(ex) SexWitch

Sex work isn’t inherently dangerous. Criminalization, stigma, and men who mistake access to a sex worker for ownership of one are. Funny how society keeps blaming the woman for hazards it created.

So let me get this straight. A woman in her young twenties, new to Los Angeles, agrees to meet a guy after talking online under the impression he’s roughly her age. Instead, a significantly older man, looking around 35 shows up having already misrepresented himself. She immediately notices abnormal behavior, he walks into the bar scanning the room instead of engaging with her, hyper aware of his surroundings, acting visibly strange enough that alarm bells start going off. Then, within minutes, he pivots into telling her he manages influencers and OnlyFans girls, which in practical terms often means acting as a pimp and then he starts aggressively pressuring a young woman he barely knows to start doing sex work, move to Miami with his help, and let him grow her brand. So from her perspective Lied about who he was. Showed up significantly older than expected. Displayed bizarre hyper vigilant behavior. Immediately introduced sexualized financial exploitation. Began attempting to recruit an isolated young woman new to a major city. And your conclusion is, “HAHA WOMEN SAY THEY’RE STRONG BUT THEY CRY.” No, dipshit. What you just watched was a woman recognizing, in hindsight, that she had likely just encountered a predator. Women don’t spend their lives learning situational awareness because the world is full of good hearted entrepreneurial alpha males. They do it because men like this exist. And after escaping a high adrenaline situation, the nervous system processes the threat afterward. It’s called a delayed stress response. Fairly basic neurobiology, though admittedly concepts above a 7th grade reading level tend to struggle in manosphere circles. What’s genuinely fascinating is how men who spend every waking hour screaming about protecting women are almost always the first ones mocking women for correctly identifying dangerous men. Which tells us the quiet part out loud. You don’t actually hate women being emotional. You hate women recognizing predatory male behavior before men like that can benefit from it. But sure, Richard. Tell us more about female irrationality while publicly demonstrating why women have to develop situational awareness in the first place. Outstanding work.

It’s time for another installment of “What The Actual Fuck Was Humanity Doing?” sexual history edition. Today I’ll be reminding you that our ancestors were out here making choices so profoundly disgusting that every modern STD clinic should have a thank you card addressed to history. And before you ask, yes. Unfortunately, all of this is true. Here is some true lore about the condoms of the Victorian Era…. By the mid 1800s, condoms made from vulcanized rubber had entered the chat. Unfortunately, unlike modern condoms, these weren’t disposable. They were expensive, thick enough to qualify as industrial equipment, and specifically designed to be washed and reused because apparently germ theory was still somewhere in early access beta testing. And because human beings have never once failed to disappoint, some brothels reportedly kept shared condoms available for multiple customers, essentially turning STI prevention into a community based initiative. Unsurprisingly, syphilis remained out there absolutely farming kill streaks across Europe. Medical mystery, truly. But fear not! Society had innovations. Horrifying ones, but innovations nonetheless. Pubic lice were incredibly common, particularly among sex workers, so many women shaved their pubic hair entirely to deal with infestations. Which is always amusing considering modern internet discourse loves screeching that women removing body hair is exclusively some patriarchal conditioning ritual, when women have been removing body hair for over 5,000 years, and sometimes for reasons far more pragmatic than “men bad.” Sometimes the reason was simply, “I would rather not host parasites in my crotch.” And because the goal wasn’t some bizarre obsession with looking prepubescent, the way internet discourse now loves to claim, women often bought merkins, yes, literal pubic wigs, to restore the appearance of pubic hair after shaving. Some were also used to conceal scarring, lesions, or visible signs of STIs like syphilis. So to summarize Victorian sexual healthcare, share a reusable condom, shave your pubes to evict the crabs, glue a wig onto your vagina, and hope whatever mysterious lesions you’ve developed resolve themselves before God notices.