The idea that I had come to represent the personification of contemporary black sex worker philosophy to certain people was news to me in 2019, which was the year that a major harassment campaign against me began in earnest. I am supposed to get over the harassment, despite its constant reprisal and the ongoing, spirit-breaking effects on my psyche. I am not supposed to talk or write about it. People say that the brain doesn’t differentiate between emotional and physical pain. They also discuss how patterns of violence are maintained by everyone, how the “truth” is often subjective and how the system rewards abuse. Yet, for some reason my experience with mobbing, doxing, rumormongering, and general harassment is viewed as outside of these systems, as either justified or irrelevant. If anything, the more I protest the more guilty I become. It’s science. Either I suffer in silence and stoicism, or I un-exist myself. The thread is fraying but I remain hopeful, because I have children.
Generally, I see myself and my perspectives as one of many, as a minor disruption in sex worker and feminist politicism. I saw Twitter as a place where someone like me could be heard. In 2016, my main goal was to share my thoughts about what was being termed “sex work,” and to survive. New to academic parlance, I identified briefly as a “survival sex worker” and a hoe, and I stopped saying prostitute—hoe (and heaux) was trendier and more socially acceptable in the spaces I was in. At the time I was camming for about 30 hours a week, give or take. I was also a full-time student, and a newly single mother. After I lost my childcare subsidy I fell into a deeper depression. Around the same time, I broke up with my boyfriend. My mother started calling me a freeloader and was campaigning to get me kicked out of my grandmother’s home. So I dipped. I moved to Memphis with the few thousand I had saved for bills, and I decided to “cam” full time. I fell deeper into poverty, but I was producing threads about my condition, and about sex work generally. People were posting their cash links and “give your money to women” was still trending, so when I started struggling to generate the income to pay my bills, I posted mine.
Solicitation is broadly disdained in United States American culture and is associated with everything from prostitution and cruising (homosexual/gay culture) to beggary and homelessness (vagrancy) to drug dealing and using. All of these are degenerate behaviors associated with debased communities. Being that I had demonstrated an exceptional skill to analyze and disseminate creative cultural and political commentary by centering “sex work,” poverty, and race, I was encouraged by followers of my work to start a Patreon and to submit queries to publish articles. Due to my Twitter connections—which functioned as a network similar to LinkedIn for me—I gained followers and legitimacy as a scholar, as well as invitations to speak at colleges and on panels done virtually. When I got invited to speak on a panel at the Yale RebLaw Conference in 2019, I became subject to suspicion. How is it that someone like me, a beggar by any definition of the word, a prostitute with “poor pussy managament,” could be invited to speak at an Ivy League university? The talk was that I had to be lying—on one forum they went to the website and confirmed my invitation as a speaker and not just a member of the audience lying for clout. Then the gossip turned to the idea that I am ugly and undesirable—how else to explain my poverty? Pussy is undeniably easy to sell, right? Men always want sex, so there must be something wrong with me. There’s something for everybody, so complaints about oversaturation and racism in the trade must be coming from those who don’t want to work hard. The sex trade is not subject to “vanilla” rules of poverty, market, and inflation; inequality doesn’t affect sexual sales. Whatever the case, I am bad representation for black females broadly, for black sex workers in particular. Crying about racism and abuse isn’t gonna pay my bills.
Despite the call for lived experience, mine is one that people would prefer not to engage. The association of prostitution, and of blackness, with poverty remains a point of contention. There is an implicit awareness that the two are somewhat related, yet to say so outright is often construed as “whorephobic” or “antiblack.” I understand that my “e-begging” is a source of disdain from the black people who despise me, as well as to sex workers who feel I lower the image of the sex worker by associating it overmuch with poverty. Early on, my resolute poverty became a source of denigration, and some black sex workers threw me under the bus when confronted with harassers to maintain distance from me and my obvious, personal lack. It is of primary importance that the sex worker rights movement create a border between “sex work” and “sex trafficking.” Overemphasizing prostitution’s connection to human trafficking, poverty, and slavery is a no-no, as it might cause people to conflate the two polarizing issues. This is one reason why the linguistic move from prostitute to the now popularly accepted term sex worker is important. Dangerous opinions like these lie at the crux of what is now an ongoing harassment campaign begun by the Twitter user @bacchianbabe in 2019. Of course this was disguised by referring to identity—none of my “dangerous” opinions has ever been fully discussed or refuted without bringing up identity as a virtue. Summarily I am rejected from these very same identities. I can’t possibly be XYZ if I disagree with ZYX. It’s science.
The issue of representation was key in @bacchianbabe’s accusations, for how did a “dangerous,” yet underprivileged, undegreed, unemployable person like me, come to represent a sector of black sex workers to white sex workers and academics? Because that was the issue. According to @bacchianbabe, I had been conceived of as a problem by many other black sex workers who were supposedly terrified of confronting me. This was puzzling because I hold no institutional power over anyone. They can’t lose their jobs for disagreeing with me, nor can I spread rumors about them that would damage their reputation enough to affect their income. I don’t have any connections or a professional network outside of Twitter. Yet @bacchianbabe, among others, interpreted my very existence as a threat to the order of things, something or someone that needed to be dealt with. My thousands of followers was a primary point of contention. After all, was it fair that they had less than 1,000 followers while I had over 10,000? Followers are often treated as a metric of power, as cultural capital. While it is true that the amount of followers one has on social media can work to increase one’s embodied or other capital, this is not something that is static. Meaning that someone like me, who lacks other kinds of more traditional, and usually hereditary, forms of capital are more vulnerable to attacks on said capital. Meaningfully, @bacchianbabe described my image as the go-to black sex worker (for white sex workers and advocates to call upon) as “problematic” because I am not a “full time, full-service sex worker.” The term “full service” is culled from advertisements for sexual services. Using it in this way decontextualizes it. Curiously, appending the term “full service” with “full time” reveals that this was implicitly a request for credentials. It is a class-status demand that I could never satisfy without exposing myself and my family to more harm. And it reveals that the usage of the term “sex worker” has acquired other goals beyond destigmatization: it begs professionalism and worker status. What does being “full time” mean in the context of sex work?
This is a question that I have wrestled with since it was posed. I have always considered myself an informal hoe, which to me means I engage in prostitution for economic survival. To be formal is to check certain boxes, to screen and other such professional practices. But I am one who allows clients to haggle, who engages men on the street, who hitchhikes and utilizes dating sites, and who takes suspect gigs in moments of desperation. Yet I also have cammed, sold clips, and done PSO work. So I am a hybrid, unable to be placed. My pursuit of writing, the fact that I am good at it, complicates my positioning. Am I allowed to create scholarship about my experiences? Am I allowed to discuss sex work politics so eloquently from my low end perch? And if I am so articulate and talented, then how and why am I impoverished? So I must not actually be who I say I am, because if I was I wouldn’t be able to stand with and against academics. If I am really “unemployable,” then it must be my fault. The tacit point being that the poor are unskilled, that we are lazy, and that someone who is as knowledgeable as me shouldn’t have any trouble building a network and accessing opportunities. This is a tenet of meritocracy, that those who are most talented, who are the cream of the crop, will rise to the top through concerted effort. So the fact that I have continued to struggle, publicly, is a problem.
At the end of the day, what I actually said doesn’t matter. People love mobs, and they love a reason. Scapegoating comes naturally to humans, but to say so is to embody the wrong kind of victim. Bullying in a group, becoming soldiers of a cause, breeds camaraderie. It’s science. Asking for evidence of claims in these situations is tantamount to blasphemy. We are going to war, what do we need evidence for? As such, I have become a folk legend of sorts, a Twitter succubus who people warn others about. I am a monster, a trickster, a vector of intellectual pollution, a thing of mythological proportion, likely deserving of any and every form of cruelty that has come to me. There are few studies of people like me, because cyberbullying is something that only kids do, and adults should grow up and get over it. There is no literature that describes my particular experience, and even black feminists who have experienced similar harassment have unfollowed me. I am not a believable representative. I am untouchable. Banishing the dysgenic to the realm of the theoretical outside of representational Others remains an implicit goal in all manifestations of abolitionism and reform (harm reduction). My early scholarship has shifted over time, from focusing on sex work as work, to questioning and affirming the porosity of the boundary between choice and coercion. For me, this was never a question of either/or, but of searching for “root causes.” Apparently this makes me a radical.
The unapologetic plagiarization of my “proheauxism” theorization by a college-educated black feminist showed me that people’s real problem with @thotscholar is my low status in comparison to other, seemingly more qualified black females and persons. My very existence disrupts the natural order of things. Twitter constitutes a different, yet no less volatile, public, and the goal of some publics is to remove degenerates from view, to sequester them in certain areas, to suppress or end their existence. I have experienced a broad array of harm since 2019, all justified under the guise of purging me from the site due to the supposed “dangerousness” of my thoughts. This to me represents the peril of being “public,” of being in public, as the kind of person I am and am thought to be. Because of my low status and racial caste anything and everything can be believed about me and anyone associated with me also becomes a target. It is easier to ostracize one person than to question your friends and comrades.
I am no longer able to fake the funk on Twitter, and so I mostly avoid the site. I no longer want to be @thotscholar, and I am no longer willing to defend myself against abuse that will never stop. As a result, my ability to supplement my income through alms has begun to falter. This, I believe, was the goal of all of these smear campaigns—to break my spirit and to force me to withdraw from public view. The (dominant) public is not simply male, it is white, and where it is not white, it is elite. And even if nonwhite, or “melanated” peoples have their own counterpublic, it is a multiplex. Either way, people like me are not meant to be in public; neither are we “private” in the sense of domesticated and civilized. Rather, we are meant to be concealed, cast out and driven underground or dogwalked to suicide. I am comforted by the fact that I am not unique in this aspect. In fact, the United States has some of the highest rates of cyberbullying, comparable to Japan’s offline rates. Apparently, bullying is related to conformity in imperialistic cultures: having, or cultivating a common enemy makes the group stronger and provides singular-plural focus. What this means is that my experience of violence and harassment on Twitter, even at the hands of other black persons, feminists, femiqueers, and white women is extremely, hopelessly mundane.
I write to resist. This is not me giving up. I am simply tired of being told not to let it affect me. People need people. I am not afraid of that need. However, I refuse to ignore the pain that I feel. There are many forms of weakness, and faking grit is no longer my forte. I don't wanna be hard anymore. If my admittance makes you uncomfortable, you are free to withdraw. I have wanted to end my life many times. The fact that I continue living, is an inspiration in and of itself.
I am filled with rage and sorrow that this is why I haven't seen you on Twitter lately. I've been on less and less myself, tired of the double whammy of Elon's BS plus endless leftist infighting and purity testing. Even so, I saw a couple tweet threads of yours where people seemed all kinds of out of line, making clearly personal attacks vs. simply disagreeing with your point. I tried to avoid feeding the trolls while still pushing back against their nonsense in the replies. You deserve all the respect and admiration and accolades. I fucking love your words, even when they hit in places I didn't know could hurt. You make me want to do better & be better, and inspire me to dig deeper and work harder so I can keep up with your analyses and observations.
TLDR: What you have to offer the world is so great and so important (and so goddamn GOOD). I just hate that some people are trying to drag you down like a crab in a bucket because you deserve better.