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Seduction narratives and dead whores

January 22, 2005

In my recent post about slut guilt I aimed straight for the fears that people walk around with: in the sex negative, guilt-ridden, judgmental society we live in it is so common for there to be a very short leap in people�s minds from sex to danger. Add commerce to sex and you�ve got a formula for all kinds of fear and ugly havoc.

This is nothing new, to say the least.

The two comments below recently cropped up in response to different posts. I�m not assuming the �anonymous� is the same person in both comments, though there is a common current through both: dead sex workers. AIDS. Murder. I told you so.

My feedback is I hope you get out before you get AIDS like Lara Roxx* and a whole lot of others did. You won’t, of course, but you should, cause it’ll kill you if some dickwad customer doesn’t first.

Let’s hope you don’t get murdered in a porn shoot some unnamed former NY sex work writers nobody wants to talk about anymore. Cuz the scene is, like, so sexy and stuff. Yeah These are attitudes produced by a puritanical society with the mind-set that coloring outside of the lines will kill you, and you will deserve that infamous death. The history of this cultural production takes many forms � one that is on the top of my head right now is the seduction novel, in which an innocent woman is seduced, defamed, abandoned and left to die a wretched death, maybe after becoming a prostitute. Two good examples of these narratives are Susanna Rowson�s Charlotte Temple (1791) and Stephen Crane�s Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893). The idea that sex workers are doomed is still very much a presence in our cultural attitudes around sex work, as is the idea that all sex workers are tricked into their profession.

There are of course many nuances to this, but it is important to point out that media hype around and coverage about sex workers is sensationalistic 98% of the time. Though we cannot say that contemporary news media creates outright fictional seduction narratives like the above mentioned authors, I do think there is a gap between the lived experience of sex workers (yes, even the downtrodden street walkers) and the stories produced about them in the media. This is not limited to tales of illicit professions; I would venture to say that there is a gap between lived experience and media(ted) productions of all stories.

I�m not going to throw statistics around, because I am inherently suspicious of statistics. I can use them to prove my points, but so can my detractors. I�m not going to get into percentages and cite sociological studies for this reason, plus the reason that sex-related studies are notoriously difficult to do well. In the case of sex work, the errors of sexual-self reporting in addition to the legal and trust issues make it near-impossible to do solid social scientific work. However, what I am doing is a cultural analysis of attitudes about sex, money and danger.

In both of these comments, there is a tone of sexism embedded into the danger: sexism against men and their intentions. Again, I am not trying to make light of the real dangers that are presented to sex workers who work both legally and illegally; there are obviously dangerous men out there who have and sadly will continue to prey on women in general, with sex workers often being in a more vulnerable position. However, many men who are consumers in the sex industry are not scary freakazoids, and are only made to feel they are by media hype.

For instance, here in New York over the past many years various neighborhoods have expressed disdain for their local smut shops, under the notion that those places attract unsavory, morally bankrupt and (by extension) dangerous people. But these are not dangerous people, they are horny people. Jokes about men thinking with their little heads instead of their big heads aside, I would not say that all men are barely contained rapists and murders, as is so often implied.

Perhaps I am a close-reading obsessed fool, but I think it�s important to unpack the meanings embedded in these anonymous comments and to confront what they mean in our society, where they come from, and how they continue to have culturally significant life.

I conclude with this: there are many dangers in the world that threaten men and women, sex worker or not. Ignorance is a danger in that it is catharsis for hate.

*Lara Roxx was one of the performers who contracted HIV from Darren James. Her case got a lot of press because she was the first of his costars to test positive last spring. Mainstream media outlets were hungry for Roxx�s story because she was a newcomer to the industry.

Posted by Dacia at January 22, 2005 03:47 AM

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Seduction narratives and dead whores

January 22, 2005

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