#62

If it had been a year or two earlier, I definitely would have had a problem with #62 being a stripper, and if it had been a year or two later, I would have been fine with it. As it was, my thoughts on this type of thing were going through a transitional period. I was a bit uncomfortable with it, but she made it clear she loved her job and I wasn’t going to argue with that. I was probably trying to look like I was cooler about it than I really was.

I knew that ‘good’ feminists tended to oppose any type of sex work, and I’d wavered between this and the ‘free speech’ argument; both sides were good at convincing me. Thus far, though, only one person had really stopped me in my tracks. When I’d been seeing #41 in Belfast, she’d told me about a feminist group she’d been part of, up until they planned to vandalise a porn shop. “I think we need better porn, rather than no porn,” she explained to me. This was one of those moments when the things I thought I believed shifted slightly. What, porn could be a force for good, not evil? You could use positive adjectives next to it? Someone as smart as #41 could see it this way?

So anyway, all this doesn’t have a huge lot to do with #62, but it gives you something more to read.

#62 and I had been penpals since our mid-teens, when she was a high school student who listened to The Cure. By the time she visited me in Edinburgh she was a stripper and had new breast implants, which enabled her to crush a can of beer between her breasts at a party I took her to. We kissed in the Moo Bar one night, just for a moment, maybe she was kissing other people too. I don’t quite remember, but it was a bit like a tornado landing in my flat for a few days.

~ by Nine on 31 December 2008.