Blurring the Lines

My use of the words escort and sex worker inhabit mostly political terrain for me. In the strictest sense, an escort accompanies a client to a given location or event. Most escorts of course, do not venture from their private apartments where they entertain clients. I no longer do escorting. I am no longer selling my services as an escort and so I am clear that I am at this point, a former escort.

Sex worker is a different word with different connotations. Some people think sex workers are doing illegal activities and others are pretty sure sex workers take off their clothes.  But in reality, a wide variety of jobs and professions qualify to be called sex work and therefore many people who do diverse things for a living can be referred to as sex workers. In fact, some people call themselves a sex worker simply because they write about sex for a living.  That is a bit of a stretch but if you add any kind of adult images, then magically the line is crossed and many will agree that someone who writes about sex with naked pictures of themselves is a sex worker.  I suppose the line in most minds occurs at the point where the person selling sex toys or writing about sex, models the sex toys or illustrates the sex they are writing about by using their own body. If a writer or vendor sells images of other naked people, then we are not sure if they qualify to be called a sex worker.

I find these distinctions somewhat arbitrary and limiting.  But even if I go with the definition of sex worker as someone who uses their own body in some way to procure a living, then I still end up with a wider definition of the term than society currently allows for. I would include as sex workers, people who marry for money and both print and runway models. Some performance artists would qualify as sex workers too.  For instance when Karen Finley covered herself in chocolate for a photo shoot with Bill Maher, her use of her own body was deeply sexual as well as political (although I was hard pressed to ascertain what her political message was). But the popular press will always refer to her as an artist instead of a sex worker.

So what is the difference between someone like Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle?  Is Annie Sprinkle a sex worker because she used to do porn or because she still uses her naked body in some of her stage performances?  Annie Sprinkle refers to herself as an activist and performance artist at this point. I know she is always comfortable referring to her past as a porn star and prostitute. Annie Sprinkle willingly and graciously stands in solidarity with other sex workers.

When women and transgenders are being murdered for being sex workers, stressing that one is a former sex worker can feel divisive.  It certainly does not seem like a show of solidarity.

Toward the end of a presentation I gave to a feminist class at a college in Marin many years ago, the professor announced that she would like to consider herself an honorary whore as a show of solidarity with all the whores who suffer for being whores. I was touched and impressed.  It was also an instructive moment for me as I realized that people all too often draw lines of distinction between each other in an effort to escape the fate of their contemporaries. I am not such a person and I will not abandon decades of activism now in order to garner a little more public approval. I would much rather enlarge the term sex worker while embracing it and standing in solidarity with other sex workers.

In the strictest sense of the word, I really am a sex worker even today, because I occasionally sell my adult DVDs.  It is funny, really.  Because if I were selling adult DVDs of Annie Sprinkle or Nina Hartley, I would not be considered a sex worker.  And when I stop selling my DVDs (which will eventually happen when I run out of copies as I have no intentions of ordering more) some may stop thinking of me as a sex worker. I, however, am fond of the word. It denotes an important aspect of the Divine Feminine which I feel called to bring forth in a variety of ways.

So while I do not intend to make more porn, I may decide to get naked in front of a camera again.  And if I do, will I be a sex worker or just like every actress in Hollywood?  Where is that magical line between the good girls and the bad girls, anyway?  I am not sure but when I find it, you can count on my arriving with a big eraser determined to blur the line even more.

Nothing But a Whore

My dad use to veto my thoughts and feelings with these words: “I make the money around here and when you start supporting this family you can have a say in how things are run.  Until then, keep your mouth shut and do what you are told.”

 

As a teenager, I often dreamed about making money so I could have an opinion. 

 

I got married in my early 30’s and my income rose dramatically from a level which barely kept the lights on to a very healthy six figure income.  It wasn’t my job that changed.  I had been an escort for a couple years before I got married.  But once I said “I do,” I did do my best to be a financial knight in shining armor.  Whatever my husband and stepchildren wanted or needed, I went out of my way to make the money to purchase it.  It felt like a self-sacrificing role but of course it was more of a manipulative maneuver given my training around money and power.

 

Despite or maybe because of MY overbearing assertions about being the one in charge because of MY income, I eventually grew tired of being the primary breadwinner in my marriage.  The more money I made the lonelier I felt and the more tired I became.  My husband didn’t express much appreciation for my money and yet he became accustomed to all that it could buy.  Making twice the money he earned never meant being respected as a good provider or a hard worker.  And though he rarely said so, he didn’t like what I did to make my money. 

 

When you are a whore, your family takes your money as penance for your sins – not a gift of your labor.

 

Shortly after I purchased my first home – my mother went to great lengths to brag about my cousin who had recently purchased a mobile home.  I was a bit flabbergasted.  I had just purchased a home in the suburbs worth nearly a half million dollars (1997 prices mind you) and I had done so completely on my own.  It was my credit rating, my savings, my down payment, my name on the contract and absolutely NO one helped me – not even my husband.  With the exception of a friend who loaned me a few thousand to put in the bank to beef up my savings account for 6 months, no one lifted a finger to help me.  Not that I minded that.  I enjoyed being a self-made woman.  Still the fact that my mother took no notice of my accomplishment hurt like hell.  So I asked her, why she was so impressed with the mobile home my cousin had acquired in part due to her husband’s recent death.  My mother replied “Well, SHE worked HARD for HER money.”

 

Apparently sucking cock and dodging serial rapists and vice cops isn’t hard work.  Oh well, it seemed like work at the time.

 

Today I live on a drastically reduced income after retiring from escorting and divorcing my husband four years ago.  Funny, you might think I would have quit prostitution while I was married.  But I didn’t.  I am too stubborn for that.  When I did quit, it wasn’t to please anyone but me.  I had simply gotten fed up with looking over my shoulder and I wanted to be legal for a change.  Towards the end of my escorting career, I had been arrested, audited and robbed or raped – depending upon how you look at it.  I was ready to go live in the woods for awhile and write my first book.

 

Despite the fact that I no longer “turn tricks” people can still assault me with their expectations and projections about sex workers and money.  It seems some people expect me to have more money than I do. And once they ascertain my scaled down lifestyle, they resort to disparaging stereotypes about money hungry whores who can’t save a penny.  I did save money thank you.  But more to the point, the expectation that we are all terribly rich (or should be) is predictable and boring.  It doesn’t matter what I do for a living now.  I used to be a prostitute. 

 

Once a whore – always a whore?  In this profession people see you as transformed from a human to something less than human.  Whores don’t do prostitution – they ARE prostitutes.  There is a difference.

 

As a sex worker I hated losing my status as a human.  But I have never really felt human anyway.  As a woman I have always watched the wicked hand of patriarchy sweep my humanity from view with a few simple incantations: whore, slut, cunt, bitch . . . and with those monosyllabic words I am marked as fair game for all sorts of crimes from rape to murder.

 

Standing mute before my accusers I despair of ever knowing true acceptance.  I may play the seductress, the mistress, the goddess but if my projection of archetypal attributes evidences a crack leaking some semblance of the mundane truth of my existence, then I am catapulted into the dark realms of the persecuted and ostracized.

 

Are there no tears for the whore?  Will the world never find it in their collective hearts to mourn our deaths?  Or honor our labor? 

 

September of 2007, a Bay Area sex worker posted a warning on Craig’s List regarding a man who raped her.  Her blunt account of events sent familiar waves of grief and rage through me:

 “He ended up throwing me down the stairs when he was done, I have a sprained ankle. And he shoved me out the door without my things. I had to flag down a car driving by and they called the police for me, but he was not arrested because I have a record in prostitution so the police saw me as exactly what the rapist saw me as…..Nothing but a Whore…” 

A month later, a Philadelphia judge put the less than human status of sex workers on the law books by ruling that the rape of a prostitute is in fact only “theft of services.”  Sadly, I understand this line of reason.  When I was raped by a man I intended to do business with, I tried to comfort myself with the words “robbery” and “bad debt.”  Maybe if I could just dismiss the whole affair as a “cost of doing business” I wouldn’t have to feel any emotional pain. 

I had conceptualized being arrested for prostitution in a similar fashion and consequently, the night I WAS arrested for prostitution, I smiled for my mug shot and treated the whole incident as something mildly amusing.  Could I treat my own rape as nothing more than a client who failed to pay his bill? Six months after my on-the-job rape, I began behaving like a traumatized rape survivor – not a business savvy entrepreneur.  So much for my psychobabble.  Turns out that I am human after all – and rape is rape – no matter what you do for a living.  If I have to learn such a hard lesson about my own victimization, how hard will it be to change the world’s (and the voting public’s) perceptions?   

Yes, I can be victimized, but I will NEVER be a victim.  I am a survivor.  I survived incest and date rape before I ever started working in the sex industry.  When I grew up and confronted my dad for molesting me, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “So what if I did, you’re a prostitute now, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?”  Yeah, I’d like to hurt him for saying that too.

 

Most sex workers are survivors.  If you don’t learn how to take care of yourself in this profession, you don’t last long.  In fact, we are wonderful caretakers.  We take care of ourselves, our clients, our families and our loved ones.  It’s what we do.

 

But the world wants to either vilify us or “rescue” us.  San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom has climbed on board the “anti-trafficking” bandwagon along with every other political player and many non-profits vying for federal funding.  This last year, San Francisco pissed away over $11 million putting poor women of color through the prostitution merry-go-round of arrests and fines. 

 

Having sat in a San Francisco jail cell with street prostitutes for over nine hours the night I was arrested for prostitution, I know the utter absurdity of prostitution laws first-hand.  Most of the street prostitutes are on a first name basis with the cops and there is a ton of flirting on both sides.  It makes the whole arrest-fine-release-arrest cycle a very expensive joke on taxpayers.  But what isn’t funny is the horribly negative impact it has on the day to day lives of those sex workers who are being put through the system on a regular basis. For them, vice functions as yet another pimp they have to pay off one way or another.

 

The real reason the world wants to punish whores is because we violate their prized beliefs about sex, love and money.  In particular, female sex workers flaunt assumptions about women’s sex drive, dependence upon men and preference for marriage.  We are a thorn in society’s side because we refuse to be “good girls” and we don’t even have the decency to feel remorse for our ways. We can also mess with the public’s “need” to know who the whores are when we blend with “good folk.”

 

Recently, I taught a workshop about Sacred Prostitution and most of the women who attended were providers.  A male friend who attended too said something completely inane – these women wouldn’t stand a chance at hooking up with men if they weren’t charging for their services.  On some level, I kind of knew what he was trying to say.  Most of these women appeared as less than sexy that particular day.  But tell me this, how is it that anyone would be able to charge for something they couldn’t give away?  That is NOT logical.  Further, he exhibited an all too typical assumption on the part of client types – thinking sex workers look like they do on the job – all the time.

 

It reminds me of the young lesbian strippers who told me tales of being worshipped and adored while wearing wigs and make-up only to be spat upon on, on their way home from the strip club – unrecognizable to their clients with their short hair, scrubbed faces and piercings. 

 

It isn’t the first time I have witnessed such a superficial and patriarchal view of sex workers. Still it made me angry.  For me, the fact that some men will pay for sex with women they might not want their friends to see them with has always pointed to the discrepancy between what actually fires the libido and what caters to social prominence.  The two have nothing to do with each other and only fools who have bought into the lies of this dominant culture and completely abandoned themselves would believe otherwise.

 

Anyway, the whole idea that sex workers are nothing but a collection of body parts and the image they project is insulting.  Maybe people confuse us with models.  But that is a different type of sex worker.  Whores do more than pose.  Whores are talented people who get paid for their sex appeal AND their skills.  Sacred Prostitution in particular is a profession which usually requires training of some sort – either mentored learning or self-study but you certainly don’t learn something that counter-culture by watching television or reading the newspaper.

 

So in the final analysis, it seems that the phrase “Nothing but a Whore” says it all.  Whether the topic is our money or our bodies or our rights or our safety, we are not to be treated like people.  Every breath we take is suspect and all the normal day to day aspects of our existence which we share with the rest of the human race, are reinterpreted to serve the denigrating stereotypes which fuel our oppression.

 

I agree with the world.  It doesn’t matter what I do for a living – I am a Whore – and damned proud of it.