Playing the Whore (10 page)

Rather than egalitarian consciousness-raising, the sharing of stories took on an air of sentimental performance. “An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic,” writes Dodson. “With her rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual abuse,” which involved her father using what the woman called “disgusting, filthy pictures” and her being made to perform an “unnatural act.” Dodson remembers, “The whole room was emotionally whipped up into a rage with their own private images of child rape, while at the same time, reveling in the awfulness of it.” If this is how porn’s relationship to women is understood, how is any woman who dissents—let alone one who has modeled for pictures—supposed to speak for herself without speaking against the violation of this child? How are you to say that the
description of the child’s violation by a woman on a stage itself mimes a pornographic revelation? How is this group of women’s consumption of the evil of pornography in a group exhibition all that different from the men seated in a Times Square theater having their own communal experience of porn?

There is a sameness here to the communal release of feeling, the shaking of the body whether consumed by sobs or ejaculations: This is what film theorist Linda Williams saw in her analysis of porn films and “weepies”—chick flicks. To be in these rooms of women raging against pornography is to give in to the hawker’s sidewalk promise of “hardcore” relief. The women whose relationship to pornography has never included participating in it are only incidentally concerned with the actual women in it. Though they claim some relationship to the women in pornography, it’s one only to pictures of their bodies, to these bodies as they are made occupants of the viewers’ own imagination. The passionate antiporn campaigner has this much in common with the avid porn consumer.

This sexualized portrayal we’re supposed to be outraged about is not limited to pornography; it’s also in the iconography of the contemporary antiprostitution movement. In images on billboards and posters in social service agencies, and traded on Facebook and Pinterest to demonstrate membership in this movement, women are shown in shadow, bent over, in heels, in short skirts, wide-eyed, bruised, and chained, their open mouths covered by the hands of men—often those of faceless men of color. For a group so focused on finding evidence of the violence done to women in media
imagery, they produce their own fair share, playing to the same tropes. Perhaps it’s intentional, to garner attention—a pseudosubversive gimmick. Still, it takes on a perverse air, when, for example, a campaign called Fresh Meat from Reden International in Denmark that decries sex slavery brands itself with an image of a half-dozen nude women folded at the waist with their knees drawn up to their chests, all arranged in a styrofoam tray and sheathed in plastic wrap. I’m loathe to use a word they’ve thoroughly demeaned, but to see women this way is dehumanizing.

Against Real Women

But what if being sexualized is neither dehumanizing nor empowering, and is simply value neutral? That the harms here reside not in the looking or feeling but in what actually impacts the body? Should women be more concerned that men want to fuck us or to fuck us and fuck us up? These (sex workers still find themselves insisting) are not the same.

This is why the concerns of the real women in the sex industry do not fully register with opponents, if they do at all. If, as Burchill writes, the prostitute stands in opposition to “all women,” that’s a neat way of explaining why she can be ignored, as she must no longer be a woman herself. This boundary is drawn each time sex workers are told that by virtue of their labor they have been “reduced” to objects. They’re told they’re blameless, as the opponents don’t actually value this labor, and instead they put the blame on customers, on men’s eyes and desires.

The goal, these antiprostitute advocates say, of eradicating men’s desire for paid sex isn’t “antisex” but to restore the personhood of prostitutes, that is, of people who are already people except to those who claim to want to fix them. Prostitutes, in their imagination, have actually become the mute objects men have reduced them to. They are apparently unlike all other women, who face objectification but can retain the ability to speak and move in the world independently.

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. They know they also serve as objects of fantasy for women: as the bad girls to fear and keep far from and, on occasion, to furtively imagine themselves as.

It’s objectification, too, when these “supporters” represent sex workers as degraded, as victims, and as titillating object lessons, and render sex workers’ whole selves invisible. Their capacity for social relations is dismissed, their lives understood to be organized almost entirely around what others call their sexual availability and what sex workers call their labor.

Witholding Consent

Sex work is not simply sex; it is a performance, it is playing a role, demonstrating a skill, developing empathy within a set of professional boundaries. All this could be more easily recognized and respected as labor were it the labor of a nurse, a therapist, or a nanny. To insist that sex work is work is also
to affirm there is a difference between a sexualized form of labor and sexuality itself.

Opponents attack sex workers who view their work in this way. “The only analogy I can think of concerning prostitution is that it is more like gang rape than it is like anything else,” antiporn feminist Andrea Dworkin offered in a lecture at the University of Michigan Law School in 1992. “The gang rape is punctuated by a money exchange. That’s all. That’s the only difference.” Taking it a bit further, antiprostitution activist Evelina Giobbe refers to prostitution, in a publication of the same name, as “buying the right to rape.” If this is a right, why must men purchase it?

When anti–sex work activists claim that all sex work is rape, they don’t just ignore the labor; they excuse the actual rape of sex workers. If men can do whatever they want when they buy sex, the rape of sex workers, of those who are thought to have no consent to give anyway, isn’t understood by opponents as an aberration but as somehow intrinsic and inevitable.

Consent in sex work, as in noncommercial sex, is more complex than a simple binary yes/no contract. Sex workers negotiate based not only on a willingness to perform a sex act but on the conditions under which their labor is performed:

Or:

Or maybe:

The presence of money does not remove one’s ability to consent. Consent, in and out of sex work, is not just given but constructed, and from multiple factors: setting, time, emotional state, trust,
and
desire. Desire is contingent on all of these. Consent and desire aren’t states frozen in our bodies, tapped into and felt or offered. They are formed.

Money, rather than serving as a tangible symbol of consent, clarifies that consent to any sexual interaction isn’t a token given from one person to another like a few bills changing hands. Money is just one factor, even if it is in many cases the most important one, in constructing consent.

It would be a mistake, then, to confuse desire with consent. There is much that sex workers do in their work that they will
not enjoy doing, and yet they do consent and have legitimate reasons for doing so. Writer and prostitute Charlotte Shane terms this “unenthusiastic consent,” a flip of the recent feminist call to demand “enthusiastic consent,” a “yes means yes” to fight for alongside “no means no.” Shane isn’t saying yes means no, but rather, as she writes at the blog
Tits and Sass
, “There is a stark difference between the times I’ve agreed to (undesired) sex with clients, and the times I haven’t agreed to certain types of sex with clients. Labeling all of those experiences ‘rape’ erases the truth, my reality, and my agency.” We have an understanding now, through the advocacy of feminist antirape activists, that even when our consent is violated, we can feel (despite ourselves?) pleasure. The corollary, then, is that pleasure isn’t necessary for one to have offered consent, and the absence of pleasure should not be construed as a withdrawal of consent.

If rape isn’t just bad sex, just bad sex—even at work—isn’t rape.

But maybe it’s a distraction to talk about something like consent to sex at all when we talk about sexual labor. There is a whole matrix of consent to consider: Will the sexual labor performed put one at risk of law enforcement? At a health risk? At risk for being outed? It’s those conditions that deserve as much if not more of our concern when considering consent, not just consent to a sex act. Focusing on consent to sex may do more to perpetuate confusion and marginalization than clarifying sex workers’ power and control at work.

Isolating sex workers’ consent to only sexual consent is used to diminish their choices, not enhance them. Sex workers, more
than any other, are expected to justify their labor as a choice, as if the choice to engage in a form of labor is what makes that labor legitimate. An even more insidious double standard is that sex workers must prove they have made an
empowered
choice, as if empowerment is some intangible state attained through self-perfection and not through a continuous and collective negotiation of power. These demands to demonstrate one’s empowerment only reproduces a victim class among sex workers, all of whom are already perceived to be disempowered. It’s as true of sex workers as it is for nurses or teachers (or journalists or academics): Dwelling on the individual capacity for empowerment does little to help uncover the systemic forces constraining workers’ power, on the job and off.

Following from these myths—that to be objectified is to reduce the self, and that sex for pay is indistinguishable from rape—are the two common and contradictory views of what a sex worker sells: either her body or herself, which is most commonly applied to sex workers who offer a physical service, traditional straight sex in particular; or a shoddy approximation of real sex, making her a fake.

Drawing from over a decade of ethnographic study, sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein identifies what sex workers offer as bounded intimacy, a service that can contain a range of labor, from the physical to the emotional. Some sex
workers, particularly those whose service allows for extended conversation with customers (whether over an hour-long hotel encounter, a webcam chat, or in VIP rooms), may negotiate their work quite differently than those who prefer to focus on the physical labor of sex, which can be a more straightforward service. Sex workers don’t all find the same physical sex acts equally intimate: a blow job, a massage, a strap-on ass fuck, a kiss.

That sex workers are continually negotiating varying levels of intimacy should be proof enough that this is labor rather than selling one’s body. But that the intimacy itself can be constructed might seem like evidence that what’s on offer can’t be real. Still, we judge sex workers’ authenticity by much higher standards than we might, for example, judge the connection we have with a favorite bartender, a hair stylist, or even a therapist—when, actually, we might prefer a bit of distance, and understand that that is part of the point.

Negotiating authenticity isn’t just the domain of sex work. Bernstein relates the emergence of bounded intimacy to the broader transition to the service economy from industrial labor. In an economy in which workers of all kinds are called on to produce an experience—not just a coffee, but a smile and a personal greeting; not just a vacation, but a spiritual retreat—sex work fits quite comfortably.

Brents, Jackson, and Hausbeck, in their study of Nevada’s brothels, for example, describe how some of these workplaces are defined not just as sexual escapes but as escapes from the workaday world into a conventionally feminine environment. It’s not only the sexual performance that will attract a
customer but the performance of leisure and comfort—not unlike the luxury vacation resort, where customers are offered a comprehensive experience of escape.

After Sexualization

Critics miss the ways in which the sex economy is working to mainstream itself in their shallow focus on sexualization: not to sexualize the mainstream, but the other way around. As the researchers observed, raunch isn’t used to appeal to the mainstream in the Nevada brothels, but they instead market themselves as classy and upscale, as the kind of places anyone might want to experience. It’s the mainstream leisure industry in Las Vegas—where brothels are not permitted—that plays up the sinfulness of sex appeal. This interplay is what they describe not as a sexualization of culture but as a convergence.

When opponents of sexualization and sex work do take aim at those who profit from women’s images, their attack can be narrow and reactionary. Critics misread the interconnections between the mainstream and sex economies and media as one of contamination rather than coexistence, and so they lack the ability or will to situate sexual images in the market or the wider social sphere. Simply removing the visible top layer of our sexually converged economy will not go far at all to changing what sexualization is said to reinforce: the fundamental inequities of the rest of the economy. These campaigns start and end with erasing women’s bodies.