Organizing beyond Facebook against violence to sex workers

The last few weeks have been full of rage and mobilization for sex workers, as a group called “Kill Your Hooker so You Don’t Have to Pay Her” appeared a few weeks back and was quickly gaining members.The group has since been taken down, as somebody tells somebody tells somebody to report the site as offensive and eventually it was taken down. It feels good to have this small victory, but there are many many more similar sites. This kind of whore hatred is everywhere on the internet. One of my clients was once showing me a t-shirt online he wanted to buy that said “I Love My Hooker” but when he searched the apparel company’s website using the search terms “t-shirt” and “hooker” all this awful stuff came up as I watched in horror: Good hookers are dead hookers; Nobody plans to kill a hooker in their hotel room; Dirty Hookers Fishing Team You’ll definitely catch something (and that’s a real sport fishing business, grrr); etc etc I won’t go on. Can you imagine what other group of people you can openly joke about killing? Whose bodies are considered so worthless and not human? Well I can think of a few: people with disabilities, aboriginal women, transpeople… sadly I can think of all sorts of sites and jokes that make light of violence against us and others. I want to make a stand against these overt expressions of violence and the deaths they produce. But we gotta remember that violence against sex workers is not just about “stranger danger” – ie evil and random frat boys joking about our deaths online, or phantom mystery clients who chop us up. Sex workers face intimate partner violence (which has more ramifications if you are used to police violence and criminalization of your work, especially for people of colour), spiritual and psychic violence generated by whorephobia (since we often have to hide our work and we don’t have access to our histories of survival under colonialization, especially for Aboriginal people), state violence at the hands of government, police and the medical establishment, and I could go on and on. But I will save that for a later post on unpacking our ideas about risk for sex workers (but you could start with this amazing piece It’s You I’m Afraid Of by Juliet November.)

It did all feel a bit weird, though, to have everyone in my community mobilizing to send complaints to Facebook. Usually I am getting angry messages about the way that Facebook is censoring breast feeding photos, or gender pronoun options, or sex positive groups, or queer performances, etc. I guess that’s the old chestnut of freedom of speech. How do we want that right served up? Well, the learning and work I have been doing recently about advocating for decriminalization over legalization and regulation, as well as the reading and thinking I have been doing about the Prison Industrial Complex, including the inefficacy of police and state responses to violence in my community is directing me to question, more and more, the amount of time and energy I spend convincing the capitalist and governmental powers that be to hear me, or represent me, or provide services to me. All those things are important, no doubt. But I’m dreaming about other responses that build the sex worker community, that fortify us and that speak to our differences across race, class, gender, and ability, that make it possible for us to confront and transform violence in our lives.

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Edited: February 16th, 2010

Whore Lover Part I

This is a longer piece that appeared in the first issue of my zine Whorelicious. I wrote it for the upcoming book Whore Lover, which is still seeking submissions. I will post the call for submissions in a few days. The story is quite long so I’ve decided to serialize it…hope you like it!

xxx
LustyDay

Whore Lover

Juliet and I are walking down Illawarra Road in Sydney, Australia. I am lagging slightly behind her. She is wearing her red striped dress and white flats. She is going out on a date after she drops me off at the brothel. I see a red thread trailing from the hem of her dress. I don’t stoop to grab it and fix it for her. The whole hem could unravel. And I don’t think she would really care about the thread anyways. Her clothes are always well-chosen, but not necessarily well-made.

We are walking towards Amore after the sun has set, it’s 9pm and I’m about to start my career as a brothel whore. She knows the way because she has already worked there. She is taking me there because she wants me to know the way, too.

“So one more time, what should I say to the clients in the intro?” I ask her. I am nervous. I have hooked before, but never in a brothel. Competing with other women, especially straight women, is terrifyingly about to become reality. I don’t think of myself as competitive. Or straight.

“Just remind yourself that the only thing you want to do in the world is fuck them,” she repeats. “Touch them at any moment you can – on the leg, on the shoulder, whatever. Call them handsome.”

Juliet has already lent me her knockout pink baby doll negligee from the Sally Ann. She thought it would go well with my sky-high red patent leather heels. I wouldn’t really know. I don’t know much about femme fashion other than fresh-faced admiration. My style is more clean-faced boyish gurl-nerd with sensible walking shoes. We have gone over the intro scenario before, the moment when I emerge from the girls’ room and lay my charm on the client for 30 seconds to convince him to book me. But I need reassurance, I need a wise whore to tell me I will be successful. (I haven’t learned yet that for every kind of ho, there is a client who will readily see her sex appeal.) I have barely arrived in Australia. But Juliet has already been working for nine months in brothels all over Sydney. She has encouraged me to come from Canada to have an adventure and pay off my school debts. After three grinding years in graduate school, I am ready for it. (more…)

Edited: November 10th, 2009