Sex work, writing work, care work, unpaid work

Online media has recently been full of news stories and opinion pieces on Amnesty International's decision to take a stance on the decriminalisation of sex work. The debate itself is so polarised and seems to result in such deep entrenchment on both sides that I've no interest in getting into it here and now - and anyway, I doubt there's anything I could say that hasn't already been covered elsewhere in the media. However, what I want to think about is exactly that: the way the Western media (read: UK and US outlets) deal with this issue. Watching Amnesty debate being vehemently fought over by pro- and anti-decriminalisation advocates on social media, feminist blogs and in major news outlets, it occurs to this feminist that the way the issues surrounding sex work are reported remain deeply retrogressive.

Every piece I read on the subject, whether pro- or anti-decrim, was accompanied by a picture of an anonymous woman, clad in a short skirt, high heels or other revealing/"sexy" clothing, standing on a dark street corner, leaning into a car, or on display in a window (Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Daily Mail, CNN). Articles were by human rights lawyers, prominent feminists or Amnesty staff, but the voices of sex workers were conspicuous by their absence, unless a pseudonymous victim of abuse was being interviewed, usually giving graphic details of violence and sexual coercion. MSBNC interviewed a district attorney, a professor, and a writer on Melissa Harris-Perry's show, but no one with any direct experience of the industry.

This is where media outlets on both sides of the debate fail hard. The voices of the women (and men) whose lives and work are being batted about like so many feminist footballs are either completely omitted, or if they are included, it's as footnote to the voices of "real" experts (read privileged academics, head of NGOs, Hollywood actors), or in order to bolster the already established opinions of the writer/campaigner.

In the case of anti-decrim op-eds, these usually dismiss the validity of the term sex work because the writer deems all sex work exploitation, and yet they often ask that women in this industry re-exploit themselves by detailing their horrendous experiences. I've read more graphic, bordering-on-pornographic, tales of both real and imagined sexual and physical abuse in anti-sex work articles than I have anywhere else ("imagined" meaning when the writer details the hypothetical horrendous acts that they believe women will be forced to submit to if sex work is decriminalised, and yes I've read this kind of thing). While I appreciate that the authors are trying to appeal to what they see as the much-needed compassion of the reader, their tactics come across as not dissimilar from that of anti-abortion advocates - cheap, nasty shock tactics that take real stories of women's lives and then use them to bolster the profile of individuals already privileged enough to have a platform. Feminists often decry PETA for their abysmal uses of the female body in its ad campaigns, rightly pointing out that, whatever your cause, throwing women under the bus is never an acceptable way to get attention for it. Yet by demanding a constant supply of horror stories from women who were victims of trafficking, violence or coercion in the sex industry, anti-decrim feminists are doing much of the same. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in her book Playing The Whore, supporters of the abolition of sex work claim that sex work objectifies its operatives, yet  “it’s objectification too, when these “supporters” represent sex workers as degraded, as victims and as titillating object lessons.”

Pro-decrim articles have not necessarily been any more enlightened in their tactics. The media outlets featuring them remained happy to use usually decapitated images of scantily clad women's bodies as shorthand for sex work. I've never seen one of these pictures accompanied by a caption "posed by models," so I assume these women are real sex workers and wonder if any of them were actually asked for permission to be photographed? As Gira Grant also writes in her book, “The portrait of street-level prostitution. . . as it’s on display in media accounts – a woman, most often a woman of color, standing in a short skirt and leaning into a car or pacing toward one – is a powerful yet lazily constructed composite." The Guardian published a sole article in favour of decriminalisation, written by a (pseudonymous) sex worker and still accompanied by the requisite photograph of two women in short skirts on a dark street. This was the only article by an actual sex worker which I read on this subject, despite dozens of op-eds on it appearing in major media outlets over the last few weeks. 

The fact the sex worker in question doesn't use her real name shows how stigmatised her job remains - thanks in no small part to this bizarre media prurience surrounding sex work which means we view the industry as full of shadowy, headless figures in thigh-high boots, but containing no actual real people - and I suppose it's not surprising that there are few others like her willing to come forward and actually pen a piece for a major newspaper, given the risks of being outed, the amount of abuse she's likely to face, and the fact that if she is pro-decrim, she will be expected to defend her job to a degree that people in few other industries are obliged to. Nonetheless, I'm glad she wrote it, and for an outlet that pays, too. Nothing gets my goat more than people being asked to provide written content for free by newspapers who pay their staff writers yet come up with BS excuses like "we don't have a budget for online content" or "we only pay professional writers;" and sadly, I see it more and more. The Guardian social care blog asks carers (yes, us badly paid, disrespected, overworked and underappreciated souls who evacuate bowels and wash bodies and are treated like disposable monkeys for it) to write about their experiences, but as far as I know, doesn't pay for the privilege. I'm a writer and a care worker. Want to know why I do the latter job? Because the former doesn't pay enough. Needless to say, I don't write for anyone for free these days, and I'm sure as shit not going to indulge in the supreme irony of giving my time and skill to write about how badly paid care work is, for an outlet that won't pay me for that writing.

In a similar spirit, as Melissa Gira Grant documents, journalists are happy to ask sex workers not just to provide their stories for free, but also in her case - as a journalist who has done sex work in the past - they pretty much expect them to help write their pieces. In this great blog post, which reflects many of my own gripes about being expected to work for free, Gira Grant refers to various instances where journalists have expected her to function as a seam of sex work anecdotes that they can mine at any time - such as when a journalist asked her to critique his article after she declined to be interviewed by him, or when a feminist emailed Gira Grant less than twelve hours before the programme she was making aired, seeking to “pick her brain,” or when "a TV producer wanted me to introduce her to sex workers from Craigslist so she could tell their stories, [telling] me “It’s not work I’m asking you to do, it’s an introduction, and a way to shed light on an important and under-reported issue.” And, quite rightly, Melissa Gira Grant tells them all where to get off.

Gira Grant states: "I am on my own kind of strike from doing anyone else’s work on sex work. I will not answer your requests. I will not give you interviews. I will not be a token on your program. I will not direct you to resources. I will not introduce you to subjects. I will not do work you are paid to do."

It seems the media is only interested in sex workers as long as it can use them for a bit of easy, quick titillating clickbait, detail their horror stories or relentlessly perky happy hooker tales (like this piece by a worker in one of Nevada's legal brothels, incidentally written for Independent Voices, another outlet that doesn't pay its writers), or as Gira Grant finds, basically ask them to do journalists' jobs for them.

Wherever we stand on the issue of sex work, coverage of it needs to be held to higher journalistic standards if it is going to be reported on in any meaningful and feminist way. This means journalists doing their jobs, and if necessary, letting those who actually know firsthand what they're talking about take centre stage, and be acknowledged and remunerated for telling their stories. This means editors thinking of something other than the laziest possible accompanying photos when they encounter an article on sex work (as someone who keeps their blog relatively image free, I doubt this will ever be realistically considered, but I do wonder exactly why any accompanying image is necessary at all in many cases - it seems like a pretty feminist act to refuse to reduce the sex work debate to pictures of women's body parts). This means any news outlets that pays its writers can damn well pay everyone who writes for them, journalist or not, if it wants them to create content for what is, after all, a profit-making enterprise, and ditto interviewees or sources who are helping create that content. Til then, all we're going to get is more cliches, no meaningful discourse, just soundbites, dogma and the voices of real people muffled and stepped over by those with an axe to grind or an article to pitch.

***I recommend any freelancer who is sick of being asked to work for free joins this group***

Class, privilege and 'respectable' feminism

This fantastic response to Lily Allen's deeply questionable 'Hard Out Here' video (which I'm not going to link to, because I agree with every criticism of its racialised objectification of black women, it and so I don't particularly want to give it the click-bait) got me thinking about the intersection of class and feminism. As Deanna Rogers says so articulately, what allows Lily Allen to treat a group of (mostly black) dancers as props in her video is not just her colour, but also her wealth. With her "mortgage paid" and her "kids settled", Lily Allen is in a position that few women in the music industry can claim - she has earned the privilege to appear in her music videos fully dressed, even looking (gasp!) slightly curvier than in her earlier videos, and even attempt to send out a bit of a feminist message in her lyrics. At a time when music videos are so unanimously populated by oiled female butt-cheeks and bikini lines waxed up to one's hipbones that it's easy to forget that there was a time when women were actually allowed to wear clothes in the music industry, this in itself seems refreshing. But then we look at the giant car-crash of racist, sexist stereotypes that Allen's video relies on, and it doesn't feel so revolutionary any more. Yes, Lily Allen was allowed to claw back that tiny victory of appearing fully clothed and relatively unobjectified in her video - but only at the expense of other women.

As I wrote in my last post about Britney Spears' "Work Bitch" video, it's not the image of black women on leashes held by a powerful white woman that is problematic per se. After all, in the same way that Lily Allen defends her video by stating the consent of all the dancers involved, we can't assume that Britney's dancers were any less happy to be depicted as submissive and highly sexualised. But we also can't assume that the power dynamic between a rich white woman and her dancers is in any way equal. The majority of us are slaves to our wages, and we all do things we don't particularly like in order to earn money. That doesn't mean we hate our jobs - when I was a care worker, it's safe to say that changing incontinence pads and helping people use the toilet wasn't my favourite part of the job, but that's not to say I didn't find other aspects of my work incredibly rewarding and sometimes great fun. However, when you need to pay the rent you are inevitably in a weaker position than those who can choose to refuse work. Writing about motorsport was not something I ever intended to do, but I did it because it was paid writing work (while certain major newspapers were asking me to write for free at the time) and I found that I didn't totally hate it, and actually found some bits quite interesting. It did mean though, that when I witnessed sexist aspects of the motorsport industry - and as I'm sure you can imagine, there are quite a few - I didn't feel able to do or say much about them. I bit my lip, rolled my eyes, did my work and went home. You choose your battles much more carefully when you're aware of the need not to bite the hand that feeds you.

Now, Lily Allen's dancers, or Britney Spears' dancers, or any number of less privileged women who are paid to dance (usually wearing very little) behind a more wealthy, more privileged woman, may not feel this way at all. They may not object to or even notice the racialised way in which their sexuality is being commodified. Or if they are aware, they may simply just not care - after all, they get a nice paycheque at the end of the day, so they're content. But it's still pretty disingenuous for Allen to imply that, as long as we can check with her dancers that they were all happy to be involved with the video (and really, are any of them likely to admit live on Twitter "No, I fucking hated it, I thought it was shit"?), there is no wider problem. The very fact that Allen's lyrics proclaim she is somehow superior because she doesn't "shake her arse on TV" says far more than her denial that her take-down of sexism is both sexist and racist itself. It also brings to mind a facet of feminism that has begun to grate on me more and more recently - the privileged, middle-class feminism that polices and dictates acceptable behaviour based upon its own narrow viewpoint.

Full disclosure - I AM middle class, white and identify as largely heterosexual. So I accept that whatever I say here is likely to be tainted by those privileges. However, I'd like to think I am learning, however slowly, to question them and how they mean my voice may be awarded more credibility and airtime simply because of them. A friend recently said to me she didn't think she was a feminist because she hadn't "read lots of books all about it". It made me sad to think that she felt excluded from a movement intended to welcome all, simply because she hadn't necessarily done the academic legwork. It also made me think, much as I loathed the deliberate shit-stirring of Joss Whedon's 'I don't like 'ists'' speech, he may have inadvertently had a point about some versions of feminism coming across as primarily concerned with academic discussions, to the detriment of real actions. I don't want a feminism that asks to see your degree certificate before you're allowed through the gate.

Nor do I want one that labels women either respectable or disposable, which is pretty much what Lily Allen has done in her video by implying that rich white women get to wear clothes and have integrity, while less well-off black women get to have champagne poured on their naked buttocks and be 'hos'. It brings to my mind the prurient mainstream fascination with well-spoken, middle-class 'call girl' Belle de Jour, the articulate and educated sex worker whose blog, books and TV adaptation were hungrily consumed by the British public. Were Belle from a council estate and had left school at 16, the discourse surrounding her would be very different, I'd imagine. She would be assumed to be ignorant, desperate and doing sex work only out of lack of other options - and I doubt she would have a regular column in a major, right-of-centre UK newspaper either. When I talk to people about my friend, a single mother whose children have different fathers, I can see the stereotype forming in their heads. I feel I have to immediately jump to her defence and explain that she is intelligent, articulate, well-qualified, a fantastic mother, and not promiscuous, empty-headed or irresponsible as people will inevitably assume she must be. In other words, I feel I have to emphasise that she is not a 'chav', not a candidate for The Jeremy Kyle Show, that bear-baiting programme watched so often by middle-class people, supposedly in the spirit of irony, but really just so they can feel better by mocking the less well-off. But why should I have to make that distinction? What would it matter if my friend was one of 'those women' - isn't the point of feminism to fight for us all, not just those of us who can afford to do their weekly shop in Waitrose?

Nowhere did I see the lines of 'respectability' more vehemently drawn, both by women who identified as feminists and those who did not, than when I recently wrote about Swansea University Union's decision to ban the pole fitness society. You can read the article for my full list of reasons for disagreeing with the ban, but the feeling that pervaded my take on the subject was one that well-meaning, very likely middle-class feminists, were patronising women they saw as less enlightened than themselves. By dictating to the female and male students of Swansea University that they couldn't consensually participate in a fitness activity, the union was basically telling women that they knew what was best for them, and that anyone doing pole dancing for fitness, or even (god forbid!) for money must basically be a brainwashed victim. But it wasn't just SUU who were making those distinctions. When I discussed the issue with several women, one of whom is a pole fitness instructor, the others in the conversation us were at pains to emphasise to her  "But you just teach it. You're not actually a pole dancer," implying that the real strippers that this woman teaches (who are by no means her only students) were beyond the pale, but she was still graciously allowed entrance to the club of respectable women. That's not a feminism I want any part of.

I'm currently reading this excellent book documenting some of the most famous women of the 'Flapper' era, who challenged conventional sexual morality and traditionally held views on how women should behave. This has really made me think how class privilege has long allowed certain feminists access into worlds that exclude poor, working class or women of colour. What comes through to me again and again as I read about Tamara de Lempicka, Nancy Cunard and Tallulah Bankhead, is how their wealth and social status enabled these women to be as transgressive as they were. Had they been preoccupied with earning money and trying to keep their heads above water as the average working-class woman of their era had been, it's doubtful that they would have had the luxury to become the artists, writers and actors that they did. Had they been middle-class women expected to surrender themselves to marriage, children and domesticity, it's unlikely they would've gotten much chance to gallivant around Paris and attend orgies either. What seems to have allowed them this freedom was their upper class status - their wealth and class gave them the social power to drink, smoke, wear shorter skirts and have pre-marital sex without being questioned, and the image of the arty, bohemian, upper-class eccentric was a convenient cover for this behaviour, one not afforded to poorer women of lower status.

I don't see that much has changed when I look at how women like Lily Allen and the powers that be at Swansea Students' Union are proclaiming themselves feminists largely at the expensive of other, less privileged women. At least many of the famous flapper women never proclaimed to speak for all women, whereas the kind of feminism that Allen and SSU are practising is doing exactly that - unjustifiably and presumptuously. I suppose the best way us middle-class, white, heterosexual cisgendered feminists can help change this is not just to stop speaking for other women, but maybe stop speaking at all - and listen, for a change, to the stories of women whose faces are often absent from the public image of feminism. So on that note, I'll now STFU.