This was not just any girls trip; it was a birthday trip for one of us and a reason to see Kacey Musgraves open her tour on the day of her birthday too!

We packed a lot into just a few days-  a visit to the Art Insititue and the Bean just outside it, steaks and champagne at Bavette's (thank you, A!), the best sushi at Joto (thank you, P!), karaoke in pursuit of mechanical bull riding, and an afterhours club that gave us a bottle and a section just because we're hot. We truly felt like God's favorites!

Thank you to the great city of Chicago and the fantastic men who made our trip so special! ✨

Have you been to a night club in the last few years? Do you know the men are the ones dancing on the bars now, even going so far as to kick girls off the bar? That broke my Millenial club kid heart. We used to be a proper country.

Whether they're at the clubs or not, women are waking up to the propaganda and realizing that they are the prize and not accepting excuses from men in their orbit who refuse to treat them as such.

Now I feel like a proud big sister, jumping up and down along the sidelines for women of all ages waking up and simply telling men they are gold diggers, refusing to go down the doomed path of the pick-me cool girls before them who didn't want to put demands on men, lest they scare them away and end up over age 30 and unmarried. More and more women are recognizing that their labor, emotional and otherwise, is not valued by their counterparts and are now themselves assigning a cash value to it or opting out all together and enjoying the privilege of living alone, perhaps taking a lover or two, quite possibly as the first female in their family line ever to do so. 

I've been asked before if I would recommend this industry to anyone and the fact is, I don't recommend it to anyone because I can't possibly know if they can handle it better than they do. It does, however, warm my heart to see aspects of the industry mentality creeping into the civilian consciousness in a way that empowers women everywhere and reminds them that they don't have to acquiese to a sub-par relationships or shitty men treating them badly just to say they're attached.

We as SWs are once again the canaries in the coal mine of the culture and for the first time in a while, the future looks bright.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007)- Season 1 Only!

A British television series based on the online diary of an escort who calls herself Belle de Jour, we are introduced to the duality of her life. By day, she's a girl next door named Hannah who tells her family she works as a nighttime legal secretary and by night, she inhabits her sexy and charismatic work persona, Belle. She breaks the fourth wall with the audience throughout the series, which I love, pulling us into her world by giving us backstory on everything from her family, her madame, even her two separate closets for her two lives, never to cross-pollinate. I especially related to her desire to keep things like accessories and clothing in their own worlds, both for privacy and energetic reasons. We see her struggles to maintain the status quo with her family while evading questions about her lifestyle, we see her dates with clients and even how she handles catching feelings unexpectedly. More than anything, she's funny and sharp, just the way I like my British protagonists to be. The first season is wonderful but sadly, it dove off a cliff after that so I can't recommend subsequent seasons. All these years later, her story rings true even despite stylistic differences from 2007 till now.

American Courtesans (2013)

This documentary sits right next to Paris is Burning for me as far as powerful and heartbreaking documentaries go. Directed by Kristen DiAngelo, herself a sex worker, she interviews escorts and performers, revealing their lives and stories in the most ethical and responsible way I can imagine it being done. Sex workers have been burned so many times by documentaries misrepresenting their statements and outright lying to their subjects about the nature of the production. By contrast, DiAngelo treats the interviews more like a conversation among peers and an opportunity to really see each other. It's at once inspiring, heartbreaking, funny and a history lesson on the evolution of sex work; everything from street work and massage parlors to early porn production, the introduction of the Internet and how that changed the entire industry. She also interviews activist Norma Jean Almodovar, which is probably my favorite part. Get ready to laugh, cry, and hear some intense stories that will make you question the limits of the human spirit.