After Hours – Page 3 – She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. Harper Lee

Posted on 5/22/201710/25/2018 by Amanda Brooks

how my personal choices affect everyone else who isn’t me

I should have Storified this but didn’t because I only have so much time and energy.

A question was posed on Twitter about not seeing guys of a certain race. I gave a flip, but honest answer, about why I no longer see Indian clients (even though Indians aren’t actually a race, they’re an ethnicity). And I don’t. I made that decision a year ago, after months of soul-searching and debate.

All of that debate was with two friends who would hear about my complaints after each and every appointment with Indian guys and they would pose the obvious solution: “Stop seeing Indian clients.” I would argue back with all the arguments I got on Twitter, plus my worry about it affecting my finances.

Posted on 1/10/201710/25/2018 by Amanda Brooks

moving past the backpage shutdown

Welp, that was inevitable.

When I was touring a few months ago, and Carl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage, was arrested, I had about $800 of credit in my account. I started spending and not replenishing because I knew BP wouldn’t last much longer. As of today, I have less than $200 in my account. I have no way of getting that money back, that I know of, but at least it’s still there and it’s not very much, really.

Posted on 8/28/201610/25/2018 by Amanda Brooks

uptown thief

Finally, a book that features sex workers as main characters, not as main victims or main outcasts! The reviewers talk about the amazing revelation that sex workers are real people, thanks to this story. The author thanks $pread Magazine, the St. James Infirmary, Bay Area SWOP, and The Harm Reduction Coalition and Training Institute in her long list of acknowledgements. Uptown Thief by Aya de Leon is the first in a series featuring the sex workers introduced in this story.

Posted on 12/29/201510/25/2018 by Amanda Brooks

longer tweeting III

This has been sitting in the Drafts folder for so long that I no longer remember what I probably intended to say.

Created March 23, 2010
Tiger Airways is like Southwest but with fewer frills, like a jetway and legroom.

If you’ve ever flown Tiger Air, you know what I’m talking about. They’re even more barebones than Southwest or Spirit or Ryanair, as having all the parts of the plane is irrelevant while flying. They get bad reviews (though I can’t say I ever experienced anything I didn’t expect from a budget Asian airline), and funny reviews.

Tiger flew out of the “budget” terminal in Singapore (yes, they differentiate their terminals that way) and the security was so cursory it was clear they didn’t give a damn if the cheap and/or poor people got blown to bits. The terminal was basically an indoor hawker stand, and boarding was a mess. You walked outside to the stairs to the plane; they weren’t going to bother with weather protection of any kind, or a climate controlled jet bridge. Not for the lower class people having the temerity to fly. At least we were all leaving the island. I’m sure that was viewed as a good thing.

Posted on 12/23/201510/25/2018 by Amanda Brooks

hobbyists offering business “advice”

This particular rant is something I’ve been wanting to say for years (and has been sitting in my Drafts folder for a while; written in 2010 in Singapore so many of the things I say here don’t apply to the US). Other than a few adjustments to reflect the passage of time, the essay is unchanged.

What sparked it was two things happening on a discussion board in one week. One was a thread where some hobbyists reacted badly to a touring escort charging $350USD/hr (the nerve! the gall! the audacity! the envy!) and another was a PM to me, an attempt by a hobbyist to “help” me navigate the Singapore scene and make sure I’m not charging too much. (Russian girls at Brix are the “cream of the crop” and I’m not so I can’t charge more than they do, which was $300SGD/hr according to him. I wonder if he knew there were two non-Russian indies charging right at $1000SGD/hr in Singapore at that time. I charged a minimum $500SGD/hr or $800SGD/2hrs, depending.)

Despite the hand-wringing and general disbelief of hobbyists, my clients are usually pretty happy with me. I’m personable, intelligent, interesting, beautiful, mentally-mature and fully focused on their needs. I don’t have a pimp hiding in the corner, I won’t phone-stalk them at 4am, I don’t try to manipulate them into becoming my “boyfriend” or desperately taking risks to make a few extra bucks to support my starving extended family in some poverty-stricken country. I don’t chase extra money or presents: clients pay my fee and that’s it. Their responsibility ends (sometimes they’re spontaneously moved to extremely kind generosity). I’m with them because I want to be — they’re with me for exactly the same reason. To me, that’s all cream. For everyone. [Insert sex joke here, if you must.]

Just because hobbyists can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it can’t exist. I’ve been fighting this stupid battle since 2002. The narrow vision and nosy desire to control a stubborn, independent cuss of a woman just keeps on keeping on. Sigh.