I have a metal ridged plunger type thing for doing laundry on the wood stove. The problem is that the water is dirty. I live on a shallow muddy river and the river it flows into is full of silt from melting glaciers. No mater how many layers of cloth I filter it through, clothes come out gritty.

The most important thing is water, and I was eager and stupid when I picked my place – I already knew I was immune to giardia, and I’ve been drinking muddy river water my whole life. I didn’t think about laundry or guests’ stomachs. Anyways, I probably couldn’t have afforded a clear mountain stream.

Click clack gorilla posted about drying laundry in her tiny off grid home (it’s a wagon!). She finally discovered the perfect wood stove laundry drying method for those of us with limited space, and it reminded me of these big wire spirals that are above a lot of Alaskan wood stoves.

Do you live off grid or in a tiny home? How do you deal with laundry?

I don’t want to “graduate” from sex work into another job. I don’t want to put myself through school with stripping so that I can live in the “real world.” I tried that and it was stupid. I want to accumulate money and reduce expenses until working is optional and unnecessary. Which is how work should be. This is what I’ve been doing the last few years, and I am very happy about being able to pay all my bills with a couple phone sex calls or a couple hours of escorting a month, or just making a video and uploading it to the internet for people to buy. It makes me sad to see other sex workers working their asses off to support themselves and pay for school so that they can go work their asses off five days a week for the rest of their lives just to be able to afford the lifestyles they started when they were strippers. So, instead of telling everyone they’re doing it wrong, I’m writing this handy dandy guide to escaping never having to join the rat race.

Why?

Most of us will never make this much money or have this much freedom in any other job no matter how much school we go to. I have a vanilla job now working with people I adore and being all fulfilled and stuff, and I do it 4 days a month. It pays great, more than someone with a BA could normally expect, and you know how much that translates to? A month of 8 hour days would be equal to what I just made in six hours spread over three days of in person sex work. “Real” jobs are not an efficient way to make money, and no matter how fulfilling they are I’ve noticed that nothing is fulfilling when you add in schedules, overtime, and office politics.

How?

I’m so glad you asked! I’ve been working on this for a while and I’ve got it all figured out:

First: Make Money

You’re already doing that, eh?

Second: Reduce Expenses

Think about it like this – you should be able to live on $500 or less per month, which is how much you might make at a part time fulfilling job or selling crafts on Etsy. $500 can be a lot of money if you don’t have bills, and since you have money now there are a lot of things you can do to set yourself up for a no bill lifestyle. My bills right now are $60/month, and my whole life costs less than $200/month if I don’t do anything extravagant.

Pay off your debt. Get rid of your mortgage (and never pay rent). I bought land and a cabin with no utilities far away from towns and rules where I can grow and hunt most of your own food. It took less than two years of working one weekend a month to pay it off and be bill free. But there are other ways to get rid of housing expenses, like travelling, work camping, woofing, networking, community building, and creative homelessness.

Now eliminate your other bills. Cancel your netflix and learn to entertain yourself. Cancel the gym membership and do body weight exercises. Cancel your fancy food box from the local farm and grow your own food. Get rid of your utilities.

If you have student loans, did you know about income based repayment? Apply and your bills will be adjusted to your income, and if you pay the adjusted bills for 25 years your student loans go poof, no matter how much is left on them! Check it out and do some math to see if it’s right for you.

Third: Invest in Your Outfit

A lot of eliminating expenses is making big purchases. Your outfit is everything you need to live for almost free. For example, I finally paid for a great new boat motor and now I don’t have to constantly buy/try to fix $500 motors. I invested a grand in a solar system and I’ve never had to run a generator. I got an amazing wood stove and now I only need a quarter of the wood I did before. These are big purchases that aren’t such a big deal now, but they will save me money and effort for the rest of my life.

Fourth: Create Passive Income

There are a lot of things you can do to create a quick and easy $500-2000/month.

1) The easiest (for me), is to make fetish videos to sell on the internet. Make a video, sell it forever. Make another video a month later and people who buy it will get some of your old videos too. Despite not making any videos for three or four months now, I made over $300 in totally passive video sales last month. Here, I made a website about how to do it, because I think we should all be able to retire and just make a video or two a month.

2) Of course there are longer, slower, less naked ways to make passive income on the internet. This guy knows a lot about that.

3) You could save up a lot of money and buy little cabins to rent out. This seems like a pretty good idea to me, but I guess it depends on the markets where you live.

4) Or you could save up a lot of money and invest in the stock market. This seems like the worst idea, since all the money could just go poof. I have done some reading about it and they say how much money you need to save is your yearly expenses x 30. So to live on $500/month you would have to save up $180,000. That seems like a lot of work. But not as much work as going to school for four years to get a degree to work at a real job and be bossed around for another 20 years.

Fifth: Congratulations, You’re Free to Enjoy Your Life!

Remember when I used to do these Who Are You posts on Hobo Stripper?

There are a lot less people reading here so far, but I want to know the same things, because I’m a little confused about what direction this site is going. So if you’re reading, pretty please answer in the comments:

How did you get here? Did you used to read Hobo Stripper?
Who are you?
Do you want to hear what I think about everything? Do you want to buy my porn? What do you want to see?

Thanks!

They say opinions are like assholes: everyone has one and if they don’t they’re full of shit. Shit’s supposed to be sacred, but I’d rather get it out and share my opinion with the whole wide internet. So.

I’ve been having two kinds of conversations about Occupy Wall Street: those with people who have been following on the internet and think sort of like me, and those with people who haven’t been following. If you’re thinking “wtf, why are you writing about revolution, I just want to see boobs,” keep reading! There are boobs at the end and I’m happy for you to see them if you hear me out.

If you haven’t been following, please take a moment to consider that what you’ve heard on the news is probably a big misrepresentation. Luckily, you can get news right from people on the ground, watch a live stream of the revolution, read individual accounts of what is going on and why, and check out this incredible tumblr that I think everyone should see. Or just read this.

When I talk to people who are dismissive or oblivious to what’s going on I’m shocked and I want to try to convince them that this is important. It’s big. People like me – and a lot of people not like me at all – are finally doing something big and trying very hard to make our voices – the voice of the 99% – heard. It is so exciting and I really want to go and be there right fucking now.

Do I think it will change anything meaningful? No, and that makes me feel really old and jaded and sad.

Let’s talk about globalization and capitalism and, of course, civilization. The current population of the earth, the United States, etc., is only sustainable if we continue to acquire a growing amount of finite resources that are running out. Without making wars for oil and drilling in important and delicate places like the Arctic Coastal Plain (by the way, sign this petition for me pretty please?) and mowing down the rain forest to grow cows pumped full of hormones and steroids with which to feed people and give them cancer, we would experience a rapid population drop. Here, I’ll rephrase: colonization and capitalism have allowed human populations to go crazy and most of us will die when they end.

The system that’s oppressing us, enslaving us with debt and shitty jobs or no jobs, repossessing our homes, poisoning our water and air, driving 35-200 species to extinction every day, and creating catastrophic climate change is also what’s keeping us alive. If we made it ethical it would collapse and most of us would die.

Here’s the more immediate thing, though: the 1% of Americans that own 42% of the wealth? They can use that wealth to buy cops. In fact JP Morgan Chase just donated 4.6 million dollars to the NYPD. Police will continue to arrest and use violence against non-violent protesters until they are eliminated. Non-violent protesters don’t do much to stop themselves from being wiped out and eventually the whole thing will peter out like all non-violent protests have.

Unless the 99% are inspired to fight back.

I wrote this handy dandy financial coercion quiz for Tits and Sass, which is an awesome blog with daily sex worker commentary on the media affecting us. Originally I thought I could make a flow chart or a line graph but, well, it’s complicated. Go see it! What’s your score? Post it in the comments or on your blog!

I took the test for me when I first started doing sex work on my own and got 27 – I had problems. Most of my high score areas at that point came from the dominant culture: I wasn’t legally old enough to have a job that would support me, I was young and homeless and the state threatened my friends with jail if they housed me, I couldn’t imagine being rude to someone who was paying me and I thought everyone was who they said they were. I was lucky that my clients were mostly respectful of boundaries and sweetly patronizing and the club culture was low contact and performance oriented. For the odd client who wanted to take advantage, I was more than ripe for the taking.

This really drives it home for me that activism needs to center around giving women and girls other options (not like this) and teaching skills like boundaries, negotiation, and general savvy. Destroying capitalism would help a lot too. The Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago is a great example of relevant services and activism.

Rescue-based organizations who try to “help” women and girls by taking away options through criminalizing us, taking away access to condoms and health care, and telling us we are damaged and should not trust our own judgement actually increase victimization. There is no saving us, there is only giving us the tools and knowledge to access different choices.

I re-took the test again for myself now and got a 9 – that means I’m basically coercion free! Sex work is pretty good to me these days, and it’s because I’ve learned how to market myself to people I enjoy who want things that I enjoy, other sex workers have taught me great boundaries and negotiating skills, and past sex work has set me up so that my financial needs are very small and I never need money.

I’m incredibly grateful for the women who taught me how to navigate this industry with a minimum of bad experiences and a maximum of good ones. I want to do my part to pass these skills on because I believe that passing on of these skills is the most viable way to prevent victimization and coercion in our industry.