My conversations with friends who do or have done sex work have mostly been about dealing with the state - you want to figure out a way to pay your taxes as an entertainer, your options for accepting money from clients are getting fewer and fewer, you don't have any legal protections as a worker and - critically - if you have a child you are at risk of losing that child should the state put two and two together. This is particularly funny since of the small number of full service sex workers I know, the majority took up the work because they needed a way to support a child and had no meaningful childcare resources, state support or support from the father.

I grant you that I am not the type of person with whom people tend to have really explicit conversations about sex, but even so, most of the sex talk has been logistics talk - cameras and props and clothes, furnishing a work area, taking promotional pictures, etc.

When people say that sex work is work I think the key bit is that it's not really more about the erotic itself than accounting is about the philosophy of math. Some people sometimes do sex work substantially because it's well-paying sexual work, just as some people get into accounting because they really like numbers. Similarly, people sometimes have sexual interest in some of their sex work just as an accountant may have a specific accounting frisson when a particular project or inquiry works out right. But for a lot of people, it's just the best and most suitable work available.

Also, it would be good to talk more about street level sex workers and sex workers who have fewer class-based resources. A lot of the sex work I am actually aware of because it happens in my neighborhood really doesn't fit into the narrative of the Baffler piece at all. I don't think that every single woman I see on the street is agency-less and traumatized, but it's tough and dangerous and women really do get pressured into it. Again, the state: homeless women are under pressure to do sex work, sex workers can become homeless because of payment issues or getting thrown out. Poor sex workers have even fewer protections than richer ones and are extremely vulnerable to the police. There are women who live in homeless encampments who have all their stuff - make-up and clothes etc - with them in their tents so that they can get out and work. Some of these women are supporting children. Some of these women work with a boyfriend who keeps them safe and for whom "pimp" would be misleading. Some of these women are targeted by pimps.

Mainly I think that it's good to keep an eye on motivations when people read and write about sex workers (and are not themselves sex workers). Whether the memoirs are good or bad, projecting a lot about the erotic etc without consider the state and economics is probably the wrong way to understand things.
posted by Frowner at 1:01 PM on September 16 [40 favorites]

I read a news story from a few years ago where a sex worker in Alaska stole a scary client's celphone. On it, she found horrifying videos of him murdering another sex worker. She didn't know what to do with the footage, because how could she confess the double "crime" that got it into her possession (sex work and then theft), without facing consequences herself?

What a testament to her courage and integrity that she got an SD card, transferred the footage to it, labelled it "homicide at (location)", and then turned it into police, claiming to have found the SD card lost in a parking lot.

Detectives were able to track the man down because they recognized his distinctive South African accent on the video, since he had been under investigation for previous crimes. Of course, they didn't release details of what those crimes were, but the man was eventually found guilty of gruesomely murdering two Indigenous women who were doing sex work, so it's not a far walk to wonder if there were more.

How abhorrent is our society that consensual sex work is so reviled and criminalized that sex workers are dis-incentivized to report ACTUAL SERIAL KILLERS. Also - how many other sex workers did this monster murder? I listened to the cops interrogating him and they were quite civil to him while speaking with contempt about the Indigenous women he murdered. Sure, they were playing "good cop" and stroking his ego to get him to confess, you might say, but if you heard them, I think you'd agree they wouldn't speak about a middle class white woman with that kind of language and dismissal.

Tara Burns is an experienced sex worker and activist who's had the a similar experience: "A few years ago I and other advocates tried to report a crime (a felony) without the victim being arrested for prostitution (a misdemeanor)." Burns has written extensively about sex work, including the circumstances that led to her doing sex work as a teen who was being mistreated in incompetent & abusive foster care, and many many experiences beyond, some positive, some negative. Her insights are laser sharp, her writing is excellent and her solutions are practical. Policymakers should listen when she says, ‘We need the complete decriminalisation of every aspect of consensual adult sex work’.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:07 PM on September 16 [31 favorites]

I used to know a dominatrix. I once asked her about why she took up the profession, and she said “I have a BA in English. I could make $9/hr with these guys yelling at me, or I could make $300/hr with me yelling at them. That’s the math.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:14 PM on September 16 [22 favorites]

I was radicalized by #GiveYourMoneyToWomen in 2015, and the work of Yeoshin Lourdes. If you are a woman in capitalism, you are doing some form of sex work whether you consent or not (your presence in an office or store is always sexualized to some degree, not to mention the emotional labor), so one might as well get paid for it. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/giveyourmoneytowomen-the-end-game-of-capitalism
posted by petiteviolette at 5:38 PM on September 16 [7 favorites]

Mainly I think that it's good to keep an eye on motivations when people read and write about sex workers (and are not themselves sex workers).

Is this general or a comment on the review? The writer doesn't say whether she's done sex work or not, so I'm not sure we know anything about her motivations.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 6:13 PM on September 16 [1 favorite]

I think the difficulty comes with a few things that are all in tension.

Sex work is exploitative. I say this not in a moralistic way; I say this in the sense of an anti capitalist who feels all work is exploitative and who knows a lot of sex workers who find it the best work they can secure under capitalism. That doesn’t, however, make it unexploited.

Any work that you do for money destroys something. Physical work destroys portions of your body. My time in the Army destroyed my back, my knees, various other smaller things. It also destroyed certain physical and emotional reactions. I will never be able to have an uncomplicated joy in things I did for money again. I will never be able to enjoy running or physical exercise again in the way I did before I ran and did physical exercise for my living. And even the joy of helping people, the purest thing in the world, is tainted by the nonprofit work I did doing it for money. I still do it, but my time doing it in capitalism has really affected my ability to engage in it with pleasure.

I am older, and so I know people who have aged out of full service sex work, who say that engaging in intimacy for money - in particular, with the kind of people who pay money for sexual relationships - has really long-term damaged their ability to engage in relationships and to trust cis men. And I think that’s important to be up front with people about before they engage in it, so they can make informed choices. As part of informed choices, I also think it’s important to differentiate between types of sex work. Cam work is probably more likely to have less long term issues because the safety concerns are lower, and you’re engaging in less things that will affect what you you don’t need to have video sex in a long term relationship.

I think there’s this strong urge to destigmatize sex work, which is admirable, but sometimes I think it crosses too far into fangirling capitalist employment. There needs to be a middle ground, wherein we accept that it is no more, but no less, destructive than other forms of capitalist employment.
posted by corb at 7:58 PM on September 16 [16 favorites]

> engaging in intimacy for money - in particular, with the kind of people who pay money for sexual relationships - has really long-term damaged their ability to engage in relationships and to trust cis men.

That could also be interpreted as indicative of a problem with cis men, or a problem with patriarchy, just as easily as it can be interpreted to indicate a problem with sex work. Kinda hard to untangle those threads.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:13 PM on September 16 [10 favorites]

I was tempted to reflexively rag on the author a bit for not being a SWer themselves, but man, that certainly doesn’t help anything, and I do believe that author bringing visibility to this subject is a net good. We’re talking about it!

I’ve had a few friends and roommates who have escorted in different capacities at different points in their lives, I think many people have, I think the only thing abnormal with my experience is that either I am putting out some extra-nonjudgmental vibe or my friends are extra-extra bold. One is ivy educated and has found a niche performing emotional labor for hedge fund managers, we spend tons of time talking about psychology and (more recently) neuropsychology. One started when her parents abandoned her at 15 and left her in charge of 7 younger siblings; after she’d sold everything in the house, all she had left to sell was her body; she found herself trafficked shortly thereafter. We spend tons of time talking about psychology and (more recently) neuropsychology. I have a couple friends who engaged in stints with fancy agencies at various points in their life and never ever wish to speak of it again. Others who have an Onlyfans, and others who have an office of workers running their Onlyfans.

They are all amazing people. I wish, before anything else, to just keep that first and foremost. But there’s also some major sampling error happening here – they’re my friends too, so of course they’re awesome! I’m sure there are unsavory and unscrupulous individuals I am not friends with. I mean, some of my friends are somewhat less than completely scrupulous in every way. But there aren’t bad people. At most, I believe we have bad coping strategies. And strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet.

I don’t know if there are minor differences between my friends or major differences, those seem most important to other people. Like any category, classification, or boundary of any sort, the more I understand and closer I look, the more ridiculous the question becomes. Like, okay sure buddy, them doing SW and me answering to venture capitalists is super different 🙄 also particles are solid, straight lines exist, integers mean something, some people are good / others are bad, and you and I are separate.

This is where I was going to say you don’t have to take my word for it, or the author of TFA, you could just listen to SWers directly but… holy fuck they’ve all been purged. I mean not all everywhere but yeah the semi-open spaces seem pretty scrubbed. I mean, this is not my day to day beat, and the friends I have who do or have done SW talk about their work as much as I do, but goddamn I guess Switter was nuked from the fediverse 2 years ago? Cloudflare providing safe harbor to Nazis but deplatforming the most vulnerable feels terribly on brand.

I sat next to their CEO, Matthew Prince, at a dinner in Macau like a decade ago. He was a very important, boring man leading a very important, boring company. So were many people at dinners like those, but he was just an absolute gaping dickhole about it. He wouldn’t answer my questions about entropy, so I mentioned how cool it was to be in Macau, I mean there wasn’t even a land route from mainland China at that point so we’d all come by heliport and I’d no-shit got to shout to a team of roboticists “GET TO THE CHOPPA” with zero irony, and holy fuck look at this room everything is nuts a giant diamond unfolded out of a laser fountain just a minute ago and every single person I’ve met has been awesome and… well, he lit up.. I’d been elbow to elbow with him at the head of the table all night but it was like he could hear the call.. to tell me how much nicer the places he’d stayed in Las Vegas were. And how he’d just had dinner with Sheldon Adelson, who was a very important, rich man who own other nice buildings. I had given him the quasi half-nod of recognition the first time he’d alluded to a mysterious dinner guest with obvious “philanthropic” persuasions, and amplified it when he’d said “Sheldon Adelson” aloud, but I swear to Zeus, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, must have gotten to his third exasperated, enunciated repetition of “I had dinner with Sheldon. A.del.son.” with the most indignant/pleading look before I realized that he needed my approval, and wanted me to perform a sort of, IDK, superstimulus simulacra of acknowledgment. I’m pretty sure I nodded and performed; I was there for money, after all. But I was also, like, a 20-something year old boy with no savings when Matthew Prince, multi-billionaire CEO of Cloudflare, needed me to impress me, and let me know how much cooler Las Vegas was than Macau, and that he had just had dinner with a very important man named Sheldon Adelson.
posted by 1024 at 12:53 AM on September 17 [16 favorites]

Is this general or a comment on the review? The writer doesn't say whether she's done sex work or not, so I'm not sure we know anything about her motivations.

Oh, I have no notion about the reviewer. I have noticed my entire adult life that the market is greatest for books by and about sex workers when they're...sexy books? I mean, you can't write about sex work without writing about sex, and I'm not saying that books should only be about sex work when they are Very Serious Indeed, it's more that...I'm not even sure how to put it. Often people are interested in sex work "as work" but they're not interested in, eg, the lives of women who work in chicken processing plants "as work" because it's not titillating, but saying "I want to read this for sex reasons" is not considered appropriate so it gets dressed up. (I do not want to deprive memoir-writers of sales to people who want to read their books for sex reasons.)

Even this review seems mostly to consider sex work in terms of sex and not in terms of work - whether it's enjoyable and sexy work, etc, is it possible to be a very sexual person who likes having sex for money, is it bad to have sex for money, etc, when every time I've talked with someone about the regular-degular of sex work it's been "am I making enough money having sex for money".

On another note, it seems difficult to separate white supremacist capitalist patriarchy from sex work simply in the fact that young white women are most sought after and marginally safer. Again, drawing on chat with friends, it is possible to have a niche as a "mature" (like, looking like you are at least thirty) sex worker, but again that's a niche. I also think about how all the sex workers I've talked with have been in special circumstances that made it easier to do the work more safely and manage the financial and logistical angles better - not all middle class, but all with unusual ability to manage things and a little breathing room meaning they were able to seek out different situations rather than just leap into the first thing even if it was unsuitable or dangerous.

The other thing that isn't really in this article is that sex workers get killed and people don't care, and that's inextricable from stigma, racism, patriarchy, transphobia,homophobia, classism. The things that. make people, mostly women, need to do sex work are the things that make them disposable to society. Like, you become homeless, you do street level sex work, you get hurt or killed and everyone treats you like some dirty shame and like it's your fault. It's much, much less likely that a person with some resources who can choose their clients and type of work and keep their profession more discreet will be killed but it's not like nothing skeevy or scary ever happens.

I think that in addition to the "I did sex work for trauma reasons and now I Have Learned and Grown" framing in popular culture there's also the "Happy Upper Middle Class Eroticism" framing, where the emphasis is on, eg, luxury and rich clients and eroticism and reassuring everyone that sex work is fun and normal....and very well-paying!! (And of course, we all know that anything that pays really well must be okay*)

Mainly I think that we often say that sex work is work without truly thinking of it as regular working class work. There's still the sort of Grande Horizontale narrative.

I also think about how sex work shades into survival sex (that is, having sex with someone less for cash than for a place to stay or protection or for cash to get out of town/get to a new town) and how a friend of mine was working at a luxury hotel some years ago when it was sort of indirectly hinted that part of her job was to have sex with high roller guests. For free! As part of her hourly job!! Like, it's true that women's work is always "sex work" in a cultural way but also a lot of women's work is sex work in a literal way even when that's not what people sign up for.

*I think the middle classification of sex work has a lot to do with increased precarity PLUS the relative ease of getting into camming or onlyfans. It's hard to make much money but a middle class person who looks right and tries can make some money, and people really need that money now, and once something becomes required for "respectable" people to get along, it becomes more and more okay.
posted by Frowner at 3:13 AM on September 17 [15 favorites]

Sex work is exploitative. I say this not in a moralistic way; I say this in the sense of an anti capitalist who feels all work is exploitative and who knows a lot of sex workers who find it the best work they can secure under capitalism. That doesn’t, however, make it unexploited.

I think you need to take this one step further, corb. All labor is exploitative under capitalism, and all work offers a range of benefits and damages, this is true. However, you slip sex work into a different category in your comment, asserting that it’s uniquely damaging by nature rather than part of a spectrum. Yes, the dominatrix I referenced above struggled with relationships, but then I’ve known a lot of people in high-pressure jobs that did likewise. Back in those days, I also knew a roofer, who had hurt himself badly a number of times and talked about coworkers who had done worse, and that put a serious crimp in their ability to find and enjoy intimacy. John Preston’s Hustling gives a very pragmatic view of life as a sex worker and spends more time discussing finance and maintaining relationships than it does with sexual activity. (Also, depending on the time and place, situations differ, and Preston was focused on a very specific time and place).

There’s obviously a big difference between types of sex work — dominatrices, cam girls, dancers, peep show performers, call girls/boys, street prostitutes, etc — and the best we can hope for under capitalism is that they all have the protection of law, access to financial services, benefits, and the basic respect we should afford other workers. I guess an additional issue is that a lot of sex workers have to deal with parasociality without the resources afforded to “more respectable celebrities.”

A lot of sex work is exploitative, even violently so, but I’m not sure it’s so much more so than, say, immigrant workers in poultry processing plants for erosion of body, mind, and spirit. What the best framework for allowing people who (for whatever reason) want to do sex work to do that safely while helping people who don’t want to do it to have sufficient options as well. Then we might do the same for other high-exploitation labor.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:32 AM on September 17 [11 favorites]

Now I know Melissa Gira Grant--who wrote an excellent book sex work and politics, Playing the Whore--is a former sex worker but I can't speak for the author either.

Too many women--especially ones who identify as feminist--are quick to exclude sex workers as part of the narrative unless they prop them up as victims. Sex work is work.
posted by Kitteh at 6:07 AM on September 17 [5 favorites]

I've no doubt this analysis of the sex work memoir genre is accurate, but I think given that the subject is work, it's poorer for a lack of discussion of class. The middle class sex worker memoir - the white woman sex worker memoir, could no doubt loose the moralizing baggage that weighs it down, but then what? We have a girl-power story of coming into your own through your job? No harm in a little light reading whatever the topic, but I'd like to see more writing about the realities of work for the majority. There is something else that is neither girl power nor brutally exploitive (though no doubt sex work includes both these experiences tipped in one direction or another mostly by how much social power the worker has) but is about the reality of work. Recently watched Working Girls and I felt it's one of the few movies that captures work accurately, let alone sex work.

This is not a comment on Shane's book - I really liked her blog and haven't read this book so I have no idea what it contains. She's a good writer!
posted by latkes at 7:03 AM on September 17 [2 favorites]

Work being exploitative means that we should fix exploitation, not punish sex workers. Sex work intersecting with trauma means we all need more healing and therapy, full stop, not that sex work is inherently bad. The existence or possibility of a bad professional dynamic exists in like, EVERY PROFESSION OR POWER IMBALANCE, and do you want to know literally the one group I’ve ever met who might be qualified to give out PhDs in navigating that power/consent imbalance weirdness & dynamic? It’s not the minds at McKinsey.

And frankly, I’m okay with people reading any / all books just for the sexy parts! They shouldn’t lie and pretend they’re interested peoples’ lives when that’s not what they’re interested in. But maybe stories about the lives of chicken processing plant workers would be more likely to be greenlit if they add a bit more sex, Zeus knows they already have danger.
posted by 1024 at 7:40 AM on September 17 [2 favorites]

saying "I want to read this for sex reasons" is not considered appropriate so it gets dressed up.

This just keeps bouncing around my head. How many problems in how we view sex work as a whole could be traced back to it just not being okay for anyone to *say* they enjoyed anything for sex reasons?

I am so glad to be out of the early-life hunger games where everyone seemed to be obviously motivated by sex but was destroyed if they said so. Sex motive was almost never 0% but it was also rarely 100%, but there was real-time-attack if you tried to communicate or reduce confusion so everybody’s always guessing. How the fuck are we supposed to negotiate boundaries and informed consent if we’re not allowed to talk. Who told us we had to do that?

I mean seriously from a, IDK socio linguistics perspective, is there a paper or something on how many years it took as a civilization to get to “fire bad!” vs. where are we at right now with “sex good?”
posted by 1024 at 7:54 AM on September 17 [2 favorites]

I think you need to take this one step further, corb. All labor is exploitative under capitalism, and all work offers a range of benefits and damages, this is true. However, you slip sex work into a different category in your comment, asserting that it’s uniquely damaging by nature rather than part of a spectrum

If I did, I don't mean to. I agree that every form of exploited labor has inherent damage. I think the biggest issue I have with full service sex work, outside of the illegality making it more vulnerable to the danger of police and mistreatment by people who know they can't utilize the police, is kind of this pendulum reaction. So you have right-wing folk who think that sex is inherently bad placing sex work in this inherently stigmatized position, which we correctly agree is bad, and they utilize every harm that they see in order to other sex workers. The issue is that I think it sometimes tempts leftists into lifting up sex work into this almost morally holy profession in reaction, where we almost try to place it outside of the ills of capitalism and argue that it exists outside of that exploitation and that it is uniquely empowering and has *no* harms. Whereas in reality, it does have some harms, just like every other form of work, and we need to be honest about those harms, but also to be honest that all forms of work under capitalism have harms, and that the fact that work under capitalism has harms does not mean that any worker should be stigmatized.

I do think that there are some unique and long lasting harms that come when human relationships are monetized, but I don't think it's unique to sex work - I think it also occurs with things like therapy or babysitting or other care work or even service work. In my belief, it's actually less about the physicality, and more about the emotional labor of having to pretend to an emotion not genuinely felt, or to place boundaries around an emotion which is genuinely felt. I personally feel a lot of damage from my time in social service work around having to back off from helping people I wanted to care about, about being told to place boundaries around my caring and not to follow up with those people once I wasn't being paid to be involved with their lives. (Whereas my true non-organizational mutual aid work doesn't have that problem, because those people continue to contact me and I'm allowed to be involved in their lives and care about them)
posted by corb at 2:35 PM on September 17 [5 favorites]

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