Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  There has to be a way to embrace sex worker identity without finding ourselves expected, again and again, to perform someone else’s sexual fantasy, whether they come dressed as a jailer or a comrade. But at the same time, our politics cannot deny the body just because someone else has a complex about it.

  Whore Solidarity

  I don’t know that we’ll ever have enough of a mass of people who have done sex work who want to reclaim the word whore—as some have done with the word queer—but there is a vocal group who do, and most of the time I would join them. Let’s say we do, though, for the same reasons that some of us also call ourselves dykes (even if and when we fuck men for money): to drain some of the hate off this word, to take up a little more space for ourselves in the world and to do it without shame, to resist all the times and ways we’ve been labeled by people who are not us. The reclamation, as these things always are, will be uneven. People in our own community will think it’s a bad idea, or bad for us, and some of us will do it anyway.

  I don’t know that using the word whore to describe yourself takes anything away from anyone. Just stating that no one else’s value is robbed by whatever it is that’s happening between my legs, and whatever it is I have to say about it, is precisely why it might be important to take whore back.

  Maybe it’s too late for that. Maybe, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, we no longer make political acts out of repurposing stigmatizing labels when we’re supposed to have left things like identity politics back in the dust of the nineties, along with our flannels, fishnets, and Foucault. But “all politics are identity politics,” as Jacobin magazine editor Peter Frase put it in his essay “An Imagined Community,” and besides, “as post-modern, ironic subjects, we will be unable to avoid facing the artificiality of our identities.”

  So whore isn’t something to be abandoned entirely, like those fashions or those arguments, as just some form of fashionable political drag. By speaking it we are bringing it forward in history, along with ourselves. “To appropriate the past uncritically,” Frase concludes, “would be to exclude all those who were excluded in the past.” Coming together around all the markers of who we are—where we come from, how we work, who we fuck—is how we produce the possibility of solidarity, no matter what we call it.

  I imagine what solidarity with whores would look like.

  Because so long as there are women who are called whores, there will be women who are trained to believe it is next to death to be one or to be mistaken for one. And so long as that is, men will feel they can leave whores for dead with impunity. The fear of the whore, or of being the whore, is the engine that drives the whole thing. That engine could be called “misogyny,” but even that word misses something: the cheapness of the whore, how easily she might be discarded not only due to her gender but to her race, her class. Whore is maybe the original intersectional insult.

  To build a class on this moves us away from our perception of the whore as someone endangered principally by patriarchy to someone whose body is crossed by multiple points of prejudice and violence—oppression and exploitation not in the abstract hands of men but in the specific institutions that prop them up. Some lines are more legible than others. Some create borders—white woman, successful white woman—that others stake their whole politics on maintaining. But to us living where they cross, we resist being defined by these borders alone, even as we are seen through them.

  This is how we could reimagine whore as a class. Because it’s not just that laws against prostitution make the act of selling sex illegal; it’s that laws against prostitution are used to target a class of people as whores whether or not they are selling sex, and in areas of their lives far outside what they do for a living.

  In recognition of this, it is fair to say that there are multiple sex worker movements. The sex worker rights movement has its own character, history, and trajectory. But there are many more sex workers in movements that are not specifically called sex workers’ movements: in queer and trans movements, in radical women-of-color movements, in harm-reduction organizing, in the prison abolition movement. In welfare women’s movements. In migrants’ movements. In labor movements. You just have to know where to look.

  And in feminist movements. As hard as some feminists work to exclude sex workers, it’s the sex worker feminists who keep me coming back to feminism.

  There’s two distinct but overlapping strands of activism within the movement for sex workers’ rights. One is concerned with changing the conditions of the sex trade itself. Its internal campaigns focus on improving workplace conditions, on workers’ rights. Its external campaigns target institutions outside sex work that impact sex workers—and police and health care providers are highest on that list. The other strand is primarily concerned with changing conditions outside the trade to impact the lives of people who do and who used to do sex work, or people who are profiled as sex workers. The first strand, which is more vocally identified with sex workers’ rights, may be more likely to argue for decriminalization in policy and building the political power of current sex workers to control the terms of their work. The second strand, which may not outwardly identify as a sex workers’ rights movement, may be more likely to argue for an end to criminalization as it’s experienced in its community’s daily life, and in building the capacity of current and former sex workers individually and collectively to define their own lives. These strands of the movement converge and go their own ways, but their common purpose is to value and believe the experiences of people who sell sex, to insist that it is not sex work that degrades us but those people who use our experiences to justify degradation.

  Outside the United States, where some sex workers’ movements emerged aligned much more closely with labor, health and human rights causes than feminist movements, these strands might look quite different. To an extent, necessity has bred an intersectional movement, one that offers the potential for so many connections: to migrants’ rights, to informal and excluded workers’ organizing. To the degree that sex workers can find safer spaces to come out in other movements, those connections can be fostered into something powerful. And to the degree that stigma and criminalization makes that frightening, sex workers will be more occupied fighting for survival alone than in finding solidarity.

  Solidarity—not support. This is what’s absent in even well-meaning “support” for sex workers: a willingness to direct that support at those people who have the power to change anything about the conditions of sex workers’ lives.

  And this is where we lose: endless, circular conversations about how sex work makes you feel (if you are someone who has not done it) that serve only to stand in for taking action. Your feelings about sex work do not make much difference to the vice police working tonight. Be bolder and look closer to home. And if you must have your feelings, take them to people who will listen: neighborhood associations, health clinics, labor unions, domestic violence shelters, queer and women’s organizations—your own people, whoever they are. Rather than narrow in on sex workers’ behaviors, turn your questions outward. What are these people doing that might harm sex workers? Why not help them, rather than sex workers, change their behavior?

  Just as suspect as too much feelings talk is the impulse from those who have never done sex work to offer up their own standards by which they wish it was regulated. For people who have never so much as talked about taking their clothes off for money they have a lot of ideas about how others should do so. What is needed long before any kind of proposals for sex industry regulation can be made is a recognition that under criminalization, sex work is regulated—by the criminal and legal system, by cops. Even for sex workers who work independently and without any kind of management, cops are management.

  The first step in talking about meaningful standards for sex work is to make space for sex workers to lead that process. That will not happen so long as law enforcement are on sex workers’ backs.

  Likewise, sex workers don’t want
others rushing in, however well meaning, to be the new boss. Sex workers are used to being excluded from developing the policies that rule their lives. Here are a few I’ve heard most often, and from all political corners, that continue to miss the point.

  • If only it were legal, we could tax them. Which ignores all the taxes currently paid by sex workers on their income and on what they purchase.

  • If only it were legal, we could test them. Never mind that sex workers already have an economic interest in maintaining their sexual health, that STI and HIV rates among sex workers have more to do with their ability to negotiate safe sex (itself constrained under criminalization) than with how many partners they have. Or that the global health community considers mandatory HIV testing to cause people to avoid health professionals, increasing their health risks. And that by the standards set forth by UNAIDS and the International Labor Organization, forcing someone—no matter what their occupation is—to be tested for HIV is considered a violation of human rights.

  • If only it were legal, we could register them. You might say we expect such protocols of other businesses, but as a culture we have yet to dignify sex work as any other business. Forced registration just looks like policing by a different name to sex workers. Those who refuse to register will form a new underground.

  None of these proposals—even if they weren’t so foolish—are mine to make. It’s not my job, and besides, I’m not sure we’re ready if we can’t yet answer one question: In what way do any of these proposals serve sex workers?

  Here’s my only proposal, because it is long overdue: If only sex work were not criminal, sex workers could do so much more for themselves, and for each other. But why should we wait?

  There’s no reason to wait for all these attitudes to change, for whore stigma to somehow fall away, to make room for another way, whether that’s amending the law, ending sex workers’ status as outlaws by other means, or by something more and yet unimagined. To hope that all those others who are occupied by their obsession with us—by the prostitutes in their fantasies—to wait for them to change and accept sex work as work and sex workers as full agents in their own lives before we take the lead? They won’t. It’s through our demands, our imaginations, that we will.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the excellent editorial staff at Verso who shaped this book, especially Audrea Lim and Angelica Sgouros. Thanks to the Jacobin crew and to publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, for bringing this into their inaugural book series.

  To all those who made a home for me in San Francisco, where this book began ten years ago: Gina de Vries, Naomi Akers, Sadie Lune, Stacey Swimme, Sarah Dopp, thank you. Thank you to friends with the Exotic Dancers’ Union, to family at St. James Infirmary. To Carol Leigh, for her imagination and her commitment, and for lending me a piece of history in COYOTE’s archives, thank you.

  To my dedicated former colleagues at the Third Wave Foundation, who refused to back away from sex workers’ rights and freedom, thank you, and thank you for introducing me to the work of many of the incredible activists I draw on every day.

  To the sex worker writers, organizers, late night comrades, and legends—Audacia Ray, Charlotte Shane, Susan Elizabeth Shepard, Darby Hickey, everyone from #sexworktwitter I haven’t been lucky enough to meet yet—thank you for keeping me going and keeping me up.

  Thanks to Caty Simon, for more than a decade of friendship and sharp thinking that shaped this right from the start.

  Thanks of the highest order, and also whiskey, to fierce friends and first readers, Sarah Jaffe and Joanne McNeil.

  With love, thanks to Tommy Moore, for endless encouragement, for cake, for the home that held this, for agreeing that the Nick Cave epigraph I was on the fence about was best kept between us.

  Further Reading

  Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Melissa Hope Ditmore, ed. (Greenwood Publishing Group: 2006)

  Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. Kamala Kempadoo, Jo Doezema, eds. (Routledge: 1998)

  Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance. R. Danielle Egan, Katherine Frank, Merri Lisa Johnson, eds. (Seal Press: 2005)

  Indecent: How I Fake It and Make It As A Girl For Hire. Sarah Katherine Lewis (Seal Press: 2006)

  The Last of the Live Nude Girls: A Memoir. Sheila McClear (Soft Skull Press: 2011)

  The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Jean-Luc Henning; Ariana Reines, trans. (semiotext(e): 2009)

  Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. Wendy Chapkis (Routledge: 1996)

  The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900–1918. Ruth Rosen (Johns Hopkins University Press: 1983)

  My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home. Amber L. Hollibaugh (Duke University Press: 2000)

  Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration. Audacia Ray (Seal Press: 2007)

  Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective. Susan Dewey, Patty Kelly, eds. (New York University Press: 2011)

  Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock, eds. (Beacon Press: 2011)

  Race, Sex, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, A Selection of Writings 1952–2011. Selma James (PM Press: 2012)

  Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. Carol Queen (Cleis Press: 1997)

  Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Shannon Bell (Indiana University Press: 1994)

  Rent Girl. Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin (Last Gasp: 2004)

  Prose and Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work, vols. 1–3. Audacia Ray, ed. (Red Umbrella Project)

  Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Laura María Agustín (Zed Books: 2007)

  Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking. Jo Doezema (Zed Books: 2010)

  Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry. Frédérique Delacoste, Priscilla Alexander, eds. (Cleis Press: 1998)

  Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry. Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy, Alys Willman, eds. (Zed Books: 2010)

  Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk, Melinda Chateauvert (Beacon Press: 2014)

  The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland. Barbara G. Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn Hausbeck (Routledge: 2009)

  “State Violence, Sex Trade, and the Failure of Anti-Trafficking Policies.” Emi Koyama (eminism.org, 2013)

  Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America. Lily Burana (Miramax: 2003)

  St. James Infirmary: Occupational Health and Safety Handbook, Third Edition. (stjamesinfirmary.org, 2010)

  Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Elizabeth Bernstein (University of Chicago Press: 2010)

  “A Theory of Violence: In Honor of Kasandra, CeCe, Savita, and Anonymous.” Eesha Pandit (Crunk Feminist Collective, January 4, 2013)

  Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot. Carol Leigh (Last Gasp Books: 2004)

  Whores and Other Feminists. Jill Nagle, ed. (Routledge: 1997)

  Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry. Annie Oakley, ed. (Seal Press: 2008)