I begin here with an article I wrote for the far left magazine Fightback, for their issue on minority voices. I had been working in the sex industry for about three months when I wrote this. While it deals with sex worker exclusionary feminism in a rough way, and locates sex work in the capitalist system with all of the attendant problems, it also hints at how sex work can heal and educate and how in a society conceivably close to our own, sex work itself would be seen sacred. Here it is:
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NOT ABOUT THE HEART OF DARKNESS: WHORING AS A PROFESSION IN LATE STAGE CAPITALISM
‘You live in a fantasy’, says my client wistfully. He is lying on my bed in a state of post coital triste, having expounded to me his marital problems. He looks around him, at the beautiful room bathed in golden light with its fin de siècle Parisian theme. He strokes the flank of the warm woman in his arms. ‘You are so lucky’, he tells me, ‘You get to have sex all day’.
He is right course, it is a fantasy. Whose fantasy is it? Then and there, it is his fantasy. And mine?
Clio is named for the Muse of History, a nod to my academic past. The Magnum Rossi rifle is my favourite gun. Clio works from an upmarket residence, has as clients mostly working class older men, and does a little ‘domming’ where required. She likes her clients and finds her time with them often enjoyable. She employs the same professionalism she always has. She sees whoring as part social work and part theatre sports. She is the ultimate capitalist, an independent business woman in charge of her own destiny, apolitical, amoral, individualistic, for her the money meter runs all the time. She is the ultimate anti capitalist, living off the grid and on her wits, undertaking transactions of a sort older than feudalism.
Left wing critique of sex work is predicated on two ideas – that it is inherently degrading to sex workers, who are mostly women, and that it must exist within patriarchal systems. Late stage capitalism with its cultural impoverishment and austerity measures has driven women into sex work and also made sex work more dangerous and more alienating. Sex work cannot be decoupled from the capitalist system in which it thrives. There would be no need for it otherwise. Most sex workers would choose not to be doing it. Sex workers are victims either of social and economic forces around them or their own pasts. They may be considered to be ‘prostituted women’. Sex work by its nature is traumatising. Clients or ‘johns’ are engaged in oppression whether they know it or not. The buying of sex exists as part of the commodification and objectification of women and is a result in part of the patriarchal view of family life. Sexual transactions are qualitatively different from all other transactions. Sex should never be bought or sold.
Sex work activists and their liberal feminist allies emphasise choice. If a woman has choices over her own body, sex work may be one of them. If sex work is dangerous and degrading, it is because it is criminalised and unsupported, not because of inherent issues in sex work itself. Sex work is just that – work. Sexual transactions are like any other transactions. Sex workers are better paid and perform often under better conditions than their counterparts who may work under a zero hour contract on minimum wage. And yet, nobody tries to ‘rescue’ workers from the cleaning industry. Sex work advocates accuse other feminists of identity politics and are concerned that the voices of sex workers themselves are not heard.
The subtext behind these arguments is the question of whether or not sex is like anything else. Proponents of sex work say yes of course it is, it can be freely bought and sold like any other service. A sex worker might say that her actions are no more intimate than that of a physiotherapist or counsellor. Left wing critics argue that sex is different. It is an intimate act involving the whole self. Sell the act and the self itself is being sold, and the selling of sex is at the absolute sharpest end of the worst of capitalism and patriarchy, where a less powerful individual, usually a woman, is selling herself to a more powerful man. Inequality is inherent.
I became interested in this particular aspect of the argument, whether or not sexual transactions are like any other transactions and whether or not sex is like any other activity. It seemed to me to be treated by both sides as a given, and yet it underpinned the other arguments. It also seemed to be the aspect most amenable to being addressed by looking at the experience of individuals, and that is what I can offer to the debate.
My experience is limited because I am new to the industry and my situation defies commonly accepted stereotypes of sex workers – I am an educated Pakeha woman and my background has no particular trauma or impoverishment. In the past I would have seen sex workers as victims, of poverty, addiction, or the men in their lives. When I began this work I was astounded to find myself selling sex, astounded to find that I did not ‘feel oppressed’, and astounded to find that I liked my work and (most of the time) my clients. Am I subjected to false consciousness? Should I feel victimised?
I am in charge in my Whoring Room. Hurt or degrade me, and you leave. For the first two weeks, my friend mentioned above, who is a gay man who used to run a parlour, ran me. He emphasised my safety and my self esteem. He encouraged me to talk with clients to assess their needs and my safety. After one unpleasant client, he assured me that I need never do anything I was not comfortable with, and that it was fine to stand up for myself. The New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective gave me similar advice – stand on your dignity, charge what you are worth, stay safe. I don’t bargain, for example. When men text things like ‘$60 for anal that’s my best offer’ I reply ‘Would you bargain with your hairdresser or your GP? I too am a professional, providing a service’. I employ the conscious use of self to assess needs and engage clients, and to keep safe. I also act. I act domme, I act cute, I act like a pet. These are roles which I enjoy, but they are roles nevertheless. My Whore’s Drawers, as I call them, my wardrobe of skimpy yet elegant outfits and killer heels, are my uniform. If I was an airline pilot I would wear a pilot’s uniform. Both uniforms denote professionalism. Moreover, my clients mostly treat me with respect and gratitude, far more so than if I worked in fast food or even many jobs such as nursing or law, for that matter.
All this implies that sex is the same as anything else. I offer counselling with actions, or massage in costume, or a little bit of theatre. A fantasy. One fantasy per man. You want a drill bit inserted into your rectum? I can help with that. Have prostate cancer and it’s on your bucket list to have a woman piss in your mouth? I can help with that. It’s all the same to me. Nothing degrading, because nothing personal. While I pride myself on my focus and use of my whole self, it is the same ethical base as for any other personalised social services, and nobody sees those as the selling of the self. I sell my labour too as I always have. Moreover, I mostly like my clients and I hope I see them as whole people.
And yet. I want to return now to the man who envied me my fantasy life, the man seeking a brief escape from a sexless marriage, from the stress of his bullshit job, and also from the soulless anomie of an increasingly atomised society in late stage capitalism where affection or its simulacra are bought and sold like everything else. If an hour with me is a commodity, if in fact I am a commodity for that particular hour, so is he, so is everyone else who is alienated from the forces of production.
I wish I had a clear stance on whether or not sex is different from anything else, and a tidier argument. My hunch is that critics of sex work and its proponents are making an Aristotelian category error, a bit like arguing whether or not a blade of grass is odd or even. It is a question best dealt with outside the arena of politics and activism, and yet, a bit like deciding somehow whether or not a foetus is a person, it underpins whole arguments and affects the real lives of sex workers, their clients and policy makers.
The strangest question I have been asked by a client so far (and note he is talking about himself) is ‘How can I go home and be on my own, knowing what I now know about myself?’ Sex is deep stuff, saturated with meaning. Humans touch each other here. Lives change in my Whoring Room. I wonder about sex work under a non capitalist non patriarchal system, as if that ever existed. I would be perhaps sacred, and valued. I would be a healer and an educator. Perhaps I am already.
Here is a quote from David Rosen, in the magazine Guernica:
‘The prostitute’s sexual exchange is the purest expression of capitalist alienation, the relation between buyer and seller’.
If sex work is a Bad Thing, as left wing thinkers like Rosen propound, then it is not because of the sex. It the alienation, and that alienation pervades all aspects of our lives in society. Buying and selling sex has taken place long before capitalism, and in other societies where patriarchy may take different forms or even be mitigated by other social forces. It is the alienation that degrades women, commodifies us, and leads men into situations where oppression is easier than communicating. One socialist commentator states it is important to see sex workers as victims, because calling them victims points to the fact that there is oppression[1]. But here and now, oppression is ubiquitous. As Clio Magnum Rossi, I would call us not to suppress sex work, but to reclaim our humanity and the depth of our relationships.
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Since writing that, I have come down on the side that says that sex is not like other human activities. It is not like physiotherapy or serving food in a restaurant, even though it involves touch and serving an individual need. Sex is soaked in meaning, cultural and personal. Sex is redolent with memory and desire. Sex is complicated. Sex changes us. Sex is magic.
I have done personal care for a living and this too can be an intuitive and energetic form of service. Once I would shower and dress a young woman with cerebral palsy. As I put conditioner on her hair, I would massage her head. Then I would shake stress and worry from my hands down the drain. She was mildly intellectually disabled, but she knew what I meant and appreciated it. As I put ointment on her feet, I sensed what had happened to her little body. She was born premature, and in childhood underwent many operations to straighten her legs and feet. I could see the scars, but I could also feel how her body remembered her pain and fear. Nobody told me that, but I knew it intuitively, and energetically, as well as from past experience. Putting on the ointment was energetic work, as was massaging her head. I am sure a good physiotherapist or counsellor can also work this kind of magic, this kind of energy work that is intuitive and wise and sees into the soul of things.
Good sex workers do this as a matter of course. We sense a client’s needs and work on an energetic level to heal and teach. We know the body remembers what the mind doesn’t.
Sometimes a man can be influenced by an event from childhood, even one image or idea implanted at a time in his development when he was particularly susceptible. One man saw an old cowboys and Indians cartoon where a man was tied to a wall and whipped. I was the first person he had ever told about this. It was an image that was a sweet torture for him, something he had never dared to speak of let alone obviate in practice. Speaking of it, he was surprised at the hold that one image had over him. Capturing that one image became the basis of the kink life he adopted after he met me. He became an intelligent, thoughtful and very successful submissive.
Another man approached me seeking a meotomy, which is a type of surgery to widen the opening at the tip of the penis. He had begun this process himself, but he wanted someone to do it for him. His desire to split his penis stemmed from a single image in a book, of a stout older woman holding a pair of scissors. Like the first man, he saw this one image at the age of about eight, and like the first man, he was entranced sexually by an image that was not explicitly sexual. I did not perform the meotomy as I did not have the surgical skill, but I did sit in a café with him and discuss his motivation and the risks involved. In the end he decided what he was most interested in was the process rather than the result, and of course once he had done it he could not go back. He decided not to pursue it further, and I think that was the wisest decision for him.
Both these men were highly functioning, articulate and in long term relationships. The next man I will describe was not so fortunate.
The first man I ever dommed came to me tormented by memories of life in an East London boarding school. He had been hiding under a staircase from bullies, when a female teacher walked up the stairs above him, and he inadvertently saw her knickers. Then the teachers dragged him out from his hiding place, and soundly beat him. Ever since then heavy beatings, and the sight of full white underpants, were mixed with pain and pleasure and desire. He worked part time as an accountant, and lived alone. I had a special very large wooden spoon I used just for beating him. He would book me for early mornings and I would snarl at him ‘I just love the feel of a warm bottom on a cold morning’, and, my favourite, in school teacher mode: ‘This is NOT going to hurt me as much as it hurts you’. Once I suggested to him he may wish to talk to someone about his traumatic experiences, as he was clearly not managing well in life. He looked at me with shock, as if I had sworn at him. It occurred to me afterwards that the ethical concerns I was having about beating him were misplaced. His monthly bookings with me probably provided as much relief and guidance as therapy, and it was also cheaper.
From these examples you may gather two things. One is if sex is soaked in meaning, the meaning is personal and sometimes quite eccentric. The other is that a lot of what I loosely describe as erotic experience is not actually about fucking. I soon learned to consider sex as a whole body/mind/soul experience. Sex takes us back to the awakening, the memory, the first thing. It surprises us and frightens us. And there are often ghosts in the bedroom or the dungeon.
Blessings on you, gentle reader.
[1] Laura Fitzgerald ‘A Socialist Perspective on the Sex Industry and Prostitution”, Socialist Party, 7 Aug 2013
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