I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the ‘outing’ of the net and twitter persona known as Alexa di Carlo. For those of you who don’t follow twitter, and have never heard of the Real Princess Diaries, Alexa was a person claiming to be a high-class callgirl. She tweeted and blogged about being one, and also tweet links to porn she liked. She was pretty opinionated, and I had my personal run-ins with her, especially on the subject of glamourizing the sex trade and some of the semiotics and memes present in a lot of porn these days.
Nonetheless, this cyberpersona was something of a work of art. There was a lot of work put into creating Alexa di Carlo, and she obviously filled a need some people had, because she certainly amassed a lot of followers on twitter, and I would suspect her blog hits were pretty high. Most people, I think, followed her or read her for fun and a bit of titillation. If there were people who were either tweeting with her, or consulting her blog as if she were some sort of sexual guru… well, I’m sorry, but the web is full of crap and misleading information, and although I didn’t agree with her stances on a lot of things, I really have a hard time believing she was much of a danger to anyone. The fact that anyone is depending on accurate and important information off a call-girl’s blog or twitter feed says much more about our inability to be discerning in sourcing information than it says about her.
Now it seems, someone has taken it upon themselves to reveal the perfidious lie that was Alexa di Carlo. Her twitter account was closed, as was her blog, and this went up: http://exposeabro-alexa.blogspot.com/.If this is to be believed, Alexa is actually a middle-aged man with a penchant for deep research and a craving to be lusted after by men.
My response is: so what?
What interests me a great deal more is the writer of the expose, who manages rather deftly to keep their OWN identity anonymous while murdering someone elses. And if it was only a stating of the facts, I would not be so suspicious but please note the vitriolic language:
“Alexa” has been thoroughly and publicly exposed as a fraud for almost a year now, but some people just refuse to believe it. They so badly want the lousy erotica written by their slutty dreamgirl to be real. They need to believe they haven’t been jerking off to the pathetically transparent fantasies of a male computer nerd who wishes he could be attractive and interesting.
Expose A Bro – Alexa, Blog post 22/10/2010, Anonymous
This isn’t the language of someone seeking to inform you of vital information. This is the tone of someone with a great deal of anger and bitterness. It’s also someone who, like the creator of Alexa, did a great deal of digging and research to expose the true identity behind the persona. Maybe. I hope to hell who ever did it is right, because otherwise, [name redacted] is about to have his life come down crashing down around his ears for some karmic debt he can’t even remember incurring. And who will pay for that? Did the person who wrote this expose also feel it was necessary to ruin the lives of [name redacted]’s wife and children? Because if he has any, that will surely happen.
There is also the accusation that the Alexa persona did harm to certain sex-work organization initiatives, harassed people involved and applauded the closure of a certain publication. Honestly, I think this is probably true. The person behind Alexa certainly misrepresented some of the realities of the sex industry. But so do a lot of films and television series. I can’t really accept that she was a significant force in perpetuating misinformation about an industry that has been horrendously misrepresented for the last 200 years by almost every power structure and media provider in the world. If she/he harassed people, then she should have been charged with harassment. And as far as applauding the demise of a worthy publication… I’m sorry, but that is a matter of holding what may be a misguided opinion, but it doesn’t rate ruining someone’s life.
The writer of the expose then goes on to defend his/her reasons for doing this thusly:
Exposing him isn’t about violating his right to privacy, it’s about cleansing a divisive fraud from our midst. He is an irritating scourge in the least, and predatory/dangerously irresponsible at worst, and some of us felt an ethical obligation to set the record straight. It’s about self-defense.
Expose A Bro – Alexa, Blog post 22/10/2010, Anonymous
“Cleansing a divisive fraud from our midst“. This is the language of witch hunts. This is the language of McCarthyism. If the person being accused has committed legal fraud or is indeed sexually preying on minors, then a responsible person would report him to the proper authorities who would charge him with those offenses and [name redacted] would at least get his day in court and the right to legal representation. As it stands, what I see here is cybervigilatism and the public trial and summary execution of a person who has not been proven guilty by any recognizable legal framework.
I don’t doubt that the person who did the exposing thought they were doing the right thing. But this is what I’m left with – what happens when I piss this person off, or you do, or another blogger you know?
How many people, creating wonderful, fantastical work are going to decide not to for fear that someone will make it their job to go “Cleansing a divisive fraud from our midst“.
Two years ago, a person who took offense to one of my FICTIONAL stories, hunted me down, and wrote a letter to the HR department of the institution where I teach accusing me of being a pornographer, a sex-tourist and a paedophile. The fact that I just WRITE and that I write FICTION didn’t matter to this person. They thought they were “cleansing’ too, I’m sure. It was just lucky that, holding a MA in Writing, and having informed my employers about my writing and my bibliography, they understood that what they were looking at was a deranged zealot. But had I lived in the UK or in the US, the very accusation of sex-tourism or paedophilia could have ruined my career.Â
Personally, I accept people on the net the way they want to be taken. That doesn’t mean that I believe everything they say, or take everything they write as instructional. I see this as a place of theatre, a circus where people play out the beautiful, breathtaking, ugly, erotic, silly, ridiculous, etc. Enjoy the spectacles that appeal to you and bypass the ones that offend you. You’re grown-ups. Be discerning about the sources of information, question the agendas. And leave execution to the state sanctioned executioners.
More troubling to me – in a general way – is what the web is becoming, or what we are demanding that it be. We are an unpoliced society of sorts. No one can force the Alexas of the web to stop pretending to be something they aren’t in reality and no one can demand the shutting down of the expose page, nor should they. We depend on civility to keep this society sane. It requires that we click away from things we don’t like or disagree with. It requires using the block function and the ban function if we are really offended. But it also requires that we don’t use this place as a babysitting service or assume it should be. The very vibrancy of the web depends, in great measure on our tolerance for each other. For our etiquette in NOT tracking down someone’s real identity when clearly a pseudonym is being used for a reason, unless we really have to – not because someone is an asshole or gives bad advice or masquerades as a call-girl-come-sexpert. And if you do need to seek out someone’s reality beyond what they offer you, then speak to them directly, privately. Do not use this place to kill the vibrancy and the chaos and the mystery of it, or I think we are going to be sorry with the gray, lifeless, orderly place we end up with.
In the interest of fairness, please take a look at some opposing arguments on this issue:
Please let me know in the comments if you feel I should include others.
Addendum:
Now, it seems, a story has emerged about a certain young woman, entering sex work for the first time, took the persona ‘Alexa’s’ email recommendation for a client. The story and the email are reproduced here and here. According to the woman – who did take the client – the person she met was the person exposed as being behind the persona of Alexa.
I have two things to say about this. First, we have a single person’s eye-witness affirmation that ‘Thomas’ is the client she serviced. I’m not saying she’s lying – I’m saying this is ONE PERSON’S word. Someone who is not under oath or being held accountable for saying this.
Second, I’m not in the sex trade and I’m not an expert. But it does disturb me that any woman, going into this business, would take a recommendation of a client via email from someone they haven’t had a lengthy face-to-face relationship with. I’m very glad she didn’t end up hurt or dead. She could have.
Furthermore, the tone and content of the letter reads a lot more like a piece of bad fantasy porn about happy hookers and their clients than any real recommendation from working girl to working girl. Having had friendships with a number of sex workers, both male and female, a recommendation sounds like this: ‘I’ve had this guy as a client 3 times, he’s clean, he’s safe, and he doesn’t misbehave.’
Because sex work is illegal in many countries, workers are incredibly vulnerable to violence and harassment, and lack legal remedy when in occurs. I’m sure many of you know my stance on sex work. I think it must be made legal for the protection of both the buyers and the sellers.
And because sex work has been ridiculously misrepresented and glamourized in literature and film and television, and because people can’t seem to separate fiction from reality, it is possible for the persona ‘Alexa’ to fool someone who is thinking of entering sex work into believing she’s a sex worker. And because men who visit sex workers want to fool themselves into thinking they are being more than ‘serviced’, they are also prey to these sorts of illusionary devices. And because, in order to tout for business, many sex workers represent their work as more pleasurable and glamourous than it actually is, they contribute to the myth.
However, to call this rape because the client misrepresented himself to a prostitute is, I think questionable. Very few men who visit prostitutes give their real names or disclose who they are, in the same way and for the same reasons that very few prostitutes reveal their own real names or details. And, whether male or female, casual sex encounters often involve people who are not who they say they are.
I am not absolving this man of anything. Frankly, I think he’s a rotten little shit. But to call this rape – and let it sit on the same level with what happens to women in the Congo. No, I’m sorry, that offends me greatly. I’m very glad to hear that the woman who saw him is safe. I hope that, should she proceed with her plan to go into what is, still at this time, and illegal and unregulated business, she will be wiser in the future about where she gets her client recommendations from. The vast majority of sex workers in the world are on the street or in bars, suffer violence, force, and non-payment for services on a regular basis.
Addendum 2:
The person who was accused of having pretended to be Alexa has responded, if only briefly, before being advised by a lawyer, to take it down and pursue legal recourse. The page is reproduced on the AAG blog, here: http://aagblog.com/2010/10/25/a-message-from-[name redacted]/
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