mary-masked

When My Problem Solving Skills Are Outsripped By My Problem Creating Skills

Published: May 20th 2018, 4:52:25 pm

I published this piece on Thursday and I was so proud. For me, this was the most important article I'd written, the one I struggled the most with getting right. I wanted to help humanize sex workers for the general population. I wanted to help people understand why sex work is so important to the people that choose to do it. And, for the people who think that sex work is always exploitation, I wanted to show them that our government is as much to blame for that exploitation as any pimp or The Patriarchy or whatever it is that people think has "brainwashed" sex workers into doing their jobs. 

More than that, I wanted to show how much SESTA-FOSTA was screwing over a group of people that our government and society had already been pretty damn shitty to. But I wanted to do all that without making sex workers seem like helpless victims because that phrase has never applied to a sex worker I've met. 

The rest of this post is pretty sad an self pitying so feel free to skip if you want to.

The article came out and people instantly started sharing it. And I was really proud and really happy...for about 20 minutes. And then one of my sources asked why I had published her legal name. I had fucked up in one of the biggest possible ways there is to fuck up. I had somehow confused her real name with a pseudonym. I jumped off the subway as soon as I could to fix the mistake. This was difficult because the only contact info I had for her was email. I emailed her, fb messaged her, followed her on twitter in the hopes that I could DM her, searched the website for ANY phone number that might get through to her or one of the other editors, I messaged all my friends who had reposted the link asking them to take it down, all while fielding VERY angry messages from my source. Which is a LOT to juggle on your phone on a sidewalk in midtown.

The post was taken down, the cache was scrubbed, the article was reposted with a different, made up, name and the original URL redirected to the new post. The site did everything they could, short of going back in time, to make sure that her name wasn't connected to the article. And the legal name I published was just a first name, it wasn't a very uncommon first name, there were no details about what she looked like or what part of the country she was in. So the odds of anyone who knew her well enough to make the connection seeing and screenshotting the article in the few hours it was up are very very small.

But I still feel gutted. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to think about this article as anything other than the time I almost fucked up someone's life.

I didn't try to defend myself. I didn't list the litany of other small but massively important details I'd fucked up in the past (showing up for a final on Thursday when it had been scheduled for Tuesday, missing a whole section of the SATs, not renewing my passport before an international trip I'd been wanting to take for 10 years, leaving my keys in the front door of my apartment, leaving my credit card in the reader at the grocery store) so, unbelievable as it was, this was an honest mistake. I didn't tell her that I'd had my photo on the front page of The Daily News under a headline that said something to the effect of "SM Prostitution Scandal" so I actually *did* know where she was coming from.

I didn't say those things because it wouldn't have helped her and my feelings didn't matter at the time. She was scared and angry and needed someone to take it out on and I DESERVED to be that someone. So I was.

But it's taken a toll on me. And I know, in the grand scheme of things, my feelings still don't really matter. I'm still the one who fucked up. But I guess I wrote this in the hopes that my feelings could matter, in just this semi-private space. I hoped I could get this all off my chest so I could feel a little better because I can't handle feeling this bad forever.