Playing the Whore (3 page)

Carol Leigh realized that she had not been alone. “One woman, another writer and performer, came up to me after the workshop to tell me that she had been a prostitute as a teenager,” recalls Leigh, “but was unable to discuss it for fear of being condemned.”

As women lined up at conferences like these in the second wave of feminism to demolish caricatures of female subservience—the innocent daughter, the selfless wife—the wretched prostitute is one myth they refused to denounce entirely. Even “compassionate” feminists like Kate Millett, herself in attendance as prostitutes crashed another, earlier women’s conference in New York, wrote of them somewhat sympathetically in
The Prostitution Papers
. However she “failed to understand the issue,” writes historian Melinda Chateauvert. Millet believed “that the prostitute’s ‘problem’ (as she saw it) could be solved by ‘some fundamental reorientation in the self-image of the prostitute,’ [that] prostitutes could be rehabilitated through feminist consciousness-raising.” That sex workers might be capable of doing this on their own, without guidance from their sisters, that their demands might extend to far beyond “self-image,” was still unimaginable.

A Politics of Sex Work

It’s impossible to come to a politics of sex work without referring back to the prostitutes and the whores who came before them, all the characters who populate the prostitute imaginary. This explains why the politics of sex work are persistently framed as a woman’s issue, though not all people who do sex work are women. Men are only present as pimps or johns or, more recently though no less problematically, as buyers and, strangely, not simply as customers or clients—perhaps because sex workers prefer these terms. When women in the sex trade are imagined, they are presented as objects of those men’s desires or violence. Men who work in the sex trade are rarely considered members of the same occupation.

Transgender women who sell sex are presented in media accounts only in stereotype, and they often aren’t understood even by sympathetic campaigners in relationship to other women in the sex trade. While there has also been a long history of gender nonconformity in the industry, it being one reliably available form of income for people who face discrimination in other forms of employment, gender nonconforming people in the sex trade are nearly invisible to those outside sex work. Anti–sex work feminists, meanwhile, don’t see sex work as a place for any woman. It is telling that many feminists who wish to abolish all forms of sex work, like
The Transsexual Empire
author Janice Raymond and author of
The Industrial Vagina
Sheila Jeffreys, refuse to accept that trans women are women. They appear to believe
that those engaged in sex work are not yet capable of being real women.

What we should also bear in mind when considering any study or news story that purports to examine prostitutes or prostitution is that many who are described with these terms do not use them to describe themselves. When many researchers and reporters go looking for prostitutes, they find only those who conform to their stereotypes, since they are the only people the searchers think to look for. If sex workers defy those stereotypes, that is treated as a trivial novelty rather than reality.

Even today, in the course of their work it is uncommon for sex workers to refer to themselves as such with their customers. Sex work is a political identity, one that has not fully replaced the earlier identifications imposed upon them. Phrases such as “sex worker” and “people in the sex trade” are used here, the better to describe all of the people who sell or trade sex or sexual services. “Prostitute” appears primarily to refer to its historical use; if I am speaking of someone in the sex trade in a period before the phrase “sex work” was invented, I will most likely not use it. In contemporary contexts, I will use the words “prostitute” and “prostitution” when they are used by others; for example, by those who describe themselves as prostitutes or who describe their politics as antiprostitution.

Use of the phrase “sex work,” then, like those that preceded it, is unevenly and politically distributed. Sex workers may be referred to in the literature of public health, for example, but that is due to their own advocacy, and in particular of those who pushed back early in the AIDS era against the notion
that prostitutes were responsible for the illness, an update of earlier health panics—syphilis, VD—in which many saw the bodies of prostitutes being considered little more than “vectors of disease.” Outside of sex workers’ own political networks, the shift to “sex work” is most complete in the world of AIDS, at least linguistically, though in putting policy and funding into action, fights do remain. The production of sex work has not gone without significant and persistent contest.

Sex workers can be found taking up the most public space within their own cultural production: ads, Web sites, photos, videos. Here’s where sex workers are most directly involved in creating their own images, informed by competing needs for exposure and discretion. Confined to media channels that haven’t censored them outright, this media is meant for customers. It would be a mistake to read such advertisements and other marketing as complete representations of sex workers. They are not meant to convey life off the clock.

This hasn’t stopped antiprostitution social reformers from using them as evidence of the conditions of sexual labor. They don’t understand such marketing as intentionally glamorized, even as the so-called glamorization of sex work is something that greatly concerns these campaigners in other forms of media. (Responsible for making sex work attractive to potential sex workers, according to antiprostitution activists: the movie
Pretty Woman
, the television show
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
, and what they call “pimp culture” in hiphop. Not as responsible, apparently, are: the labor market, the privatization of education and healthcare, and debt.) All their
emphasis on the pop culture depiction of the prostitute allows those opposed to sex work to keep their fight within the realm of the representational.

For a time it felt as if the fight might not be a long one: In the United States in the early seventies, sympathetic portraits of prostitutes entered the mainstream alongside an increased visibility of commercial sex as part of city life and tourism. It was 1971 when Jane Fonda took home an Oscar for her role as a bohemian, independent call girl in
Klute
, and a firsthand account of prostitution,
The Happy Hooker
, arrived on the
New York Times
bestseller list the following year. Also at the opening of the decade, after a series of court rulings appeared to relax prohibitions on “obscenity,” the cities of Boston and Detroit became the first in the nation to explore licensing adult entertainment businesses. Times Square, then the most cinematic red-light district in the world, had not yet completely expelled them along with the hustlers and working girls who made it famous.

These were also the years recognized as the birth of the modern sex workers’ rights movement. In 1973, the American activist Margo St. James launched the first prostitutes’ rights organization, Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), to oppose the criminalization of prostitution; in 1975, more than one hundred prostitutes occupied a church in Lyon, France, to protest police repression, issuing statements that they would stay until prison sentences against their members were lifted. The movement for what was then called prostitutes’ rights may have been born from demands for sexual freedom, but its own demands were for freedom from police violence.

It was these groups that laid the foundation for Carol Leigh’s invention of the phrase sex worker, and through their networks of activists and allied organizations that “sex work” advanced. In the first decade of this century, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and several bodies within the UN called for an end to the criminalization of sex work; these included the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, which was created by the United Nations Development Program for the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, an independent commission. The International Labor Organization recognizes sex work as labor and discrimination against sex workers—including forced HIV testing—as a violation of their labor rights. Human Rights Watch recommends the decriminalization of sex work. The World Health Organization recommends that “all countries should work toward decriminalization of sex work and elimination of the unjust application of non-criminal laws and regulations against sex workers.”

All this isn’t to say that with increased visibility sex workers’ lives have unilaterally improved, that these recommendations have been adopted without struggle (if they have been adopted at all), or that a new focus on sex work as work has meant an end to the social phenomenon of prostitution.

In the not-quite-forty years that have passed since the invention of sex work, the public’s fascination has only found new avenues for fulfillment, even as people involved in the sex trade have taken charge of their own depiction. Just as sex workers have taken up more public space in which to work and speak, each opportunity stands in contrast to the
imaginary roles they are cast in. Prostitutes are still, for many people, just what’s at the other end of the peep hole—or the handcuffs. As Anne McClintock observed in her 1992 essay “Screwing the System,” “The more prostitutes are obliged to speak of their actions in public, the more they incriminate themselves.” A prostitution arrest doesn’t require actual sex (not that this stops police from pursuing sex themselves), but rather, only communications for the purpose of committing prostitution. If sex workers’ speech is where whole lives are made criminal, how does that carry through to public demands to make sex workers’ lives visible and relatable through “sharing our stories”?

McClintock argues, with reference not only to specific treatment in the courts but throughout sex workers’ lives, that this is precisely the point of soliciting their testimonies: “By ordering the unspeakable to be spoken in public,… by obsessively displaying dirty pictures, filmed evidence, confessions, and exhibits, the prostitution trial reveals itself as structured around the very fetishism it sets itself to isolate and punish.” Sex workers are to understand that they’re outsiders and outlaws for selling their bodies, and yet what’s called for in relaying their stories is the repetition of that sale, and to a much broader public than they encounter in their work.

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.

These demands on their speech, to both convey their guilt and prove their innocence, are why, at the same time that sex work has made strides toward recognition and popular representations that defy stereotypes, prostitutes, both real and imagined, still remain the object of social control. This is how sex workers are still understood: as curiosities, maybe, but as the legitimate target of law enforcement crackdowns and charitable concerns—at times simultaneously. And so this is where the prostitute is still most likely to be found today, where those who seek to “rescue” her locate her: at the moment of her arrest.

The first women who shared anything with me about prostitution were later arrested.

“Were you scared when you started?” I had asked. She stood at my kitchen counter buttering bread. We sat together at the table under the stairs that had once led to the servants’ quarters, but now just led up to my room. I didn’t know if I should be asking. Was it okay to ask? Did she want to tell me? And should she tell me? Would she think I thought I was too good to do what she did? Did my asking, my not knowing, the fact that I had to ask mean I didn’t have it in me? Was I just like one of her customers, asking terrible questions, wasting her time?

She was patient with me. She had no reason to be.

The men, she said, would call the mobile phone number listed in an ad in the paper. Some met her in a motel or hotel
but many also invited her into their homes, and in those homes they would leave their mail out, their family photos. It was astounding, she said, how many men felt so safe, to do that; that men maybe always feel safe, even around strangers who are women; that what she knew about these men’s lives could put her in far more danger than if these men were cops.

How few people did she think she could tell any of this to? How many times was I, asking my own questions, just seeking a kind of validation? We are told that women, either by nature or otherwise, would never want or need to hear from someone that they think could be a whore. Would I be believable to customers, the ones I was just learning enough about to construct my own suspect values of: who those men were, and who I would be to them if we met. Could I be good enough for sex work?

I asked her, What did she do in her hour with them? How did she get from the phone call to the money to the act and then home again? Why was this path not immediately understandable to me when I had performed it time and again without the appearance of money? It was only because it had been made obscure to me, like so many feminine mysteries of sex that are actually maintained by men who prefer us ignorant and dependent.

A division had been constructed between them and me, prostitutes and all other women, which had resulted in a break in transmitting such vital information. It was the breakdown, not the sex work, that kept us apart, that could cause us to suffer unnecessarily. Now I wanted everyone to know exactly what it could be like, what their choices were, what
power they had, should they ever be in the situation of explicitly trading sex for something they need.