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One more time, with feeling
January 25, 2005
I am making this (I think) my last post on Rachel’s article and resulting conversations over at feministing.com. It may jump around a bit, but these are some of my leftover thoughts and scattered ideas.
I consider myself someone who is able to see the greater issues of things and is not the overly sensitive type who thinks that disagreement means that people hate me (or I just let it roll off of me). But watching and participating in conversations over at Feministing has given me this interesting perspective on such conversations. Although of course I’m used to laying my stuff (naked bits, wordy opinions) out there for people to examine, this feels a bit different. When I apply theories about class, feminism, etc to my own life, it feels very different than when other people do that without asking me about my reaction. It’s weird to have commenters wonder publicly about things that they could easily ask me about directly. At times over the last few days I’ve felt like I’m eavesdropping on my own conversation.
One of the complaints that has been made consistently over on Feministing is that Rachel’s article didn’t show the Other Side of Sex Work, the downtrodden working class sex workers who have no other options. While this is true, her article does not attempt to give a comprehensive view of sex work; she highlights a few people who she finds interesting and relates this to her own experience. Her column is primarily about exploring different aspects of sexuality and dating – and she unashamedly does this through the lens of her own experience. Of course, everyone does this, as it’s impossible to speak without the framework of where you’re coming from, but Rachel makes no pretenses at doing otherwise.
There is a tendency for people to want to generalize the experience of one person to stand for the experiences of many. I think that we should be careful not to make a leap from an article about individual experiences to assumptions about Sex Work As A Profession.
There have been a lot of comments made about the fact that Rachel describes Jane and me as middle class, white, educated and privileged. This is put forth in the article in a very uncritical way, which is partly what has incensed so much debate. In the debate, there seems to be this current of “why would you choose sex work if you could do something else?” and “privileged women choosing sex work makes a mockery out of all the poor women who have to do it.”
The first question devalues sex work as a choice for any woman, and views it as an absolute last resort, which it may be for some, but not for others. Both statements make a kind of hierarchy of experience – because I can choose to not do sex work, the sex work I do is somehow less valid and less real than women who have no other options. I am very aware of the privileged place I say this from, and I don’t think people should have to do work they dislike (sex or otherwise) but the fact remains that I, like many other sex workers (and unlike yet others), touch strange men’s penises for money.
I think that, no matter what non-sex work wages look like, service providers will always exist at many different income levels and will offer many different services because there will continue to be a demand. The root of this issue, the thing that gets everyone’s knickers twisted, is an economic one. There are many ways in which it can be argued – and is useful to argue - that sex work is work like other forms of work. Not just because some sex work is illegal or at the fringes of society, sex work is notoriously more lucrative than many other kinds of work, which sets it apart and makes it more appealing than many other forms of work – and this appeal seems to often override the risk. I’m going to quote myself from an email I sent to a reader I’ve been corresponding with in reference to the problem of very visible prostitution in the neighborhood he lives in, and his urge to help the streetwalkers:
Help them quit for what? is the big question. Yes, $5 for a blow job is a horrifyingly little amount of money, however – this woman’s other option is probably a minimum wage job, making per hour what she can make in about 10 minutes as a prostitute.
The women in your neighborhood can hook for a few hours, and go home to their children with cash to feed them. What jobs can you offer them that promise the same things? Sure, you can prattle on about work ethics, honest living, the satisfaction of a job well done, but in cold reality how can a job where you have to punch the clock compete with sex work?
This is a frustration that faces sex workers of all kinds and of all classes. If you want to be there, great, keep on at it. But if you don’t want to be there, even if you have skills in other areas your earning power is probably depressing. I’m personally overeducated by hot shit East Coast universities and I choose sex work because it gives me day-to-day freedom, time to myself, and many times over the hourly pay I’d receive in the field I’m schooled in. Is this sad for me or sad for society? Can I claim empowerment by taking advantage of the system and working within the patriarchy to finance my various subversive ventures? Big questions that don’t necessarily have answers, but they’re important to ask.
Posted by Dacia at January 25, 2005 02:23 AM
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