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Sex work semantics
September 29, 2005
Okay, so I know sometimes (most of the time) I’m vague about what exactly I’m up to in terms of the sex work I have done. It’s a bit of a legal issue, so I know I’m being deliberately obtuse, I’m not trying to be evasive about the whole thing. If you go back a year in the archives, you’ll hearken back to a time when I was more anonymous in blogland and less careful as a sex worker, and you can read all about my professional mischief. I haven’t written much in that vein in a while partly because of the aforementioned deliberate obtuseness, but also partly because after the initial excitement of being a sex worker, it really does just become a job, with some daily monotony to it. I know that the tales of sex workers are interesting and titillating because it’s so far outside of most people’s experience, but honestly sometimes I’d try to write about it and it would just bore me.
But what about this phrase “sex work”? Is that just my nifty little linguistic wiggle, a way to avoid saying that I’m a whore?
In issue 2 of $pread magazine, we started a recurring piece called “On the Street,” wherein we stop passers-by in New York and ask them a question. We started out the column with the question “What does the phrase ‘sex work’ mean to you?” I’m not going to give away all the juicy answers, but suffice to say that most responders linked the phrase sex work directly to prostitution. (And psst psst, issue 3 is about to come out, its prettier and cooler than ever, and includes an interview with Tracy Quan as well as a feature article on periods and porn by one of my favorite indie webwhores, Trixie, plus lots more awesome).
I define sex work as “the pre-agreed upon exchange of money or goods for erotic energy.” So, this could include porn performers, phone sex operators, prostitutes, and many other kinds of workers. As a kind of secondary definition, I would say that a good way to judge whether or not you are part of the sex industry is the way you describe what you do for a living - if that description isn’t always 100% true to life or is vague, you might be a sex worker. For instance, when I did PR for a porn company, depending on the people I was with, sometimes I’d say that I worked for “an independent film company” and when I was doing more naked stuff, I would often say I was doing “freelance” work - technically true, but you see my point. Unfortunately, sex work is usually met with varying degrees of scorn and disapproval, so it’s a tough thing to be out about.
More and more politically aware sex workers are beginning to use the phrase – but it’s a tough one to deal with. If you’re a whore, no doubt it sounds better to use the phrase “sex worker,” but if you’re a stripper or work the counter in a porn shop, use of the phrase may make people assume that you have sex for money. There are all kinds of hierarchies built into the industry, and though I do think “sex work” is in many ways a more general and democratic term, it still has some connotations that not all people in the industry are eager to link themselves with.
But what difference does language make? A critique of the use of the phrase “sex work” is that the edge is taken off; it’s a phrase meant to be more palatable, politically viable. There are plenty of sex workers who reclaim derogatory phrases and use them at themselves, which I think is pretty badass. “Sex work” is most useful in the labor sense – it expresses plainly that sex work is work, even if it is illegal or otherwise illegitimate in many places. That’s one of the big challenges of the sex workers rights movement – legitimizing sex work as work that many women and men do, under a huge variety of circumstances (good and bad) all over the world.
Posted by Dacia at September 29, 2005 12:31 PM
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