Are Sex Workers Safe on Bluesky?

Who Are Online Communities Intended For

TRIGGER WARNING FOR GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT

The short answer is: no.

Sex workers will never be “safe” on a tech platform run and populated by dogmatic liberalism. Our labor protections will always be a topic for debate by people who want to hear “both sides” of why our employment should allow us dignity but also that maybe we are all broken women with daddy issues who need to be saved and whatever violent rape fantasies they’ve imagined. Never mind that the platform’s image autoflagging feature labels any feminized individual showing a loosely defined excess of skin as “sexual.”

But what of the growing left community on the platform? Certainly they’re doing more to make the platform feel more inclusive to a fellow oppressed worker!

Again, the answer is no. Social influencers on the left, regardless of what technology they use, have either positioned themselves as SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) or simply do not care about the rehabilitation of sexually abusive members of the community, especially if it makes them more popular.

I’m being extremely generous calling these spaces “community” because, in my experience, these people are a half step away from cannibalizing each other at any given moment. But that doesn’t mean that online spaces are occupied completely by spam bots. There are very real people influenced by their favorite creators, especially when they revere them for intelligence. We as socialist influencers need to not only offer critiquesof capitalism but also liberal behaviors such as the parasocial relationships often formed in this line of work. We must be cognizant of the fact that we are often acting as a replacement for education. We are sending real people into organizations that are just as ill equipped for mediating interpersonal conflicts.

Rehabilitation of the ‘left-of-centre’ YouTube essayist who sexually assaulted me was inevitable. Of course, this effort has never included my well-being as the central issue to overcome. Left leaning social media influencers are not equipped for ruthless self criticism of their own liberal tendencies, as proposed by Chairman Mao. Many of the people I am directing ire at are white and western.They are embarrassed by the fact eastern people have had the monopoly on,not just crafting communist theory, but revolutions in practice.

My left of center issue is that I have always felt that there was an extra level of cruelty directed towards me by this person and his sycophants because I am a sex worker; Automatically disqualifying me from labeling being molested under my clothes while medically induced on heavy sleep medication as sexual assault. I have never been offered an apology on my terms. I was manipulated during my attempt to settle the situation privately. Then, I had the rug pulled out from under me when they published a sponsored video criticizing the wave of ‘Manosphere’ content that was a popular discourse that year.

I was already suffering emotionally during that time while dealing with another serial abuser the communists around me had been supporting. I was having gut wrenching flashbacks trying to remember what happened to me. The memory was a sickening haze of blurred darkness and heavy breathing— hands tearing at my clothing, or was it under? Did his fingers slip into my vagina under the loose shorts I always wear to bed? I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I know he touched my breasts because he grabbed me hard while he was grinding against me roughly enough to make my stomach turn when I realized in horror I could not move my body, I could not speak to tell him no. Still he continued to claw at me for sex that was never going to be consensual due to my sleep medications. He had seen me take them on the several trips I made to visit him. How could he not know when I tell everyone I have a sleep disorder? How many times had he done this and I had not awoken because my pills did their intended job? These questions still live in the pit in my stomach and torture me whenever I go to sleep in someone’s home.

I believe the attempt ended because he was so rough with me I rolled onto my stomach making me inaccessible. I know for certain he was inebriated (I saw him drinking before I went to bed) and likely worn out from his nightly drunken stupor that he lacked the energy to complete the act, not because he realized he had made a horrible mistake. I woke up before him and started packing since it was my last day there. When I reached for my pills, a sudden realization of what happened the night before sucked the air from my lungs. I saw him stirring in the bed, likely hungover, and knew at that moment what he had done was no accident. We had been fighting before I arrived and I felt little desire to sleep with him, when dating him felt like pulling my own teeth. I knew in my heart that this was going to be the last time I saw him the moment my feet touched the ground.Maybe he sensed my coldness too and that’s why, in a drunken state, he felt entitled to sex with me one more time.

I did not know how to navigate the fallout in my personal life, a break up with someone who I was scared of using their popularity in the left independent media community against me and the new person I wanted to date. Yes, I was seeing someone behind his back, someone who had offered me a place to stay the last time I saw my ex, if I felt like I was unsafe. I will always regret not loving myself more and taking that offer because I could have avoided this whole mess. My defense is this was no longer a normal relationship dynamic I could navigate by simply leaving abruptly. I felt I needed to hide them so they could also be safe from the petty tyrant behavior of a scorned drunken social media influencer. I wanted it to come to a seemingly natural end by disengaging from any attempts to communicate with him. I was always busy, I just needed a break from the internet.

I broke up with him around the same time I was finally able to tell my friends what had happened. I knew it had happened, I knew it was wrong, but I was in so much denial in my conversations with my friends, one person literally had to tell me, “Marina if I told you this story as your friend what would you tell me?” Without missing a beat I said I would tell my friend they had been assaulted.

To me the breakup was amicable in the moment, I was just too busy and unable to be there as a partner. It would be better if we went our separate ways. He still had no idea that the sexual assault was part of why I was ending things. He never once mentioned trying to rouse me for a sweet moment of late night sex. However, once the rejection and alcohol set in he began posting unhinged comments he intended me to see. On Twitter it was mostly emo cry baby bullshit but both publicly and in private group chats he would post inappropriately about the new women he was having sex with because he knew I was reading them. There was an Instagram post of song lyrics, “the next time I see you I hope it’s your funeral.” This is something I could maybe excuse as a severe case of huge fucking loser syndrome, but those words, coupled with the fact he had seemingly forgotten he had assaulted me, felt violent. A violence people would excuse because of my job as a sex worker. A violence so self proclaimed socialist should tolerate amongst their ranks.

This next part is exactly where I start going completely insane. Immediately upon seeing how his immature drunken behavior was exactly why he felt entitled that night to assault me, I contacted another mutual friend of ours in the community; None other than Sophie From Mars. Those poisoned by the knowledge of this ecosystem will know that Sophie has been public about her own experiences with narcotic abuse and sexually assaulting her partners. This is something I would find out about much later and really is it’s own other essay at this point. The summary of this mediation is he was to attempt sobriety and not speak to or about me. He tells Sophie he’s writing a manosphere commentary and she says that might upset me, but she can’t stop him. She never tells me to prepare me for this knife in the back. When I’m in his city again, and purposefully not posting any information about it to prevent him from contacting me, his friends see me in public, tell him I’m in town, and he contacts me against my boundaries attempting to meet up and talk. I am emotionally rocked by the entire interaction and tell him to stop trying to apologize until I am ready to hear it. I tell Sophie, who responds by sayingI’m being too harsh on him. (Later I find out he was telling people I promised to see him again and went there without telling him as if I needed to????) Within 2 weeks, he releases his video. I tell the public simply that he sexually assaulted me and is profiting off of masquerading as one of the good male feminists. Many of his friends and fellow creators unfollow me. This is all the summer and early fall of 2022. None of those people ever ask me what happened. Many of them still feature him in their videos. It isn’t until March of 2023, after a trip where multiple creators are pictured hosting him, that I finally tell the public the assault in exact detail, as well as everything that lead up to this point.

Then the apologies rolled in… but only from a few creators who I believe were only embarrassed by their own whorephobia. Ashamed in brushing off my erratic and upsetting comments as petty drama or an outright lie.

At one point, months later, his best friend, who I had levied harsh criticism against for being a giant asshole, reached out to me. He begged me to recant what I had said because it was ruining his income. He said he was not in communication with his friend, but I found tweets of them interacting during this time period. We talked at length and I explained a lot of the hostility between us was due to massive miscommunication and manipulation on the part of his best friend. For example, he had lied to the friend about when I had told him he assaulted me. I have evidence that it was within a month of our break up. He told the friend it was far later and he never knew about it. I felt uncomfortable saying I was incorrect about the friend because it meant I had to direct more blame towards my ex. The friend wanted me to leave this part out, insisting I apologize for lying while my health was at its lowest, a direct result of all the stress. This turned into another posting crash-out because I was tired of these two men being allowed to continue lurking in the shadows of the YouTube community, when they contributed to harm against me . The entire conversation was posted publicly to smear me as a liar, but all it really proved was that his friend intended to manipulate me for his gain… so long as it didn’t harm his best friend.

My ex disappeared for a few months but eventually went back to making sponsored videos to an ever increasing audience. I know this is in part because the accusation never really left Twitter. I refused to participate in any videos on the subject because it felt like fetishizing the violence against me, but it’s also because he categorically denied what he did to me was sexual assault because he lacked the mens rea, the guilty mind, or what we in the legal profession commonly refer to as intention. The Model Penal Code adopted by most states lists four states of culpability a criminal defendant may have:

1. Acting purposely - The defendant had an underlying conscious object to act.

2. Acting knowingly - The defendant is practically certain that the conduct will cause a particular result.

3. Acting recklessly - The defendant consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustified risk.

4. Acting negligently - The defendant was not aware of the risk, but should have been aware of the risk.

His explanation of his intent, one that never stayed consistent, is that I was cheating on him making me cold and distant and he was simply desperate for my affection. I had misunderstood his intention to make love to me that night and was weaponizing it against him as a cover for cheating. He was drunk, it was a mistake, and I was being unreasonable in taking the matter public. Again, I will reiterate for all his friends, colleagues, and fans that at no point in his “misunderstood affection” could he have a consensual interaction with me because I was heavily medicated. His own voluntary intoxication is not a defense because you can only make this argument to demonstrate you lacked specific intent, a specific state of mind, to commit a crime like first-degree murder. Rape is a general intent crime meaning all I need to demonstrate is his intention to have sex with me without my consent which is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED YOU STUPID MOTHER FUCKERS.

At best he was extremely negligent as a partner who should have known the risk associated with attempting to have sex with an medically induced person. At worst he assaulted me on purpose. I have consistently held the position this was either reckless or negligent on his part. However, the denial and smears against me are without a doubt purposeful and continued violence. He should have known better that night, but he did know what he was doing in the aftermath was cruel.

This week, much to my chagrin, I have now found several of these YouTube creators, some of whom had to apologize for ignoring me the first time, in the recent followers of my assaulter Bluesky account. You know, the website everyone is flocking to because it’s an escape from the fascist echo chamber once proudly called Twitter. Users on Bluesky often rally to get the agents of fascism such as influencers, journalists, and some politicians moderated out of existence t’s hard to see this as some kind of progress and not petulant liberalism, especially when I look and see some of these same people openly supporting the exact abuse many sex workers are trying to avoid by switching platforms. Why is everyone else allowed to escape the cruelty of Twitter, but I am consistently denied a feeling of safety where I have to work online?

I do not care if you think I am being petty and dramatic at this point. I just hate you phony bitches. And I am certainly not going to tolerate literally the first type of liberalism Mao discusses from any of you on any social media platform. This is not petty drama, this is genuine violence against me as a sex worker that you are all allowing to perpetrate for whatever ugly little reason you have.

“To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.”

Fraternizing and rehabilitating the image of an unrepentant sexual abuser, without the express consent of the sex worker he assaulted, does not build solidarity with one of the most under-classed work forces. To have solidarity with us requires you as a civilian socialist to accept that far more of the men in your ranks buy sex services. This directly increases the likelihood you are surrounded by a range of bad clients who need ruthless self criticism to amend their anti-social behavior.

Your friend sucks, but you also suck for your liberalism; to see both sides of violence against an oppressed worker as something valid to defend. You are pitiful in your quiet support of someone you know you shouldn’t be giving a platform. At least scream it with your whole chest. You fight for the right to be a rape apologist. You’ve been unabashed in your desires to glean from the teat of his popularity. I’m sure just one more suckle will nourish you with the superiority that you’ve protected this sweet innocent little man from the wicked vile whore. As Mao says, “Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.”

What the entire left of centre population, but especially the chronically online sort, needs to understand is that a lot of the men you see as comrades and allies are buying sex in some form or other. If they want to continue having access to sexual services then they need to be subjected to reeducation to weed out the misogyny as well as thewhorephobia. There are men in your life thatclaim to be feminists who will still treat sex workers as subhuman because we experience a form of dehumanization. This process strips us of our gender, making the feminized sex working population something less than a “real” woman; One who does not sell her body to other less feminist sexual deviants.

So even if I’m wrong and they have read a few pages of the little red book, based on the above experience I will continue to challenge their commitment to building actual socialism that includes sex workers.These people are the very opportunistic liberals Mao warns us to combat.

“Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.”

I have never consented to the rehabilitation of this man because he has shown me nothing but cruelty. Everyone who continues to support him in public against my wishes can eat my shit and hair for this violence against all sex workers. Enjoy the liberal slop like the hogs you are and may your lack of solidarity haunt you in every socialist community you touch. Only when you have toiled and your hands are cracked and blistered from your defense of the under-classed will you be granted your salvation.