A
Remember Agencies?
- Thread starter flipmatic
- Start date
Same. Hopefully it happens. Its a glaring obvious need in Ottawa. The disparity between high end independents and low end scammers with very little in between is massive.
I’m grateful for all of your input, thank you. If you want to PM me more private thoughts/ideas/comments, I’m very open minded.
I can agree with this statement about LisaAhhh Pink Kitty, good memories
No, agencies usually offer less security unfortunately, since they don't actually care about the girls who work for them, they only care about the money. They put my life and the other girls who worked there lives at risk basically every day, and would get angry at us if we expressed feeling unsafe.
My first client with Pink Kitty was a blacklisted client that they knew couldn't see any of the regular girls there, so they always sent him to new girls since they didn't know he was blacklisted or dangerous.
If anyone ever wants any fun behind the scenes stories from PK I'm always happy to spill, they definitely ran themselves to the ground that agency did
Though I still have so much love for all the girls I worked with back then, they were a wonderful crew; Karmin, April, Paige.. We used to have so much fun!
The Ottawa market is actually the perfect spot for agencies, but the only issue is that most who run them usually don't care about their workers at all, and when that's the case you end up with a high turnover rate, unreliable reputation and overall a business model that's guaranteed to die out.
At the time when I worked at PK Lisa was running it, and she either had no idea what she was doing or didn't care and refused to take any business help from the girls, so eventually we all went independent when it was clear they couldn't advertise us properly, would bait and switch or have us no show clients often, and wouldn't even answer the phones most days.
An agency run by and for sex workers would be a huge difference, but with the legalities and all the start up necessary, most don't want to take the risk of starting one up.
A lot of independents will speak badly of agencies, and as someone who worked at one I completely understand why, but the fact is that agencies can actually serve a purpose in this industry, if done as ethically as possible.
I sometimes miss the days when I could just clock in, never have to worry about phones or texting or time wasters, just show up, work, then clock out and go home at the end of your shift like a regular job
PK was a hit and miss. There use to be a guy that took calls and we had chats. Turn over was not too bad. There have been amazing experiences along with uninspired ones. One of my fav was Betty. Oh Betty!!!!
PK was my go to agency. Usually had a decent choice and good experiences more often then not.
Natasha was an indy at a Kanata residence then moved to PK was my go to for about a year. But like all the greats.....gone
Natasha was an indy at a Kanata residence then moved to PK was my go to for about a year. But like all the greats.....gone
It is really fascinating to read your views, this provides a perspective we would never get otherwise.I think everyone knows what I think about OIC at this point
For background: I helped manage and eventually build up the Indycompanion collective from 2015-2018(we built it from 20 members to 120+ within those years, it was amazing!), and also was one of the starting members alongside a handful of others who created the slack and group that would eventually become OIC(though I left before it had a name yet).
I voluntarily left both groups in 2017/2018 and tried to reapply years after and was refused with no reasoning why from both groups.
Overall, I have a solid amount of experience at this point from both being a member of a collective, running a collective and eventually being an ostracized outsider of them also.
With all that in mind, collectives are actually a vitally important and very much needed resource in different cities and communities - if run properly, they provide community, shared warnings lists, advertising, and safety to members of the sex worker community in ways that is so necessary to not just survive, but also thrive in this industry.
However, the issues that we end up having with collectives like OIC and Indycompanion(and some in the US are like this as well), is that they ultimately become like cliques in high school - run by the popular folks, usually those with more power and privilege and their friends.
Collectives like OIC and Indycompanion have a rich history of gatekeeping their safety resources and access to community to members only, which might not sound too bad until you realize that they have no due process for adding or removing members, sex workers can be kicked out or refused access purely because someone in the collective have a personal issue with them, and there is many instances of members being bullied out of the collectives if they speak up or fight with any members at the top, meaning they get to decide who has access to safety and who doesn't, usually on personal biases.
This is immensely dangerous given that isolation in this industry ultimately puts us in vulnerable and sometimes life-threatening positions.
(Indycompanion and OIC have since made their blacklists more accessible in the last two years since this issue started being talked about more openly, so will give them credit there)
The collectives we have locally right now aren't run in a way that's actually a community collective, but instead exclusive cliques that end up benefitting some while harming or isolating many, many others within the sex worker community.
So yes, collectives are very important IF done ethically, same as with agencies in my opinion.
We're seeing exactly what happens when collectives like OIC allow already privileged sex workers to have too much unchecked power in a big group like that: they end up putting their community at risk in the end and ultimately do the opposite of what they're supposed to achieve, especially when members become too afraid to speak up when they see wrong happening within.
(For those who missed the drama on twitter and since OIC kept things tight-lipped: OIC protected a known predator and rapist, Romulus, and allowed him to be a respected member of their collective for well over a year, despite being told about what he's done and that he was on blacklists for his assaults. Because of this, he was able to prey on and assault many more within and outside of the collective for the whole year after they knew about the warnings with the respected reputation of OIC behind him. Why did they throw out the warnings about him? Because they came from me and friends of mine and they deemed their accounts of rape and assault as untrustworthy because of this. Nathalie, who was the show-runner of OIC, has had a personal grudge against me since 2017 and because of this she refused to let anyone act on the warnings of Romulus because they came from me and my friends, and ended up causing great harm within the community because of her personal issues with me. And since there's no form of accountability within the collective, everything got swept under the rug, no one within the collective would have even found out if myself and others hadn't started making noise publicly about the issue.)
And that's only one example of the many issues that come up when collectives are run exclusively instead of for the community, there could be a whole expose written on the harms local collectives have done to community members honestly
(and I will be the first to admit that I took part in some harmful actions to individual members when I was managing Indycompanion also, so when I'm casting the stone at these groups, I'm also aware of exactly when I need to be pointing the finger back at myself for my part as well. I speak up to also keep myself accountable for my past mistakes that harmed others and to make sure I don't repeat them.)
At the end of the day, it all boils down to this: none of the collectives that currently exist in our communities locally are actually collectives at all, they are just a community group. A collective would mean that every single member holds equal weight within the space, because it's a *collective* of individuals working together(a co-op if you will)..
When you have members who have no idea what decisions are being made, have little or no say in collective matters, there's no transparency or process for any actions the collective take and there's people at the top in charge with nothing in place to keep them accountable and in check, you end up with just a clique-y club instead of an actual collective.
Sorry for the huge ramble I just went on with this question, but boy oh boy do I have thoughts on this topic and I'm glad it came up!
One of the biggest reasons I partake in this lifestyle is the convenience, which is almost certainly true for many others. While there are some great independent escorts, a lot of them have adopted approaches and practices that are inconvenient. Would love to see some agencies in Ottawa.
