Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  When we look at sex workers this way we produce conditions in which they are always being policed. “Criminalization” isn’t just a law on the books but a state of being and moving in the world, of forming relationships—of having them predetermined for you. This is why we demonize the customer’s perspective on the sex worker as one of absolute control, why we situate the real violence sex workers can face as the individual man’s responsibility, and why we imagine that all sex workers must be powerless to say no. We have no way of understanding how to relate to the prostitute we’ve imagined but through control.

  This fixation on control is what constrains our vision of sex work just as much as sex work’s clandestine nature. I want to remove these constraints and move beyond the imaginary. What follows is not a promise of some new reality beyond the fantasy for hire that sex workers engage in but the slow circling around of a more persistent fantasy, and its end.

  2

  The Prostitute

  I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman.

  —Henri Leclerc, attorney representing

  Dominique Strauss-Kahn (2011)

  Controlling the sale of sex is not as timeless as we might imagine it to be. Commercial sex—as a practice and an industry—as well as the class of people within it are continuously being reinvented. So many methods of punishing what’s thought of as sexual deviance persist, imprisoning “sodomites” and “fallen women,” for example, even as the names we give these dangerous characters shift with time. Some say the danger began to drain out when the outcast whore gave way to the victimized prostitute at the end of the nineteenth century; since the middle of the seventies, “prostitution” has slowly begun to give way to “sex work.” It’s this transition from a state of being to a form of labor that must be understood if we’re to understand demands that sex work is work: how it came along; what goals it serves; who drove it; who contests it; who it benefits. The most important difference is that the designation of sex work is the invention of the people who perform it.

  This is why I’m not so interested in what people think of prostitution: It doesn’t really exist anymore. The person we call “the prostitute,” contrary to her honorific as a member of “the world’s oldest profession,” hasn’t actually been around very long. The word is young, and at first it didn’t confer identity. When prostitute entered into English in the sixteenth century it was as a verb—to prostitute, to set something up for sale.

  The word whore is older, old English or old German, possibly derived from a root that’s no longer known, and dates back as early as the twelfth century BCE. There were countless people whose lives prior to the word’s invention were later reduced by historians to the word whore, though their activities certainly varied. Contrary to King James, there was no whore of Babylon. There were no prostitutes in Pompeii. No one, not in old or new Amsterdam, worked in a red-light district until they were named as such toward the end of the nineteenth century.

  It’s the nineteenth century that brings us the person of the prostitute, who we are to understand was a product of the institution that came to be known as prostitution but was actually born of something much broader. Prior to this period, anthropologist Laura Agustín explains in Sex at the Margins,

  there was no word or concept which signified exclusively the sale of sexual services … “Whoring” referred to sexual relations outside of marriage and connoted immorality or promiscuity without the involvement of money, and the word “whore” was used to brand any woman who stepped out of current boundaries of respectability.

  At the same time that we see a new kind of woman in the character of the prostitute, we also see the invention of a new kind of man, the homosexual. But just as sexual relations between people of the same gender of course preceded him as constructed in this period, so too was the identity of the prostitute applied to a much older set of practices, and for parallel purposes: to produce a person by transforming a behavior (however occasional) into an identity. From there a class was marked that could now be more easily imagined, located, treated, and controlled by law. This is the character laws are made for: a fantasy of absolute degradation who is abandoned by all but those noble few who seek to rescue her.

  And—to the dismay of prostitutes and homosexuals, and to those of us who are both—we have not left this period. The late nineteenth century made criminals of the people, not just of the practices of sodomy and the sale of sex. In the late twentieth century, outsized fears of AIDS led to the levy of social and criminal penalties against these same people. These penalties were not against all people who engaged in same-sex sex or in selling sex but against those who were most visibly different and most easily associated with other forms of deviance.

  We would be wise to remember that the raid on the Stonewall Inn one June night in 1969 would not have become a police riot were it not for the street-hustling transvestites (as they then referred to themselves) who resisted when threatened with arrest, who tossed coins and bottles back at the police. Still, the same people, the queens and the butches and the hustlers who kicked off gay liberation’s most celebrated battle—one that has so surely and safely ascended the ranks of civil rights history that it found its way into President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address—are those most likely to experience police harassment in the neighborhood around Stonewall to this day.

  We—and especially people who sell sex—have not yet fully departed from this period.

  I was born in the same year and in the same country in which sex work was invented. “In 1978,” writes Carol Leigh, a sex worker activist, artist, and author, in her essay “Inventing Sex Work,”

  I attended a conference in San Francisco organized by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. This conference was part of a weekend of activism featuring Andrea Dworkin and an anti-porn march through North Beach, San Francisco’s “adult entertainment district,” during which the marchers embarrassed and harassed the strippers and other sex industry workers in the neighborhood.

  A march like this could only be construed as a feminist activity if they believed that the people they targeted had in some way directed or requested such a protest. They would have to conclude that these marches were somehow distinguishable, to those workers, from the vice raids that targeted the same businesses—their workplaces—that the marchers were protesting against. Or the marchers would have to tell themselves that they simply knew—better than the sex workers—what was in their best interests.

  Carol Leigh understood that by attending this conference as a prostitute she could confound some of these assumed divisions within feminism—that the prostitute who would be discussed in the conference room would herself be absent. This presumption was a profound departure from the prevailing feminist theory of the day: Politics proceed from women’s own experiences. Which women, though? Women in the sex trades were not the first to challenge their presupposed absence (for not being out) and simultaneous inclusion (for being part of the universal class of women) in a largely white, cisgender, middle-class, and heterosexual room of their own.

  People who sell sex, and the women who sell sex in particular, are not absent from these rooms, and as Carol Leigh attests, themselves bear witness to the politics of exclusion perpetuated by other women who don’t understand that they share sex workers’ concerns. “I found the room for the conference workshop on prostitution,” she continues,

  As I entered I saw a newsprint pad with the title of the workshop. It included the phrase “Sex Use Industry.” The words stuck out and embarrassed me. How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used, obscuring my role as an actor and agent in this transaction? At the beginning of the workshop I suggested that the title of the workshop should be changed to the “Sex Work Industry,” because that described what women did. Generally, the men used the services, and the women provided them. As I recall, no one raised object
ions.

  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 r
ecommends 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”?