It’s Monday morning here in Paris, the middle of the night for most of you in North America. I’m here on a gig. This one is very specific and unusual: he’s a voyeur, so, like most of my gigs, it isn’t quid pro quo in the conventional sense of whoredom. We’ve also become good friends, so to call him a client feels strange. He is, but he isn’t. But he is.

This morning, something terrible happened back at home for him and he had to leave. It’s awful – I feel absolutely terrible for him – and now I’m here, in a suite in Paris all alone. There’s a story to be told about what’s just happened, but it isn’t a story to be told right now.

This got me thinking about ‘whore stories,’ and two things: the debate between two women I respect, Audacia Ray and Susannah Breslin, over the spaces or venues in which our stories are heard, and my recent skirmish (if it can be called that) with an online publisher (if it can be called that) that momentarily considered subsuming my blog into its empire but came to the conclusion that they wanted the stories I haven’t told or refuse to tell. In a public thread on the subject, some concluded that women like myself don’t have the capacity to tell those stories; one suggested that this publisher find a ghost writer so they could get my stories without my distracting voice, comparing me to 50 Cent, who has “some serious shit to say” but lacks the ability to express said shit.

Meanwhile, Susannah Breslin’s project, Letters from Working Girls, in which she publishes single, anonymous letters from sex workers, was being questioned as potentially exploitative. In the comment section of the sex worker blog Bound, Not Gagged, Ray wrote:

Instead of sending your stories about being a sex worker to that blog, we should encourage sex workers to start their own blogs or participate here on Bound, Not Gagged… I personally would rather see that than see sex workers send their writing to a blogger who, to my knowledge, isn’t a sex worker. This isn’t to say that Susannah has evil intentions for our words, but I’d rather see those words in sex worker run spaces.

I can understand Ray’s sentiment, especially since I’ve been compared to 50 Cent by a non-sex-worker. I do believe the statement that’s been repeated here and elsewhere that until you take part in sex work, you can’t begin to ‘know’ sex work, and yet people often believe they do. But then, I’d take it further to say that even then, the term ’sex work’ is too broad, because the power differential varies wildly depending on whether one is independent or with an agency, a fetish model or a fetish worker, a callgirl or a courtesan, and I know this because I’ve done all these things, and one form of sex work didn’t necessarily prepare me for the next. And I agree with Breslin’s position that we should feel free to publish our stories anywhere we like, not just in spaces run by sex workers or our own personal blogs. In fact, I can see a strong reason to publish outside of those spaces: reaching a mainstream audience might do well to soften those pre-existing stereotypes. Right now, the world seems to be drawing its knowledge from television.

I suppose I’m thinking about this because Breslin just posted a summary of the debate on her site. And I’m thinking about it because I’m on a gig right now in an empty suite after a turbulent early morning, and I’m sitting on another story that hasn’t been told.