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The Age of Ambivalence
February 23, 2006
Over a City Bakery hot chocolate with homemade marshmallow (holy mother of fuck, so awesome) this afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with an Italian journalist who is working on a chapter of a book I’m also writing for. We were swapping ideas and got to talking about the current state of scholarship and discourse around sex work and porn. I was talking a bit about an anthology I just read, Flesh for Fantasy, which is a collection of writings by people who have worked in or patronized strip clubs, the vast majority of whom are also academics. A lot of the pieces are “autoethnographies,” which is a sort of fancy bullshit word for self-reflexive personal essay, and a lot of them reveal a deep ambivalence about the sex industry. This is a fascinating new trend that falls under the rubric of third wave feminism, this exploration of the love/hate relationship people working in sex have with the whole business. It’s really not as simple as empowerment versus exploitation.
What’s more than that, it was never that simple, but as the march of history and activism goes (cuz you know, time moving forward always means progress – not), there was definitely a time when the pro- and anti- stances were all that there was to talk about. We’re not there anymore, we’re in a new place – one with equal but perhaps different challenges.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of $pread precisely in terms of ambivalence before – now it seems painfully obvious. My fellow $preadsters and I always talk about the necessity of the magazine being a forum for many perspectives on sex work, but perhaps the real meat of the matter is not making sure that both pro- and anti- voices are heard, but pushing ahead with much more complicated (blurry, irritatingly non-committal) ideas about the sex industry. I do believe we’ve been doing this (sometimes all in the same article), but I don’t know why it wasn’t clear to me before, and needed to be said to me by someone else. Maybe I just need more sleep. Nah, that can’t be it.
So, this is the age of ambivalence. That may sound like an invitation to roll over and die, but I don’t think ambivalence needs to be a stepping stone to apathy. Sex workers speaking to their ambivalence about their work is a good thing, even if it doesn’t make a good sound bite and the mainstream media will keep trying to coax hardline stances of out us (those cocksmokers).*
*no offense to people who enjoy cocksmoking
Posted by Dacia at February 23, 2006 03:03 AM
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Comments
City Bakery, this afternoon? Shut the hell up! I was there catching up with a friend and remarked that this was the first time I had been there when I had NOT unexpectedly run into someone I know. Well whaddaya know?
Posted by: Mitzi at February 23, 2006 08:32 PM
Ambivalence - gosh I do feel it. Very little about my work because I am in the right area of the business for me, but I do feel it about the sex industry in general. And like you said it does not need to be a stepping stone to apathy. I see these conflicted feelings as a sign that I need to reflect more, process more, learn more.
Posted by: Seska at February 24, 2006 08:40 AM
Well, I’m ambisexual. Does that count?
I’m kidding. Yes, I get that the sex industry can cause such feelings. One aspect of it can be lierbating, in that you own your body and sexuality, and another sections of the sex industry can be damaging in the way they help form harmful opinions of women and sex.
Sex is like fire. We can’t live without it, but it can destroy even if you don’t start it.
Posted by: Josh Jasper at February 24, 2006 04:27 PM
