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Either/Or
December 18, 2004
Last night, the Sex Workers Outreach Project hosted a national Day of Rememberance, which the New York Times has covered in a fairly even handed article, which quotes whores and former whores who support the legalization of prostitution and those that don’t.
It also touches on something that I poked at in my post “sex workstyles and class”: “Those who study prostitution say there is a wide range in types, from streetwalkers to high-priced call girls, and in the working conditions they face.”
So this sentence says “wide range in types” - and it could have stopped there, but instead it goes on to name the types at either end of the spectrum, and though the “range” is implied, the either/or gap is drawn.
In popular imagination, there are only these two types. I mean, what could possibly be in between? “Everyone” knows that there are only two reasons to whore, and the sentence following the one I just quoted makes that clear:
“‘Some people are doing very well,’ said Juhu Thukral, a lawyer and director of the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project in New York City, which offers legal representation to the women and researches the field. ‘Others are really doing it out of desperation.’”
Read between the lines: to be a whore, you must either be wildly rich immediately as a result of it or completely desperate (which implies having a drug habit). Otherwise, sex work is not a legitimate choice of career. But, whether the Times thinks its legit or not, for all those sex workers in the ever-mysterious and unspecified “range,” sex work is a living, like other livings (but sometimes naked).
Posted by Dacia at December 18, 2004 01:46 PM
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