Post transition to a ‘real job’, I’ve had plenty of time on my hand to think about Carol Leigh’s life and legacy and the way ‘sex work/er’ has been co-opted by outsiders. Concepts like ‘pleasure activism’ and ‘sex positivity’ have become intertwined with terminology that was created to simultaneously assert and reinforce our agency as workers, irrespective of our personal sexual proclivities. Which feels…incredibly disrespectful to her intent and her legacy. The insistence on tying notions of empowerment and sexual awakening to labor, especially in a capitalist society, specifically because this kind of labor confronts long-held, deeply entrenched notions of morality, is pissing me off. Real bad.
At the risk of alienating a hell of a lot of people, I’m honestly starting to think of the word ‘empowerment’ as a slur. I’d like to believe it’s (usually) coming from a good place when some well-meaning, if disgustingly earnest and painfully ignorant, person starts in with the usual talking points. I just don’t know if I can be that charitable because I’m tired. I am tired of arguing the same things over and over and over…and over again.
At the risk of alienating a hell of a lot of people, I’m honestly starting to think of the word ‘empowerment’ as a slur.
To be a sex worker is to be an anathema. It’s defined by cognitive dissonance from the start – a constant battle between societal expectations, norms, and shame surrounding sex and sexuality, and the mandate to earn money in a world where poverty is a crime in practice, if not by legal definition. It’s a constant fight to justify your existence and decisions through the prurient, navel-height gaze of a pseudo-intellectual with a hard-on for picking fights from behind a computer screen.
After 4 generations of feminist thought and discourse arriving at the current psychosexual awakening where sex is (allegedly) divorced from centuries of misogyny, racism, and patriarchal violence, I had hoped we were beyond this. There’s something so sick and twisted about self-professed liberal feminists and leftist hordes demanding an explanation for why one would ever choose sex work. What, exactly, did bell hooks warn us about the dangers of sisterhood based on shared victimization for, if the purported students of her work turn to hurl accusations of “paid rape” at us? Or was it so that bored housewives could let their fantasies of oppression cosplay out for a breather, admonishing their peers that “we’re all whores in some way”? I’m not sure which is the more offensive because they both give me indigestion, waking nightmares, headaches, and swamp ass.
There’s something so sick and twisted about self-professed liberal feminists and leftist hordes demanding an explanation for why one would ever choose sex work.
Some time ago, I received an email from a reader – a self-professed liberal feminist looking for a playthrough guide to seeing sex workers as real people. At first, I wasn’t kind, then I tried it again. Now, several years later, I can identify what frustrated me the most about that email. This person spent approximately 1700 words assigning the same status, power, and societal investment they had received, to every single member of an incredibly diverse community of women. We know that we’re not a monolith and that the diversity of our experiences have led us to the choices we’ve made, for better or worse. We know that our worth and identity exists independently of what puts food on the table, whether we enjoy it or not. And yet, this person, for all their awakened ideology, could not fathom the humanity or agency of someone who…does that.
Of course, people who feel this way never come right out with the slurs or open disdain. They have to wrap it up in a pretty package of empowerment and fulfillment to make it sound less like casting aspersions. But honestly, I would rather you just call me a slur. At its core, the demand for some kind of ethereal, otherworldly sense of higher purpose to justify participation in the sex industry is an attempt to invalidate every other aspect of a person’s existence beyond their job. What are we, cops? My sense of self, my inherent value as a person, my identity is not tied to the ways I’ve protected myself from how this world treats poor, Black, mentally ill women. It is, quite literally, just a job. I am not obligated to have positive feelings about the work I do, or have done, to deserve the same acknowledgement of my humanity and respect for my agency that is afforded to every corporate pencil pushing seat filler.
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