Playing the Whore (4 page)

I remembered the workshops during college, held each spring in a barn on a nearby campus where you could learn how to perform a menstrual extraction—which can be used as a form of abortion—at home. There was no subtext: This information was shared in case abortion was criminalized again in the United States. Did you ever want to have to use it? Most likely you didn’t. Were you ashamed to know it? You should not be.

Recently I got an e-mail asking if I had any information on how to become a prostitute. The writer said that although she liked my work, it was not appropriate as a “101” resource on how to do sex work. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that people reading it would not try to find advice in it anyway. It’s what I did whenever I came across a book about prostitution or stripping, some years before I ever did sex work, reverse engineering the text into a how-to. This was before many people began to use the Internet to share this kind of information, certainly before sex workers kept blogs (though not quite before they started e-mail lists and discussions on Usenet).

Sex workers’ ability to share information among themselves is essential for supporting all sex workers in negotiating their work, and in turning down work that is unsafe, underpaid, or undesirable. This is true of any job. But what does make this aspect of our work unique, and what creates the thump of panic in my gut when I open such an e-mail, is that to share this lifeline of information could be construed as criminal. Selling sex in the United States is a misdemeanor,
but sharing information with someone about how to do it is considered a more serious criminal offense.

For sex workers, sharing honest information even anonymously means taking social, political, and emotional risks. Even in more uniformly legal forms of sex work—which in the United States could include pornography and stripping—secrecy reinforces stigma and shame and can compromise sex workers’ ability to take control of their own labor. When sex workers are spoken of as having “double lives,” rather than simply concealing who they are, this narrative obscures
why
it might be necessary for sex workers to conceal what they do at work. All that is intentionally discreet about sex work (protocols to ensure customer and worker privacy, for example) are strategies for managing legal risk and social exclusion and shouldn’t be understood as deceptive any more than the discretion and boundaries a therapist or priest may maintain. But this necessary discretion warps under the weight of anti–sex work stigmas and policing; workers aren’t sure what they can say and to who and not face consequences which themselves are unknown.

Remember Deborah Jeanne Palfrey, the famed “DC Madam” who, in the first decade of this century, counted David Vitter, the “family values” Republican senator from Louisiana, and the pro-abstinence soon-to-be-former AIDS czar Randall Tobias among her escort agency’s clients? When she was charged with money-laundering and racketeering, her finances were seized, and her most marketable asset was her client list. In spring 2007, I found a page of it online, a phone bill with a typed list of numbers and corresponding
towns, and the only unredacted phone number on it was the one at the bottom of the page—her own. Without her business, that client list was her last asset worth anything.

So I called her. I didn’t take notes, but if I recall correctly she was looking to sell the list to a media outlet that would sift through it and track down the most high-profile customers. I may have made a soft bid for it: I had just launched a blog with the cofounder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project–USA, Stacey Swimme, and we were following Deborah Jeanne’s case obsessively. ABC ended up with the list and put on a nighttime special program hyping it, only to declare they hadn’t found anyone of significance on it. (Here’s another name: Harlan Ullman, the man regarded as the architect of the shock-and-awe doctrine used by the Bush administration in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) It did not stop the show, with its promise of “true tales” of prostitution. ABC was even calling us, asking if we could produce a “classy,” “educated” (read: white, conventionally attractive) escort—like the ones they said Deborah Jeanne preferred to hire. Stacey and I took turns returning the bookers’ calls, one of us playing the blogger and the other playing the escort, when in truth we were each both, and we compared notes on how much of the story’s angle and progress the booker shared. To the blogger, he framed the story as an opportunity to show the “real world” of escorting, to present escorts without further objectifying them. In his phone call to the escort, he asked how soon they could meet for a preinterview at Starbucks. We declined his offers and kept going with the blog, where we could report the story instead of playing it.

There was something else about Deborah Jeanne’s agency that captured our attention as much as it animated fantasies in the press: Reportedly, she required her workers to sign contracts stating that they wouldn’t have sex with their customers. It’s not an uncommon practice with agencies that offer outcall services, for which an escort, masseuse, or dancer travels to the customer’s location. It’s a legal fig leaf, an attempt to absolve the agency owners of liability and shunt it off onto the workers. But maintaining that fiction—however justifiable or necessary when prostitution is criminalized—also shuts down real-world talk about the actual content of these jobs. If you’re not, as far as the paper says, having sex, why would the management ever need to acknowledge that negotiation about it is also part of the job? How can they address their workers’ health and safety, like their need for condoms or lube? How can bosses provide legal support to their workers in the case of a sting when, to protect themselves, they insist the work is entirely legal?

It’s not sex work but this kind of fiction and the criminal context that demands it that produces risks and hazards. Only in 2012 did a couple of US cities—San Francisco and Washington, DC—stop using condoms as evidence of prostitution, and did so only after considerable pressure from sex workers and public health and human rights advocates. In New York, the practice of using condoms as evidence of prostitution is so routine that the supporting depositions filled out by cops upon arrest have a standard field available to record the number of condoms seized from suspected sex workers. This is the tragedy of enforcement: A system that is
supposed to use surveillance by law enforcement as a tool for combating violence against women (as prostitution is understood to be) produces violence against other, less defensible women. Sex workers refuse condoms from outreach workers, and from each other, as a way to stay safe from arrest.

These risks, not poor self-regard, are why sex workers might not share their experiences, even with each other.

There are other risks, too. So often in telling sex work stories, the storytelling process is a form of striptease indistinguishable from sex work itself, a demand to create a satisfyingly revealing story, for audiences whose interest is disguised as compassion or curiosity. In the conventional striptease routine, the sex worker dances suggestively for a first song, removes her top by the end of her second song and her bottom during the third. Off that stage, she knows there is also a script for how her story will be received. She’s often accused of not being capable of sharing the truth of her own life, of needing translators, interpreters. But part of telling the truth here is refusing to conform the story to narrow roles—virgin, victim, wretch, or whore—that she did not herself originate.

The public is most accustomed to relating to sex workers through their sexuality—or more accurately, through a sexual performance that may or may not follow their sexuality off the job. The public may not perceive this as a performance, or alternatively, they may dismiss and fetishize it as fake. Whether they’re received as brave truth tellers or conniving liars, the viewing public expects that this will be an erotic relationship whether or not they identify it as an erotic turn-on. Accordingly, sex workers calibrate what they share
in public in order to compensate for this uncompensated erotic exchange.

This is not a peep show
. So I will not, for example, be telling my story, though the means by which I came to the story I am telling here is inseparable from my experience as a sex worker. My job here is to reveal through an exchange of ideas, not through the incitement of arousal—while also not entirely putting aside that I have skin in this game.

Maintaining this kind of selective silence about myself is only a temporary, and ultimately insufficient, means of resistance. It’s a tactic until the time comes, or is made to come, when I can share my story in legal and economic conditions more favorable to me and to others who still do sex work. While we wait, and also because it’s just as important, I want to shift your gaze from sex workers to the fantasies of prostitution that occupy and obsess those who seek to abolish, control, or profit from sex work.

As a result of my political choice to remain silent on some of the questions we are taught to ask of sex workers, I worry that there might be so much absence in this story that it borders on erasure, that not speaking to those questions may cause some readers to think that there is almost no story here at all. Putting that privileged interrogation aside, however, will reveal all the space that is taken up by the idea of who the whore is. Rather than fear what we may be missing, I’ll continue there.

The sex work debate, no matter how sedate and sympathetic its interlocutors claim it to be, is a spectacle. It attracts an audience with the lure of a crisis—
prostitution sweeping the nation!
—and a promise of doing good by feeling terrible. Sad stories about sex work are offered like sequins, displayed to be admired and then swept off the stage when the number is done. As a treat, the organizers may even decide to invite a token whore to perform.

Here come the questions for her:

Then there are the questions rarely up for debate, the ones she is left to raise alone:

We should, in fact, refuse to debate. Sex work itself and, inseparable from it, the lives of sex workers are not up for debate—or they shouldn’t be. I don’t imagine that those in the antiprostitution camp who favor these kinds of debates actually believe that they are weighing the humanity, the value of the people who do sex work. (This assumes, of course, that there is a coherent antiprostitution camp, but for the sake of argument, let’s limit it to the antiprostitution feminists and their allies loosely congregated in the secular left.) Their production of the debate rests on the assumption that they themselves comprise the group that really cares for prostitutes. They may consider the purpose of the prostitution debate to be the challenging of myths and assumptions, to demonstrate their own expertise, perhaps to “raise awareness.”

What constitutes the nature of this awareness, particularly concerning the enduring and ubiquitous nature of prostitution, pornography, and other kinds of commercial sex? Awareness raisers can still count on a social hunger for lurid and detailed accounts, as well as a social order that restricts sex workers’ own opportunities to speak out about the realities of their lives. These factors in combination promote demand for the debaters’ own productions.

To fuel and stoke it, awareness raisers erect billboards on the sides of highways, with black-and-white photos of girls looking fearful and red letters crying
NOT FOR SALE
. They hire Hollywood bros like Ashton Kutcher and Sean Penn to make clicky little public service announcements for YouTube in which they tell their fans, “Real men don’t buy girls.” They occupy column inches in the
New York Times
with those such as Nicholas Kristof, who regales his readers with stories of his heroic missions into brothels and slums in Cambodia and in India “rescuing” sex workers.

The rescue industry, as anthropologist Laura Agustín terms such efforts, derives value from the production of awareness: It gives the producers jobs, the effectiveness of which is measured by a subjective accounting of how much they are being talked about. Raising awareness serves to build value for the raisers, not for those who are the subjects of the awareness.

Awareness raising about prostitution is not a value-neutral activity. Sex workers see a straight line between foundation dollars earmarked for advertisements such as those that appeared on Chicago buses—
GET RICH. WORK IN
PROSTITUTION. PIMPS KEEP THE PROFITS, AND PROSTITUTED WOMEN OFTEN PAY WITH THEIR LIVES.—
and the allocation of resources to the Chicago police to arrest pimps in order to save women who they call “prostituted.” Inevitably, all of these women face arrest, no matter what they call them, a demonstration of the harm produced by awareness raising despite any good intentions. “On paper, sex workers are still not as likely to face felony charges as their patrons,” according to the
Chicago Reporter
, “who can be charged with a felony on their first offense under the Illinois Safe Children’s Act, which was enacted in 2010.” But when the paper examined felony arrest statistics they found,