Katha Pollitt, Melissa Gira Grant, and Sex Work

I read with interest Katha Pollitt's piece for The Nation, "Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to be The New Normal?", which was inspired by Melissa Gira Grant's controversial new book in defence of sex work, Playing The Whore (which I have already explored in length in this post). It's somewhat disappointing to see so many great feminists falling for pernicious myths about sex work, and I wonder what it is that's stopping them seeing past the often-trotted-out misconceptions about sex work, what it is, and what it means for gender relations.

 

Pollitt sets her thoughts up in the deeply unhelpful, divisive manner that anti-sex-work feminists seem unable to discard. Her first move is to sarcastically over-simplify the point that Gira Grant's book is making. "Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even “empowered” if they make enough money, you’re just a prude". Nowhere in her book does Grant say anything that could be considered a call for everyone to embrace sex work in the name of liberation, but anti-SW fems clearly feel so offended by the suggestion that they sanction a way of having sex that they personally deem unacceptable, that they feel the need to come out swinging with sarky comments like these.

 

Pollitt pulls out all of the anti-SW arguments, accusing Gira Grant of not saying enough about "the women at the heart of this debate: those who are enslaved and coerced—illegal immigrants, young girls, runaways and throwaways, many of them survivors of sexual trauma, as well as transwomen and others cast out of mainstream society." This assumes that anti-SW feminists have the right to set the terms of the debate, even when those terms are irrelevant and inaccurate. No one fights more loudly than sex workers themselves for  the right women and men to do sex work free from coercion, harm and stigma; the idea that you cannot believe sex work is a job if you also condemn the idea that anyone ever be forced into it is a massive red herring. Why should Gira Grant be obliged to be a spokesperson for trafficked women, when what she is talking about is consensual, freely chosen sex work? And if you're going to come straight back at me with "Well, it's impossible to untangle the two, sex work and trafficking go hand in hand", are you then also going to say that we should smash the restaurant industry to smithereens and make domestic service illegal, because both of those industries have a helluva lot of shady underparts where people (mostly poor, vulnerable women) are trafficked, exploited and harmed? If not, then you have to accept that defending a type of work does not entail that you spend all your time apologising for and advocating for those who have been abused in ways that are (sometimes only tangentially) related to that industry. Because it goes without saying that any 'job' where someone has their passport taken off them, is lied to, is locked in a basement and beaten, underfed, not paid or exploited is not a job at all, it's a terrible crime. So why do we insist that Grant not allowed to talk about sex work without having to constantly stop and remind us about those for whom sex is not a job, but a horrendous coercive nightmare? We wouldn't just be trying to derail her argument and demand that she justify herself in a way that anti-SW fems are never asked to, now, would we?

 

That brings to my next point, the inevitable idea that as long as some women are trafficked, no real consent to sex work exists. This, as Grant points out in her book, is a very dangerous argument to make, as it inadvertently supports the already-too-common idea that sex workers cannot be raped. If, against the background of a sexist society built upon male privilege, sex workers' choice to do their job is meaningless, then presumably so is their consent. If they are so brainwashed by the patriarchy that we don't believe their consent to do their job is 'real', then presumably the flipside, their withdrawal of consent to parts of that job, can't be real either. Feminists can't have it both ways. We can't say that we believe in women, that we trust women (one of the major pro-choice slogans), that women are worthy of a place in this world to make decisions, make changes and do important work that affects and shapes society, and then suggest that certain subsets of women are just too stupid to know when they're being conditioned by the patriarchy. It doesn't just hack at the very foundations of feminism, but it's also obnoxiously elitist. As Gayle Rubin once said of anti-BDSM  feminist writing "the erotic preferences of the writer seem to be presumed as universal". Pollitt and anti-sex-work feminists impose a similar assumption by treating sex as a sacred cow, a different, unique case. She rejects the idea that "all service work [can be] collapsed into one", and clearly thinks that there is a difference between being up to your arms in food grease for £4.50 an hour and performing oral sex for say, £80 an hour (I have done the former, in a pub kitchen when I was 20, while hearing about my colleague's sister doing the latter. I know who I felt was "the mug" in that particular situation). But that is simply her opinion. She sees sex as something different from baking bread, lugging hods of bricks about, cleaning toilets, changing incontinence pads on drooling people with Parkinson's (the latter being another job your writer has done). And I believe that's because at root, she holds a fundamental idea about how sex should be, which she is trying to impose on the rest of us.

 

Pollitt argues that what she objects to is the asymmetry of it all, the fact it's mostly men who buy sex and women who sell it. This, she claims, feeds into a culture of entitlement. And yes, this is something that used to trouble me too. Why, I wondered, if men can just buy sex, would they ever bother being nice to a woman when there's clearly no need for that effort? (When I voiced this to a sex worker on Twitter, she said something along the lines of "God, URGH, I hate the idea of someone 'being nice to me' just because they think it'll get them sex!"). Pollitt suggests that sex work sends out the message that "men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her". This is where I think a lot of anti-SW fems draw artificial lines. As I said in my piece about Gira Grant's book, "all sex, paid for or not, exists on a continuum". Is there really as much of a difference between paying for sex and the aforementioned "pickup in a bar" as Pollitt thinks there is? Can we guarantee that the man who goes out for a one-night stand has any interest in pleasing or satisfying the women he finds (if indeed he does find one), or is it safer to assume he probably just wants a quick fuck? And what of his female partner, do we assume that she is also interested in mutual pleasure and intimacy, or might she just be someone who wants to get laid? In a world of fuck buddies, friends with benefits, play partners, one night stands and a million other ways to have casual sex, it's clear that humanity strongly rejects the idea that there is one right or best way to do sex. And we have not got a shot in hell of assuring that all or any of these ways of making genitals meet involves respect, equality or even pleasure (although obviously one would hope that at least some of them do), because we cannot police the bedroom, and hopefully, as feminists, we have no wish to either. Yet according to anti-SW feminists, as soon as sex is paid for, and that transaction goes from male to female, that particular act of sex somehow becomes instantly wrong and a way of propping up the patriarchy.As I also said in my post, if we apply this thinking consistently, then "Does that mean that every man who buys dinner for a woman and then has sex with her afterwards gets his kicks not from the sex, but from the impact on his credit card that two nice steaks will have? Does that mean that men whose wives do not work in order to care for children are secretly high-fiving themselves at 'owning' the 'commodity' of their wife's body every time they have sex with her?"

 

In my limited dealings with sex workers (mostly online, via Twitter, email and blogs), the issue of women buying sex has often been raised. Several sex workers have said to me that they believe the gender asymmetry of sex purchase has a lot less to do with the stereotype of male demand (and the accompanying icky idea of female unwillingness, this myth that women 'don't really like sex' and just do it to please men) and much more to do with the fact women are much more advantageously placed when it comes to finding casual sex partners. My male friends have unanimously told me how easy it is to be a single woman in a nightclub, as opposed to a single man. One is constantly policed, viewed as sleazy, desperate or creepy. The other is "just having fun". (And yes I know the ubiquitous creepy man in a nightclub who inevitably finds a way to wreck women's nights by sleazing on them deserves to be policed, but that is not the point I'm making here.) In my local area, single women can get into a swinger's club for £15 - for single men it's £35, if they're allowed in at all (some nights are listed as just "couples and single women"). We assume that we live in this society where everything defaults to men, where women and our lives and our bodies are constantly controlled so that we will fit a stereotype that pleases men. And yet, my intelligent, attractive, polite 29 year-old male friends will tell you that they do not experience a society that is out to please them at all. Instead they experience rejection, insecurity and fear of being perceived precisely as that "sleazy man". They find approaching girls difficult, awkward and riddled with potential for (sometimes extremely rude) rejection. They feel that the power is anywhere but in their hands.

 

As a slim-ish, young-ish, white woman with feminine presentation I have to acknowledge that on balance, it's pretty easy for me to go out and find casual sex, if that's what I want., and definitely easier for me than it is for my male counterparts. Even if I couldn't access sex so easily, I doubt I'd want to simply pay someone to pleasure me, but that's just me - it's not evidence that as Pollitt and anti-SW feminists assume, that women all desire this meaningful, 'connected', loving type of sex (and I don't, anyway - the very idea sends me to sleep). Plus, if Pollitt's assumption that we live in a society of male sexual entitlement, or that the existence of sex work props that up, is true, then why aren't all my male friends who struggle with girls just giving up and going to sex workers? Why are they still meeting women the 'normal way', forming relationships, going through the struggle of making connections, if all men are just supposed to want callous, uncaring, casual sex? And why do we assume that all sex work involves only the latter kind of sex, or that all non-paid for sex entails meaningful, tender encounters where both partners fully acknowledge each other's humanity? We do not have any grounds for making these assumptions other than our own prejudices. Which is why we should be listening to the likes of Gira Grant, a former sex worker herself, who actually has experience of the issue we are so blithely theorising about.

 

Pollitt is trying to throw sex workers a bone by saying "It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail." However, she betrays the notion that she truly supports sex workers in any way by immediately going on to say "But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area." So where exactly does that leave sex workers? Can't stigmatize them, but can't normalize them either. Erm... It doesn't seem particularly sisterly to sigh "Well, we'll accept that your work has to exist if we really must, and if it'll keep you out of jail, but I don't want to hear anyone saying anything good about it, nor do I want any slowing of our fight to ultimately end the profession you're in." It seems patronising and dictatorial.

 

None of us are going to live long enough to see the feminist utopia come to fruition, so ultimately none of us know what it's going to look like. Maybe it'll be a Marxist paradise where no one pays for anything - not sex or clothes or bread or writing (yo!). Maybe instead it'll be a gender-equal sexual free-for-all, where women and men, old and young, gay, straight, trans, able and disabled people sometimes have sex in exchange for something else, and sometimes have it for no reason other than pleasure, and no one gives a frig (several SWs suggested to me that they believed more women would pay for sex if there was less stigma and more ways to guarantee personal safety). But you don't get to dictate what this "most feminist" world would look like based on nothing other than your own personal prejudices. If you don't like the idea of sex work, fine. (Sometimes I really don't, either.) You don't like what (you think) the existence of the sex industry says about gender, or the effect you believe it has on relations between the genders. But til you can show me irrefutable proof that a woman accepting cash for sex is worse or different than a woman accepting an engagement ring worth thousands of pounds in return for nothing other than her sexual loyalty, or that one or both of those women are so disempowered by the sexist society we live in that their actions cannot be said to be feely chosen, you don't get to dictate that we can't say anything positive about sex workers lest we "normalize" them.

Melissa Gira Grant's Playing The Whore - An Alternative Perspective

I read with interest feminist journalist Sarah Ditum's review of Melissa Gira Grant's new book, Playing The Whore: The Work of Sex Work. As a regular book reviewer, and a feminist who regularly writes about the politics of sexuality, I chased down a review copy of this book myself and spent much of my Christmas holidays immersed in it. As a sidenote, it may be worth mentioning that I've tried to interest several major UK publications in a review of the book, and have only had non-committal or disinterested responses, or no response at all. This may well be a coincidence, but I don't think it's a massive leap to suggest that the subject matter of sex work still has the power to unsettle.

And nowhere does it unsettle more than in the feminist community, where the lines over the ethics of sex work are drawn so bitterly that admitting ambivalence feels like confessing to a serious character flaw. But I am ambivalent, as my earlier writings will tell you. I'm uncomfortable with a movement that demands I either unequivocally support the purchase of sexual services or condemn it as a socially-inscribed misogyny. I'm uncomfortable with the choice between supporting Bindel-esque views of sex workers as unsalvageable traitors to the women's movement, and having to quash any qualms I might have about sex work for fear of being shouted down as 'whorephobic'. It's important to mention here that I am also not a sex worker, and if you feel that renders my voice in this debate redundant, that's fair enough and you're welcome to stop reading. However, all that said, I do still want to answer back to some of the things Sarah Ditum says in her critique of Gira Grant's book.

From the outset there appears to be an anti-sex-work agenda that means instant hostility to Gira Grant's theory that sex work is work, and needs to be treated thus. Ditum seems immediately irritated that Gira Grant is not interested in discussing demand and hence placing the focus on men - the faceless, definition-less mass of 'the men who buy sex' (always men, and always cisgender and heterosexual), who anti-sex-work feminists spend a lot of time talking about but only within the strict parameters of condemning, loathing or at best pitying those men. Gira Grant does mention men, but as a counterpoint to the women (and men) who accept money for sexually servicing them - "The demand for victims, as anti-sex-work activists describe it, is driven by men's insatiable desire - not by sex workers' own demands for housing, health care, education, a better life, a richer life."  Grant is making the point that we focus on 'male demand' at the expense of seeing sex workers as full people with agency, and I agree with her.

Ditum's statement that "while it’s true that money provides motivation for sex workers, sex work can only be work if someone is willing to pay for it" seems so mind-boggling obvious that I wonder why she thinks it's even worth mentioning. Substitute any other job in that statement and it just seem facetious. "While it's true that money provides motivation for bakers, baking can only be work if someone's willing to pay for bread and cakes." "While it's true that money provides motivation for nurses, nursing can only be work if someone's willing to pay for care." What exactly is so outrageous about the idea of providing a service for money in a capitalist society - unless you think that sex is somehow different, somehow a sacred cow, and unless you assume that sex is something that is never 'paid for' in other forms anyway?

Unless we already have a skewed view of sex as something that is harmful to women, something that women never enjoy or freely choose and something that is a form of domination, why the hell does it actually matter if someone sells it, any more than if someone sells their art, their writing (hello!), or  their skills as a pilot, photographer or care worker? I say this as someone who has previously written that I'm "uncomfortable with the notion that a man can buy entry to a woman's vagina, anus or mouth, and find it difficult to defend sex work beyond believing that it should at least be made safer for women." I do question a society that encourages perpetual female sexual availability and the accompanying pressures heaped on women and their bodies. However, I hope I'm clear-eyed enough to see that my own personal discomfort may a) be borne of puritanical beliefs about women, sex and the female body that perhaps I need to dismantle, which is no one's job but my own and b) that my own personal discomfort with the idea of sex being purchasable is not, on its own, justification enough for hating on sex workers or legislating in ways that make their lives more difficult.

The assumptions that Ditum makes about the men who buy sex seem grounded in very little but her own prejudices: where, exactly, is her proof that "the punter is driven by a belief that he has the right to access women as a commodity because he sees women as his inferior, and he finds erotic gratification in a relationship where the social roles are clearly defined by a cash transaction"? Does that mean that every man who buys dinner for a woman and then has sex with her afterwards gets his kicks not from the sex, but from the impact on his credit card that two nice steaks will have? Does that mean that men whose wives do not work in order to care for children are secretly high-fiving themselves at 'owning' the 'commodity' of their wife's body every time they have sex with her? I don't consider myself someone who has a high opinion of the human race at large, but when I read the words of anti-sex-work and anti-porn feminists, I feel like a perpetually grinning Pollyanna by comparison, so low is these women's default opinion of men and all that motivates them. As someone who used to be vehemently anti-sex-work and disgusted by the idea of any man who paid for sex, I have had to do a fair bit of evolving when I found out that men I knew well - both friends and lovers of mine- had paid for sex in the past, and that women I was good friends with - wives and mothers amongst them - had been paid for sex (and even liked doing sex work!). You become a lot less absolutist and lot less quick to judge when you see both sex workers and their clients as real people, rather than a faceless mass of exploited women and evil, exploiting men. That, to me, is the important message of Gira Grant's book, but one that's not going to be acknowledged by those who are determined to paint the male 'demand' for sex as the root of all evils.

To say that Gira Grant "sees nowhere for women to fit other than in the sexual market" is disingenuous - Ditum seems to be accusing her of this simply because she dares to suggest that all sex, paid for and not, exists on a continuum (also, it seems a bit rich to criticise the author for mostly giving time over to examining the position of women and sex in society, in a book on sex work). I personally think Gira Grant is spot-on to say that much like in the Victorian era, women are unfortunately still guilty of 'othering' sexually transgressive women, in order to elevate their own view of themselves. As long as we can say we are not like those women who sell sex, we can feel smug, legitimate, enlightened. We're not exploited, we're not victims of the patriarchy. Which brings to mind Margaret Hunt's words when responding to anti-S/M feminists - "The argument that there is no free choice in the world is never all-inclusive. It always admits of the existence of a small group which is morally superior to the corrupt mass." Sex workers, S/M lesbians, and heterosexual women who consume pornography or participate in BDSM are apparently this 'corrupt mass', lacking the ability to step outside their patriarchal conditioning and 'see the light'. The feminists who judge them, however, are apparently entirely free of social conditioning - ergo Gail Dines' criticism of porn must be objective, not in any way based on her own personal prejudices, her distaste for certain sexual acts or her total failure to imagine that any woman might enjoy them, or any man might participate in them for reasons other than misogyny.

Gira Grant's book certainly isn't perfect, and as Ditum points out, is guilty of inconsistency in places. It does feel like a fairly slim volume in the light of the gargantuan nature of the industry it is talking about, but my sense when I finished reading it was that Gira Grant is deliberately steering us away from our usual obsessions - she doesn't describe all the filthy goings-on in the sex industry just so we can disapprove of them, she doesn't lay out her own experiences for the reader's titillation, nor does she focus on or harangue the men who go to sex workers - precisely in order to highlight exactly what is wrong with those preoccupations. Nowhere have I seen more obsession with (and more graphic, triggering descriptions of) supposedly degrading sexual acts than in anti-sex-work and anti-porn writing. Nowhere have I seen more assumptions that women are brainwashed idiots and victims, to such a degree that I feel many misogynists would find much with which to agree, than in the same writing. And yes, I have also read the reviews on PunterNet (which are nowhere near as horrifying as the carefully selected phrases on the incredibly biased and propagandist tumblr Invisible Men would have you believe), and even though I know I'm going to be met with a furious blaze of hatred from anti-sex-work feminists for saying this, I mostly found that 'punters'' comments were pretty reasonable. They did not enjoy sex with women who seemed frightened, rushed or bored. They gave high reviews to the women who appeared to enjoy what they did and took their time. Now, if we see sex work as the inevitable result of male entitlement to the female body then of course we're going to see this as terrible evidence that women are paid to fake pleasure for men's benefit. But as Gira Grant reminds us "The presence of money does not remove one's ability to consent," - unless we are going to also condemn every bartender who smiles as they serve a drink to someone they think is a jackass, or a doctor who listens patiently to someone they consider a whining hypochondriac, as mindless dupes of capitalism too.

If, like Ditum, you  consider "prostitution a wrong because it places all women within an economic structure that prices them sexually", I doubt you will be much persuaded by Gira Grant's book. As a big old lefty hippy at heart, I would love to live in a world where nothing, including sex, was judged by monetary value, but as my post on writing for free will tell you, I acknowledge the reality that we all exist under capitalism and as such have to use our skills to pay the bills. While we live under this structure, I believe in enabling all of us to make the best of this often-shitty world regardless of class, race, gender and sexual identity, and I don't believe that the demonising of one very specific way of having sex helps anyone. Simplistic narratives which conflate consensual sex work with abuse, exploitation and trafficking, and deems any man who has ever exchanged something of economic value for sex as no better than traffickers, coercive pimps and rapists, and which frame sexuality as a simple binary of the dominant and the dominated (with men always in the first position and women always in the second), also don't help anyone, least of all the women (and it's usually viewed as women, as I've said before, correctly or incorrectly) who anti-sex-work feminists are trying to 'protect'.

I'll end this with probably my favourite quote from the book. "Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work in order to have the right to do it free from harm. There must be room for them to identify, publicly and collectively, what they wish to change about how they are treated, without being told that the only solution is for them to exit the industry. As labor journalist Sarah Jaffe said of the struggles at her former job as a waitress, "No one ever wanted to save me from the restaurant industry."