I feel like people think of me as someone who really believes in a "sex as empowerment" philosophy, like Sasha Grey or something, when actually I feel like I'm much more what a lot of liberal feminists would call "sex negative" than most women I know.

There's just something "off" about equating the act of spending three years writing a book with the act of someone exploiting themselves by drunkenly flashing the camera for "Girls Gone Wild" or something.

I guess I'm also obligated to note that the experience of sex workers who are not upper/middle class/white probably have much worse conditions than anything that's portrayed commonly in media/what I experienced.

I seem to have made my friends proud of me/proud to know me. I also feel I've learned and grown a lot even in this short time, and this event has given me a lot of opportunity to continue doing so. Obviously there were a lot of negative reactions, but they seem to have overall little relevance to my life.

I'll be the first to admit I wasn't very happy doing what I did [escorting] nor was I very talented at it, so perhaps that's what worked to make it boring for me. However it's hard for me to imagine that a lot of young women who would enjoy and be good at being an escort.

I've gotten a lot of exposure for my writing. My writing blog has gotten over 1000 unique hits since the Observer piece (quite a lot as before it was something like 20 people a day if I was lucky.) But more importantly the coverage exposed me to and so has allowed me to connect with a lot of new people I really enjoy interacting with.

I think I would have been a lot more miserable and discovered a lot less of things I liked if I hadn't had LiveJournal in high school. I think it's interesting how blogging seems to be shaping a new generation of writers. I feel like growing up with the Internet/blogging/other structures seems to be a reason for the similarities people see in Tao Lin's writing and other young writers, rather than direct.