Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

  Joe said he couldn’t use me again. But Ruby knew other movie makers. For my next film, a solo, I dressed carefully in a tangerine-colored sheath, which came to mid-thigh, and crotchless beige mesh pantyhose. I thought I might do a strip for the camera.

  But Harry snorted. “A strip? What are you gonna take off? You hardly have anything on. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you. You’re nothin’ special to look at, and I’ve already done everything I can think of.”

  My face burned, but I showed him the crotchless stockings. “Can you do anything with these?”

  “Hmm. Lemme see. Take off your dress.” I did. “Now lie down here.”

  I lay on a pile of pillows, and he wheeled the camera over. “Okay, raise your left leg. . . slowly.” The lights felt hot on my inner thighs. The camera zeroed in on my crotch, my genitals open to the lights, and involuntarily, I clenched my vagina. “Huh?” said Harry. “Do that again.” I clenched it again; open, close, open, close. “How’d ya do that? I never saw anyone do that before,” he said.

  “I don’t know — I’ve always done it.”

  “Hold on. This could be interesting.” He brought the camera closer. “Okay, now, do it again. Slow.” For the next quarter hour, I tightened and loosened, clenched and unclenched those muscles. I’ve always wondered what Harry did with the footage. Cut it in with standard peep show shots? Superimposed the giant vagina on other images? I don’t know. The edges of the no-crotch mesh stockings must have made a provocative frame. “Okay, that’s enough.” I sat up and put on my dress, and he paid me.

  My last two productions were imitation lesbian movies. The first, with Lee, the wife of a friend, was filmed in the living room of a Buena Vista mansion, on a leopard skin sofa and on maroon shag carpet four inches thick. Leaning against satin throw pillows, Lee and I, who disliked each other, stroked one another’s arms, legs, and breasts. This kind of intimate touching would have been fine with Kate or even Ruby, but with Lee, it was unpleasant. She kept watching me with narrowed eyes. We each got forty dollars, however, so I told myself it was tolerable. Lesbian films paid more than the peep shows; maybe some women refused to make them.

  The other was an ersatz lesbian fight film. The deal was arranged by Maureen, a writer and friend of a friend. “I’ll meet you at Ken’s,” she said on the phone. “Take the bus — it’s about forty miles up the coast.”

  “Are you taking the bus?” I asked, thinking maybe we could ride together.

  “Nah — my old man’s taking me. I’m allergic to the bus.”

  “But —” I stopped. She had hung up.

  Like all the movie makers I dealt with, Ken was impersonal, professional, and indifferent to me as an individual. Maureen had worked with him before, so I felt left out. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt,” he told us as we stripped to underpants. “Pretend to scratch, bite, kick. . .but no real scratching. Sometimes chicks get carried away.” He appraised us: Maureen, blonde and statuesque; me, short and dark and sturdy. “Careful,” he told Maureen, “you’re twice her size.”

  We stood around, smoking, saying little, as Ken got the equipment ready. Again the props included thick carpet, throw pillows, leopard skin. “All right, Maureen, grab her and throw her down — gently! Don’t hurt her! Just make it look good. Jane, push her away.” But he didn’t have to tell me. At that first unfair attack, adrenalin poured through me. I easily broke her hold — easily because she wasn’t really trying — and entered enthusiastically into my part.

  She grabbed me; I kicked her away. “Okay, Maureen, pretend you’re scratching her breasts. Good. Jane, you’re gonna bite her knee. Fine. Now Maureen, get your legs around her — you want her in a scissor lock. Jane, push her legs away.”

  “Ow! Not so hard!” Maureen cried.

  “Sorry.” Panting, I lunged for her ample chest.

  “Maureen, you’re gonna pull her hair — not really! Jane, jerk your head away, bite her hand, they like a lotta biting. That’s good. . . No! Don’t hurt her!” I eased my hold. “Okay, scratch her back. Fine. Now wind your legs around her chest. . . that’s good. . . Maureen, push her away. Run your hands up her legs...Good, good.”

  Finally, Ken said, “Enough!” and stopped the camera. Maureen stood up, dusting off her hands. “I don’t know if I could beat her in a real fight,” she told the cameraman. “She’s a real tiger.” I stood there smirking until Maureen went off to get dressed.

  Ken paid us each fifty dollars and asked me if I’d like to do a real fuck movie. “I pay one hundred and fifty; seventy-five each for your and your partner.”

  “I don’t know — do I get to bring my own guy?” He nodded. “I’ll see,” I said, intrigued by the money. That night, I asked a friend, not a lover, if he was interested.

  “That’s a lot of money, but I don’t know if I could get it up for the camera,” he said. I understood that this was a serious question. For a few weeks, whenever I saw him, one of us would mention the subject, usually when we needed money to get high. But talk was one thing. To say, “Okay, let’s do it!” was somehow to cross a critical line. By then, anyway, I had a steady boyfriend who didn’t like the idea of my making skin movies. So the fight with Maureen was my last appearance on film.

  * * *

  I’m not glad I contributed to the pornography industry, although I admit I’m proud that I once did something so inconsistent with my present respectable persona. I’ve read a lot of feminist theory, however, and I feel disloyal when I say that my movie experiences were not brutal and degrading. I can imagine the reaction of someone who works in the business for a living: “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s living in a fool’s world. She just dabbled in the business. She was lucky.”

  That’s probably true. Also, I was armored by social class and education. I could type; I could express myself; I could write. In straight clothes, I could present the image of an educated girl from a middle class family. Without those “coulds” a woman is far more vulnerable.

  Moreover, I managed to stay out of the hard core. Twenty years ago, hard core meant sexual intercourse. I understand that today, intercourse is soft core, and hard core pornography depicts beatings, bondage, mutilation, even murder.

  The last thing I want is for some young woman to read my essay and say, “See? It’s perfectly okay to be a porn model — it sounds like fun.” But does that mean I should keep my story secret, or invent a brutality I didn’t experience?

  Even from my rather mild story, it’s evident that men ran the business for men. Women were only the raw material. The filmmakers set the terms, ordered us around, and decreed what would sell. None of that surprised me. In my experience, men ran everything. I didn’t mind being raw material, because I felt that my core was untouched. It certainly never occurred to me that women could make movies for women’s pleasure.

  I think the way I reacted to being raped, that same year, illuminates the way I felt about the movies. I was raped at three in the morning as I walked through a rough section of San Francisco — at knife point, on the ground in an alley. Afterwards the rapist said, “You just wanted some cock, like I wanted some pussy,” and took off. I couldn’t quite see it that way — I’ll never forget the terror I felt as he followed me for a block and a half, an arm’s length back — but all I did was dust off my miniskirt and go home to bed. I didn’t tell my housemates until the next day.

  They were horrified. Was I all right? Did I want to go to the police, a doctor, the free clinic? “I’m fine, it was nothing,” I said, surprised and a bit indignant that they thought I wasn’t tough enough to ignore a rape. I suppose I believed that taking a rape in stride proved I was hip. If I admitted I was shaken, if I allowed myself to be shaken, someone might suspect that I was hung up. For a woman, being hung up was the ultimate indictment.

  It has taken me twenty years to acknowledge that being used as raw material, being raped, did affect me. In 1967, my hippie ideals told me the real, inner Jane was inviolate. To
day, the grown up woman knows it was Jane that was manhandled, raped, used. That’s a heavy knowledge. I’ll be dealing with it the rest of my life.

  Confessions of a Feminist Porno Star

  Nina Hartley

  “A feminist porno star?” Right, tell me another one, I can hear some feminists saying. I hear a chorus of disbelief, a lot like the two crows in the Disney movie “Dumbo” — “I thought I’d seen everything till I saw an elephant fly.” On the surface, contradictions seem to abound. But one of the most basic tenents of feminism, a tenent with which I was inculcated by the age of ten, was the right to sexual free expression, without being told by society (or men) what was right, wrong, good, or bad. But why porno? Simple — I’m an exhibitionist with a cause: to make sexually graphic (hard core) erotica, and today’s porno is the only game in town. But it’s a game where there is a possibility of the players, over time, getting some of the rules changed.

  As I examine my life, I uncover the myriad influences that led me to conclude that it was perfectly natural for me to choose a career in adult films. I find perfoming in sexually explicit material satisfying on a number of levels. First, it provides a physically and psychically safe environment for me to live out my exhibitionistic fantasies. Secondly, it provides a surprisingly flexible and supportive arena for me to grow in as a performer, both sexually and non-sexually. Thirdly, it provides me with erotic material that I like to watch for my own pleasure. Finally, the medium allows me to explore the theme of celebrating a positive female sexuality — a sexuality that has heretofore been denied us. In choosing my roles and characterizations carefully, I strive to show, always, women who thoroughly enjoy sex and are forceful, self-satisfying and guilt-free without also being neurotic, unhappy or somehow unfulfilled.

  In order to understand why I can be so happily involved in a business that is anathema to so many feminists today, it’s important for me to explain the uniqueness of my early life experiences. My parents were ex-communists, having left the party in 1956, seven years before I was born. My father’s subsequent blacklisting in 1957 cut short a promising career in radio. My mother put her double major in chemistry and statistics to work in a long career for the State Health Department. By the time I, the youngest of four, was in grade school, my father stayed home to write and my mother worked full time. I grew up assuming that I, too, could “have it all”: education, career, mate and family.

  My parents were very liberal and never censored my reading material. By the time I was twelve, I was checking out books on the subjects of puberty, pregnancy and sex. I was doubly lucky to live in Berkeley, California, during the sixties and seventies, as the librarians never tried to disocurage me from checking out “unsuitable” books. This access to factual, non-judgmental biological information is the basis now for my “surprising” lack of shame and guilt: since sex is so natural, and since I demystified sex early on, having sex on screen, if that’s what I wanted to do, was not traumatic at all.

  Once I passed puberty, two books in particular were very influential in the continuing development of my personal sexual philosophy: Our Bodies, Ourselves, and The Happy Hooker. The former taught me that women deserved to be happy sexually, that their bodies were wonderful and strong, and that all sexual fantasies were natural and okay as long as coercion was not involved. The latter book taught me that an intelligent, sexual woman could choose a job in the sex industry and not be a victim, but instead emerge even stronger and more self-confident, with a feeling, even, of self-actualization.

  High school was uneventful — I became deeply involved in the excellent drama department at Berkeley High, exploring a longstanding interest in the theater arts. Contrary to a lot of adolescents’ experiences with peer pressure in the realm of sex and drugs, I was lucky to have no pressure placed on me one way or another, because that was the norm in Berkeley in the seventies. Consequently, I had a more active fantasy life than sex life, and was very ripe when I lost my virginity at eighteen to a man with whom I had my first long term relationship. This, unfortunately, had more forgettable moments than memorable ones. The sex and intimacy were mediocre at best, and I realized that my libido was not to have a good future with this man. My present husband is just the opposite. He gave full support for my long-dormant lesbian side; for the past four years I have lived with him and his long term woman lover in a close-knit, loving, supportive and intellectually stimulating menage-a-trois.

  I stripped once a week while getting my bachelor’s degree in nursing, magna cum laude, enjoying it to the fullest and using the performance opportunity to develop the public side of my sexuality. I went into full time movie work immediately following graduation, having done a few movies while still in school.

  I know there are people who wonder, “Is she naive or something? What kind of a cause is porno?” But let’s face it, folks: while the sex drive may be innate, modes of sexual behavior are learned, and I don’t see Nancy Reagan setting up any “Happy, Healthy, Sex Life” institutes in the near future. If the media can have an effect on people’s behavior, and I believe it does, why is it assumed that sex movies must always reinforce the most negative imagery of women? That certainly isn’t what I’m about. From my very first movie I have always refused to portray rape, coercion, pain-as-pleasure, woman-as-victim, domination, humiliation and other forms of non-consensual sex.

  I can look back on all of my performances and see that I have not contributed to any negative images or depictions of women; and the feedback I get from men and women of all ages supports my contention. I get a lot of satisfaction from my job — for me it is a job of choice. As feminists, we must all fight to change our society so that women who don’t want to do gender-stereotyped jobs can be free to work, support their families decently, and fulfill their potential in whatever job they choose. This includes not feeling compelled to do sex work because other well-paying options are severely limited.

  Each of us has some idea or action that we hate but that is still protected by the First Amendment. I consider myself a reformer, and as a reformer I need a broad interpretation of the First Amendment to make my point. As a feminist I have principles that won’t allow me to take license with that precious right to free speech. There have always been, and to some degree will always be, extremists who see the First Amendment as their license to do or say whatever, and not as a right which has implied responsibilities. Of course the sexual entertainment medium is no exception to this. I say censure them, but do not censor me.

  The Right to Protection from Rape

  Karen

  Several years ago, I was working as a prostitute on the streets, in Fresno, California. I was walking to my hotel room with a birthday cake when I met a man who said he wanted to do business with me for fifty dollars. He proceeded to pull an ice pick out and rape me. He kept me about three hours, and then was walking me to a pane, not far away, where he said he was going to kill me. Suddenly, my friend Alice spotted me. She jumped out of the car she was in, approached the man who had raped me, and pulled me away from him. We went back to the hotel room and were sitting on the bed. They were trying to calm me down, when suddenly I saw him walking down the driveway, again. I screamed and pointed to him and my friends took off after him. They cornered him and he pulled out his ice pick, again. Somebody got it away from him, and they held him there for the police. We went back to our room, where there was a loud banging on the door. Alice asked who it was.

  It was the police. They said, “Open the goddamn door or we will break it down.” Less than five seconds later, the door came crashing in, hitting Alice. They barged in, and four shotguns and two handguns were staring us in the face. They said we were under arrest for assault on the man who had just raped me repeatedly. Alice went outside with one of the officers and was explaining what had happened. He, in turn, told her it was impossible because I was a prostitute and could not be raped. He also said the man was too drunk to do anything. We told the officer where the ice pick was, and he tried to ma
ke one of us go on the roof to get it, because he did not believe there was an ice pick. When someone finally got it down, they grudgingly decided it had happened.

  When I told them I wanted to press charges for rape, the officer would not take a police report. They just took him to jail for being drunk in public. After three hours he was released. I was very disappointed and outraged at the police for their callous and uncaring attitude. At the time I was only seventeen years old and still believed in our justice system. Even though I am a prostitute, I feel I should still be entitled to protection from the police.

  The Continuing Saga of Scarlot Harlot VIII

  Carol Leigh

  I sit at my typewriter and try to figure out what I can do to make the world safe for prostitution. That doesn’t sound so good. I know why. It’s the word prostitution. I looked it up in the dictionary:

  1. Trading sexual services for money or goods;

  2. Selling one’s talents for an unworthy cause.

  That second definition tarnishes our reputation. There’s plenty of causes less worthy than survival or feeding your family. What about Porsche-titution? That’s selling one’s talents for a Porsche.

  Oh, how I love wallowing in these complications. But, seriously, there are women for whom providing sexual services is not synonymous with compromise. Some women seem to relish careers as sexual facilitators. They enjoy their work and make lots of money. I think they should be afforded the same status as doctors. And me? Well, I don’t wanna be a sex doctor. I just wanna write and think.

  Have you heard the news about the prostitutes in Bologna, Italy? Well, the Associated Press says that eight hundred high school students marched through downtown Bologna to protest cancellation of a sex-education lecture by a prostitute. Teachers had invited her to speak on “relations between men and women in society.”