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?
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."
