Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Natalie WestIt’s 2012. I’m in my mid-twenties, struggling to pay my not-yet-skyrocketing Los Angeles rent. I’ve recently moved from the Midwest, where things weren’t really any easier. I’m in graduate school, getting a degree that is unlikely to end in a career that will garner an income high enough to make a dent in the student loans I’m taking out to supplement my meager TA salary. I don’t know that yet. Well-meaning people have told me that I would be an exception and I believe them. I’m the first in my family to have gone to college. My mom and dad are in awe of the fact that in a few years, they will be able to call me “Dr.”I meet a woman on a dating site who tells me, an hour into a first date, that she’s a professional dominatrix. I like her. We kiss. I go home and Google “dominatrix.” I ask my grad school friends if they think I should actually consider dating a dominatrix. They tell me not to be a SWERF. I Google “SWERF.” It means, “Sex Worker Exclusive Radical Feminist.”Some time passes. I date the dominatrix. I can’t make rent in the summer. I resent my colleagues whose parents send them checks in the mail to cover happy hour tapas and new MacBooks and research trips to the Beinecke Library at Yale. I get bitter, start smoking again.I meet my dominatrix girlfriend’s best friend: a middle-aged man who calls himself a fetish photographer, but doesn’t appear to work much. On his desktop, he shows me photographs he’s taken of blonde bombshells in leather motorcycle jackets and cheesy red press on nails, who remind me of the girls in hair metal videos my older brother used to watch MTV when I was a kid. The fetish photographer used to be in a hair metal band. Now he’s bald. My dominatrix girlfriend often goes over to his house in the afternoon and doesn’t come back until 2am, complaining she was exhausted but he wouldn’t let her leave.
You’re the fucking dominatrix, I think but don’t say.***“You can wear a wig in your sessions,” the photographer tells me. “There are no good blonde Dommes in LA right now. You’ll make a killing.” My hair is dark, short, boyish, “men wouldn’t pay for it,” he says. He pulls one of his finest blonde wigs down over the wig cap he’s placed on my head. I look in the mirror and, surprisingly, like it. I look like a Texas beauty queen. I take a sip of the Prosecco he’s poured me, set it down carefully and start patting down the wig with the palms of my hands. It doesn’t shift, but it’s hot as hell.“I’ll teach you everything you need to know.” He says it nonchalantly, like I should recognize I’m being done a huge favor, but the man offering doesn’t want too much attention for his generosity.I go alone to the fetish photographer’s house to “train,” the first time I’ve been alone with him, without my dominatrix girlfriend. He’s got a large, metal dog cage set out waiting. He’s wearing nothing but black boxer briefs and his prescription eyeglasses with transition lenses that have stopped working and never adjust to clear, even inside, even at night. He tells me he wants to assist me in putting on makeup. I already have makeup on, but I acquiesce: I am training, after all. We go into the bathroom and he drops to his knees. He picks up a tray lined with orangey makeup, far too dark for my complexion, and holds it out in front of him.“I’m here to serve, Mistress. To help you get ready,” he whimpers.I grab the foundation. He lowers the tray, pulls down his boxers and places his hard cock onto it, its distinct curve to the right making it point directly at a cheap palette of shimmery eye shadows.“You’re so helpful,” I say, holding back the urge to laugh.I realize at once that professional domination is, indeed, a facet of the service industry. That sex work, as they say, would indeed be real work.***I’m standing in front of the elevator to the fourth floor of a university building that houses the administration offices for the graduate program I’ve been attending for four years, with two to go. I usually take the stairs, but I’m already sweating. I rehearse my lines in my head before pushing the button to ascend: “He’s a jealous ex. No, I don’t think he’s dangerous.”After years of coercion into free play for helping to “launch” my side hustle in professional domination—as well as the career of my much more established dominatrix girlfriend—the fetish photographer snapped, ended our friendship, and went on a mission to end our professional lives. Jilted on a vacation he attended with she and I and two paying clients—imagine that, feeling obligated to pay more attention to the guys who were paying—he returned from paradise to purchase some domain names. He bought NatalieWest.com and re-directed it to my grad school student profile, with my legal name and a smiling photograph of me in front of a bookcase, wearing glasses and the blazer I bought for academic conferences, trying my best to look the part of the young professor. He bought the URL of my legal name and re-directed it to my dominatrix website, outing me to anyone who cared to Google my name or work.I knock timidly at the door of the university administrator’s office. Going into as little detail as possible, I tell her, “I have a jealous ex.” I tell her that he’s harassing me online and possibly stalking me and definitely trying to ruin my reputation. I tell her he’s taken my photograph. I cry and think that, because she’s a woman, she’s likely to have been stalked too and won’t investigate the matter.I make it past this incident and out of graduate school, earning a degree they can’t take away from me, even if they find the photos of me in leather, even if they find out I was a sex worker through all those years, making enough money to eat, even well sometimes, on my meager TA salary.***Reading the outpouring of #MeToo stories on Twitter and across the media landscape in 2017, I immediately thought of the fetish photographer. And then I thought of the kitchen manager at the corporate chain restaurant where I worked in college, who cornered me in a walk-in freezer and forced me to kiss him and feel his erection through his pants. And then I thought of the BDSM client who pushed his fingers inside me without my consent. I had experienced sexual harassment and abuse in nearly all the jobs I had done—sex work or otherwise—throughout my working life. I didn’t tell any of these stories in 2017, when the #MeToo movement gained traction on social media. I didn’t use the hashtag at all.In the wake of #MeToo, there have been numerous accounts of those workers left out of conversations about workplace sexual violence, and sex workers have been mentioned in those accounts, alongside women of color, poor women, domestic workers, and women working in various low-profile industries. A
Time magazin
e piece titled “‘They Don’t Want to Include Women Like Me’: Sex Workers Say They’re Being Left Out of the #MeToo Movement” addresses the idea that sex workers cannot be sexually assaulted. One worker who used the hashtag in an act of solidarity reported getting messages saying she deserved to be raped, and numerous iterations of the question, “How can you sexually assault a whore?”If you think this question is the type that could only come from some virulent strain of misogyny found in the bowels of the online “incel” community, think again. Consider the 2007 rape of a sex worker in Philadelphia, and Judge Teresa Carr Deni’s reduction of her sexual assault to “theft of services.” After hearing the case of a nineteen year old woman who arranged to exchange $150 for an hour of sex with one client, but arrived to the address he gave her to find an abandoned building where she would be gang raped by four men, at gun point, Judge Carr Deni justified her decision by saying “She consented and she didn’t get paid… I thought it was a robbery” (Plato 250). Clearly, sex work’s absence from #MeToo isn’t a simply lack of public attention. The de-humanization of sex workers can render us impossible to victimize, or else it can render us the ultimate victims.A common refrain in the sex workers rights movement is “sex work is not trafficking.” The reason that this refrain is common is that anti-trafficking organizations justify police raids and arrests of sex workers as part of a broader fight against sex trafficking, which US law broadly defines as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act. While it’s key to keep in mind whilst reading this collection that its authors have varying relationships to trafficking, pimps, management, and other forms of alliance or association that may be swept under the umbrella of trafficking, we do not advocate for the criminalization of sex work as a means to “rescuing” those populations that are being trafficked in the US and globally. Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s chapter on “Borders” in
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers Rights problematizes the move to categorically differentiate between sex work and trafficking, rather that welcoming conversations about human trafficking that would take up “how border enforcement makes people more vulnerable to exploitation and violence as they seek to migrate—an analysis which should be central to sex workers’ rights activism” (85). Melissa Gira Grant, in
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, urges readers to question and complicate outsider narratives about the horrors experienced by “prostituted” girls and women: “The experience of sex work is more than just the experience of violence; to reduce all sex work to such an experience is to deny that anything but violence is even possible. By doing so, there is no need to listen to sex workers…” (102). For the purposes of approaching the stories in this anthology, readers should keep in mind that sex workers have different relationships to what the state defines as trafficking, but that we as a collective agree on one central point: criminalizing sex work does nothing to mitigate the exploitation and violence that the most vulnerable among us experience.Anti-trafficking NGOs have worked for decades to convince the public that “if we could abolish prostitution through criminalizing clients and managers, the trafficking of women would end, as there would be no sex trade to traffic them into” (Mac and Smith 59). This argument ignores the economic need that drives people to enter the sex industries by their own free will, or at the will of another. In the United States, one result of the conflation of sex trafficking and sex work was a 2018 law that attempts to stop sex workers from communicating online, with potential clients or within their own communities, putting workers into greater danger without safe outlets for screening potential clients.[4] But beyond the fact that anti-trafficking campaigns do not use their vast resources to support survivors, anti-trafficking efforts are inherently carceral. Christa Marie Sacco’s essay in this collection demonstrates the ways that anti-trafficking works within and through law enforcement, arresting and incarcerating “victim-defendants” as a means to “rescue” them.The umbrella term “sex work” encompasses a variety of acts, gigs, and professions, with different levels of vulnerability to law enforcement and the criminal legal system: escorts, hoes, dominatrices and BDSM/fetish professionals, people in the trade, porn performers, cam models, strippers, and others who trade in sex and sexuality for money. Many sex workers face the criminalization of their work, and because women of color face the criminalization of their bodies, sex workers of color live at a particularly violent intersection of these processes. As such, the sex workers rights movement has sought to legitimize our work to the wider public, defending our choices, fighting for our rights to make them, as part of a battle for de-criminalization. This fight makes it difficult to make a complaint, to allow the non-sex working public see the problems within the sex industries, especially when that allowance may confirm what they thought they knew, when what they think they know comes from a culture that stigmatizes sex and criminalizes sex work. These differences between sex work and other forms of work render the #MeToo movement particularly vexed terrain for sex workers. The public often considers abuse a natural outcome of sexualized labor, and because sex work is criminalized, sex workers have no access to workers’ rights that might mitigate those abuses when they do occur. If you’ve encountered the movement for sex workers rights, you’ve likely heard the refrain, “sex work is real work.” Without seeing sex work as work, sex workers cannot be seen as laboring subjects in need of rights, not rescue. This refrain reverberates under the stories you’ll encounter in this collection.
#WeToo: Sex Work in the Wake of a Movement treats sex work as work, and as such, allows space for sex workers to speak openly about the harms they’ve experienced on the job, whatever the job might be. For most readers, this will be a new experience. You will hear from people working in the sex industries describing labor rights violations, sexual assaults, shit days, with shit managers, in shit clubs and on shit porn sets. We ask that you to resist the urge to use our stories as symbols through which to criminalize our work, or to turn us into victims in need of rescue. The answer to labor rights violations, sexual assaults, and shitty days at work is not criminalization or (re)victimization: putting us in prison or taking away our incomes would not right the wrongs of the stories you’re about to read. As Juno Mac and Molly Smith explain in
Revolting Prostitutes, “In being candid about bad workplace conditions, sex workers fear handing a weapon to political opponents; their complaints about work paradoxically becoming ‘justification’ to dismiss them as not ‘real workers’” (45).As sex workers, we are taking a big risk by sharing our stories with “civilians.” (That’s the in-group term we use to describe non-sex working people—this book will introduce you to many such words, but it will rarely slow down to explain them to you. We trust that if you can’t pick up our language with context clues, you’ll do the labor of looking it up, educating yourselves.) The “happy hooker” narrative is the one we typically reserve for civilians, keeping our complaints about bad working conditions to private conversations with other sex workers. That “happy hooker” narrative is one that works in tandem with sex positivity, and it’s worked to yoke the sex workers rights movement to sex positive formations in third wave feminism. Mac and Smith describe this narrative as one that blurs the line between paid and recreational sex, creating “the illusion that worker and client are united in their interests” (32). This is a narrative with which many sex workers are familiar, even beyond the bounds of activist practice, because it’s a narrative we use in our advertising to clients: “The bored, libidinous housewife, the authentic ‘girlfriend experience,’ […] and the powerful, formidable dominatrix are socially palatable fantasy characters designed to entice and impress customers” (Mac and Smith 32). Certainly, there can be a kernel of truth in these fantasy characters, but there must be room in our narratives for the
unhappy hooker: the sex worker who chooses to work in the sex industries—compelled by the same economic necessity to work as any other type of worker—but who wants to improve the material conditions of their labor. If we cannot discuss the material conditions of our work, we cannot decrease violence in our industries. If we want to address the problems that sex workers face, we have to stop thinking of sex workers simply as self-directed individuals choosing sex work as a joyful project of selfhood (the sex-positive liberal model), or as victim-criminals in need of carceral reform.Sex workers in America, and in many other places that criminalize sex work, live in fear. But those fears might not be the fears that we, in a culture unaccustomed to listening to sex workers, expect to hear.
The pimp. The bad date. The good client gone bad. The sleazy producer on the casting room couch. The exploitative strip club manager. Living through a culture in which sex work is vilified, we all—sex workers included—know the stories about what goes wrong in the sex industry and the figures who perpetrate those harms. You will encounter these figures in the narratives that make up this anthology. There are other fears within the sex industries that you might not hear about if you’re a non-sex working person. The leak in the strip club ceiling, causing you to twist your ankle and lose a week of wages. The cops. The fetish photographer calling himself a BDSM “trainer.” The client who tries to slip off a condom. The child welfare court. The fucking cops. The criminal status of many forms of sex work—and the stigmatized status of the rest—makes it difficult for sex workers to take action to mitigate the harms they experience at work. We try our best to protect each other—through community support networks, bad client lists, and sharing best practices to keep us safe from law enforcement—but the state seems hell bent on passing legislation that keeps us from doing so. But again, we ask you to approach these issues with an open mind: we are not asking for rescue. We are, as contributor Lina Bembe says, “demystifying” our industries, for ourselves. We are allowing you, reader, to sit with us as we do so across the pages of this anthology. We hope that giving voice to our individual experiences as a collective will allow us to heal, and to continue our work toward transforming our industries to become safer, saner, and more supportive, in the face of the violence we endure.This anthology will not offer its readers direct argumentation against the criminalization of sex work, but it will offer personal narratives that undergird the logic of decriminalization. We believe that we are people who deserve to be treated with compassion and humanity. Decriminalizing the facets of the industry that are currently criminalized—and de-stigmatizing the rest—is central to that movement toward compassion and humanity. However, this collection does not exist to convince you that sex workers deserve to be treated with compassion and humanity. We have written to and for those who would deny our humanity for far too long. As contributor Lauren Kiley writes, “My focus as an activist is no longer to convince anyone that sex workers are people too. I did that for years and frankly, it was exhausting. I don’t have the time or energy to convince anyone that it matters if we are raped, killed, or beaten.” Kiley expresses the hope that animates this creation of this book:I see us building a new economy. I see us pouring our sex work dollars back into supporting other sex workers. We buy each others art, pay each other for services, and find ways to make us all more money. [I see us] learning and borrowing from our elders and previous movements. [I see us] using social organization tactics from church groups, [navigating] healthcare resources that grew out of the AIDS crisis, and [training] in apprenticeship with BDSM traditions that stretch back generations.I see us talking to the media, demanding that they get our stories straight. I see us doing legal advocacy for one another, distributing condoms and clean needles, providing self-defense workshops and holding space for healing and self-care. I see us making protest signs and standing on courthouse steps. I see us rallying for black and brown lives and speaking to our state representatives. I see us offering peer-led healthcare services, and helping to parent each other’s children. As a collective of voices, I see us responding to the rallying cry, Me Too, as part of a broader movement toward healing, by and for sex workers. We have varying levels of faith in the actual #MeToo movement to respond to the concerns that we face in the sex industries, but we have unwavering faith in our community and ourselves.We have come together to collect the personal narrative essays that make up this collection because sex workers—current and former—are the experts on the working conditions in the sex industries, and yet our voices are often ignored in favor of politicians, celebrities, law enforcement, and NGOs that claim to know what is best for us. To include sex workers in the discussions about sexual harassment, abuse, and violence that have become part of the public discourse on gender, sexuality, and violence, you have to make room for us to say “Me Too.” This collection makes that room.
