There was one group of people who did perform unwaged work in the dungeon: the many male “houseboys” who would telephone, at least once each day, to ask to come and clean. The women who worked in the dungeon knew that managing these men’s slave fantasies was itself a form of work, but when they could just turn them loose on the dishes, the worst they would have to do is check later to see if anything untoward had happened to a glass or fork. It was never meant as a commentary on the years of feminists’ arguing over the value of housework, but it still could feel deeply gratifying that the houseboys were made to understand their only reward would be the empty sink.
This—the notes, the bills, the dishes—is the look inside a dungeon you’ll get when you work there, not when you’re paying for it.
On an opposite coast, there was the college town escort agency “run” by R., who really was just the one who paid for the ad in the back of the paper each week and the mobile phone that customers would call after seeing the ad. The women who shared the ad and phone line paid R. a share of each half-hour or hour appointment they got through the ad, which meant they didn’t need to be around all the time to pick up the phone or give any information about themselves to the newspaper that ran the ad. They just showed up at the motel room or house where they’d meet their customers. Every once in a while a woman would call the phone number, wanting to work with them, and R. would meet with them in a coffee shop. If they decided to work together, she’d train them on all of this. Some of the women took turns answering the phone and booking appointments, and after they learned how to manage that, they’d end up going off on their own.
And there was M., who modeled for a few “shemale” Web sites. This was not a term she used to describe herself, but she made most of her money escorting men who were fans of those sites to sex parties held in clubs and other semiprivate venues—whether or not they had sex, which they did sometimes. The Web sites were ways to advertise herself as a date for hire without having to pay to be featured in online escort ad directories, and when the customers would e-mail her as fans, they could make plans to meet up. M. would make it clear that she would be paid for their meeting as well. A friend of hers was busted when an undercover cop contacted her through an overt online escort ad, made an appointment, and then arrested her in her own apartment, also taking her phone and her laptop. M. wasn’t as fearful of having an encounter with police at the club.
And there was C., who ran a porn site out of the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. In addition to modeling for her own porn, she also recruited others from the online forums she posted in, or through friends who knew what she did for a living. When a model came to C.’s apartment to shoot, the only contact she’d have with anyone associated with the porn site was C., who also acted as photographer. C.’s work computer was her personal computer; her workplace was her living room—a couch, a photo backdrop, her DVDs, and her cats. Sometimes she ran out of money to pay for models and would just shoot herself until more memberships came in. Sometimes fans would ask her to visit them in other cities and pay for her to fly out and shoot models there. The money could be unpredictable. She used to work in a strip club to supplement it.
Though these are four of the most visible forms of sex work—porn, stripping, domination, and escorting—and each offers a distinct environment, it’s not uncommon for workers to draw their incomes from more than one. It’s about more than maximizing their earning potential; it’s also a way to negotiate the varying degrees of exposure and surveillance that come with each venue. For every escort who would never give up her privacy by working in a strip club, chancing that someone she knew would come in, there’s a stripper who would never give up her privacy by working in porn or having her image posted online, and there’s a porn performer who would never have sex for money outside the context of a porn shoot.
These are also only anecdotes drawn from sex workers I’ve met and worked with over the last ten years, in this first decade of the twenty-first century, and in the United States. Each involves some work online and offline. Each caters to customers in a specific way, and with its own conventions: Web sites sell photo sets and memberships; escort services set up appointments; clubs charge entrance fees and sell drinks; and performers sell stage shows and private dances. Each sell takes its own skills, has its own hustle, its own downsides.
However, as distinct as the work and their environments may be, there is a political usefulness in calling all of this sex work, while also insisting that it varies considerably over time and place. The portrait of street-level prostitution, for example, as it’s on display in media accounts—a woman, most often a woman of color, standing in a short skirt and leaning into a car or pacing toward one—is a powerful yet lazily constructed composite. As the lead character of the prostitute imaginary, she becomes a stand-in for all sex workers, a reduction of their work and lives to one fantasy of a body and its particular and limited performance for public consumption. Sex workers’ bodies are rarely presented or understood as much more than interchangeable symbols—for urban decay, for misogyny, for exploitation—even when propped up so by those who claim some sympathy, who want to question stereotypes, who want to “help.”
The character isn’t even representative of all the street-soliciting sex workers she stands in for. When considering the practice of street-based sex work, sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein observes, “It is important to recognize the extent to which the practices and meanings of sexual labor varied in the different prostitution strolls,” even in the same city. Some of this sex work can be more accurately described as trade or barter, Bernstein writes, “self-organized, occasional exchanges that generally took place within women’s own homes and communities.” She distinguishes this from “the sexual labor of ‘career’ streetwalkers,” in which “commercial sexual exchange was conceptualized as ‘work’ that resided in the public display of the body.” You find this echoed in the research of Chicago youth involved in the sex trade conducted by the grassroots group Young Women’s Empowerment Project. They’ve adopted the descriptor “sex trades and street economies” to recognize that, for their community, trading sex for what they need to survive isn’t necessarily understood as their “work,” and that it occurs alongside other informal labor, such as hair braiding or babysitting.
The sex industry is varied and porous throughout. Consider its other most visible outpost in America: the legal brothels of rural Nevada in the few counties where prostitution was never fully criminalized, and where strict regulation and isolation are employed to make it tolerable to the public. There, according to a recent study conducted by Brents, Jackson, and Hausbeck and published in The State of Sex, one third of brothel workers had never done any other kind of sex work before, but rather came to it directly from “non-sexual service work.” Three quarters of those they interviewed move between “straight work” and sex work. “Selling sex,” they write, “is often one form of labor among a variety of jobs.”
When we say that sex work is service work, we don’t say that just to sanitize or elevate the status of sex workers, but also to make plain that the same workers are performing sex work and nonsexual service work. In her study of Rust Belt strippers published in Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective, Susan Dewey observed that the vast majority of the dancers—all but one—at one club in upstate New York had worked outside the sex industry, and “many had left intermittently for low-wage, service-sector work elsewhere before returning with the recognition that they preferred the topless bar with its possibility of periodic windfalls from customers.” For the dancers who Dewey surveyed, it was the work outside of the sex industry that was “exploitative, exclusionary, and without hope for social mobility or financial stability.”
Opponents, from the European Women’s Lobby to reactionary feminist bloggers, like to claim that sex workers insist it is “a job like any other,” but sex workers do not make this claim—unless by this anti–sex work activ
ists agree with sex workers that the conditions under which sexual services are offered can be as unstable and undesirable as those cutting cuticles, giving colonics, or diapering someone else’s babies.
But that’s not what sex work opponents are referring to when they snap back with a phrase such as “a job like any other.” When they say “jobs” they don’t mean those informal service jobs, but their more elevated labor administering social projects, conducting research, and lobbying. Rescuing sex workers is good work for them. As feminist anarchist Emma Goldman noted in 1910, the prostitution panic “will help to create a few more fat political jobs—parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives, and so forth.” The loss of sex workers’ income was their gain.
Opponents even take our jobs when we win. Socialist feminist activist and antiracist campaigner Selma James, in her essay “Hookers in the House of the Lord,” documents the closure of a successful grassroots sex workers’ legal project in London in the eighties, so “feminist lawyers and women from the anti-porn lobby” could create their own without having to actually employ the sex workers who started this advocacy. “What we are witnessing before our very eyes is the process whereby women’s struggle is hidden from history and transformed into an industry,” James writes, “jobs for the girls.”
The message of anti–sex work feminists is, It’s the women working against sex work who are the real hard workers, shattering glass ceilings and elevating womanhood, while the tramps loll about down below. As political theorist Kathi Weeks notes, to call a woman a tramp is to judge the value of a woman’s sexuality and labor. Tramps, she writes in The Problem with Work, are “potentially dangerous figures that could, unless successfully othered, call into question the supposedly indisputable benefits of work”—and home and family, and women’s commitment to all of it. When sex workers are “rescued” by anti–sex work reformers, they are being disciplined, set back into their right role as good women. This isn’t just the province of large NGOs; one-woman rescue missions have popped up online and in megachurches, projects that claim to support themselves through the sale of candles and jewelry made by rescued sex workers. These jobs may technically exist outside the sex industry, but without a supply of rescued workers, there would be no cheap labor, no candles—and there would be no projects for the rescuers to direct.
These demands on sex workers’ labor, while it is simultaneously devalued, is why we still insist that sex work is work. But this should not be confused with uncritical sentiment, as if sex work is only work if it’s “good” work, if we love to do it. Being expected to perform affection for our jobs might feel familiar to sex workers—management at the unionized peep show the Lusty Lady tried to insert language in their contract that the job was meant to be “fun,” which the dancers refused to accept. To insist that sex workers only deserve rights at work if they have fun, if they love it, if they feel empowered by it is exactly backward. It’s a demand that ensures they never will.
6
The Peephole
BIG BROTHEL IS WATCHING YOU
—parody ad accompanying Margo St. James’s
redacted FBI file printed in COYOTE Howls (1977)
Klute is Jane Fonda’s star turn as a call girl, for which she won an Oscar, and all throughout it she’s radiant—in a backless, silver-mirrored dress, in her shag, in a swingers’ cocktail lounge. Before we are allowed to see her we are introduced to her voice, surreptitiously recorded by an unknown man. The recording, played first with the opening credits, is a one-sided solicitation. She assures us we are going to have a good time. We listen to her voice, and the tape loop spins; we’re overhearing her private conversations with a customer. We might think we know something, but all that we learn is that the way to know a call girl is when she doesn’t know we are listening. An alternative would require her participation, or her consent.
This is the way that we come to know a sex worker, not only in Klute but in other prostitute media, from Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to the columns of Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. We know her through the author’s interpretation of the words and poses she chooses to represent herself with to her clientele. The novelist’s and reporter’s and researcher’s eyes graze over whatever window, physical or digital, in which she leans. Aside from an origin story of her life “before,” this is where the exposition will be confined: the red light, the bed, the men, the money. Everything else is out of frame. This is her everything—until she turns her back on it.
It’s how Klute introduces us to this style of reportage, however limited, that we should receive it: as a single moment in one woman’s life, captured on tape, and stuck on repeat.
Surveillance is a way of knowing sex workers that unites the opportunity for voyeurism with the monitoring and data collection performed by law enforcement, by social service providers, or by researchers. Even under surveillance, sex workers’ own words aren’t to be trusted without the mediation of those who are almost always regarded as superior outside experts. As motivation, such surveillance isn’t meant to expand the public knowledge of the lives of sex workers; it’s to investigate some form of harm to the public that’s believed to originate with them.
AIDS occasioned one such investigation, but not before sex workers were scapegoated as “vectors of disease” who—it was claimed, with misunderstood evidence—would endanger the public; that is, the families of men who paid for sex. “ ‘The Prostitute Study,’ ” writes historian Melinda Chateauvert in Sex Workers Unite, “didn’t require participants to be sex workers, and most of the 180 women who volunteered for it had never done sex work.” The 1986 study didn’t attempt to trace transmission but rather the prevalence of the virus in women. It took on a life of its own in the press and public imagination, she adds, and “when male AIDS researchers heard about the study to track the virus in women, they assumed the subjects were prostitutes.” This and an earlier Walter Reed study of ten soldiers who reported that they contracted HIV after sexual contact with “prostitutes” was mischaracterized as evidence that women—still assumed to be prostitutes—could transmit HIV to men through straight sex. “To Walter Reed doctors, it was obvious that prostitutes were disease vectors,” writes Chateauvert. “They were wrong, but the idea stuck.”
As we have moved from the panic of the period of AIDS crisis to what Sarah Schulman calls the era of “Ongoing AIDS,” the new site of sex work panic is the Internet. New technologies, we are told by the press and politicians, have made new forms of sexual commerce available as never before in history. And as the technological innovations supporting sex work have expanded, they are used to justify new forms of surveillance.
Invisible Women
The prostitute is imagined as an invisible woman, a voiceless woman, a woman concealed even in public, in her nudity—in all her presumed availability. I say “is imagined,” but there are many people who take part in this imagining, who are invested in it. I remember paging through a phone book as a kid, flipping to the “E” section and finding the ads for escorts. No actual women were pictured, nothing explicit. Escorts were revealed with clip art: a woman in a long gown that hung off one shoulder, a white woman with shoulder-length hair, her fingers to her lips. There may have been a moon drawn in the background. There were lipstick prints, another popular graphic element of the time. It was the eighties, and this was the palette the phone book designers had to draw on: No one created clip art just for escorts, so all the images that could signify women or glamour or class were strung together. A careful reader of the lipstick and the bare shoulders against the curls of text, words such as “elite,” “private,” “upscale,” and the perennial “discreet,” could interpret them. They could imagine whatever they want.
Even in full-color ads reproduced nearly infinitely across the Web, the sex worker herself may not be present. There are good reasons: not wanting to be outed and not trusting the publishers to protect the records linking the payment information—lega
l identification, a credit card—with the purchaser. As a result, escort and outcall dancers’ agencies may run stock photos of women who have never even worked for them, and independent escorts and models might select photos that show only specific body parts, particularly as they may relate to their marketing niches: long hair, small breasts, a round ass, toned legs. Some sex workers, particularly those who do it only occasionally, may want to leave their ads on the Internet for only the periods that they are actually working. For the most part, sex workers want to minimize their exposure and preserve their privacy while also earning a living.
When I first saw online sex work ads, I couldn’t believe that the police would allow them to exist. They appeared in many forms: expensively lit glamour photos arranged in slide shows, by outfit or fantasy theme; casual motel-room mirror self-portraits with a few hasty lines of text, a phone number, and clear instructions not to call from a blocked line; elaborate portfolio Web sites listing favorite books, shoes, and dietary restrictions; vague solicitations that had a single, striking photo and an e-mail address.
But of course the cops have an interest in these ads, if not in their creative flourishes: Online ads provide a steady flow of people to target in their vice operations: to monitor sex workers’ activities and set them up for stings. They allow cops to build databases of their working names, photos, mobile phone numbers, locations, services offered, prices, and availability. In some cases police have impersonated customers in order to gain access to sex workers’ private online forums, including databases of dangerous clients. A typical vice patrol still doesn’t make this many sex workers immediately available to police for such systematic surveillance.
Playing the Whore Page 5