Feminist Responses to Sex Work: Healing the Wounds of Patriarchy, Capitalism, and Classism

What do we mean when we speak of sex work? Sex work is essentially any form of labor in which persons receive money in return for using their bodies in some way to titillate or arouse their customers. Broadly, then, sex workers include pornographic models, phone sex operators, high-priced escorts, street hookers, and even sexual surrogates. Some sex workers are self-employed, and some work for bosses (sometimes called madams or pimps) or companies. Sex workers include people of all genders, races, classes, and nationalities, although people who start out with more marginalized identities are likely to find themselves operating under more stringent working conditions.

Sex work is not monolithic. Within every country, every city, and every branch of the profession, there is a diverse range of experiences. Nevertheless, sex work is often discussed as if it were one single issue, a “topic” that can be defended or opposed. In this essay, since I am focused on analyzing these modern feminist responses to sex work (I will only be considering responses since second-wave feminism), I will be omitting discussion of many of the (especially gendered and raced) complexities of sex-worker experience; however, it is important to keep in mind this present absence.

Also, a note on terminology: “sex work” is in itself a contested term. It has not exactly replaced “prostitution,” since it encompasses more forms of labor than “prostitution” (usually used to imply streetwalking) does. However, many contemporary sex workers prefer to refer to themselves as such rather than using the term “prostitution” because “sex work” puts the emphasis on labor rights rather than on gendered exploitation:

The term 'sex worker' was coined by sex workers themselves to redefine commercial sex, not as the social or psychological characteristic of a class of women, but as an income-generating activity or form of employment for women and men (Leigh, 1997). Similarly, use of the term 'sex industry', was aimed at inclusion of exotic dancers, masseurs, telephone sex operators, receptionists (maids) and a whole host of people (including men) who sell sex (Delacoste and Alexander, 1987). Both terms have gained increasing credence since the 1970s, better acknowledging the active, wilful, moral, reflexive and insightful agency of sex workers (Chapkis, 1997) and recognizing that the prostitute is socially situated in a culture that includes a range of other actors. ¹

Many anti-prostitution feminists despise the terminology change because they believe it sugarcoats the harshly exploitative reality of the career. ² Some contemporary sex workers (as well as many other sex radicals) are also reclaiming the words “whore” and “slut,” in order to question the presupposition that sexual promiscuity is inherently shameful. In this paper, I make use of all of the following terms: “prostitution/prostitute,” “sex work/sex worker,” and “whoring/whore.”

Theorizing Sex Work:

Feminist/Sex-Worker Responses (yes, it is possible to be either and both)

At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, I find it useful to classify the feminist responses to sex work into two categories: anti-prostitution feminist and sex radical feminist/whore revolutionary.³ This classification system is helpful for identifying some of the common trends in the responses and for examining the tensions between these trends. A note of caution, however: such a classification system, if taken too literally, overdetermines the boundaries between these groups and conceals the fact that some voices in these movements, but not others, are heard because they are privileged by media and history. Also, it is necessary to keep in mind the specific historical contexts in which these theories arose and the ways in which they were shaped by the experiences and identities of their spokespeople. ⁴

Anti-Prostitution Feminists

Prominent second-wave feminists (many of whom were white and middle-class) such as Andrea Dworkin⁵, Catharine MacKinnon, and Kathleen Barry theorize prostitution (and pornography, and sadomasochism, and butch/femme) as an example of patriarchal power. They point to prostitution as an institutionalization of men’s at-will access (sexual and otherwise) to women. They reject a labor analysis of prostitution (including the use of the term “sex work”) because they argue that it obscures the inherently oppressive nature of prostitution. They base the claim that prostitution is inherently oppressive on the idea that it is always and necessarily involuntary, due to the ubiquity of patriarchy, and on the idea that selling sex is selling part of the self. They view prostitutes as victims unable to express agency, constantly raped (all sex work is rape) and inherently rapable (by nature of the profession, sex workers can never legitimately say no). They often extend this victim analysis by seeing sex worker theorists as having “false consciousness” if they challenge anti-prostitution feminist theorizing of sex work. They tend to omit a class or capitalist analysis of sex work, and they also omit an analysis of pleasure and desire. Desire is presumed never to be present on the part of sex workers, and clients’ desire is figured as inherently predatory and pathological.⁶

The Feminist Sex Wars and Sex Workers

In response to utopian radical feminism, sex radical voices began to emerge, many of which belonged to working-class women, including sex workers (two queer working-class white women important to the sex radical movement were Dorothy Allison and Amber Hollibaugh—Hollibaugh was also a sex worker). Also, in the context of the more recent third-wave feminism, more and more sex workers are speaking out and influencing the direction of feminist organizing. Many sex workers’ writings are now published. Carol Leigh’s book Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot7

is one example of this, as are the anthologies Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry,⁸ Working Sex: Sex Workers Write about a Changing Industry,⁹ and Whores and Other Feminists.¹⁰ Sex workers have also shared their perspective on tour through the Sex Workers’ Art Show, a performance art tour performed entirely by sex workers.¹¹ Many sex workers have well-traveled online blogs (http://renegadeevolution.blogspot.com/ is one) and some, like Emi Koyama and Sarah Katherine Lewis, are popular campus speakers. Sex workers working in legal portions of the industry are unionizing: Julia Query’s film Live Nude Girls Unite12 documents the unionization of the Lusty Lady, a strip club in San Francisco.

Sex radical feminists and sex workers have responded to the anti-prostitution positions by pointing out their failure to adequately account for human desire and pleasure, and as such their allegiance with reactionary and ascetic forces bent on labeling unruly bodies and sexuality as dirty or pathological. (Priscilla Alexander points out that the terms that are used by anti-prostitution feminists—“degraded,” “dehumanized,” and “debased,” for example, are the same that arise in the writings of an “all-male commission that studied prostitution at the end of the nineteenth century…[as well as] the patriarchs who wrote the Torah.”¹³) The recognition of these troubling alliances helps to build an analysis of the ways in which sex-negativity actually bolsters patriarchy by reinforcing the mind-body split, devaluing physical and emotional (i.e., archetypically feminine) forms of knowledge, reifying myths of women as sexually responsive (or frigid) and men as sexually initiatory, reinforcing the virgin/whore dichotomy (and thus permitting men to continue defining and regulating women’s sexualities), increasing the invisibility of lesbian sexualities, and essentializing gender, among other things. In addition, sex radical feminists began to depart from the earlier feminist utopianism, both by acknowledging that relations of power are often integral to human desire, and by recognizing that under patriarchy, all choices are necessarily constrained and imperfect, and thus no choices can be immediately dismissed as “non-radical” (and by the same token, no one is innocent of complicity with the power structure)¹⁴. Since no actions are perfect but action is necessary to overthrow patriarchy (“We can’t wait to have sex until after the revolution!” ¹⁵), formerly maligned activities suddenly came within the realm of the potentially revolutionary. Based on this new view, the sex radical feminists began to analyze how sex work could be subversive and agentive, in order to counter the anti-prostitution feminist claim that it (and pornography and sadomasochism and butch/femme) was simply coerced reification of structures of patriarchal power.

In contrast to the anti-prostitution feminists, sex radical feminists argued that sex work was not inherently oppressive and was not any more involuntary than any form of heterosexual sexuality under patriarchy. Koyama writes:

[Prostitution is] not any more [oppressive] than other lines of work in a global capitalist system. If prostitutes were [sic] more vulnerable to exploitation than other workers today, it is because we, like offshore sweatshop workers and migrant farmworkers, lack the institutional power to defend our rights as workers. To say that prostitution is always or “inherently” oppressive would absolve the wrongdoers of their responsibilities, and therefore is ultimately reactionary. [emphasis present in the original]¹⁶

Working-class feminists add that sex work is not more exploitative than other forms of labor under capitalism. In fact, under capitalism, all forms of labor—especially working class labor—involve the alienated selling of some part of the self. (For example, Emi Koyama points out that the fact that migrant farmworkers and sweatshop workers are exploited does not cause us to call for the abolition of agriculture or the garment industry.¹⁷)

Sex radicals also argue that sex workers subverted men’s enforced access to women by making that access visible by taking payment for it. Eva Pendleton writes (79), “[The act of making men pay] reverses the terms under which men feel entitled to unlimited access to women’s bodies. Sex workers place very clear limits on that access, refiguring it on our own terms.”¹⁸ Sex radicals also emphasize sex work’s potential for women’s ability to reclaim sexual agency, pleasure, desire, and control.

Adding to this framework of choice-under-constraint, working-class sex workers have corrected a middle-class sex radical position that emphasizes sex work as a radical empowering choice for women. Working-class sex workers argue that the shift from viewing sex workers as victims to viewing them as having agency must not be so complete that it obscures the very real constraints under which sex workers, particularly working class sex workers, make the choice to enter or remain in the industry, nor that it be allowed to obscure the dangerous and terrible conditions under which many such women work. For example, Koyama writes,

[B]y telling sex workers that sex work is inherently empowering, [Carol Queen] was making invisible the exploitation and abuse of workers by the management, and making it easier for them to further the exploitation. By labeling someone “anti-sex” for having legitimate grievances against their working conditions, whether the work involves sexual act [sic] or not, Queen’s pro-sex feminism renders sex work as primarily sex as opposed to work—and thus her argument is counteractive and anti-worker.¹⁹

Also, sex workers point out that sex work has been insufficiently theorized from the perspective of capitalism and class. It is these sex workers who pushed for the shift toward the terminology of “sex work” rather than prostitution, in order to emphasize that sex work is indeed a form of labor that is taking place under the capitalist system. This framework not only makes visible the effects of capitalism on sex workers, it also emphasizes that it is possible to address the abuse of sex workers through worker organization and industry regulation rather than solely through abolition. By way of one example of how this logic counters the arguments of anti-prostitution prostitution abolitionists: whore revolutionaries point out that sex workers should not be considered unrapable, that consent should be part of the job and that sexual advances in the absence of consent should be treated as sexual harassment just as they would be in a middle-class work environment, rather than treated as evidence of the inherent exploitative nature of sex work. Koyama writes, “[A]nti-prostitution feminists share one thing in common with rapists: that they do not understand ‘yes means yes, no means no.’ While rapists argue in court that prostitutes can’t get raped, anti-prostitution feminists argue that prostitutes can’t avoid being raped—both arguments exonerate those directly responsible for the act of raping.”²⁰

Activist and Policy Outcomes of the Theories

Based on these theoretical differences, the two schools of thought recommend different activist approaches to sex work.

Anti-prostitution Feminists

Anti-prostitution feminists suggest that since prostitution is an outgrowth and a reinforcement of patriarchal oppression, it ought to be banned and expunged. They have tended to approach this goal through an alliance with state regulatory forces—laws and police. In some cases this takes a supposedly pro-woman form by stipulating punishment of clients rather than punishment of workers. (Even in places in which clients are as criminalized as prostitutes, prostitutes (and particularly working class women of color) tend to make up the bulk of those targeted by police for violence, arrest, and jail time.²¹) Grassroots activist work tends to focus on “rehabilitation” programs for ex-sex-workers that combine needed resources with enforced ideological compliance (for example, requiring a commitment to leave the industry as a prerequisite for counseling or support services). Emi Koyama describes the collusion between one such program and law enforcement:

SAGE cooperates with the law enforcement, which means that it gains its ‘clients’ by threatening prostitutes…that unless they go through its program they will go to jail. Under this threat, it then demands women to accept and internalize its anti-prostitution message….Talk about women being kidnapped, brainwashed, and trapped in an abusive system through enormous power differential!²²

Sex Radical Feminists and Whore Revolutionaries

Since sex radical feminists recognize that prostitution can be an empowering choice for women and potentially subversive toward the patriarchy, and since they recognize that illegalization reinforces the sex-negativity that in turn reinforces patriarchal oppression, they call for decriminalization of prostitution and thus legal protection for what can potentially become a site of subversion of patriarchy.

Whore revolutionaries point out that the typical feminist approach (trying to eliminate sex work and liberate sex workers through state legislation) is based on a series of faulty assumptions: that sex work is inherently oppressive, that to abolish sex work is to liberate sex workers to some life situation that is in fact less oppressive, that this will on the whole help dismantle patriarchy (and perhaps capitalism), that state legislation is effective in abolishing prostitution, and that the harm such legislation does to sex workers will be justified by the ultimate gains. None of these assumptions is borne out. The criminalization of prostitution disproportionately affects working-class sex workers and sex workers of color, who are in the first place more likely to be working on the streets, and who in the second place are more likely to be targeted by police arrests²³ (including deceitful tactics such as entrapment by plain-clothes police²⁴) as well as violence (and since prostitution is illegal and prostitutes’ voices are not often taken seriously by the court system, sex workers’ attempts to get justice in response for police brutality (or, for that matter, rape, assault, or murder at the hands of clients) are almost never successful²⁵). Also, criminalization of prostitution provides a pretext for police to pick up any “social undesirables,” even people who are not clients or sex workers, or sex workers who are not working at the moment of arrest.²⁶ Also, under laws that prohibit “encouraging prostitution,” police can arrest prostitutes for sharing safety information, organizing to prevent abuse, and offering each other support²⁷—and as such, this legislation often makes prostitutes more vulnerable to abusive pimps²⁸ (who, unlike prostitutes, are rarely arrested by police when they are reported). Under laws that prohibit “pimping, pandering, or procurement” or “benefiting from prostitution,” prostitutes can be arrested for voluntarily sharing resources with family and friends, or can even have their own property taken away.²⁹ Finally, laws designed to prevent the trafficking of sex workers or their assets by exploitative pimps actually end up being used against prostitutes themselves who try to send money across state borders or themselves attempt to cross international borders, even sometimes being deported when they are in fact immigrating as refugees from trafficking.³⁰

However, not just any form of legalization will do. In some cases in which prostitution is de facto (such as through tacit state acceptance that sex work is being done under the auspices of “massage parlors” or “escort services”) or de jure legal, conditions for sex workers actually worsen. Sex workers may be forced to register with the state, which increases their vulnerability to surveillance and police targeting, while other prostitutes (who for one reason or another do not “qualify” for state registration) are forced even further underground.³¹ Thus, whore revolutionaries call for a particular form of decriminalization (a term they use to distinguish their goals from this less judicious “legalization”). By decriminalizing sex work but using state power to regulate abuses against sex workers just as state power is used to prevent exploitation in all sorts of industries, decriminalization maximizes sex worker autonomy, minimizes state surveillance, avoids forcing sex workers underground, and maximizes the potential for group organizing to empower workers and improve working conditions.³²

Whore revolutionaries call on feminists to relinquish their focus on abolition and to stand by a whore-defined agenda for the appropriate use of state power, as well as to stand with prostitutes to counter other forms of state- and socially-sanctioned stigma, such as the practice of returning juvenile runaways to abusive homes rather than providing them with safe and anonymous shelter and support,³³ and the scapegoating of sex workers as victims of abuse,³⁴ drug-users, and vectors of sexually transmitted diseases.³⁵

Feminist Classism

Omission

In general, sex work is insufficiently taken into account by both gender theorists and labor theorists. It could be argued that a small percentage of the population is engaged in the sex industry and thus the omission is arbitrary and justified in the same way as the omission of studies of other industries. However, I would argue that it is clear from popular culture and daily language that the prostitute is an important cultural archetype against which “pure people” constantly define themselves, and which defines the boundaries of nation and citizenship both de facto and de jure.³⁶ As such it is extremely crucial that sex work be taken into account in any analysis of gender and labor. It is clear to me that, while this omission may also be upholding racial and gender privilege, this omission is at least partly a classist omission, an omission made possible by the fact that so many theorists are middle-class and are insulated from the realm in which sex work seems like a viable or necessary option.

Not only do theorists take sex work into account insufficiently, when they do, they treat it as monolithic, failing to take into account the diversity of sex workers’ genders, class status, individual histories, job descriptions, races, ages, etc. (Carol Queen writes, “[W]e learn next to nothing about those women for whom sex work is an excellent occupational choice and nothing at all about sex workers—isn’t it a bit ironic that men are present in the sex industry in every capacity that women are, yet their lives, failing to fit neatly into theory, are simply ignored?”³⁷) Once again, while this monolithicism also injures other parties, it particularly injures working class sex workers by ignoring the specificity of their experience—and thus of their theories and needs—within the industry.

As far as feminism in particular, the fact that many prominent feminist theorists and activists are middle-class, coupled with the fact that working-class feminists’ voices are often marginalized and dismissed, makes it possible for the most common form of feminist classism: the omission of a class analysis. Both anti-prostitution and sex radical feminists are guilty of this. Anti-prostitution feminists, who were mostly women who were not experiencing class constraint, thus did not have as much need to theorize the possibility for agency under constraint, because although they were experiencing the constraint of patriarchy, their class (and usually race) privilege insulated them from experiences of extreme constraint. The utopian ideas of anti-prostitution feminism are also comprehensible in this light: it is much easier to rely on delayed gratification when class privilege affords you a high degree of daily instant gratification.

For their part, some sex radical feminists found it easy to theorize sex work as an empowering, anti-patriarchal choice for women while at the same time not understanding the extremity of the (often class-based) constraint under which working-class sex workers were often making that choice, or the violent and often fatal consequences of that choice.

Devaluation, Disrespect, and Paternalism

In addition to their omission of a class analysis of sex work, feminists, particularly anti-prostitution feminists, act in actively devaluing and paternalistic ways towards especially working-class sex workers.

Anti-prostitution feminists tend to see sex workers as complete victims who have no possibility of agency because their choices are made under constraint. This is a strange stance to take given that one of the main tenets of radical feminism is that all women operate under patriarchal constraint until the revolution. However, some actions are considered to be exempt from that impurity (reciprocal sex, androgyny, for example). Meanwhile, acts that disproportionately involve working class women (not only sex work but also butch/femme lifestyles) are considered more tainted by patriarchy, and thus necessarily coerced (sex workers’ claims to agency can be easily dismissed by attributing “false consciousness”). This idea of complete victimhood is revealed through the idea of the always and already raped whore (all sex work is rape), which eerily parallels the patriarchal legalistic construction that whores can never refuse (no sexual contact with a whore is rape). Both ideas reveal the idea of the impossibility of consent due to complete victimhood. This is not only classist in theory (insofar as middle-class women are disproportionately unaffected by a life situation in which consent is analyzed as impossible, despite all women existing under patriarchy), but also classist in outcome (insofar as the idea of the unrapable/constantly raped whore makes it impossible to think about how to regulate or organize within the sex industry so that whores have more control over the sexual boundaries they set on the job, which would significantly lower physical and emotional danger). In addition, the idea that whores cannot possibly take agency implies that they require advocates and caretakers—conveniently, middle-class feminists are waiting in the wings (voila!) to take on this paternalistic task.

Just as sex workers cannot possibly have agency, they also cannot have their own analysis. Once again, anti-prostitution feminists justify this claim by appealing to the notion of “false consciousness,” but this thinly veils the class prejudice that makes many middle class people unwilling or unable to take working-class people seriously as intellectuals.³⁸ (Amber Hollibaugh writes, “Why did it take so long for the women’s movement to genuinely consider the needs of whores, of women in the sex trades? And why did it take so long for the movement to produce writings by those women? Maybe because it’s hard to listen to—I mean really pay attention to—a woman who, without other options, could easily be cleaing your toilet?”³⁹) Emi Koyama tells how she was told by Sarah Lawrence College, on three days’ notice, that her speaking engagement was canceled because the president of the college labeled her planed speech (about sex worker feminism) “inappropriate and uneducational.”⁴⁰ This attitude continues to be expressed in the current era—I recently saw a posting for a “Prostitution Conference” in which “professionals” working with prostitutes are planning to convene—prostitutes themselves are, of course, not considered professionals. (Under the heading “Who Should Attend,” the website says, “This conference is open to researchers, practitioners, and workers in the social service, criminal justice, and health care fields.”) ⁴¹

The conversation about whether or not sex work should be considered labor is inherently classist. By any definition, any service performed (even if not for money, such as housework) is labor. The reluctance to consider sex work labor reflects classist standards for what labor is. For example, to say that sex work is not labor because it involves alienation (which is essentially the argument under the idea that sex work is not labor because it is inherently exploitative since it involves selling of the self) is approximately the same as saying that no working-class labor is labor. Most working-class labor involves high degrees of alienation on top of high degrees of selling the self—the physical self in dangerous factory jobs, the emotional self in pink-collar jobs (“Good morning, Dr. Jones, how are you today?”), the sexual self in sex work. Also, to say that sex work is inherently exploitative and not labor because it is not regulated the way middle-class work sites are is also classist.⁴²

Saying that working-class labor is not labor is classist for several reasons. First of all, as can be seen in the feminist desire to recognize women’s unpaid housework and caretaking as labor, to entitle something “labor” suggests social value. Secondly, the desire not to consider sex work labor partially stems from the idea that if it is legitimately viewed as labor, regulation will take the place of abolition and the reality that sex work is inherently oppressive will be obscured. This is classist because it takes a paternalistic attitude towards sex workers by ignoring their requests for a very specific type of support (recognizing sex work as labor, decriminalizing it, supporting worker organizing) and by trying to eliminate sex work as even a possible choice, as if working-class women could not decide for themselves whether the costs outweighed the benefits. (Abolition efforts disproportionately affect the jobs of working-class sex workers.) A more respectful ally position would recognize that while working-class sex workers may not be making a “free choice,” they deserve support in the choices they are making (and obviously will continue making despite illegality), and they deserve both the option to get out of the industry and safe working conditions for women within it.

Thirdly, the refusal to consider sex work as labor makes it very difficult to think about sex workers as anything more than victims—indeed very hard to think about collective organizing such as unionizing—and leaves middle class white feminists the only potential “caretakers” for streetwalkers. As such, this refusal stands in the way of decriminalization, unionization, and the development of worker consciousness and empowerment. Empirically, this is the same as standing in the way of saving women’s lives and selves. Thus, this investment in terminology reflects a highly classist devaluation of working class (and possibly “sexually deviant”) lives. Fourthly, the refusal to consider sex work labor reinforces very conservative notions of monogamy, policed sex, non-promiscuity, sex in the private sphere, notions of sex as the province of the feminine (which coincides with the idea that emotional and caretaking labor are not labor because they take place in the private sphere), and bodies in general in a way that reproduces an oppressive mind/body split that is unhelpful for social healing and for gender equity as a whole.

Sex workers also point out that middle-class anti-prostitution feminists’ elaborate theorizing seems to be a mask for their disgust for whores (fear of being branded whores?). Anti-prostitution feminists seem to have some inconsistency in their theory about agency as it pertains to sex work: they both pity sex workers as victims (of patriarchy and false consciousness) and accuse them of perpetuating patriarchy, expressing disgust and dismay about their “choices,” as if their jobs inherently devalue the women themselves as legible humans deserving of respect and protection (read: radical feminists with “good” politics).

Scapegoating

The sex industry is punished by prostitution abolitionists for making visible the ways in which, under patriarchy, sexuality is often exchanged for goods and services, and may be split off from erotic desire. This is a form of scapegoating. The reality is that a lot of heterosexual sex in this culture happens under some kind of constraint and in the absence of desire. Traditional marriage, arguably, reinforces this more than sex work, because in marriage the exchange of goods (both material and moral—how do you keep wife status and avoid whore status? by not reporting marital rape) is invisible. Also, as far as the injury caused by alienating one’s own labor, sex might be one of the easiest activities to alienate from without further injury because, sadly, women in this culture are likely to learn that skill well whether or not they work in the sex industry.

Also, the sex industry is no more sexist than other industries. Koyama writes:

Since we live in a sexist society, every industry is guilty of incorporating sexist elemtns [sic] to a degree. In the medical field for example, doctors are disproportionately male while nurses female [sic] as a result of the pervasive institutionalized sexism. Sex industry [sic] similarly reflects the society’s sexist structures and attitudes. On the other hand, it is one of the few fields where women make at least as much as men if not more for the same work, and there is a lot of female companionship and rapport among female sex workers. Scapegoating the sex industry for its sexism trivializes the far-reaching impact of the sexism in other fields.⁴³

In fact, sex work can be a site of subversive possibility, in which women learn how to keep their sexuality separate from their desire so that they do not internalize sexual abuse. (Carol Queen writes, “[S]ex-positive whores have learned to sexually negotiate at the intersection of our clients’ desires, our limits and boundaries, and with regard to issues of safety and emotional well-being. Were we to be acknowledged by orthodox feminists as the experts we are, our voices could help push the feminist analysis of sex in positive, productive directions.”⁴⁴) Learning how to completely alienate sexual service can be a hugely liberating thing in a world in which the vast majority of women have to give sexual service without consent at some point in their lives. (A commonly quoted statistic is that 1 in 4 college women is raped during her college career.) Also, it is important to note that archetypically, sex is split off from desire much more for men than for women. Thus, a space in which women consciously split sex from desire might be a way of demystifying sex for women and fighting against the sexual double standard (men are players, women are sluts, women are virgins, men are babies). Teri Goodson writes (250-251),

Proper women are socialized to associate sex with intimacy and often have difficulty negotiating their desires with men. Yet men are able to more easily distinguish between love and sex. They hold an advantage because they can enjoy erotic pleasure without the emotional restrictions so many women wrestle with. Our culture disproportionately discourages such behavior in women and will continue to do so until feminists claim such privileges for themselves.⁴⁵

Whore revolutionaries argue that since sex work is no more inherently oppressive than other forms of sexuality under patriarchy or other forms of labor under capitalism, the attempt to abolish the sex industry turns out to be a way of scapegoating the sex industry, sex workers, and clients and punishing them for the massive destruction borne out by the real culprits—patriarchy, capitalism, racism, heterosexism, etc.—rather than attacking those systems at the core. ⁴⁶ This is not only a form of classism (attacking a disproportionately working class population (even though middle-class sex workers are also being attacked, they are much less affected by abolitionist attempts’ collusion with the state)) but also a missed opportunity to transform culture in a way that is broadly liberating and healing—and to recognize sex work and sex worker theory as a potentially subversive site from which to do this revolutionary work. ⁴⁷

Thus, abolishing prostitution is not a logical way to resolve the reality of coerced sex and alienated labor. What is at issue here—and this is an issue for sex workers and their allies—is to think about how the industry itself could be set up so that women can learn how to split off healthily if that is what they wish to do. This is encouraged by feminist awareness, which would be encouraged by decriminalization.⁴⁸

The Middle-Class Investment in Classist Analyses of Sex Work

If there is so much classism in anti-prostitution feminist analyses, and if the activist outcomes of anti-prostitution theory are so damaging to sex workers, why do so many feminists still hang onto them despite having been challenged by whore revolutionaries?

In the first place, it is necessary to consider in what way middle-class feminist classism is rooted in unwillingness to give up class privilege. Middle-class people throughout the US (as well as some working class people) are invested in the idea that the US is a classless society, because it anesthetizes their own fear of downward mobility⁴⁹ and their guilt about class privilege. The myth of classlessness (and its handmaidens, class segregation and the myth of meritocracy) enables middle-class people not to “see” poverty, not to acknowledge that people at different class levels have different experiences and needs, and, most of all, not to share resources. This blindness to the reality of class oppression in the US helps to explain the inability to see and hear working-class women’s class analyses of sex work, which in turn bolsters the process of scapegoating. I think that the myth of classlessness takes on a particular strength in feminist communities, however, since white middle-class feminists have long been unwilling to recognize differences within the community because of the threat it presented to “women as a class” fighting against patriarchy. Also, feminists, like all politicized oppressed people, are sometimes liable to think that, as the oppressed, they could never be the oppressor. Also, feminists, as self-consciously progressive people, may try to avoid guilt about their own privilege by denying it. Such feminists adopt a “hip downward mobility”⁵⁰ and look askance at anyone who takes the resources of the system to make a profit—because, not incidentally, they have the privilege to not need to make one. This behavior passes for class solidarity but actually stands in the way of a more honest recognition of the damages of capitalism and of class privilege. The denial of class privilege, the pretense of a classless society, the maintenance of class privilege, all enable such feminists to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of basing choices on access to resources. The result of this is that working class women’s choice to enter the sex industry is seen as more constrained and less agentive than other constrained choices that are not based on class. Seeing class constraint as more victimizing than other forms of constraint is yet another form of classism. Insidiously, of course, this failure to acknowledge classism allows feminists to hold onto an analysis of sex work that allows them to maintain their access actually to the patriarchal money structure by working in cooperation with forces (particularly the state) that keep working class women from accessing economic power.

In the second place, I think the scapegoating phenomenon explains a lot. Middle-class feminists are full of pain and rage about patriarchy (and particularly sexual assault and compulsory heterosexuality), and even about capitalism (the devaluation of traditional women’s labor, the patrilineal transfer of resources, the mind-body split required to traverse the etiquette of middle-class-ness, the class division among women, self-deprivation that comes from the fear of falling, the economic exploitation that middle-class feminists may experience for the first time as they leave the safe haven of their material connections with men). Middle-class women are also full of fear. They are full of fear about losing what privilege they have, especially in light of their gender-based marginalization. They are full of fear about losing class privilege. Their class privilege is already endangered by their challenge to patriarchy and thus to those holding the majority of assets)—and recognizing classism, sharing resources, and standing as allies with working class women (becoming a class traitor) further endangers it. They are also full of fear of losing what “well-genderedness” they still have despite their challenge to patriarchy. Depending on the person, this well-genderedness might involve being a wife, not a whore, or being sexually “acceptable” (by radical feminist standards) rather than “deviant” (practicing sadomasochism, doing sex work, liking or posing for pornography, being butch/femme, being promiscuous, being overtly sexual). Whores (literal sex workers or just women or queers who due to their refusal to be regulated are labeled whores) are still treated terribly, and becoming an ally to a whore is likely to lead to being labeled a whore. (Circuitously, and arguing against her own claim, Kelly Holsopple writes, “Supporting prostitution as consensual sexual activity and labor will not protect these feminists from being treated like prostitutes. Making sure that a class of woman is available for men’s profit and pleasure will not protect other classes of women from harassment, battery, rape, torture, and murder. Because guess what? Men treat prostitutes like women.”⁵¹) It is important to recognize that the fear of being labeled a prostitute is justified. (Amber Hollibaugh writes, “The whore stigma is not imaginary; it underscores the ‘good girl/bad girl’ dichotomy we all grow up with and pinpoints the punishment in store for any woman who ‘slips’ from being madonna to being whore.”⁵²) Being labeled a whore is not just a momentary insult. Being a whore makes you ineligible for state recognition (if you are not a whore, you are a wife, and are thus eligible for patriarchal protection, whether in the form of marriage (yes, I would argue that the whore label is surreptitiously mobilized against queers seeking state recognition of their relationships) or in the form of protection from pathologization, surveillance, and criminalization). Being a whore makes you dirty, inhuman, less-than-female. It is scary to risk being a whore. But also, for non-whores, it is scary to think that whores might be liberated—if it becomes clear that the oppression of whores was never based on a rational justification, then non-whore status is no longer a badge of pride, and access to humanization and recognition are no longer the province of the well-gendered.

Whores are scapegoated because provide an easy target for women’s rage and fear. Whores are not protected by the state, and they are kept sufficiently invisible that it is possible to conveniently ignore them when they tell you that your political stance is killing them. Also, because whores are easy to imagine as victims, it is easy to conceal this attack in the clothing of “charity.” Thus, middle-class feminists can vent their rage and see themselves as moral all at the same time. This also neatly avoids the difficult tasks of actually confronting the power structure (which just might kill you if you look at it the wrong way) and of recognizing and grieving for the depth and permanence of the damage caused by patriarchy and capitalism. Much easier to believe that that damage has a quick fix, that eliminating a situation in which choices are made under dehumanizing constraint will magically erase all the other circumstances in which choices are inevitably made under dehumanizing constraint—even in middle-class lives. Also, easier to believe that sex, particularly sex that recognizes the eroticism of power, is dirty than to face up to our own “dangerous desires”⁵³—desires that, if acknowledged, could set us free, but which also force us to face the degree to which trauma has permeated our deepest selves. Also, easier to believe that if no one explicitly acknowledges that heterosexual service is in exchange for resources, then no heterosexual service is in exchange for resources (“No, really, this is true love”/“If I don’t get paid for it, why should she? By profiting from her oppression, isn’t she reifying the system?”) The industry is targeted for making visible what is already true, which is that emotional labor and sexual labor are always and already being bought and sold.

White Middle-Class Women Becoming Allies to Sex-Workers:

Healing Classism, Healing Ourselves

The whore label is attached to anyone who is “out of bounds,” not only those who work in the sex industry⁵⁴—and disproportionately women of color, working class women, and queers—such that sex workers and other people labeled “whores” become the bearers of social defilement and impurity.⁵⁵,⁵⁶ Thus, the whore image is used to regulate people—women to be monogamous, queers to be as asexual as possible. This image presents an “other” against which “pure people” can define themselves. This relieves people from dealing with the messy realities of deviance, desire, and desperation in themselves and in their communities, which relieves people of doing real healing around the way in which the regulatory whore image hurts all of us.

One really good reason for middle-class women to stand in solidarity with working-class sex workers is that if we do not, those sex workers will continue to die and be destroyed. However, solidarity is sometimes only possible when we understand why it benefits us (this is the interest convergence concept from critical race theory). Every system of privilege and oppression hurts everyone, not just the oppressed. It is true that the oppressed bear the brunt of the system on their bodies. However, the damage is universal. For those feminists who are privileged, privilege may mean the loss of solidarity with sisters. It may mean guilt and subsequent self-deprivation. It may mean fear of losing privilege, which may lead to self-regulation and constraint. In the case of middle-class women’s failure to be allies to working class sex workers, classism (mind you, classism, not class) divides the effort to end sexism. Classism (in the context of capitalism) also reifies a mind-body split and distorts our experiences of desire. Fear of being labeled whores (i.e. badly-gendered threats to the heteropatriarchy) leads to sexual constraint, limited dissemination of sexual health information, and insufficient sexual exploration and healing.

Thus, it would actually benefit white middle-class women to stand in solidarity with working class sex worker feminists. When we exit denial about the extent of power of patriarchy and capitalism, we begin to work through class guilt. This may relieve us of habits that both hurt ourselves and squander resources: for example, hoarding and self-deprivation. Also, when we learn from sex workers’ ability to theorize choice under constraint in a complex manner, middle-class women can recognize a whole range of new subversive options for taking agency within our own circumstances of constraint. In particular, we can reclaim parts of desire that we shut ourselves away from out of our fear of being labeled whores. As we reclaim desire and sexuality, we fight sexism and promote sexual healing for people of all genders and sexual orientations. Koyama writes,

to be a slut in this u.s. of fucking a.

that thinks that marriage is the solution to poverty

that punishes homeless people for sitting on benches

and excludes trans people to protect “women”

means that we must refuse to allow the rhetoric

of safety to pervert and circumvent

our commitment to justice

so, let us be sluts, political or otherwise

let us form the posse of sluts everywhere

because everyone is safe when sluts are safe

because everyone is safe when sluts are safe.”⁵⁷

Also, fighting for the human rights of whores makes sex work become a more viable option for all of us—and certainly, at the very least, we can learn to listen to sex workers and open ourselves to all the knowledge that their unique vantage point has taught them about gender, labor, and desire. Teri Goodson writes,

Many women would like to know how to enhance their sex lives and relationships. They could benefit from associating with seasoned sex professionals, many of whom would gladly share their insights and expertise. These teachers are known as sacred prostitutes, mythologists, sex educators, or sensual masseuses. Their knowledge and expertise in the field of the erotic arts is sorely needed and should be highly valued.⁵⁸

Ultimately, then, classist understandings of sex work reflect denial of class privilege and the misdirection of capitalism- and heteropatriarchy-related rage onto sex workers. This not only desperately hurts sex workers themselves, but in fact perpetuates the very structures that are wounding middle-class feminists, which takes us further from healing. Thus I recommend that middle-class feminists listen, really listen, to sex workers, learn from them, become their allies. If we do this, all of us will be one step closer to wholeness.

1 Wendy Rickard, “Been There, Seen It, Done It, I've Got the T-Shirt: British Sex Workers Reflect on Jobs,

Hopes, the Future and Retirement,” Feminist Review (No. 67, Spring 2001, 111-132), 111.

2 “Andrea Dworkin and others denied that prostitution could be accepted as a free choice for any woman and suggested that seeing prostitution as work misleads feminists into legitimizing systems of abuse and exploitation (Dworkin, 1987).” Ibid, 112.

3 Borrowed from the title of Emi Koyama’s pamphlet, Instigations from the Whore Revolution: A Third-Wave Feminist Response to the Sex-Work “Controversy” (Second Edition, Dec. 2002—available for download at http://www.confluere.com/store/zine-emi.html).

4 Chela Sandoval (Methodology of the Oppressed, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000) and Donna Haraway (“A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Socialist Review No.80 (March-April 1985), 580-617) write about the risks inherent in creating a watertight taxonomic or genealogic history of thought.

5 For example, Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, New York: Free Press, 1987.

6 Carol Queen writes (131), “It is as though sex, especially male sex, is a bubbling cauldron of trouble, and if we don’t keep a lid on it, awful things will result” (“Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma,” in Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York: Routledge, 1997), 125-138).

7 San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2004.

8 Frédérique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, eds., Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1987.

9 Annie Oakley, ed., Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007.

10 Nagle.

11 http://www.sexworkersartshow.com/home.html

12 San Francisco: First Run Features, 2000.

13 “Feminism, Sex Workers, and Human Rights,” 83, in Nagle, 83-97.

14 “We know that the time for utopian feminist revolution is over. The forms of opposition we create are necessarily impure and draw from the very systems of oppression we wish to overthrow” (ibid, 81).

15 Gayle Rubin talks about the utopian feminist image of “perfect sex after the revolution” (in Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 120).

16 Koyama, 3.

17 Ibid, 2.

18 “Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality,” in Nagle, 73-82.

19 Koyama, 31.

20 Ibid, 27.

21 Alexander in Nagle, 86.

22 Koyama, 28.

23 Priscilla Alexander (197), “Prostitution: A Difficult Issue for Feminists,” in Delacoste and Alexander, eds. 184-214.

24 Alexander in Nagle, 85.

25 For example (283), see Rachel West, “U.S. PROStitutes Collective,” in Delacoste and Alexander, eds., 279-289.

26 Alexander in Nagle, 85.

27 Ibid, 93.

28 Alexander in Delacoste, 209.

29 Ibid.

30 Alexander in Nagle, 91.

31 Alexander in Delacoste, 191.

32 For an example of these specific decriminalization demands, see International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights, “International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights World Charter and World Whores’ Congress Statements,” in Delacoste and Alexander, eds., 305-321.

33 Alexander in Delacoste, 205.

34 Koyama, 3.

35 Alexander in Nagle, 88-89.

36 See Gail Pheterson, “The Social Consequences of Unchastity, “ in Delacoste and Alexander, 215-230.

37 Queen, 128.

38 See Joanna Kadi, “Stupidity Deconstructed,” in Thinking Class, Sketches from a Cultural Worker. Boston: South End P, 1996.

39 Hollibaugh, 181.

40 Koyama, 33.

41 http://www.prostitutionconference.com/

42 Koyama, 29.

43 Ibid, 4.

44 Queen, 134-135.

45 “A Prostitute Joins NOW”, 248-251, 250-1.

46 Koyama, 32.

47 Pendleton analyzes how sex work can be a site from which to “queer heterosexuality” through the explicit performance of it (drag) that is made possible by getting paid.

48 Queen discusses the ways in which organizing encourages sex-positivity among sex workers, which in turn helps protect sex workers psychologically.

49 For an analysis of this, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

50 Bonnie J. Morris, “Class Beyond Classroom”, 391-396, in Out of the Class Closet: Lesbians Speak, Julia Penelope, ed., Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994.

51 From “Pimps, Tricks, and Feminists” in WSQ, Spring/Summer 1999, p50.

52 Hollibaugh, 183.

53 Borrowed from Hollibaugh’s title.

54 “[I]t’s important to keep in mind that not only prostitutes are labeled whores.” Hollibaugh, 184.

55 See Pheterson.

56 Also, see Joan Nestle’s account (“Lesbians and Prostitutes: A Historical Sisterhood,” in ibid, 231-247) of how similar laws and social stigmas have been applied historically to both lesbians and prostitutes (who can, of course, be one and the same).

57 Koyama, 43—from the poem “Refusing to be Safe.”

58 251.