Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  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 Net
work 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.”

  The Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers reported that a common theme in interviews with detainees was the appalling food delivered in plastic bags which they then retained to use as toilets, disposing of them by hurling them from windows. Through eyewitness accounts, human rights observers established that at least three detainees were beaten to death by guards. Observers from LICADHO witnessed the body of one woman, left to die after advocates found her just the day before comatose on the floor of a detention room where she had been locked in with twenty other people. This occured at a facility on Koh Kor, an island that had once served as a prison under the Khmer Rouge. “The government needs to find real solutions to the economic and social problems which cause people to live and work on the streets,” LICADHO stated in their 2008 report on conditions at Koh Kor and a second facility at Prey Speu. “It cannot simply round these people up and throw them into detention camps.”

  If the sex workers standing in the doorways in Phnom Penh’s red-light district looked out on the street with fear, it could be just as likely from the prospect of rescue as due to any customer.

  As is the case for much of industry, accurate data on how many sex workers are in Cambodia are hard to come by and difficult to trust. One study USAID funded themselves found that of a sample of roughly 20,000, 88 percent were not forced into sex work, whether through physical force or debt contracts. It’s especially tough to know how accurate figures on coercion are. But these are the figures found in the USAID-commissioned study and were presumably available to all those in the State Department who were agitating for crackdowns on all Cambodian sex work as a means to end trafficking.

  These crackdowns are no corrective to abusive conditions in sex work, and can expose sex workers to yet more abuse, including those who want out. But this is of no concern to the American government, which not only wishes to “eradicate prostitution” (as a US attorney testified on USAID’s behalf before the US Supreme Court in 2013), but requires those receiving foreign aid to agree with them. When the Cambodian government sought to demonstrate their commitment to these American values, they had in no way “eradicated prostitution”—they had simply taken action, through detention and violence, to eradicate sex workers themselves. The State Department, in turn, upgraded Cambodia’s compliance ranking, and in its 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, offered only a weak admonishment that “raids against ‘immoral’ activities were not conducted in a manner sensitive to trafficking victims,” and recommend further “training,” not investigations or sanctions. The US has spoken: They see no meaningful difference between the elimination of sex work and the elimination of sex workers themselves.

  “The twin assumptions that no woman would willingly sell sex and that sex workers lack education and skills for ‘decent’ work are central to the issues playing out in Cambodia,” writes Cheryl Overs, author of the 2009 APNSW report Caught Between the Tiger and the Crocodile: The Campaign to Suppress Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation in Cambodia. In truth, many have also worked in garment factories, and left the factories due to low wages to move into sex work. The APNSW logo, a sewing machine with a red circle and slash through it, is a nod to all of this. Although antiprostitution NGOs such as International Justice Mission and AFESIP (the Somaly Mam Foundation) claim to teach women they have “rescued” and “recovered” from brothels to operate sewing machines at their Cambodian shelters, sex and garment workers together call attention to the poor conditions in the factories that make sex work a higher-paying, more attractive alternative.

  It was these workers, under the umbrella of WNU and APNSW, who came out strongly protesting against the crackdowns and illegal detentions in the summer of 2008. Sex workers told their stories of detention and abuse at the hands of police and guards at a rally in Phnom Penh of 500 of their colleagues and hundreds of allies. They screened video testimony from others who had been denied medical treatment and had been sexually assaulted in the rehabilitation facilities, and they showed it again, to United Nations staff and international human rights groups, just a few weeks later in Mexico City at the 17th International AIDS Conference. APNSW received awards for their work exposing the abuses driven by US policy, which itself remains the same.

  The day I visited the brothel in Phnom Penh was just a few months before the worst of the US-influenced crackdowns would begin. The brothel grounds and the road leading to it were covered in dust, which left red dirt on the bottom of my laptop bag when I sat it down to take a seat on one of the plastic chairs between the bungalow-like buildings. I didn’t take any photos. It was just a moment to breathe in the place, the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of multiple televisions playing against each other and drifting out into the night air. Everything that was necessary to me about this place was in the stories I had already heard, on the boat, on the outreach van, off the clock.

  Before I left Phnom Penh, WNU hosted a musical revue, with burlesque, karaoke, and traditional dance. The Condi/Bush video played on a big screen, and a sex worker activist from Fiji lip-synched as Mary Magdalene, dressed in business drag and wearing pearls.

  10

  The Movement

  When prostitutes win, all women win.

  —Black Women for Wages for Housework (1977)

  COYOTE Howls was the newsletter of the first prostitutes’ rights organization in the United States. It was published from San Francisco in the latter half of the seventies, and like any good alternative newspaper of the time, it had a robust back-of-the-paper section with classified listings. But being a newsletter for and by whores, the back pages advertised their own satellite organizations. There were the Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts (PUMA), the Spread Eagles (Washington, DC), the Kansas City Kitties (Missouri), Scapegoat (New York), and PROWL (Professional Resource Organization for Women’s Liberties; Spokane, Washington). The copy of COYOTE Howls on my desk now (lent from the archives of legendary sex worker activist Carol Leigh) bears the headline “Hookers and Housewives Come Together: Violence Abortion Welfare Become Common Issues at 1977 International Women’s Year Conference.”

  “Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together.

  As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its Feminine Mystique era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.

  Feminist thinker Wendy McElroy wrote in her essay “Prostitutes, Feminists and Economic Associates” that to the early prostitutes’ rights movement

  the feminist movement reacted with applause. Ms. magazine lauded both the ef
forts and the personality of Margo St. James. As late as 1979, prostitutes and mainstream feminists were actively cooperating. For example, COYOTE aligned with NOW in what was called a “Kiss and Tell” campaign to further the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] effort.

  McElroy cites a 1979 issue of COYOTE Howls, which reads:

  COYOTE has called on all prostitutes to join the international “Kiss and Tell” campaign to convince legislators that it is in their best interest to support … issues of importance to women. The organizers of the campaign are urging that the names of legislators who have consistently voted against those issues, yet are regular patrons of prostitutes, be turned over to feminist organizations for their use.

  It’s as optimistic as it was naive, if you could have looked ahead to what became the highest-profile political sex work scandal in the United States. Eliot Spitzer was the prochoice Democrat from New York who as New York State attorney general targeted corruption on Wall Street and as governor signed legislation toughening prostitution penalties that could have been used against him had he not stepped down first, slunk off, and waited the requisite months before launching himself back into the public sphere, as men like him often do. In the United States, anyway, a right-wing politician opposed to women’s rights, such as Louisiana’s Republican senator David Vitter, can turn up on an escort agency’s client list and be elected to another term. Is it that conservatives harbor less shame, or that liberals possess no spine with which to support sex workers while actually in office—or both?