Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  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:

  Yes, I will give you a lap dance for $20. If you want me to stay for another song after the first one has ended, it will be another $20. If you want your dance in the private room, that will be $150.

  Or:

  I’ll come to your motel room for a half an hour, and that will cost $150. If you want me to strip, you need to tip me, and tips start at $50. If you want me to give you a massage, that’s $100 tip.

  Or maybe:

  I’ll give you a blow job in your car for $40, but you need to drive over to this spot (where I know my friends can write down your license plate, and they know that I will be leaving your car as soon as you come, and if you drive away before I get out they will know something is wrong and come after me).

  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-perfecti
on 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.

  I’ve “sold my body” to countless men yet I still have it right here on the couch with me. Odd that.

  —@AnarchaSxworker

  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.

  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 se
en 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?

  9

  The Saviors

  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.