Authors: Melissa Gira Grant
If we take the naked girl out of the picture in
Playboy
or on
this page
, it does nothing to free any of us from the constraints on women’s actual sexual lives, on our power. To remove so-called sexy images from view in the supermarket, the Internet, wherever they are said to do the most damage becomes a quick, soundbite-y substitute for the kinds of demands we might make if we shifted our attention off the exposed skin and onto the lives of those women off the screen, off the clock.
The incoherence of these arguments is most evident in complaints that women in sex work are somehow responsible for the desire of women outside the industry to act like them, and for free. No other generation of young women, Levy claims in
Female Chauvinist Pigs
, have grown up “when porn stars weren’t topping the bestseller charts, when strippers weren’t mainstream”—as if making icons of sex workers were confined to the twenty-first century (ask the courtesans of Venice, the burlesque queens of old), or the public’s embrace of pop representations of sex work is the same as embracing sex workers. “The thong,” she warns, “is the literal by-product of the sex industry,” as if this is reason enough to cast them out, as if this is what holds us back. The thong and the women who first wore them are interchangeable for Levy, and interchangeable, too, with actual male dominance. They mistake the sex workers’ whole selves, as they accuse men of doing, with their uniform for the day.
Objects in the Rear View May Appear
Sex workers are only a symbol for Levy and other “raunch culture” opponents, a symptom of some more important
disease who matter only insofar as they impact the behavior of other women, the women who matter. I could say that their analysis is flawed, that it confines our understanding of sex to the representational and how it makes women feel (often, about other women) rather than to the material and how it constrains and shapes our lives, but that is precisely the point: Sex work informs their analysis of sexualization not because sex workers’ 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 to the surface? If we let go of the desire to diagnose and pathologize what’s been called sexualization, we could observe and describe women’s lives more fully and describe more precisely how power and sex shape us.
The convergence of commercial sex with service economies gives a way to understand what looks like the mainstreaming of commercial sex; it also provides an alternative framework to sexualization for understanding this transformation. This frees us from having to position commercial or noncommercial sex as the “right” choice, since it locates commercial sex on a continuum of other commercial services—travel, beauty, dining, entertainment—that we don’t feel we have to judge as better or worse than their noncommercial counterparts before coming to an analysis of their
value. It doesn’t regard sex work as service work in order to imagine what it could be: It acknowledges that sex work and service work already overlap, share workforces, and are interdependent.
By extension, valuing the ability of sex workers to negotiate intimacy can shift the focus of those who seek to end sex workers’ exploitation: from representations of sexualization to the ways sex workers’ labor is organized. When massive chains like Pret A Manger or Starbucks require their workers to serve up coffee with a smile or else, we don’t believe we can remedy this demand for forced niceties by telling attention-desperate customers to get their emotional needs met elsewhere. The demand lies not with the customers’ whims, but with the management. This is why sex workers gain no greater control over their work by locating their exploitation only or even primarily in the hands of their customers. It’s understandable why that might be appealing, in an age where consumer choice is seen as the salve on so many labor abuses. Buying “the right things” might matter, but not enough, and not much at all at the bargaining table.
It’s doubly appealing to blame commercial sex consumers when your concerns about commercial sex have less to do with the health and wellbeing of sex workers than with, as Burchill and Dworkin and their supporters have demanded, the wholesale eradication of their livelihood. Sex workers’ own needs, in contrast, should be quite a bit more familiar to all women: to be legally recognized; to end discrimination in housing, health care, education, and work; to move freely in the world. Even for those who wish to leave the sex trade,
their demands to seek an alternative income would hardly be met by the elimination of their current one.
As controlled by customer demand as sex workers are supposed to be, anti–sex work reformers carry on far more about customers than sex workers do, insisting that they and their sexual demands are all-powerful. Sex workers are made helpless before them, their consent and critical thinking apparently eroded by their attire. The advocates won’t say we were asking for it, but they still claim to know better than we do. Is it out of fear that they might someday have to do the same, to cross the hard line they imagine divides them from the “other” women?
As far as Western media is concerned, the foremost expert on sex work in Cambodia is Nicholas Kristof. It doesn’t hurt that he works for the
New York Times
and that his position on sex work aligns with that of the American and Cambodian governments, who would like it “eradicated.” This is also what permitted him to “purchase” two women who worked in brothels in Poipet. If he had been operating as a private citizen, he could have been charged as a trafficker or a sex tourist. A press badge, along with his proper readership, protected him.
Kristof has gone to Cambodia bearing and promising both police and rescue, as nongovernmental organizations (NGO) sometimes do: While riding shotgun along with international antiprostitution NGO the Somaly Mam Foundation on a brothel raid in northern Cambodia, he broadcast what he saw for his audience on Twitter, a breathless stream detailing people he described as scared, underage rape victims. It goes without saying that he published all of this without obtaining their consent.
Police burst in, disarmed brothel owners, took their phones so they can’t call for help … Girls are rescued, but still very scared. Youngest looks about 13, trafficked from Vietnam … Social workers comforting the girls, telling them they are free, won’t be punished, rapes are over.
—@NickKristof
Kristof is not alone in this peculiar participatory literary tradition of exposing this heart of darkness that is prostitution: At the turn of the last century, William T. Stead used his column inches in London’s
Pall Mall Gazette
to drum up concern over a burgeoning “white slave trade” that never quite turned up to be documented. Not that this stopped him: Stead did time as a result of the story for which he had bought a thirteen-year-old, the sacrificial heroine of his exposé entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” He only went to jail because he bought the girl from her mother rather than her father, who was understood to have had a legal right to her.
The panic Stead helped stir up got a new antiprostitution law passed in the United Kingdom, and would soon drift across the Atlantic; states from Iowa to California drew up “red-light abatement acts,” the beginning of the end of tolerated prostitution in the United States. All of them were premised on fears that our nation’s (white) daughters were doomed to a life of waste, to be held captive in the “modern Babylon” of industrial capital.
We might say that people like Kristof have erred in mythologizing sex work using only its worst cases, but we aren’t in a
position to know what the concept of worst cases even means to those who adhere to this tradition, which casts all sex work as a worst case merely for existing. This allegedly honest storytelling cannot accommodate the range of experiences sex workers have, report on, and are adamant about having understood.
Such a vision of sex work is easily communicable. The December 2012 newsletter of the Kolkata-based, US-registered antiprostitution group Apne Aap published an account from a new volunteer, what she had deduced only from the few minutes of her first guided tour through Sonagachi, Kolkata’s red-light district:
There are more than just brothels here; facing the streets are stores, homes, businesses and shops. People live, work, and carry out ordinary lives in Sonagachi, too. Some of the girls we saw were dressed in average clothing, weren’t wearing any make-up, and may have been out living everyday lives. But it wasn’t long before I saw what we had come to witness, a group of prostituted girls that couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen. They were standing outside a doorway, waiting. Waiting for purchase. They were dressed up, wearing their colorful saris, had make-up on their faces, and their skin was fair, as that is a highly demanded quality. All these efforts are an attempt to make the girls look healthy and happy to be there, however, the girls were not well. You could easily tell by their faces and from their sunken eyes that they were tired, ill and sick with disease and trauma … It was
impossible not to look at the girls, just standing there waiting. Waiting for the next person to dehumanize her, to rape her, to take away more of her childhood. That’s all she is, a teenage girl disguised as an adult to fulfill the desire of someone who’s buying the domination of another human being. The fear and terror of living in this hell is immeasurable.
The experience of sex work is more than just the experience of violence; to reduce all sex work to such an experience is to deny that anything but violence is even possible. By doing so, there is no need to listen to sex workers; if we already know their fate, their usefulness lies solely in providing more evidence for the readers’ preconceptions. For those working in the antiprostitution rescue industry, sex workers are limited to performing as stock characters in a story they are not otherwise a part of, in the pity porn which the “expert” journalists, filmmakers, and NGO staff will produce, profit from, and build their power on. Meanwhile, when sex workers do face discrimination, harassment, or violence, these can be explained away as experiences intrinsic to sex work—and therefore, however horrifically, to be expected. Though this antiprostitution perspective claims to be more sympathetic to sex workers, it produces the same ideology as the usual distrust and discarding of them: Both claim that abuse comes with the territory in sex work. If a sex worker reports a rape, well, what did she expect?
I have not worked as a sex worker in Cambodia, so my knowledge is limited to what I’ve observed firsthand, what
others have told me, and what I have found comparing the various official publications of governments with the NGOs who attempt to uncover abuses. But what I have that Nicholas Kristof does not is trust. Through my relationships with sex workers and sex worker activists in the United States, I met several from Cambodia. When I visited a brothel outside Phnom Penh, it was at their invitation, with no grand welcome or melodramatic conclusion.
Arriving with activists and outreach workers, we were greeted by sex workers who weren’t otherwise occupied, dropped off some boxes of condoms, and then gathered in an open courtyard. They brought us cold scented cloths with which to dab our faces and pitchers of water. I didn’t bring a camera crew, unlike NBC’s
Dateline
, or countless well-meaning documentary filmmakers. Nor did we bring the police and the promise of rescue. Instead, we sat together on plastic patio chairs under the stars and talked there, openly.
Back in my hotel room in Phnom Penh there was a sign in English on the door, posted where I could read it in bed:
SEX WORKERS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN IN THE HOTEL
. I could look out across the road from my window, swollen with motorbikes and
tuk-tuk
traffic at sunset, passing by the river where the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) office’s boat was docked. Earlier I had sat on its wooden floor with a few of their members, circled around a MacBook, watching videos they’d made themselves and were posting on YouTube.
As we watched videos—stop-motion animations that used Barbie dolls in the roles of sex workers who wanted to remain anonymous but still speak out, and another, a work-in-progress
about the abuse of mandatory health-check programs to extort bribes from workers—banners hung overhead moved gently in the breeze coming in off the water:
DON
’
T TALK TO ME ABOUT SEWING MACHINES. TALK TO ME ABOUT WORKERS
’
RIGHTS
.
The hit was a karaoke video, a slide show of images casting then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as Mary Magdalene in
Jesus Christ Superstar
, singing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as a troubled ballad directed to President George W. Bush. At the time the State Department was pressuring the Cambodian government to take a stand against sex work or else lose aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Cambodian police, who had long been cracking down on sex workers, were now working in concert with the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans, and Youth Rehabilitation; they were hauling sex workers out of brothels, loading them onto the backs of trucks en route to “rehabilitation” centers. They didn’t anticipate that sex workers would snap photos of these raids on their cell phones. One of these pictures showed up on placards and on buttons made by the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), with USAID renamed “USRAID.”
What happened once the sex workers rounded up in brothel raids were unloaded from the trucks and moved to the so-called rehabilitation centers? They were illegally detained for months at a time without charges, as were others who worked in public parks and had been chased, beaten, and dragged into vans by police. The Cambodian human rights organization LICADHO captured chilling photographs of sex workers caught in sweeps locked together in a
cage—thirty or forty people in one cell. Sex workers who had been detained reported being beaten and sexually assaulted by guards in interviews with LICADHO, Women’s Network for Unity, and Human Rights Watch. Some living with HIV, who had been illegally held in facilities described by the local NGOs that ran them as “shelters,” were denied access to antiretroviral medication. In one facility sex workers were “only able to leave their rooms to bathe twice a day in dirty pond water,” Human Rights Watch reported, “or, accompanied by a guard, to go to the toilet.”