by Jiz Lee
“Feminism, to me, is about developing higher-order abilities so one doesn’t have to rely on materialism/sexuality to survive.”
“How can you be a feminist and a stripper at the same time?”
When you are out as a sex worker, your voice is regularly distorted; your body is considered expendable; your life is treated as public property; your behavior is misinterpreted; and your mind is dismissed as ill informed. Your body bears the brunt of scrutiny as a place where social fears about consumer culture, objectification, and sex acutely intersect.
Journalists demonstrate disregard for the effect of their articles on your personal life and career and, especially when they misquote you or pan down to your diamante stilettos while you are speaking about human rights, reinforce discourses of fetishization, titillation, pathologization, and victimization.
The favorable media I have received is no doubt because I am white, middle class, cisgender, and tertiary educated—my agency is not disputed.
There are opportunities to “sanitize” how I talk about my job. If I am concerned for my safety, unwilling to respond to probing questions, or uncomfortable with strangers accessing my life, I could refer to my work as a dance instructor, a policy officer, trapeze artist. All these things are true. But I also stick lollipops in my cunt, put electrical devices on stranger’s genitals, and pose nude in magazines. And I’m proud of it!
Hierarchy comes with the language we use—and our work doesn’t need to be “cleaned up” to make it palatable. If you have a problem with sex work, that’s your problem. Our movement should not defend certain kinds of sex work whilst stigmatizing others.
This question of reconciling feminism with the sex industry used to interest me. I am grateful I was able to ask sex work 101 questions to peers, mentors, and role models in the industry. They critically informed my politics, challenged my internalized stigma, and gave me a historical, theoretical, and legal context to situate my own practice.
Ten years later, having answered this question repeatedly, it has become a little jading. To put it politely.
Anti-sex work feminist focus on ‘raunch culture’, ‘sexualization’ and ‘pornification’ have been used to call for increased criminalization of our workplaces, clients, and colleagues. They are echoed uncritically throughout popular culture, media, universities, and parliamentary inquiries.
We are luring girls into a triple-X-rated world, perpetuating antifeminist stereotypes, hijacking sexuality, complicit in violence against women. We should wake up. We are traitors, victims, objects, commodities, pornified, sexualized, sexist, postfeminist, low-brow, degraded, clichéd, brainwashed.
These accusations—and their implicit assumptions about what is natural, normal, and feminist—are employed without reference to sex workers’ own individual sexualities, identities, politics, strategies, or feminist practices.
They are debilitating. They are depressing. They are relentless.
Of course, I take it personally.
It grates down on me like a war of attrition slowly scraping away the layers of glitter from my skin. I have a physically sick reaction to news reports. The ferocity and violence of abolitionist tactics make me cry. My heart sinks. I have become closed, private, protective of a part of my life that for me has been a refuge.
Nowadays, here is what goes through my head whenever I am asked this question: Do I have the emotional stability to facilitate a vicious Internet debate? Do I have the time to outline a history of sex-work feminism, queer theory, and the global sex worker rights movement? Do I have the inclination to recount the methodological flaws in nonpeer studies of the sex industry? Why is it my responsibility to defend my profession instead of their job to challenge their prejudice? Will I be further attacked if I even engage in this dialogue? What is the cost?
Managing this stigma on a daily level means that I have become a jaded, resentful, walking encyclopedia. I have a photographic database—bibliography, footnotes, policy messages, statistics—burnt into my brain that I can never afford to switch off.
Stigma forces us to be reactive. And more—it drains vital energy that could actually be invested in creating, dreaming, producing new sexual material, new theoretical paradigms and new kinds of ethical intimacies. This is the worst.
This in turn feeds into ammunition for abolitionist feminists to argue that our industry is narrow, stereotyped, and predictable.
It’s not just that these assumptions are offensive. They are dangerous.
Law reform is occurring in every Australian jurisdiction with proposals to criminalize clients/workers/workplaces, remove antidiscrimination protections for sex workers, impose mandatory STI/HIV testing, and require permanent registration on police and government databases. Parts of our community are marginalized by criminal laws, racial profiling, barriers to service provision, lack of funding for peer projects, and excessive policing. Submissions processes are being fuelled by readings of objectification, degradation, rescue, and rehabilitation, rather than informed by sex worker voices, epidemiology, human rights, or United Nations recommended best practices.
Over time, any solid line that ever divided my work and personal identities has slowly eroded. I think, feel, dream, and breathe sex and politics. My house is a library of queer, feminist, and sex worker literature. My work name is now my legal name. I wear Sluts Unite and Feminist Stripper singlets. In porn, I fuck real-life lovers. I give strangers unsolicited lap dances. I take my work home and I take home to work. I take my ten-inch cocks, pink gloves, and organic lube through X-ray at airport security. For now.
Because being out does not mean that you are invited to dissect our lives to satisfy your own curiosity.
Sex workers are not on call for your university assignment. Our bodies are not open slabs for you to project your opinions, voice your concerns, open up and extract information: Certainly, this has been the hobby of the medical profession, rescue NGOs, and governments.
We are not a walking research project to appease the voyeurism and sexual tourism of middle-class careerist professionals who want access to our sexual communities while avoiding stigma and protecting their reputation.
We are human. We breathe, we bleed, we break.
Being out and proud is a strategy of visibility and activism; it fosters community and belonging, but it is also, for me, a necessity. I am too tired to hide my “lifestyle” because it makes you feel more comfortable. Why should I?
Besides, being out can be such a pleasure. I get to be a queer stripper auntie and buy pole-dancing baby jumpsuits. I am surrounded by a sex worker family who I know are always there for support, advice, and tears. Cute dyke daddies have helped me build stage props, film porn, and been my bouncer at Buck’s parties—not that I need one with my killer stilettos! In supportive relationships, I come home and share stories of work to my lovers. Because of my job, I have learned to think critically, love generously, and speak loudly.
Being out is a privilege, sometimes a burden, but also a blessing.
“Porn Star Runs for Parliament” again.
HOW THEY REACT
Zak Sabbath
Zak Sabbath is the porn name of an artist named Zak Smith. They wrote a book called We Did Porn, which has true stories and pictures in it. His paintings and drawings are held in worldwide major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His other books include Pictures of Girls and Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
How Your Friends Act
“What’s up, Craig?”
“Hey.”
“So, what’s the score, are you . . . uh . . . coming to samurai night?”
“Am I coming? I don’t know, what are we doing?”
“We’re gonna . . . uh . . . go to BBQ’s and then go watch Goyokin.”
“‘Guy Oakin’? What the fuck is ‘Guy Oakin’? Is it, like, gay Finnish porn?”
“Yes, Craig
, it is gay Finnish porn, that’s what I really want to watch. I want to go to BBQ’s and then see mad Finnish loads. All over. Creamy.”
“Is there, like, reach-arounds where they’re, like, Finnish-ing each other off?”
“That was so stupid.”
“Well, what the fuck is it? I don’t want to watch Finn fucking.”
“Oh, y’know, it’s like a fucking samurai movie! You know, there’s like vengeance and honor and stuff.”
“Is it gonna be like that last one with people rolling around in barrels?”
“I don’t fucking know. I haven’t seen it. It’s a fucking samurai classic or some shit, there’s like some fighting in the snow or some shit and a kabuki face.”
“A ‘kabuki face’?”
“I don’t know, I saw a still somewhere. Okay, I got the box. ‘A young samurai returns to his home and discovers a higher calling . . . revenge.’ Okay? ‘Directed by . . . ‘ Okay? ‘Tells the story of a haunted samurai . . . past massacre, revenge . . . . soul.’ Another massacre, there’s a woman and ‘Mango-bei absorbs a truly phenomenal amount of punishment as a way for atoning for the sins of his clan.’ See, good, right?”
“And what’s it called?”
“Goyokin.”
“Why is it called Goyokin?”
“I have no idea.”
“And where are we eating?”
“BBQ’s.”
“Do I have to wear one of those greasy bibs?”
“I don’t know, you wear whatever you want.”
“No, but I mean, I’m just saying—”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“No, I’m just saying, if I wear something nice, then are you gonna, like, drool barbecue sauce all over me?”
“I don’t know. I have not yet come to a decision about that. Are you coming?”
“I guess. What time is it at?”
“6:30.”
“Okay, but if it’s fucking Finn porn, I’m not watching you jerk off.”
“Get off my phone, you freak.”
How Drunk People in Berlin Act
[Eight college guys come into the kebab place where I’m eating a chicken filet and cheese with a side of fries. They all sit around me at my table. They are German and drunk. One Drunk German College Guy grabs the two men on either side of him and explains about how he wants to suck their cocks.]
ZS: “Y’know, when I saw you walk in that’s exactly what I thought. I thought: Now, that guy wants to suck some cock.”
DGCG: “Yah! Right now! Both of their cocks!”
DGCG2: “Yah! He loves cocks!”
DGCG3: “His cock is also the biggest cock!”
ZS: “Really? I didn’t know that.”
DGCG: “It is!”
DGCG2: “Yah! You have seen the tower of Alexanderplatz? It is bigger than this size!”
ZS: “That’s a large cock.”
DGCG: “All of the women, they know about it!”
DGCG3: “It is legend!”
ZS: “That’s so strange—it’s not in my guidebook . . . ”
DGCG2: “It is underground phenomenon! Not for tourists!”
ZS: “His cock? So, if it’s so big, how do they know it’s his? I mean, they must see it long before they see him. Um, I’m very hungry and if you keep eating my fries, I’ll be very upset.”
DGCG: “They all know it because I am a porno star!” (He isn’t.)
ZS: “Really? I’ve fucked some porn stars.”
All of them stop their drunk munching and look very gravely at me.
DGCG2: “Really?”
DGCG3: “The porrrrrn stars?”
ZS: “Yeah.”
DGCG (suddenly friendly): “I am Thomas. I don’t know your name!”
How Suzanne’s Parents Act
One morning—before shooting starts—around 5:00 a.m., Suzannne calls from her car crying and tells me that “the worst thing” has just happened.
“The worst thing?” I ask.
“They found out,” she says.
“Your family? About the porn?”
“They said that . . . “
The theology involved was more complex than the threat, but it involved the staining of the family honor, and murder being acceptable in God’s eyes under certain circumstances, and Suzanne being defective from birth. All of these ideas she seems to believe or not believe or repeat or question, like a true sub, depending on who is talking to her. The basic idea is that she would come to live with her family again and not talk to any of her friends again, and then eventually the whole family would move back to Japan, and so she should go out in the car and think, but if she drove away she was disowned, and that, most important, no one else was ever to know about this.
“You should come home, Suzanne.”
“He said he saw something, he saw me in something, a clip, I don’t know what it could’ve been—like, he said it was something with cum in it—but I don’t think I have any creampies online but—and—and he saw God when he saw it.”
“Okay. That’s crazy and you should drive away and come back to Los Angeles,” I tell her.
“But don’t you think that’s kind of a scary thing to see God in?” she asks.
“Listen to me, Suzanne, this is important. Are you listening?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think it’s very important that you drive home now.”
But she stays on the phone, crying and sifting through meaningless arguments, unnoticed, on a street somewhere in Orange County.
“I think my battery’s dying,” she says.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to come get you?”
“No, I’ll be okay. I’ll just talk to them in the morning.”
“Do you think you’ll be okay?”
“I think I’ll be okay . . . as long as that scarecrow doesn’t come any closer.”
“Scarecrow?”
“There’s a scarecrow on the hill. When I look, it moves closer.”
“Suzanne. You’re hallucinating and that isn’t real.”
“It’s not real?”
“No, and I think you must be really tired.”
“Yeah.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I’m going to sleep.”
“Okay, you sleep, but call again in the morning when you wake up so we know you’re okay?”
“Okay.”
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of every porn performer or pornographer.
COMING OUT LIKE A PORN STAR is by no means a comprehensive collection, but the tip of the iceberg on conversations about pornography from the people who have had experienced it first-hand. For more information about the book and its contributors, or to share your own story, please visit ComingOutLikeAPornStar.com.
Jiz Lee
San Francisco, California
June 2015