Author’s note: This was originally published on my, now-defunct, Substack page. In the time since, a (former) Substack executive openly mocked sex workers asking for a revision of the terms of service, the co-founder referred to the platform as “just like OnlyFans,” the platform was used to generate revenue for a right-wing…influencer targeting childrens’ hospitals and libraries, the CEO refused to answer a question regarding their moderation policies for hate speech, and The Atlantic (attempted to) explore just how big the white supremacy problem is on Substack. While my Substack was always been free to access, and I only published 2 pieces in total, I am forced to acknowledge that I was contributing to the problem by allowing my intellectual output to live on a platform that profited from the hate and bigotry I have tried so hard to call out in my professional career. To that end, I have deleted my Substack in its entirety, and Tryst has been gracious enough to allow those two pieces to live on their blog. Below is an updated version of the original article.
In February of last year, a fellow freelancer asked if any writers with a background in sex work would be willing to review a yet-to-be-released Netflix documentary, Strip Down, Rise Up. I’m not a culture critic or writer, but as a writer that often complains about the representation of sex work in popular media, I threw my hat in the ring for the opportunity.
The documentary was overwhelmingly fine, if extremely on the nose, but I didn’t want to tear what felt like an earnest attempt to profile some very well-meaning women to shreds. I spent about a paragraph talking about the middling, at best, representation of sex work the documentary shoehorns in, bookended by conversations on empowerment and loving your body as a radical act. Overall, any critique in the piece is pretty lukewarm, and any mention of sex work is largely overshadowed by the feminist empowerment message the filmmakers prioritize.
I’m not a culture critic or writer, but as a writer that often complains about the representation of sex work in popular media, I threw my hat in the ring for the opportunity.
Having never written for a publication the size of NBC Think before, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from the response. It was overwhelming. A few hours after it was published, my review was re-posted on several aggregate sites and MSN. My mother let me know that Google was auto-completing a search for my name with the title of the piece. My public-facing email inbox was a lost cause within 24 hours. I’m not a stranger to hate mail or being called a whore on the internet, but it stopped being amusing, if annoying, by hour 36. But the worst responses came from self-professed liberal women who couldn’t understand why I would ever debase myself or other women by endorsing the sale of sex. Didn’t I have any shame? (No.)
One email in particular demanded to know how any woman could feel empowered by encouraging the male gaze. She struggled, despite a liberal feminist point of view, to understand how anyone could find empowerment in upholding a narrow, patriarchal view of sex and sexuality. At the time, I wrote a less than charitable response, which I threw on Ko-Fi and promptly forgot about. While I still believe most of what I wrote was correct, I’ve evolved my thinking a little bit since then, and I’d like to revisit some key points now that the original response is no longer available.
Labour is not empowering. Selling your labour for a pittance is not empowering. The assertion that sex work must be empowering to be a valid occupation is capitalist propaganda that makes liberals feel enlightened when they support legislation and organizations that overwhelmingly target women of color, trans people, and disabled people. We are overwhelmingly unprotected in "traditional" means of employment. We're subject to harassment, wage theft, and retaliatory firings when reporting mistreatment, and a system that insists we ‘have it all’ without giving us the means to do so. While empowerment is a fun buzzword that conjures up images of Rosie the Riveter and knitted pink hats in provocative shapes, it ultimately absolves people of their complicity in the criminalization and stigmatization of sex workers and those assumed to be so.
Labour is not empowering. Selling your labour for a pittance is not empowering. The assertion that sex work must be empowering to be a valid occupation is capitalist propaganda.
Empowerment is a concept that requires traditionally feminised forms of labour – childcare, domestic labour, education, administrative labour, etc. – to remain devalued in the larger society and thus undeserving of labour protections and basic human decency. It demands that people meet ever narrowing definitions of respectability and normalcy to earn the privilege of humanity. This is a self-defeating proposition in a society that inherently positions the people most likely to engage in sex work as subhuman. Women, queer people, drug users, the houseless community—these are not people who have the benefit of earning sociopolitical approval on a universal scale.
To dangle your alleged support for sex workers over our heads like a particularly bloody cut of meat over a den of starving lions is an act of ego. Your support of sex workers is irrelevant to whether or not people will continue to trade sex and sexual services. For those without your self-admitted privileges of higher education, whiteness, socioeconomic mobility, and financial security, it’s insulting to imagine that individualised support, contingent on acceptance of their less-than-human status, matters in any meaningful way. For those who are not equally privileged, the choice of where to commodify their labour in exchange for basic necessities and survival is a false one. It is the height of arrogance to presume that one person’s approval can or should supersede the material conditions that led a person to sex work or their continued participation in the industry.
Further, the objectification of women and femme-presenting sex workers is not a problem inherent to sex work. It is a problem of patriarchal and misogynist societal rules that inform policy specially designed to subjugate gender minorities. What fault is it of ours if men choose to act out their violent impulses, encouraged by a society that rewards misogynist acts of aggression from near-infancy? The task of dismantling patriarchal structures is not, and never will be, the responsibility of women and trans people who have monetized the discrimination and oppression they will experience, regardless of their occupation.
What fault is it of ours if men choose to act out their violent impulses, encouraged by a society that rewards misogynist acts of aggression from near-infancy?
To ask how women refrain from throwing each other under the bus is a particularly bad faith argument that insists I, and other sex workers, are responsible for your own internalised misogyny and fealty to respectability politics. I am not. We are not. The choices that I have made, and continue to make, to feed myself and my family are not a valid excuse for you or anyone else to foist centuries of patriarchal conditioning and norms off on others. The work of undoing those biases is yours and yours alone, and the discomfort you feel is not meant to be shared. To ask for community support in undoing the decades of social conditioning that led you to this point is not unwarranted. But I have to wonder how dedicated you are to the pursuit if you insist on furthering the same dehumanising and fallacious logic that got you to this point. It feels less like an earnest effort to learn how to best support the most marginalised members of your community and more like a demand to have silly notions of propriety co-signed.
"I don’t believe most of them are there by choice." is direct evidence that you are not listening to, or caring about, the very same sex workers you claim to want to support. For years, sex workers have been begging allies—alleged and real—to make clear linguistic distinctions between sex work and sex trafficking. The continued conflation of these issues has led to disastrous results, namely SESTA/FOSTA and its multitude of legislative offspring. Refusing to consider sex workers experts on the subject of sex work is a product of the same misogyny that ‘well-meaning’ supporters claim to combat. It is gross infantilization that presumes sex workers cannot be trusted with our own wellbeing. There’s a sick irony in this logical rollercoaster when you consider how sex workers are also handed the responsibility of men’s bad behaviour, societal deviance, and the corruption of children who happen to find internet porn in their search for basic sex education.
Knowing that we live in a society that prioritises strict adherence to heteronormative standards and gender roles—ones that pit men and women as insurmountably opposed without a sex act between them—I can’t be too upset with how you’ve come to these conclusions. This is why I characterised my original response to this email as uncharitable. It’s also why I don’t argue with those who make these same, redundant talking points. It’s not my ministry to undo the decades of sensationalist propaganda (and copaganda) you’ve been exposed to through countless forms of media. I’m most certainly not up to that task when you admit that you’ve never really interacted with sex workers or their experiences outside of the same, intentionally exaggerated and inaccurate, media depictions. This tells me two things: one, you’re not actively trying to change your point of view beyond a few token gestures, like this email; and two, the sex workers around you don’t trust you enough to disclose that information. Because there are most assuredly sex workers around you—there are just too many of us for you to not know a single one.
Despite this, here I sit, attempting to soften my delivery and provide the necessary context to guide a journey that I hope you haven’t abandoned in the last 18-odd months. I have to because this country is on the precipice of a sociocultural revolution that threatens all of us. The time to support the same sex workers that have been warning you of inevitable political and legislative regression, is now. The time to seriously interrogate how you’ve come to hold these biases, and do the work of shedding them, is now. And maybe you won’t read this. I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to never interact with my writing again after my original response — I am not a nice person when it comes to philosophical debates regarding my humanity or right to survive. But even if this doesn’t reach its intended audience, I hope it reaches someone.
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