Reproducimos aquí la entrevista que Caty Simon hizo a Alissa Afonina el pasado 16 de marzo en el blog de trabajadoras/es del sexo Tits and Sass. Por su interés, y con la intención de no perder ningún matiz, la reproducimos en el idioma original. Sin duda, una cuestión que encenderá el debate...
In 2008, high school student Alissa Afonina, her mother Alla Afonina,
and her brother were in a disastrous car accident on the Trans-Canada
highway, the result of her mother’s boyfriend Peter Jansson’s
reckless driving running the car off the road and overturning it.
Both Alissa and her mother suffered brain injuries. Alla, a Russian
immigrant with a degree in chemical engineering, began to have
trouble with basic arithmetic and was unable to keep her job as a
bookkeeper. Alissa, a bright student with film making aspirations
prior to the accident, began the 12th grade displaying problems with
impulse control, following directions, memory, energy level, and
social appropriateness in class. She dropped out of school to finish
grade 12 at home, and was able to only briefly attend college.
Psychiatric evaluation revealed that she didn’t have the ability to
maintain most employment.
Around
2013, Alissa Afonina became a pro domme in order to support herself,
working under the name Sasha Mizaree. In January 2015, the British
Colombian Supreme Court finally awarded Afonina and her mother 1.5
million in damages for loss of employment opportunities.
Most
reporting
on this story has taken the court case and salaciously interpreted it
as “BRAIN DAMAGE TURNED HER INTO A SEX MANIAC DOMINATRIX!” The
following is a condensed and edited version of the e-mail
conversation Afonina and I had to clear up the whorephobic hype.
Can you talk about the importance of sex work as an option for disabled
people?
Sex work should be decriminalized. The fact is, many disabled or
otherwise marginalized people need this as an option, and it makes no
sense to take [it] away or make it more dangerous for sex workers to
screen clients (which is what happens when you have the Swedish model
for example) without offering alternatives.
I
am thankful that in my area I was able to work without any legal
issues. That is a freedom that everyone should have, disabled or not.
However, people with limited options especially need that freedom.
When
it comes to brain injuries, what one aspect of your condition do you
wish the public were more educated about? How would you instruct our
readers to be sensitive to people suffering from the sort of injuries
you have?
A
huge thing is that people think you need to “look” disabled for
it to be “real.” For example, if I had a scar on my face but had
no physical or mental difficulties, people would probably feel much
more automatically accepting of the reality of my injury. It’s
rather backwards since the brain is such an important organ and even
small changes in it can have devastating effects, but still, time and
time again it comes down to me not looking the way people imagine a
disabled person should look.
Another
huge thing is how against medication people are when it comes to
emotional problems. I have been told countless times by people with
zero medical training that I should look for more “natural”
alternatives and get off antidepressants ASAP. Can you imagine
someone telling a person to get off insulin or their heart meds? But
when it comes to things like antidepressants, everyone thinks they’re
an expert. Truth is, I had a hard enough time accepting that I need a
pill in order to function, and don’t need anyone else doubting me.
Lastly,
I wish everyone who got a concussion of any kind would pressure their
doctor to do an actual MRI, not just a CT scan. I had a CT scan done
when the accident happened and it didn’t show soft tissue damage.
Only an MRI did a year later. The only reason that was even done was
because my mom took charge of the situation, and a lot of people I
talk to seem to think that concussions aren’t a big deal.
As
you wrote to me in our initial e-mails, the way the media framed the
quotes from the judge and your lawyers in your case was “done
specifically to support the sensationalism.” In most coverage on
your case, the judgement is interpreted to imply that only someone who was incapable of making
“correct decisions” would ever choose to do sex work, rather than
sex work being the most rational economic option for someone who’d
suffered a brain injury which made it impossible for them to earn a
degree or work at a nine-to-five job. How would you retell the story
the media tried to tell for you?
The
judge’s comment [“the plaintiff argues that it [her pro-domme
work] shows a lack of correct thinking on the part of Alissa”], at
least how I understood it, had to do with lack of safety measures
implemented for my work. That part is very true as I failed to have
even the most basic safety measures such as texting a friend. The
judge also made comments about how he understood my financial needs
and he actually declined the request to open the trial when the
defense brought in “new” evidence showing that I am still
working. This leads me to believe his comments were not meant to be
sex worker negative.
My
brain injury is supported by far more than just the sexual symptoms,
which is all the media decided to focus on. The truth is I have brain
scans, countless assessments and [a] history of behavior that is
totally congruent with my type of brain injury. I very much wish that
my story was just as readable to people if it was not full of flashy
sexual context to spark their enthusiasm. I would love for people to
be [just as] interested in being educated about mental illnesses and
brain injuries.
 |
| Alissa Afonina |
Your
lawyers did argue that your decision to do sex work was based on an
“unnecessary risk assumption”—that you didn’t really need to
take that risk to “get rent and get food.” The judgement in your
case reads: “Her chosen…line of work is an example of inability
to make appropriate decisions around safety or health.” How would
you respond to that?
I
would say that this is maybe their opinion. However, this opinion
didn’t include what they thought I could have done INSTEAD. I have
not been able to come up with safer and more realistic options for
employment in my condition, aside from maybe continuing to do
strictly internet-based work.
I
do however agree that the way I did it was unnecessarily risky and I
did more work than strictly needed for survival. Meaning, I worked
also because making that amount of money felt good and I wanted to
save as much as I could, while not having any safety measures in
place with all the clients I was sessioning with.
The
impression I got from both my lawyer and judge was that while their
wording wasn’t always perfect, their intent and worry was mostly
about my safety. I am usually pretty good at judging who is a
whorephobe and who isn’t, and that wasn’t something I sensed when
it comes to them.
The
defense in your case argued that you were able to organize clients on
a schedule, thus the idea that your brain injury barred you from most
employment was fallacious. Many disabled sex workers are very good at
their jobs and yet incapable of maintaining a straight job, because
the way a disability can affect someone’s ability to work can be
very specific. A sex worker with chronic pain, for example, can be
good at “reading people well and anticipating what they desire”—as
the Huffington Post Canada paraphrases you in a
recent interview—but
would be unable to take the long hours associated with many other
human service jobs. How does this play out in your life?
That
is a comment I found to be on the invalidating side, because of the
reasons you stated. It is very hard for some people to imagine that
while being good at one thing (such as reading people and meeting
their emotional/fetish needs) I maybe completely lost in other areas.
The
fact is client sessions were something I booked not on a set
schedule, but on a constantly changing basis. It is also not the end
of the world if I [have] to cancel a session or move it due to
health, which isn’t a freedom I’d have in other employment. I
find domme work more manageable, though still difficult because of
general low energy levels, because it is more empathy and creativity
based. So no, I am not completely useless in every area, but it
doesn’t mean that areas I’d need for most conventional employment
weren’t significantly affected.
In
your case, your new “sexual impulsivity,” caused by changes in
your personality due to your brain injury, was connected to your
choice to to become a pro domme. You wrote to me saying rather that
“my domme work wasn’t connected to my [sexual] needs at all.”
In the Huffington Post Canada interview, you explained: “Part of
why I became a dominatrix wasn’t just because I had this
inexplicable urge to spank people.” Why do you think the general
public persists in connecting sex work to the worker’s own
sexuality rather than their need to survive?
Why
would people assume my personal needs are connected to my work? Do
people assume doctors have a fetish for white lab coats and are
personally in love with all their patients? Sex workers in general
are not seen as regular humans. I find that extremely true with
myself when you throw the brain injury into the mix.
The
defense in your case argued that because you were goth as a teenager
and acted out occasionally, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and
because you saw a counselor at one point, you had “borderline
personality disorder” and wouldn’t have been successful as an
adult even if the accident hadn’t occurred. How do you feel about
these kinds of assumptions made about countercultural and opinionated
teenagers?
I
think that the defense had to come up with an argument against me,
any argument, because that is the nature of their job.
I
do however see this sort of thing in other people. It feels like
unless I was Mary Sunshine who wore pink before the accident and
never rebelled in any shape or form, it must mean I was “damaged”
to begin with. I wasn’t Mary Sunshine, I had a mohawk and I drank
alcohol occasionally. I also had done some drugs, like pretty much
most kids in high school (even if parents would rather not believe
this). However, I was happy and healthy. Having a mohawk doesn’t
equal depression, anxiety, memory and concentration problems and the
ongoing list of things I currently suffer from. All those things
started after the accident.
What
do you think you needed most after your accident? In a perfect world,
how would your disability have been supported?
Education,
right away. Proper care done immediately. Meeting other brain injured
people and being taught all of the things that I had to slowly learn
on my own. Fundamental things such as the fact that being tired all
the time isn’t because I’m lazy. Being told that I could have
disability benefits right away instead of years later when my mother
has already [run] into credit card debt. People not telling me that I
“should” be able to handle and do this that and the other.
Basically, acceptance of invisible disabilities.
Do
you think the precedent your judgement sets is helpful or harmful to
sex workers as a group, or both?
I’d
like to think neither. It’s a lot of pressure to think about my
case in this manner, and it overlaps with disabled people’s rights
so it becomes even more complicated.
I
think the bigger issue is people demanding that I define if I either
LOVE or HATE my time as a sex worker, when it fact it’s a bit of
both. I loved a lot of it, I also hated some of it, just like, you
know, any other job will not be either totally perfect or totally
horrible. When I said that “I don’t want to be stuck doing it,”
that is all that meant. I want to have choices. It does not however
mean that I think sex work is bad, that I didn’t draw any
empowerment from it. It is nuanced.
But
at the end of the day, I want it to ideally always be a choice, which
is what the judgement allows for me. I still don’t have as many
choices as I did when I was healthy, but at least now I have money to
rely on if I one day wake up and decide no type of sex work is right
for me anymore. I just think I should have that option, ideally.
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