Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

  This has been one of the foundational contributions of sex worker feminists to feminist discourse and activism: challenging whore stigma in the name of all those who live under it. There’s an echo of this in the popularization of whore stigma in a milder form as outrage at “slut shaming.” What is lost, however, in moving from whore stigma to slut shaming is the centrality of the people most harmed by this form of discrimination.

  There is also an alarming air, in some feminists’ responses to slut shaming, of assumed distance, that the fault in slut shaming is a sorting error: No, she is certainly not a “slut”! This preserves the slut as contemptible rather than focusing on those who attack women who violate compulsory virtue—for being too loud, too much, too opinionated, too black, too queer. Slut may seem to broaden the tent of those affected, but it makes the whore invisible. Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and the impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others. If woman is other, whore is the other’s other.

  I’m thinking here of the first time I saw a SlutWalk protest, in Las Vegas in the summer of 2006, during the century’s first national gathering of sex workers activists. SlutWalk hadn’t been invented yet. It would be another four years before Toronto police officer Michael Sanguinetti explained to a group of university women, with the kind of contempt not unfamiliar to sex workers, that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” SlutWalk, in its way, was also a reaction to police harassment, though one raised by women who presumed, unlike the prostitutes of San Francisco and London, that the police would listen to them in the first place.

  It should not be surprising that the first vocal critics of SlutWalk were women of color and women in the sex trade. Reading the SlutWalk rallying cry, writes Brittney Cooper of Crunk Feminist Collective:

  I was struck by the righteous indignation these women had over being called slut. Although plenty of Black women have been called “slut,” I believe Black women’s histories are different, in that Black female sexuality has always been understood from without to be deviant, hyper, and excessive.

  For some white women, slut transgresses a boundary they’ve never imagined crossing. Women of color, working-class women, queer women: They were never presumed to have that boundary to begin with.

  In Vegas, on the sex workers’ own walk, protesters dressed in the kinds of costumes we now associate with SlutWalk—fishnets, leather and PVC corset tops, shiny hot pants, tall boots, and platform heels—with wild hair and hand-painted signs and slogans on their chests and stomachs (another homage to an older feminist practice: to riot grrrl, or at least to the photographs that had circulated of riot grrrl, few of the protesters having been around to be riot grrrls themselves). Marching from casino to casino, sex workers took over the carefully sculpted Vegas sidewalks, passing out fliers to tourists and to the few sex workers who were also out that night although, since they were working, attired far more conservatively. Dressed and brazenly conducting themselves as they never could if they were actually working the tables and lounges for clients, the protesters were more shocking to the men employed by the casinos and hotels to surveil, who came and went, and at Caesars, despite the intervention of a lawyer from the ACLU who had tagged along with the march, were hustled out. It’s not that they were whores, as clearly whores are permitted in Vegas casinos. It’s how the space they took up put whoring in the public’s face; that’s why they were removed.

  At the Wynn, on my way up to a party following the sex work conference a few nights before, with activist and artist Sadie Lune and an outreach worker from St. James Infirmary, a sex worker health clinic, an elevator attendant stopped us, asking if we were there for “a party.” “We are,” we said, “but …” and he began to explain, kindly, that if we had called ahead he could have made arrangements for us to be taken up in the VIP elevator. “No, no, we’re not here for,” one of us started to explain, “that kind of party …” which then would have to be followed up with, “… not that there’s anything wrong with that”—and not that he was wrong about us—“but …” so instead we just left it there, and went up the elevator meant for everyone but the whores.

  “What it was like and what it does to you.”

  When the public is groomed to expect a poor, suffering whore, it’s appreciable why some sex workers who do come out take pains to provide a counternarrative: to never look like a prostitute. They are asked only to talk about how empowering it all was or about how much of a survivor they are. They have to convince their audiences how much they always had their shit together, how they do now—how they are not like those other girls, whoever they are.

  Sometimes, like when calling out “slut shaming” only to then shame sluts, this undermines solidarity. This is just rearranging the pecking order of sex and gender outcasts rather than refusing to order ourselves in the first place. There’s a risk of reinventing the virgin/whore hierarchy within sex work, even when—to everyone else—all of us could still be whores.

  Telling the truth can exact collective costs. When each sex worker’s story carries with it the demands of correcting this whole historic record, each comes preopposed. “It’s not just Pretty Woman!” someone will complain, as if anyone but a few movie PR people ever claimed that. “Well,” they go on, “they’re not all Happy Hookers!” but neither was the real-life happy hooker. Read Xaviera Hollander’s 1972 bestseller, and you won’t set foot in her brothel without first being led through shabby and unsatisfying apartments and relationships and nasty men posing as nasty cops conspiring to stalk and extort the author. The people most responsible for keeping the myth of the happy hooker alive are in fact those who are so convinced of their misery.

  Remember also the teacher who appeared on the cover of the New York Post in late 2010, who was photographed without her knowledge on her way to work. Along with the pictures the Post dubbed her “the hooker teacher,” shaming her for publishing an essay criticizing the campaign to shutdown Craigslist’s sex work ads and making reference to her previous work as an escort. She hadn’t always enjoyed her job, she wrote, but it had been her job, and Craigslist had been her way to have that job on more of her own terms. The teacher, Melissa Petro, had never told her students she was a sex worker, or discussed sex work in her classroom. There had never been complaints about her performance. It was the Post photos and the headlines that got her “reassigned to administrative duties” and ultimately dismissed from her job.

  You would think that the kinds of women’s groups who lobby for the abolition of sex work would have risen to Melissa Petro’s defense. She had talked openly and honestly about her past, including the times it felt as if escorting damaged her sense of self. She had left sex work for a low-paying job as a teacher, moving on with her life. But she had also written about why shutting down Craigslist’s Erotic Services section could be harmful for sex workers. Those same anti–sex work women’s groups that normally might defend a woman wrongly fired from her job were spearheading the campaign to close Erotic Services, so they were silent.

  As a whore regarded by the public, there is no right way to be a victim.

  A few months after the Post had moved on from Melissa Petro’s story, and while she was still fighting to find another job in the wake of the coverage, I was standing on the edge of a parking lot on Gilgo Beach on Long Island, NY. The family members of women whose bodies had been found there had organized a press conference marking the discovery of another body: the remains of Shannan Gilbert. Ten bodies had been found by now, five of them women who had once used Craigslist or Backpage and had gone missing in the course of seeing customers. The families of the other missing women—Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and Amber Lynn Costello—had met one another as their missing daughters’ and sisters’ stories hit the press. They shared tips and information with each other. They started a Facebook page to draw out more leads, to ke
ep the story alive.

  Maybe there were two dozen people there that day, counting the families, a lawyer, supporters, and the news crews. There was no way of knowing from watching the video report later how many of us were actually there. The Gilbert family clustered together in front of the microphones. The cameras were a good distance away. The family spoke more to the people who weren’t there than to those of us who were, shivering in the winter wind lashing at the shoreline. They wept and vowed to find out the truth, begged people with information to come forward, offered a reward, speculated about when the FBI might get involved—which they didn’t, and as far as anyone knows, they still haven’t.

  “I can’t imagine doing this over and over,” I told Audacia Ray, who runs a media advocacy organization for and by sex workers called the Red Umbrella Project, who had driven a group of us out there. We met in 2004, after exchanging comments on each other’s blogs. Now we were living in the same city and were both retired from sex work, and I was reporting and Dacia was there to help the families, if they wanted it, through talking to the press. Doing this each time they find a body, crying for all these cameras. It was like their currency. It’s what they’ve got left.

  Dacia told me that, in a way, it was worse than that. There weren’t as many cameras today as there were the last time.

  8

  The Other Women

  When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

  —Julie Burchill, Damaged Goods (1989)

  For the study, they recruited young women to wear bikinis. To document the effects of what they call “self-objectification,” first, they asked the women to complete a set of math problems. Another group of women wearing sweaters were given the same problem set. Observing that some of the young women had a harder time with the math while wearing less clothing (and perhaps anticipating a researcher would soon return with yet more questions) researchers concluded that self-objectification was harmful to women. The American Psychological Association offered these results as part of a larger 2007 report, presented as evidence that “thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity.” The APA’s interpretation was greeted by some women’s groups as welcome proof—but of what? That math is real work, whereas trying on bikinis is stressful? Of no scientific interest, when evaluating nudity’s impact on self-esteem are all the actual women who perform essential feats of accounting while wearing G-strings, nightly. (Not—please—to incite a rush on strip clubs for such research.)

  It’s not an accident that even the arithmetic of sex workers is suspect. They are at once blamed for contributing to the objectification of women through being objectified themselves and, through their occupation, for sexualizing all women, and for profit. Writer Pamela Paul deemed this phenomenon “pornification,” one in which the conventions of commercial sex are polluting all sexual relations. This is how women are transformed into “female chauvinist pigs,” according to journalist Ariel Levy. If women participate in any form of sexual exhibitionism, they aren’t pursuing their own fantasies but just playing into men’s hands, stoking demand for this kind of “faking it,” stimulating demand for whores while at the same time rendering them redundant by driving all women to whorishness. One woman’s ruin is made all women’s ruin.

  For opponents of sexualization, the danger is not only that a woman will be reduced to a sexual being for the enjoyment of others, but that if a woman is sexualized, it obliterates her as a real woman—that is, it is a violence that renders her a lesser woman, a whore. At the root of the opposition to sexualization is the essential belief that for a woman to be thought of as a whore is so profoundly damaging that it constitutes a challenge to one’s real womanhood.

  This is where concerns about the sexualization of women become inseparable from those conventional ideas about their sexual value, even though sexualization’s critics claim to stand against the latter. “Thinking about the body” in a way the APA described as “sexual” in its report is what they claim “disrupted mental capacity.” Rather than discourage young women from “thinking about the body” sexually, perhaps we should ask why how one feels about one’s body in a bikini is an acceptable measure for evaluating any young woman’s thoughts about her body and her sexuality, or why—again—the body is coded as the source of our self-worth. Developing women’s sense of self-worth and sexuality isn’t really the point of disrupting sexualization. “Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification,” the researchers caution, “is that it fragments consciousness.” Forget embracing your desires, girls; just swap the bikini for a sweater and the psychic wounds of patriarchy will be healed.

  Confusing a representation of sex with sex itself is what sexualization’s critics are supposed to stand against. These concerns about sexualization, focused as they are on image and fantasy, ignore the labor involved in performing sexual fantasy, the skills that enable sex workers to perform a fantasy without living it. Their worries begin to sound like a panic, a fear that the wrong kinds of sexual looks and wants must be confined or else all women may be at risk.

  This isn’t to deny that objectification and sexualization exist; this is to protest the narrowness of this focus, its potential to recast women as pure and blank slates who risk contamination from the wrong fantasies, the wrong desires. Resisting sexualization doesn’t necessarily translate into greater sexual agency for women, and without a complementary demand for women’s freedom, sexual and otherwise, this resistance can become a platform to defend women’s absence from sexuality. In insisting that some representations of sexuality are less real (or more harmful, since these are used interchangeably) than others, boundaries between women, between desires, between classes of women and our labor are reinforced.

  Porn and stripping get the rap for driving sexualization, though critiques of them only go as far as representations of our labor—the pole, the thong, the waxed pussy—and not to our labor itself, not to our lives. Critics get close to the truth: Acting as if we share our customers’ desires is the work of sex work. But that’s not the same as allowing our customers to define our sexuality. When critics do venture outside the representational, it’s to insist that sex workers are victims of sexualization, that they are responsible for the sexualization of all women. This is a return to older claims that sex workers suffer from “false consciousness,” only now with a dash of social science and perhaps in tinier underwear than was available to the second wave.

  To see off-the-clock sex workers as whole, as people who aren’t just here to fuck, would defy sexualization. But that’s not the role they’re permitted, especially by the women who seek to save them.

  Pornographic Feeling

  Fears of sexualization and pornification are nothing new, and as in earlier waves of contempt for porn’s gaze, the fears quickly becomes contempt for people in the sex trade. The late seventies and early eighties were the heyday of Women Against Pornography (WAP)—a backlash, in many ways, to the increased visibility of sex workers in the women’s movement. Just a few years after the National Organization for Women invited her to present a slide show on women and masturbation in 1973, artist and sex educator Betty Dodson participated in one of WAP’s group meetings in New York; she later wrote that it was impossible to imagine the NOW slide show happening in the climate produced by WAP. At the WAP event, woman after woman went to the podium and recounted stories of how porn had injured her. “Each speaker’s words and tears were firing up the room into a unified rage,” Dodson writes in her essay “Porn Wars” in The Feminist Porn Book.

  Rather than egalitarian consciousness-raising, the sharing of stories took on an air of sentimental performance. “An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic,” writes Dodson. “With her rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual abuse,” which involved her father using what the woman called “disgusting, filthy pictures” and her being made to perform
an “unnatural act.” Dodson remembers, “The whole room was emotionally whipped up into a rage with their own private images of child rape, while at the same time, reveling in the awfulness of it.” If this is how porn’s relationship to women is understood, how is any woman who dissents—let alone one who has modeled for pictures—supposed to speak for herself without speaking against the violation of this child? How are you to say that the description of the child’s violation by a woman on a stage itself mimes a pornographic revelation? How is this group of women’s consumption of the evil of pornography in a group exhibition all that different from the men seated in a Times Square theater having their own communal experience of porn?

  There is a sameness here to the communal release of feeling, the shaking of the body whether consumed by sobs or ejaculations: This is what film theorist Linda Williams saw in her analysis of porn films and “weepies”—chick flicks. To be in these rooms of women raging against pornography is to give in to the hawker’s sidewalk promise of “hardcore” relief. The women whose relationship to pornography has never included participating in it are only incidentally concerned with the actual women in it. Though they claim some relationship to the women in pornography, it’s one only to pictures of their bodies, to these bodies as they are made occupants of the viewers’ own imagination. The passionate antiporn campaigner has this much in common with the avid porn consumer.