Playing the Whore

the stigma and violence faced by sex workers are far greater harms than sex work itself

Prostitution is, much of the time, a talking crime.

Sex workers are called to give testimony on the nature of their work and lives in ever more venues: in secret diaries; on cable specials, opposite the “disgraced” politicians who hire them; to social workers, psychotherapists, and other members of the helping classes; and inside tabloids if they— or the ginned-up scandals created around them— have made headlines. Very rarely does sharing anything in these venues serve them, or the public. Sex workers are there for the sake of some unseen owners’ profits.

Questions asked of Sex Workers
• Is prostitution violence against women?
• Are prostitutes “exploited” or are they “empowered”?
• What are the factors that lead women (and it’s always women, and most often not trans women) to enter into or be forced to enter into prostitution?
• What about “the men”/ “the johns”/ “the demand side”?
• How can we help women “escape” / “exit from” / “leave” prostitution?
• How can we “raise awareness” about “this issue”?

Questions asked by Sex workers
• How do we define “prostitution”?
• How do people who sell sex describe it?
• What are some of the factors that lead women to not sell sex?
• What are some of the factors that lead women to oppose prostitution?
• How can we help women (and anyone else) better understand what selling sex is really like?
• How can we ensure that sex workers are leading any public debates on “this issue”— that is, about their own lives?

The problem at hand is not, How do we improve the lives of sex workers?, but, How should we continue to think and talk about the lives of sex workers, to carry on our discourse on prostitution regardless of how little sex workers are involved in it?

Their complaints about sex work shouldn’t be construed, as they often are, as evidence of sex workers’ desire to exit sex work.

 physiological

emma goldman - “the prostitution panic will help create a few more fat political jobs - parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives and so forth”

“whore stigma” exposure for breaking with “compulsory virtue” - be virtuous, appear virtuous.  term invented to unit women in and out of sex work.

sex worker feminists add to the feminist discourse: challenging whore stigma (“slut shaming” loses centrality)

whore stigma makes central the racial and class hiearchy reinforced in dividing women into pure and impure, clean and unclear, the white and virgin and all the others.

If woman is other, whore is the other’s other

pornification - a phenomenon in which the conventions of commercial sex are polluting all sexual relations

if a woman is sexualized, it obliterates her as a real woman - it is a violence that renders her a whore.  to be thought of as a whore is a challenge to one’s real womanhood.

Porn and stripping get the rap for driving sexualization, though critiques of them only go as far as representations of our labor— the pole, the thong, the waxed pussy— and not to our labor itself, not to our lives. Critics get close to the truth: Acting ; as if we share our customers’ desires is the work of sex work, But that’s not the same as allowing our customers to define our sexuality. When critics do venture outside the representational, it’s to insist that sex workers are victims of sexualization, that I
they are responsible for the sexualization of all women. This is a return to older claims that sex workers suffer from “false * consciousness,” only now with a dash of social science and perhaps in tinier underwear than was available to the second wave

description of the child’s violation mimics a pornographic revelation

what if being sexualized is neither dehumanizing nor empowering, and is simply value neutral?

Sex workers know they are objectified; they move in the world as women too, and through their work they have to become fluent in the narrow and kaleidoscopic visions through which men would like to relate to them as sexual fantasies embodied.Sex workers know they are objectified; they move in the world as women too, and through their work they have to
become fluent in the narrow and kaleidoscopic visions through which men would like to relate to them as sexual fantasies embodied.

demands to demonstrate one’s empowerment reproduces victim class among sex workers

sex workers are continually negotiating varying levels of intimacy

in a service economy, workers of all kinds are called on to produce an experience (smile, personal greeting, etc)

critics misread interconnections between mainstream and sex economies and media as one of contamination, not coexistance

sex work informs their analysis of sexualization not because sex worker’s lives are important but because sex work makes women who don’t do it feel things they prefer not to feel.  it is the whore stigma exercised and upheld by other women.

how different might our analysis of the relationship between sex, value, and womanhood be if we could see through the panic of sexualization to the tectonic social and economic shifts that have pushed commercial sex and its representations up the service?

the convergence of commercial sex with service economies gives us a way to understand what looks like the mainstreaming of commercial sex: it also provides and alternative framework to sexualization for understanding this transformation.  locas commercial sex on a continuum of other commercial services -- travel, beauty, dining. it doesn’t regard sex worka s service work to imagine it could be, it acknowledges sex work and service work already overlap.

anti-sex work reformers carry on far more about customers than sex workers do, insiting that they are their sexual demands are all powerful.

Hookers and housewives, considered rivals, opposite sides of economic circle. Labour considered illegitimate, caretaking and sex should be offered freely, with genuine affection and out of love. Both diminished and confined by same system that keep women dependant on men for survival.

“we, like they, are in the situation of prostitutes in that forced to marry we are obliged to sell ourselves body and soul to our lord and master in order to survive and have a respectable place in this male society”

Margo St James, Sylvia Rivera

post aids sex panic

sex work to support unpaid activism

documentary Live Nude Girls Unite

Annie Sprinkle

US forces sex worker support groups in Brazil to sign loyalty oaths declaring opposition to sex work in order to keep AIDS funds, Brazil refuses and loses 40 mil.

condoms in purses as evidence of intent to do sex work

travel ban on sexworkers and drug users

“one thing i want eveyone to understand is that when people scream about how empowering sex work is, they are reacting directly to whorephobia.  it does not mean our work is about sex rather than economics.  it means you have left them no room for a complicated relationshi with work or any possible other paradigms. sex work can indeed be empoweri. but that’s not the point. money is the fucking point.”

movement focusing not on why sex work is outlawed but why sex is a vehicle by which people are made outlaws.

not a movement to reclaim the value of sex but a movement to reject the systems that use sex to render certain people less valuable.

sex worker as a class identity as workers that they can’t use at work.

sex worker identity gives shape to the demand that sex workers are as defined by their work as they are by their sexuality; it deroticizes the public perception of the sex worker, not despite sex but to force recognitition of sex workers outside of a sexual transaction

political work still understood as sex, as if we cannot speak without producing pornography

reporters, academics, filmmakers, activists want to speak to sex workers to tell their stories without considering that sex workers are already playing that role

how to embrace sex worker identity without being expected to perform someone else’s sexual fantasy

whore solidarity - no one else’s value is robbed by whatever it is that’s happening between my legs.

jacobin “an imagined community” all politics are identity politics

so long as there are woman who are called whores, there will be women who believe it is next to death to be called one. men will feel they can leave whores for dead. the fear of the whore, of being a whore, is what drives it. whore as the original intersectional insult.

not just laws against prostitution that make the act of selling sex illega; it is the laws against prostitution that are used to target a class of people as whores whether or not they are selling sex

sex workers rights movements not explicity about sex workers rights: queer and trans, radical women-of-colour, harm reduction organizing, prison abolition movement, welfare women’s movements, migrants movements, labour movements, feminist movements.

rights movements lose in endless circular discussions on how sex work makes you feel (as someone who has not done it) that serve only to stand in for taking action. what relevance are your feelings to those working tonight?

people who have never thought about taking their clothes off form money have a lot of ideas about how others should do so.

within criminalization, cops are management

the first step to talking about meaningful standards for sex work is to make space for sex workers to lead that process.  impossible when cops are managing.

sex workers are excluded from developing the policies that rule their lives:
- if it were legal, we could tax them - ignores all taxes currently paid by sex workers on income and what they purchase
- if it were legal, we could test them : sex workers already have an economic interest to maintain their sexual health. STI and HIV rates have more to do with ability to negotiate safe sex than number of partners. Global health community considers mandatory HIV testing to cause people to avoid health professionals, increasing health risks.  Standards by UNAIDS and international labour organization, forcing someone to be tested for HIV is considered a violation of human rights.
- if it were legal, we could register them: forced registration looks like policing by a different name.  those who refuse to register would work under ground.

in what way do any of these proposals serve sex workers?

If sex work were not criminal, sex workers could do more for themselves and each other.

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