AYE WRITE!
STOCKING FILLER
Ahead of an appearance at Aye Write!, Kirstin Innes discusses a long period of extensive research she undertook into the sex industry.
The result is her debut novel, Fishnet
M ost people think they know what the word ‘prostitute’ means. In early 2009, I certainly did. It meant a victim, a poor soul, probably a drug addic addict, a sad indictment of our patriarchal society. I hadn’t met anyon anyone working in that particular i eld, but I was a feminist, and m and my understanding of what feminism meant, back then, told m told me that prostitution was unequivocally bad.
At At that time, The List was putting together its Valentine’s Day Day sex issue. As staff writer, I was working on a feature calle called ‘Sex in the 21st Century’, interviewing women who wor worked in glamorous, ‘empowering’, sex-related jobs (pic (pictured, right). With some in-depth Googling, I found a fem feminist porn director, a woman who ran upmarket, female- foc focused sex parties, and an ‘indie pornographer’ called Fur Furry Girl, all of whom agreed to talk to me. I I also found the anonymous blog of a woman who worked as as an escort in Scotland. She didn’t ever respond to my (m (many, naïve and presumptuous) emails, but I couldn’t stop thi thinking about her blog and her voice. I’m still ashamed to ad admit why: she was so articulate and positive about her life an and the choice she’d made, and it hadn’t occurred to me th that a ‘prostitute’ could be like that.
Over the next year, without being entirely sure why, I b began researching the online sex industry, in Scotland a and all over the world. That research has formed the b basis of my i rst novel, Fishnet. The entire ecosystem of a a completely new (to me) industry unfurled, hyperlink b by hyperlink. Forums like Punternet, where sex workers’ clients post reviews, a strange mix of vicious misogyny that coni rmed my worst suspicions about sex work, and thoughtful, heartfelt writing that confounded those suspicions.
There were also support groups set up by sex workers to help each other and websites where old hands offered advice and buddying services to newcomers. And there was the increasingly vocal group of online sex workers’ rights activists: women and men who got mad and couldn’t take it anymore, and who found that the internet suddenly offered them ways to express themselves and address potential dangers head on. Over a range of blogs which were often part-shop window, part-political platform, these brilliant, angry, articulate voices argued for their own rights – as humans, as workers – to be considered. After about a year of lurking around at the fringes of this world, a very uncomfortable voyeur, bloating with knowledge that I didn’t know how to process, I plucked up the courage to contact some of the women whose blogs I’d been following. Some spoke to me online and I met two in person. I’m not sure I fully realised what a huge risk they took by agreeing
42 THE LIST 2 Apr–4 Jun 2015