Because the worst thing a girl can be is still a whore

I was so insulated in Austin. I got into town during a freak snowstorm last Thursday to cover SXSW Interactive, and almost left in a car hired by CBS so I could still make my flight after an appearance on the Early Show. Catching up on Spitzerpalooza — not the story so much as the media circus around it — at home now in San Francisco, listening to the “Ella Fitzgerald” channel on last.fm and eating delivery sushi, I’m feeling drawn into whore-shaming I haven’t felt so personally in years.

I should be so comfortable. I have a lifestyle that prostitution has made possible — both the apartment in San Francisco and the connection to an on-call network of other sex workers who have responded to the outing of Spitzer and the escort he hired with speed and aplomb. I spent the last two days of SXSW checking in on the press statements written collaboratively (GoogleDocs pushed to its limits), getting ten emails every ten minutes with press queries, and not feeling as helpless and removed — geographically outside ground zero — as I could have. But the frenzy of the conference, the pace of which had me swapping phones with friends over breakfast and over drinks to keep up with the news, kept me safe from getting swallowed up with fear. I had about 5 minutes to decide last night how much I wanted to come out on national broadcast television. This is all too fast, and it’s how we have to move now if we want to stake some ownership in this story that’s rightly ours.

The Early Show segment ended up cut too short to bring me in. I’m still stripped raw from six days of Nerd Spring Break so it’s just as well — coming out on teevee was a decision I’m fortunate that I have more time to work it out. In the meantime everything you need in whore-media-watchdogging is going down at Bound, Not Gagged. I’ll be on my couch nursing a post-SXSW bug (in retrospect, now the morning after I started this post, the sushi was a bad idea) and hammering out more for Valleywag, which deserves a post of its own.