by Alison Bass
In an interview, Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW), used much the same language to explain why her organization is opposed to all kinds of prostitution, not just trafficking. “How can a government allow an industry that exploits women like this?” she asked. “[The client] can spit on you, defecate on you, use any orifice of your body.”
For some sex workers, particularly those forced into prostitution as teenagers, prostitution is indeed degrading and profoundly damaging, as the John Jay College study and other studies have shown. But what antiprostitution feminists fail to acknowledge is that some sex workers, both those who work as escorts and those who walk the streets, actually view their work as liberating.
In an interview with sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, Eve Pendleton, a former street worker in San Francisco, argued that prostitution was empowering to women because, unlike conventional relationships, it at least compensated them for their submission. “I have more independence than the women who have to do for their husbands and make their dinner,” she said.35
Kimora, one of the transsexual sex workers I met at HIPS, also spoke of how proud she is of being financially independent and not being a burden to her mother, who has eleven other children, plus four stepchildren. Sitting across a seminar table from me in a conference room at HIPS, Kimora is garbed in a tight-fitting purple dress cut low to reveal her ample breasts. She wears dangling silver earrings and a black sailor’s cap set jauntily over a cascade of silky black hair, and when she waves a hand in the air, her beautifully manicured French nails (painted purple to match her dress) sparkle in the fluorescent lights. It is not at all obvious that biologically Kimora is a man.
When she was younger, Kimora says she was molested by her stepfather, a former Marine. When she came out as a transsexual in her teens, her stepfather would belittle her. “He would call me a clown and make fun of me in front of my siblings,” she says. Even so, Kimora finished high school and began taking college courses. That’s when she started doing sex work, she says, because she needed money for books, for clothing, for everyday living. “I wanted to show my mom my independence.”
Kimora says she started out streetwalking and then began posting ads on Craigslist because it was so much safer than walking the streets. Now twenty-eight and in law school at Howard University, she says she still posts online ads “every now and then if I need a quick coin for a bill.”
At first, she says, her mother had a hard time with her daughter’s sexuality and how she makes ends meet. But just last year, her mother, who is no longer married to the Marine, told Kimora how proud she was of her. As she relates this anecdote, Kimora starts to cry, and Tasha, who is sitting next to her, rubs her arm with genuine concern. Kimora smiles gratefully through her tears. “[My mother] said, ‘You are my heroine for being able to live your life the way you want to,’ ” Kimora says. “That made me feel so good.”
Just as sex work can be an avenue for some women to take control in a situation where they had none, some sex workers and psychologists see it as a way to triumph over tragedy. That’s certainly how Maddy Colette, the high-end escort from North Carolina, frames it.
When Maddy was seventeen and on a vacation trip to Costa Rica with her mother, she was violently raped and left for dead. “My Mom had to call hospitals to find me,” she says. She recovered physically but turned to drugs to escape from the trauma and ended up being expelled from school in North Carolina. At the age of eighteen, Maddy went to live in Spain, and that’s where she began working as an escort.
“My Spanish clients were paying me thousands of euros and it was very empowering,” she says. They gave me extravagant gifts, took me out to the opera. That feeling of being in control helped me heal.” She acknowledges, however, that her rape experience plays into how she views sexual relationships. “That event helped me separate the physical from the emotional,” she says. “In my personal life, I can have tremendous emotional intimacy.”
Maddy says she first started thinking about sex work at the age of thirteen after reading a science fiction book by Jacqueline Carey about a fantasy world in which being a courtesan was a highly respected profession. “I started reading it before it was confiscated by my mother, who gave me a stern lecture about my book preferences,” she says, grinning wickedly. “That was my first realization that I saw relationships differently than other people do. I’m open to a serious relationship, but I will never be monogamous.”
A year after Maddy moved to Spain, she met another American woman on the Metro who was an escort. The older woman introduced her to a high-end escort service that catered to men in the upper echelons of society. “This is an acceptable aspect of society there,” she says. “It’s acceptable for men to bring escorts to cotillion dances, opera, art events, and social gatherings. So it ends up being more about companionship than sex.”
Being a sex worker is not illegal in Spain, although it’s a crime to sell someone else. As a result, there’s less exploitation of women than there is in the United States. Spanish escort agencies are very careful not to dominate or exploit anyone; they just take care of the bookings, Maddy says.
Maddy doesn’t see herself as a victim. She says she remains in charge of every interaction and has never experienced violence from a client. “You have to re-educate some clients,” she says. “Because of the things they see or hear, they do things they shouldn’t — like spitting on a woman. It’s really common in pornography, and it’s disgusting.”
The few times that clients have spit on her, Maddy stopped what she was doing and pulled away. “I said, ‘I’m going to go clean up now. This doesn’t work for me,’ ” she says. “I have very strong boundaries. My risk of HIV is lower than a woman in a monogamous relationship because I insist on condoms for every sexual encounter.”
Julie Moya has a similar view. “I see prostitution as a way of getting back control over your body,” she says. “Some women who’ve been molested become totally against sex, but other women like [sex work] because it gives them control over sex.” In the course of a sexual transaction, Julie says, “We’re the powerful ones.”
That’s precisely what some sexuality researchers have found. The late John Money, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who studied sex offenders, developed a theory to explain individuals’ divergent and sometimes deviant sexual fantasies and practices. Money coined the term “lovemaps” to describe the mental template of sexual desires that is stamped on all of us in childhood. In his 1986 book, Lovemaps, Money described how adults can “vandalize” children’s sexual development by punishing them for innocent childhood play or by abusing them. He argued that when a vandalized lovemap tries to heal itself, it sometimes becomes skewed and distorted. For example, when young boys are humiliated or excessively punished for early sexual behavior (including cross-dressing), their mortification is transported into erotic arousal as a way of “triumphing over tragedy,” Money says. And that can produce fetishes such as the desire to cross-dress or be tied up and spanked. Harsh sexual abuse in childhood can produce more dangerously distorted lovemaps or paraphilias, such as the desire to kill women and have sex with their dead bodies. According to Money, this theory also explains why some boys who have been sexually abused as children grow up to be men who become aroused when they sexually abuse young boys or girls.
Boys are more vulnerable to what he calls “developmental lovemap disabilities” than girls are, Money says, perhaps because boys are more dependent on visual imagery for arousal. Since lovemaps are shaped by input from the social environment, he hypothesizes, boys’ greater dependence on visual input may explain why they experience a greater variety of what he calls “paraphilic disruptions.”36 Money also notes that just as boys are more likely than girls to experience developmental delays and reading disabilities, so too are they more likely to develop distorted lovemaps.37 Females, however, are not immune. Money notes that the vandalism of lovemaps in girls can le
ad to either a lifetime of frigidity (not enjoying sex) or, in some cases, to a desire or compulsion to have sex with multiple partners.38
Money argues that when a society endorses (instead of punishing) early erotic play in children, normal lovemaps predominate and paraphilias are rare. Rather than criminalize commercial sex or condemn pornography, he says, one way to minimize deviant sexual behaviors would be to teach children about sex and discuss its positive moral benefits in appropriate relationships. Ironically, he uses the example of how the Catholic Church, which has fostered such a distorted view of sexual intimacy over the centuries, teaches young children about death and crucifixion: “Millions of children learn in explicit detail, with vividly realistic models and pictures, how to perform a crucifixion. They learn also the moral principle involved, and they do not play crucifixion games with their dolls and playmates.”39
Some health professionals argue that commercial sex provides an important outlet in a society where distorted lovemaps and fetishes exist but often cannot be acted out in the marital bed. And indeed, many sex workers feel they are providing a valuable service to clients who have unhealthy or unusual sexual impulses. “Sex work can be really preventative of child sexual abuse — clients can indulge their fantasies with us rather than with their children,” says Maddy Colette during lunch at the Desiree Alliance conference.
Commercial sex can also provide an outlet for men who might not get laid otherwise. Jillian had one such client, a mentally challenged man in his forties who worked in a candle factory in western Massachusetts. He was “sweet, consistent, and predictable, despite his odd, close-smelling room and his standard of hygiene,” she recalls. “I feel as if I’m performing a service when I have sex with him.”
Many sex workers describe what they do in much the same terms. Elle St. Claire, the escort who does live web-cam shows in Massachusetts, compares herself to a therapist, even an educator. “A true professional fills the gaps of every other professional out there,” she says. “Even a sex therapist has certain guidelines they can’t cross. I have a lot of clients who ask me a lot of questions and I answer them openly. It’s my job to make sure people have a safe and healthy erotic experience.”
Elle and Jillian belong to an informal network of sex workers in western Massachusetts who share a bad-client list, and Elle contacted me after Jillian spread the word on a private listserv that I was interested in talking to sex workers. After we spoke on the phone, Elle emailed me the link to her website, which featured photos of her posing seductively in various states of undress. But when I met Elle St. Claire (her stage name) for the first time at a restaurant near where she lives, I was shocked to discover that, anatomically, she is a man.
On that warm September evening, Elle is wearing high heels and a short, tight-fitting black leather dress with spaghetti straps that reveal broad shoulders and long, toned legs. A bracelet tattoo circles one of her muscled upper arms, and Elle’s hair is long and dyed red, dark roots visible at the part. She has arrived with Jessica, whom she introduces as her fiancée, a much shorter, curvier woman with an angelic-looking face framed by blond curly ringlets. Jessica is wearing a very short ruffled skirt and a short-sleeved blouse with a plunging neckline that shows off her ample breasts to advantage.
When the maître d’ escorts us up the stairs to the dining room, he attempts to seat us at a separate table near the bar, just underneath a noisy television screen. I ask for a booth, and he darts a quick look at the three of us but in the end obliges. As we seat ourselves, I notice that the people in the booth behind us are staring. A group of four people who are seated at the table next to us a little later also can’t seem to stop ogling. When Jessica gets up to have a smoke, she walks right by their table and says loudly, “We’re married, you know.”
When I tell Elle I thought she was a woman, she giggles — a high-pitched, oddly discordant rasp that contrasts with her deeper speaking voice. “I make that clear on my website,” she says. “I also put it in the ad [on Craigslist]. Sometimes people show up and they say they didn’t know, even though it’s in the ad. If they’re not comfortable with that, I make light of it and I say I’m not offended. I say, ‘If you’re interested in a woman, you can see Jessica.’ ”
Jessica is a former erotic dancer who has performed in several slasher movies — “I’m very good at screaming,” she says at one point. She also does sex work.
Both Elle and Jessica say they were never molested as children. Elle (whose name at birth was Richard) had a fairly typical working-class childhood. His father, a first-generation Irish American who served in the Korean War, was an alcoholic, and Richard’s parents divorced when he was eight. His mother eventually remarried, and Richard became captain of the football team and class president at a private all-boys Catholic school in Massachusetts. He was also a gifted dancer and musician (he played the saxophone), and in his senior year, he was accepted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. But he couldn’t afford the tuition, and his stepfather refused to sign a waiver so that Richard could obtain financial aid. So after winning a coveted slot with the popular singing and dancing troupe, Up with People, he decided to tour with them instead. It was while he was on a world tour with Up the People that Richard got an inkling of his true identity.
“We were walking around the red-light district in Amsterdam and knocked on some doors, and the shade went up and I went in,” Elle recalls. “And it was like, wow. The penis was flopping around and the tits were flapping. When I saw my first transsexual in Amsterdam, my first reaction was that it is so hot, and then I realized I’m not sexually attracted to this person, I am this person.”
Richard decided to come out as a transsexual in 1994, even though he was married by then and the father of two young boys. His wife kicked him out of the house and told everyone she knew that her husband was a transsexual, ruining his career in real estate. “Within twelve hours, I found that the life I had built was gone,” Elle says. She changed her name legally to a woman’s name (she asked that her legal name not be identified) and began driving a cab. Nine months later she received custody of the boys after their mother had a breakdown, was confined to a psychiatric hospital, and was ruled an unfit parent.
In 1996, Elle decided to physically change her body to match how she felt inside. “I’m non-op [meaning no surgery],” she says. “I chose hormones. I like to be natural.”
Elle is dressed more casually the second time we get together, at the white-shingled duplex she and Jessica are renting in Holyoke, a former mill town in western Massachusetts. Surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence, the three-story house sits on a side street in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood a few blocks from downtown. Elle and Jessica live on the ground floor, record their live web-cam performances on the second floor, and meet with clients on the third floor. Elle, who is thirty-nine, greets me at the door in black pants and a green ribbed sweater that sets off her striking green eyes. Her dark roots are even more obvious this afternoon, but her long nails are beautifully manicured with purple polish and white stars on the tips.
When I ask how she became a sex worker, Elle explains that she started out in the industry as an entertainer, producing and starring in pornographic films about bondage, dominance, and submission. Her film production work eventually led her into sex work in the late 1990s.
“After a film was released, I would begin getting emails,” she says. “They would say, ‘Are you the Elle St. Claire I saw in this film?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes,’ and they’d say, ‘Well, I’m going to be traveling through your area, I’d like to spend a little time with you.’ ”
Elle chain-smokes Marlboro cigarettes as we talk. She says she smokes a pack a day, and she lights up within a few minutes of my arrival. Our conversation eventually circles back to her philosophy about the importance of sex work. “There’s a need in society for educated providers. [Sex work] is a healthy release for people who don’t feel comfortable getting help any other way,” she says. “This is why y
ou have sexual predators and stalkers. Unhealthy sexuality manifests itself in all of those crimes.”
Echoing many other sex workers, Elle says that people don’t hire a prostitute just for the sex. “They share their deepest secrets, their deepest fantasies with me,” she says. “They ask for advice. People contact me for 101 reasons, and one of them is information about their own sexual identities.”
Elle says she makes referrals to counselors when she sees clients with serious psychological issues. “Maybe they were raped as a child and they have a lot of emotional issues, so my next question is, ‘It sounds like you haven’t dealt with that issue. You’re trying to deal with that issue by covering it up with sex, which is not healthy.’ So then I ask them — I know some really good counselors — ‘Do you want a referral so you can work on those issues?’ ”
Most of Elle’s clients, of course, are not deviants; they simply want some variation or excitement in their sex lives. For many of the reasons outlined by John Money in Lovemaps, sex is not always about romance or straightforward love. As Alain de Botton observed in his 2012 book, How to Think More about Sex, “[Sex] is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.”40
As a longtime sex worker, Elle understands that better than most people. “Some people like spanking, but they won’t come out and tell anybody they like spanking,” she says, holding her cigarette neatly between two long manicured fingers. “They couldn’t begin to address that with their wife, so they hire a provider.”
This afternoon, Elle explains that she has a 1:30 p.m. appointment with a regular client, a doctor in his midforties who Elle says is happily married with a family. For this man, spending time with a transsexual is a way of relaxing and disappearing from his responsibilities, his public persona. “He works in a crisis center, and a lot of the patients are children. It can be heart wrenching, and he needs to escape,” Elle explains. “He gives me a call and hires me for an hour or so and really just breathes.”