@ heart's continues...
Now, I think, initially, some folk over there had problems with me (sex worker) not only blogging at Feministe, but my conversations on...terms & language. V and I have actually had a very interesting (and I guess I would even say) productive discussion on the matter...then, Sam drops in with this:
v wrote: “I don’t actually like to use the word prostitution for what i’ve done. Just as its easy to deny addiction “cos i don’t inject”, its pretty easy to deny prostitution “because i never did it for cash money”. Exchanges of sex for other sorts of goods and favours, in my experience, are really common, but most of us doing that don’t describe it as ‘exactly’ prostitution.”
This where you get kicked out of the credibility club. In my experience, the majority of the kicking out is done by strippers who call themselves (but not girls sucking for their supper) sex workers, phone sex operators who call themselves (but not boys fucking for drugs) sex workers, women who sell nude pictures of themselves and call it (but not an actress posing in Playboy) sex work.
The term “sex work” is a top-down phrase meant to mark the hierarchy within prostitution, to highlight the differences between women instead of their commonalities. If you don’t explicitly embrace how men sexually exploited you as a prime indicator of your identity then you are out of the hierarchy and are expected to shut up. Personally, I think there’s a unique perspective shared by those of us who have repeatedly been beaten so viciously we thought we were going to die, but patriarchy hasn’t devised a sexy, catch-all club moniker to euphemistically dignify that experience.
When women paid to get fucked is honestly called prostitution then I might consider using the term ’sex work’. So long as women in pornography are considered not prostitutes but “sex workers”, I’m going to have to treat the term as a tool used by the dishonest and in-denial to intentionally mislead people about the truths of what prostitution is and how it affects prostituted women.
First I want to respond with a quote:
"What's the difference between prostitution and porn? Well, in porn, there are forms and a camera in the room" - Renegade Evolution
Why yes, I said that, right here on this very bloggy blog. Are there other differences, yep, mostly legal ones and the fact that in porn performers are fucking eachother for the viewing of third parties who pay to view it, and not fucking the pay'ers themsevles, but yep, at heart, there's the big difference in my opinion.
However, if people are so bent out with me talking about terms and language, um, why does Sam get to do it? So far as I know, Sam has never identified as a prostitute (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, Sam), and why does Sam get to identify strata amid the people in the business?
I mean sure, I call myself a sex worker (or often, the word "whore" suffices for me), but if sex worker is a word, you know, for the privileged clique, then how come women like Jill Brenneman, Sharmus Outlaw, Mariko use it? I mean, they are not exactly "privilged like me", their experiences haven't exactly been all fun and money (unless you call getting more or less tortured, being stabbed, and being tricked into a NV brothel "fun")...and does Sam get to tell them they are? Define terms for them? Set language and apply it to their cases and lives...or do they get to do it?
I mean, if someone says to me, they are/were a prostituted woman, well then, that's what they are, as defined by...well, them, the person who has lived the experience. If someone says they are a sex worker, well then, they are, as defined by the person who has lived the experience....
I mean, yeah, V has "cred" in my book. So does Rebecca and any other person who has ever been in the sex trade, for whatever reasons. And I sure as hell don't think I'm better than either of them, just different....
But when Sam rolls in and does the exact same thing, complete with wider sweeping generalizations and assumptions than I've thrown out there...well, I have to wonder.
And yep, sure enough, I've stripped, fucked for money, fucked for money on film, posed nude, all that stuff, and been refered to (and called myself) numerous things that state that flat out...including a prostitute. (Not, however, a prostituted woman...and not because I am better, but because I haven't been one!) So really, who gets to define my experieces and reasons for doing what I do? Sam Berg?
I think not. So, yeah, if I'm gonna get called out for writing on why I dislike the term "selling your body??"
I'm waiting, but expect no more than
....
(And, psst, did you know I was uncivilized?)
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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11 comments:
OK, I don't care what folks who provide sexual services are called. I don't care if it's "right" or "wrong." I want protection for them. Period.
http://www.ziteng.org.hk/events/2008JUL04_e.php
http://www.ziteng.org.hk/events/2008MAY03_e.php
http://www.ziteng.org.hk/events/2007DEC18_e.php
Thousands of sex workers and supporters marching behind Sex Work banners in Hong Kong.
http://empowerfoundation.org/kumjing.html
Project put together by Empower in thailand. Each doll represents a sex worker who couldn't risk being there in person.
Top down? Designed to separate the heirarchy of whoredom?
Not that I see.
The more I read your words, the more you ascend my personal pantheon of heroes.
You're more witty, intelligent, well-spoken, and visceral than your detractors, you're a hell of a lot more substantial, and what you say can appeal to anyone, instead of a tiny subset of a subset of a particular circle jerk.
You've definitely snagged a reader here.
One of the things that a lot of people don't seem to realize is that there are thousands of people calling themselves "sex workers" and being activists in "the sex workers rights movement" and that's in third world countries! This movement in large part is run by people who are poor and underprivileged and doing unglamorous sexual jobs and who are organizing themselves. It's not just run by a handful of privileged and never-abused strippers here in the Western world (and, as Ren has pointed out, a lot of the activists over here don't fit that stereotype either).
You uncivilized? No, a thousand times no! You are the very soul of civilization!
As a trans-women I get pretty testy about someone trying to define who I am. One of the first rights ant marginalized group fights for is the right to define themselves. So Sam you do not get to define someone else's life, they do because they have lived it.
B13 & Hexy: THANK YOU...
Rachel: it matters to US
And while we're at it, let's not leave out these folks:
http://www.aim-med.org
Sex-worker founded, sex-worker organized, sex-worker operated since 1997. Testing, healthcare, counseling and, yes, scholarships and exit strategies for anyone wanting to get out now.
And Rachel, if you want protection for people, one of the things that needs protecting is their dignity, of which the right to define themselves as opposed to being defined by others is a crucial component.
Those who argue that insistence on calling sex workers "prostituted women" is merely being truthful have exactly the same credibility with me that Klansmen have when they insist that using the N-word is just telling the truth about African-Americans.
Language has power and don't think that reality is lost on those who, whatever their claims to the contrary, derogate the humanity of every sex-worker living and dead by linguistically placing them all in the same class of pitiful victims or collaborating low-lifes.
Noam Chomsky, addle-pated hero of the mad-fem anit-porn crowd, at least knows that much.
Ernest
Yes, I'm all for people having a say in how they're referred to. But most of all, I want them safe.
I understand that it is meaningful to the group whom these terms describe. I honor that. But I want them safe above all else.
I'm not disputing the importance of language (and will hold forth on the Whorfian hypothesis if anyone wants). But more than anything else, I want them safe.
jesus christ, Sam, is it possible for you to get through -one- comment without writing something like "sucking for her supper?" is this some kind of of tic or something?
Rachel,
It is never safe to be a pariah. As long as language is used that distorts the reality of sex workers' lives and denies them their humanity, the reforms that might actually protect them are made that much more difficult to create.
Routinely, and insistently, referring to all sex workers as "prostituted women," which reduces them to helpless objects of pity who must be saved with or without their consent by others who know what's better for them than they do, and implying in the process that those who reject that definition are either brainwashed fools or knowing collaborators in the oppression of other women, is no better than just dismissing them as a bunch of pathetic fools or lying whores.
If you really want to make them safe, you can start by challenging the slanders spread about them in the "feminist" community, where you might have real influence, and insisting on dignified treatment for them by those who claim to care about their actual condition, as you would for any class of workers you intended to help.
Go through feminist discourse on sex work, change the context to undocumented foreign workers, substitute the kinds of terms routinely used by racist nataivists to describe these workers, and see how helpful the resulting rhetoric would be in securing the rights of such workers.
When sex workers are recognized as fully human, their own truths about their lives respected as much as any other women's testimony and they are granted real, not back-handed and grudging, respect, the sense of common cause needed to effect political reforms might be found.
Can radical feminists not see that by slandering sex workers they make it easier for those who do exploit and brutalize said workers to justify their own behavior? In blaming "the patriarchy" for creating the conditions under which sex workers are constantly vulnerable to every kind of danger, do they not realize that they shift the responsibility for those dangers off of the individual men and the legal and social institutions directly responsible for these harms, or do they just not care?
I very much suspect the latter is true, though fiercely denied, and that what really powers rad-fem hostility to sex work is about half anger at the system under which it operates and about half simple prejudice against sex workers themselves, which is brutally evident in the way they talk to and about us.
You want sex workers to be safe? Start by making them safe from hate-speech in the community to which you belong.
In other words, clean up your side of the street before bringing the broom brigade to ours.
Ernest
by the way, are male sex workers "prostituted men?"
and do trans women who are either workers or prostituted get to be "prostituted -women,-" or are they prostituted some other term, or do we just not care, or what?
I mean, putting aside mAndrea's or whatever her commenter's claim that trans women obviously just do it because it feeds their fetish, or maybe not. Blanche? What are your thought on this? Or on yaoi, for that matter?
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