising from the vermicelli bowl in front of her and fogging her lenses.

[AmericanSamurai]

Yeah, true. Maybe Libertarians don’t mind this freedom, but then again, I’m still trying to understand Libertarianism. :P