My name’s Jaina Rodriguez-Grey, I’m trans, I’m a career journalist, and I’m also a sex worker. I’ve been writing professionally for most of my adult life and I’ve been a sex worker off and on for a lot longer. I’ve written for publications like WIRED, Reuters, Vice, Digital Trends, and The Guardian.
For years I covered civil litigation for Westlaw, filing daily summaries of every lawsuit filed in the state of Oregon, plus San Francisco County and LA County. After that I pivoted to tech journalism, covering PC hardware and gaming for Digital Trends. Then finally I ended up at WIRED, where I came on board to cover PC hardware and laptops but ended up pitching and building out broader and more inclusive sex tech coverage.
There were issues, as you can imagine, being trans and covering sex for a legacy publication owned by THE legacy media company, Condé Nast. I burned out, I had one too many meetings with middle managers pushing for more content, faster, friendlier, less me. I spent the next year recovering from burnout and supporting myself the way I knew best: Freelance writing and sex work.
Now that I’ve gotten my voice back and I know what I want to write, how I want to write it, and for whom, I’m ready to get back to work.
Why Strapped?
Because I’m a dirty little pervert who loves a triple entendre. Strapped can mean either wearing a strap-on, being fucked by one, or, as is often the case as a freelance writer: being broke. There’s also the connotation of being armed which in the context of wearable silicone cocks is really funny to me.
So it’s just like a sex blog?
Yes and no. Like I mentioned, I’ve covered civil lawsuits, PC hardware, gaming, coffee, sex toys, music, even patents at one point. My coverage areas are vast and strange but overlap in a lot of surprising ways.
The tech industry has always been terrified of sex, and fascists are taking advantage of that opening. They see a pathway to erase queerness by criminalizing explicit content. Payment processors are censoring access to it, and pornography is slowly being criminalized in one state after another. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And one way to stand out in a crowd of mealy-mouthed centrist techno-optimist shitheels more eager to keep access than actually have an opinion on anything, is to get filthy. Get vulgar.
I hate/love this and/or want to get in touch, how do I do that?
Send me an email at [email protected]