The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) and allied lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) organizations stand in solidarity with Cece McDonald, a young African American transgender woman violently attacked by a group of people in a racist and transphobic hate violence incident in June 2011 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Despite being the survivor of this incident of violence, CeCe McDonald was the only person arrested. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has charged McDonald with two counts of second-degree murder for acting in self-defense and allegedly fatally stabbing one of her attackers. Hennepin County has dropped murder charges in three similar cases where people have acted in self-defense. NCAVP and our allies add our support to the public outcry to drop the charges against CeCe McDonald.
Transgender women of color face severe and deadly hate violence in the United States. NCAVP has responded to three murders of transgender women in the month of April alone. NCAVP’s most recent report, Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and HIV-Affected Communities in the United States in 2010, documented 27 anti-LGBTQH murders, the second highest yearly total ever recorded by the coalition. Transgender women made up 44% of the 27 reported hate murders in 2010, while representing only 11% of total survivors and victims. Transgender people represented a higher proportion of hate violence survivors with serious injuries (11.8%) as compared to non-transgender men (6.2%) or non-transgender women (1.3%).
The report also showed that transgender people and people of color were the least likely to receive medical attention, and that transgender people of color reported higher rates of negative law enforcement experiences. NCAVP members know that transgender survivors of violence often face biased and discriminatory treatment from law enforcement, courts, and other first responders. We are concerned that Mcdonald could be facing discriminatory charges based on her transgender identity. While we do not have all the details about this incident, our experience tells us to strongly advocate that Hennepin County consider CeCe McDonald as acting in self-defense.
NCAVP does not condone violence and expresses our condolences that a life has been lost in this incident. However, self-defense is not murder, and McDonald should not face murder charges for acting to defend her own life in a racist, transphobic assault. Charging McDonald with murder while other non-transgender people have not been charged by Hennepin County in similar cases where defendants were acting in self-defense highlights the potential differential treatment placed on McDonald because she is transgender. Furthermore, in a society where violence against transgender people is all too often condoned, ignored, and unsolved, charging McDonald with murder minimizes transphobic violence and reinforces a transphobic culture.
NCAVP and our allies call for Hennepin County to drop the charges against CeCe McDonald and for community members, anti-violence organizations, and public officials to take immediate action to support survivors of transphobic violence.
ACTION STEPS
Sign the Petition: Join Change.org in calling on County Attorney Michael Freeman to honor his committment, in his words “to serve all of our citizens with understanding, dignity, and respect” by dropping the charges against CeCe McDonald.
Report Violence: NCAVP encourages anyone who has experienced violence to contact a local anti-violence program. For help locating an anti-violence program in your area, please contact us.
Get involved: Join NCAVP in our efforts to prevent and respond to LGBTQH violence. Contact us to learn more.
NCAVP works to prevent, respond to, and end all forms of violence against and within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and HIV-affected (LGBTQH) communities. NCAVP is a national coalition of local member programs, affiliate organizations and individuals who create systemic and social change. NCAVP is a program of the New York City Anti-Violence Project.
Signatories:
AIDS Foundation of Chicago
FIERCE
HIV Prevention Justice Alliance
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Coalition for LGBT Health
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance
Queers for Economic Justice
Red Umbrella Project
Sex Workers Outreach Project of New York City
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
Transgender Law Center
Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project
Ceyenne: I was running a trans program in Jersey and I loved it. I would do anything for my clients and I did! I believed their fight was my fight and I was fought hard for them. The cooking came about when one Thanksgiving I was going to a trans clients house and they didn’t have anything and they were depressed and what I decided with my boss is I would cook a big dinner for as many clients as I could get and just have a big party for all the girls. So, I was cooking and realized we didn’t have any stuffing! All the stores were closed and I was thinking ‘We cannot have Thanksgiving without stuffing!’ I gave some money to one of the girls and asked her to go to a corner store and get some Italian bread and I found some cornflakes in my clients house and ended up making stuffing with cornflakes and Italian bread. And, you know what, it was phenomenal! When you’re cooking for people there is nothing like watching their face as they eat what you’ve made for them! Nothing like it. This is what got me started on cooking for people again.
A few years ago I was running an ad for a little fetish site I was doing. In the state of Jersey fetish work was considered illegal and I was arrested. First of all, in jail there is no good food! Oh my God, the food was horrible! It’s just not edible! Some things I couldn’t eat and I was over myself with grief in being locked up for 28 days. After my first day I was just crying all day long. My next door cell mate said to me after hearing me crying for the whole day, “Hey, let’s get you to a place where you’re not wanting to cry all the time, and you’re getting out. Stop feeling like its the end of the world, were going to put your mind somewhere else.” Then he paused and said, “Don’t you cook? You cooked for my uncle…” And I realized this was a guy who was a friend of the person I was seeing! He said don’t worry about anything, lets talk about food. And we started talking, and right there I began to think about recipes. I started to write, and write…and one day turned into 15…and I was using everything I had around me to write on, newspapers, magazines - just everything. By the 15th day I had close to a full cookbook. When my lawyers came to see me they said you know we’re trying to work this out for you and they asked me what I was going to do when I got out. And I said I wanna cook, I wanna do a cookbook. And they thought it was a great idea. I didn’t just want to do a cookbook, I wanted to do something related to my identity. I want other people to see that there is nothing you can’t overcome. Be it gender identity, disability, it doesn’t matter. You can overcome it! I want people to remember to fight to be who they are. From this book I also want people to know that there are trans people who want to live normal lives. Not every one of us strives to be buck-naked on the back of a magazine. Some of us do want normal lives, some of us want family. I have well over 6 gay children. I mean children that I’ve mentored and when I mentor I do it for real. I advocate for them in school, make sure they can get their name changed and get their gender identity respected by their teachers. I know that if you have nobody to advocate for you it’s so easy to give up your dreams. But if you do, you start to think of ways to make your life better. And I strongly believe you can’t do much without a solid education. I think that is so, so important.
Morty: Can you tell me a little more about your advocacy work in Jersey?
Ceyenne: I was working for a place called Jersey City Connection. I wound up in the state of New Jersey as a mistake. I got caught there after the World Trade. I went for a funeral and got trapped between the funeral and the World Trade coming down. While I was in Jersey I was invited to a trans meeting and the person running the meeting was being disrespectful to the kids. I didn’t agree with how she was running the meeting. I got called into the directors office to give them my information and I happened to talk to her about what I saw and she asked me if I had a resume, which I did, and within 5 minutes I was hired. And in the 7 years I worked there I didn’t miss but one day due to sickness. I didn’t take a vacation. Advocacy work means not ever knowing whats going to come up and things came up for my girls all the time. In Jersey there were no resources and I came in a found resources that were never ever there.
We were trying to get the girls in to get tested but found out it was hard to get them in for that but easy for them to come in for hormones. So we killed two birds with one stone. I set up a program which did HIV testing and hormones at the same time. Until then, they were buying hormones on the street from people you really couldn’t trust. Sometimes what they thought was hormones was really vegetable oil. Why do that when you can get your hormones from a trusted place from someone like me who you could put your trust in? We did a lot of good for many years.
We’re still raising funds on Kickstarter to do a photo shoot and print beautiful color photos and hopefully hopefully shoot a few episodes of Ceyenne’s online cooking show. So please pledge if you can, and keep spreading the word about the project!
Speak Up! Doing Legislative Advocacy for Change in New York
For most issues that impact people in the sex trade within the United States, marching on Washington or asking the President to make a change is misdirected energy. States write their own criminal codes, as well as most public health, labor, and housing laws – all of which affect people in the sex trades. And cities have important powers too, regulating zoning, deciding how local money is spent, and making
the kind of decisions that affect us on a day-to-day basis like how late parks are open or where police patrol. The language –often just a few words– included in bigger state and city laws can have major impact on the ability of public services and law enforcement to place restrictions on us and penalize us for trying to make a living. On the flip side, the absence of language that protects people in the sex industry can create space for law enforcement and public services to abuse us and violate our human rights.
Being aware of how state and city law making works is important because it gives us the ability to engage in our democracy and demand change for ourselves and our communities. This guide serves as a primer on how the legislative process works and what opportunities there are for people in the sex industry and our allies to engage in making change.
The Red Umbrella Project is a run and led by people who have wide-ranging experiences in the sex trades. We believe there is a lot of value in engaging in advocacy to change policies that negatively affect our communities, and that people with lived experience in the sex industry are the best people to do this work. But we’re not going to lie: there’s a lot stacked against us. The conflation of sex work and trafficking, not to mention the social and legal stigmas associated with the sex trade, make it really difficult to get our messages across. The truth is that getting rid of bad laws and getting better laws passed is slow work, and it is often discouraging. It’s unreasonable to expect that we will have big successes right away. But we are long-term optimists, and we believe that it is crucial that we invest time and energy in working for legislative change, and that it is vital for people like us to have seats at the table when our lives are being legislated.
A note about the audience for this guide: This manual was prepared specifically for people in New York City and State who are interested in doing legislative advocacy and making change in state and city policies. State and city legislative processes vary widely, so although some of the strategies are transferable to other locations, the information about the process of how a bill becomes a law is very different in other cities and states. Please research your local situation before you engage in legislative advocacy!
If you want to talk about how it can be adapted for your local area, please email audaciaray@redumbrellaproject.org
Download the PDF for free here: Speak Up! Doing Legislative Advocacy for Change in New York (15)
[blog post I wrote for the Ms. blog]
Currently in the state of New York, police and prosecutors use condoms as evidence of prostitution-related offenses, including the murky crime of “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense.” Even when they don’t use condoms as evidence to aid them in making arrests and convictions, in the process of doing their stop-and-frisks police often confiscate and destroy condoms.
When I tell people about this practice, they’re usually shocked. It makes no sense whatsoever. New York City has distributed ample free condoms in clinics since 1971; in 2007, New York City was the first city in the U.S. to launch a city-branded condom initiative. So there’s this: New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene distributesfree condoms to people who are at risk for STIs, including HIV, and unplanned pregnancy, and the New York Police Department takes them away.
When this issue first started getting media attention, a lot of people were up in arms about it because, to paraphrase, “This could happen to anyone carrying condoms!” But let’s be clear: The use of condoms as evidence of prostitution and the confiscation of condoms is very much an issue of profiling. It’s an issue of who the police think might be trading sex: poor people of color, especially trans women, who police perceive as loitering in public space. The use of condoms as evidence of prostitution affects not just people who are trading sex, but also people profiled as trading sex.
You might have noticed that the Cooking In Heels project is more than 100% funded on Kickstarter. That’s amazing, and it happened faster than we could have dared to imagine!
So why should you, not-yet-backer, pledge to a project that is already, definitely happening?
- Pledging the $30 level means that you are pre-ordering the book and helping us figure out how big our print run should be. The best -and right now the ONLY- way for you and all the people you know to get a copy of Cooking in Heels is by pledging to our Kickstarter campaign. We would love to pre-sell at least 250 hard copy books, which means we need about 175 more pledges at the $30 level to make that happen.
- More pledges will make for a better and more beautiful book, with full color pictures of food shot by a professional photographer. In our initial planning for the book, we were afraid to dream up a budget bigger than we could raise funds for, so our original $6000 doesn’t cover photography beyond the cover. If we raise more money (aka, sell more books plus some bigger pledges), we can afford to produce a photo shoot and get the book printed in full color.
- If our fundraising continues to blossom, we can produce a series of video webisodes, which will be free to watch and feature Ceyenne cooking dishes from the book and telling stories. Our first obligation, of course, is to making the book awesome. However, we’ve been getting A LOT of requests to produce a cooking show featuring Ceyenne. We would love love love to make this happen, and have the crew to do it: the video crew that produced Ceyenne’s Kickstarter video is Emmy Award-winning, and the director has directed episodes of food shows like Chopped and Man Vs. Food Nation. Creating a high quality and very entertaining web series is well within our abilities, we just need some more funds to make it a reality.
So for those reasons, and because Ceyenne is amazing, please do pledge what you’re able to, and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.
Advocates for Sex Workers, Elected Officials, and Public Health Experts to Call for Law Barring Use of Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution
Report to Reveal Public Health Crisis Caused by NYPD’s Confiscation of Condoms
On Tuesday, April 17 people with experience in the sex trade, elected officials, public health experts, and human rights advocates will hold a press conference calling on the New York State Assembly to pass legislation barring the use of condoms as evidence of prostitution. Supporters of Bill S323/A1008, known as the No Condoms as Evidence Bill, say that allowing condoms to be confiscated by police and used as evidence in criminal cases discourages sex workers and other vulnerable New Yorkers from carrying condoms, undermining efforts to combat sexually transmitted diseases and educate the public about safer sex.
At Tuesday’s press conference, The Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center and the PROS Network (Providers and Resources Offering Services to Sex Workers) will release a report, entitled “Public Health Crisis: The Impact of Using Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution in New York City.” The report reveals findings from two separate surveys of NYC sex workers, including a survey conducted in 2010 by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) that is only now being released.
WHAT: Elected Officials, Public Health Experts, and Human Rights Advocates Hold Press Conference Calling for Legislation Banning the Use of Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution, Release Report on Public Health Crisis in NYC
WHO: Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Audacia Ray of Red Umbrella Project, Sienna Baskin of The Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, Chris Bilal from Streetwise and Safe (all members of the PROS Network), and Kathryn Todrys of Human Rights Watch.
WHEN: Tuesday, April 17that 1:00pm
WHERE: Room 130, Legislative Office Building
Street Wise: Cyndee Clay constantly walks the intersection of society and sex, survival and discrimination in an effort to uncover the humanity hidden by stigma - Interview by Will O’Bryan, Photography by Todd Franson
One of the things HIPS is trying to do is take a step back and change people’s thinking from the knee-jerk reaction – ”Let’s get the prostitutes off the streets. Let’s get more law enforcement to tackle this problem.” – to the unintended consequences of those positions and those laws. Let’s address some root causes. Residents are concerned about things like trash and traffic. These are issues we can deal with. And we can deal with them without putting people in jail.
We’re really there to protect people’s health and not to make judgments about whether theyshould or shouldn’t be there, because that’s the first step in gaining people’s respect and starting the conversation about changes they want to make in their lives.
- Great interview with our friend Cyndee Clay from the wonderful HIPS! I had the privilege of being a volunteer with Cyndee back in her early HIPS days…it’s so cool to see how far she’s brought that program…lots of love to Cyndee and the whole HIPS crew!!
I was introduced to Ceyenne in February 2011 by the women at the Sex Workers Project - her lawyers and colleagues in the fight for the rights of people in the sex trades. Ceyenne, they told me, is an amazing, funny woman who was piecing her life back together after a stint in prison on a prostitution conviction. And she had this idea - she wanted to write the first cookbook by a sex working transgender woman, a cookbook that would bring people together and make it ok to talk about these tough issues.
I had to meet her.
After more than a year of collaboration on her book, which she’s calling Cooking in Heels, we launched a Kickstarter campaign Monday to raise the funds for Red Umbrella Project to publish it.
The response so far has been amazing - we are 85% of the way to the $6000 minimum we need to make the book a reality. Ceyenne and I have been blown away by the support and have started scheming about the ways we can make the book even more amazing than what we had planned. To be honest, we thought the combined forces of racism and transmisogyny (let’s face it, Kickstarter campaigns aren’t the most diverse of pursuits) would mean that we would be hustling hard to raise that six grand by our deadline, May 9.
Watch the video of her making paella on Kickstarter because me talking about her just isn’t anywhere near as awesome as watching Ceyenne in action. If you can spare a few dollars, please support the project and help us make this book bigger and better. $1 gets you access to backer-only updates, $10 gets you a personalized postcard from Ceyenne, $30 gets you a hard copy of the book when its available in August. If its within your means to donate more, there are rewards above and beyond what I’ve listed here. The more we raise, the more amazing this book is going to be.
Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne Doroshow, a black transgender woman from Brooklyn who while she was incarcerated on a prostitution conviction a few years ago, got inspired to write a memoir cookbook. We’ve made significant progress on the book: we have more than 50 recipes, plus an oral history about her life, and now we’re ready to start producing the book itself. We need $6000 to get it copyedited, pay for the cover photography, and have it designed and printed. This morning I hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign to raise that money.
Our rewards include signed postcards, copies of the book, baked goods, cooking lessons, and private dinners - all depending on the level you donate at. We need your support to make this book come to fruition. And really, any amount helps - the minimum donation is $1. If you don’t have cash to spare, please check out the video anyway - it really captures who Ceyenne is and why she’s amazing. Also, there’s paella and it is mouthwatering - we ate it at the shoot and wow.
If you think the project is cool, as I hope you will - please spread the word!
This essay originally appeared in the 2012 Momentum conference anthology ebook. I know this is a bit long for Tumblr, but this is the full text of the article, and I wanted to make it available online for people who aren’t at the conference for my presentation of the same title and/or want to mull it over in text format.
If the pursuit of pleasure is good, how can it be bad for sex workers, people who are professionally steeped in sexuality? Well, it’s complicated. Over the past several decades, a contingent of feminist, sex positive sex workers have emerged, and they have claimed their right to experience the pleasures of sex and share those pleasures with others, including paying clients. Sex positive sex workers have moved to the forefront of conversations about the sex industry, and today are prevalent in online discussions of sex work, especially when it comes to first person accounts. Offline, too, sex positive sex workers have been making their mark on the discourse around sex work, and many have appeared on academic panels and at other public events to offer their perspectives on sexuality and sex work.
However, the promotion of pleasure and sex positivity within the sex industry and as an element of sex worker rights activism, is proprietary to a small but very vocal group of people, namely: white, cisgender women who are conventionally attractive, able-bodied, and have some degree of class and educational privilege. People like this – people like me – are central figures in the American sex worker rights movement, and often claim sex positivity as a key vehicle for claiming rights and making progress. Arguably, some progress has been made, especially in the area of cultural engagement and public awareness about the struggles and humanity of people in the sex industry. The fact that the phrase “sex worker” appears regularly in news outlets when the subject is covered is a testament to this progress. Though offensive slang still publicly brands people in the sex industry, the awareness of the preferred terminology has certainly grown. But despite the progress, there are many barriers to justice. One of these barriers, the one that this essay explores, is sex positivity.
Before we dig in, let’s talk for a minute about unintentional consequences. Surely, you might argue, sex positive feminists, including people who work in the sex industry and those who do not but respect the rights of sex workers, see sex positivity as a means to achieving social good, with a few great orgasms along the way. Why would sex positive feminists want to halt the progress toward human rights for sex workers? I believe that the answer is that sex positive feminists do not intend to create barriers for the achievement of sex workers’ rights, but that there are ways in which this happens anyway. And though it is frustrating to have something that you thought was good, that has your best intentions behind it, pointed out as being potentially or actually harmful, it is crucial to think about the ways we can make our umbrellas bigger and not smaller. Even if sometimes this may come at the personal cost of rerouting your values.
On a Personal Note
I am a former sex worker. My several years of work experience in the business included escorting, sensual massage, porn, fetish work, and working as a phone girl at a dungeon. During much of the time I was working, I also engaged in activism in support of sex workers’ rights. In particular, I was an editor at $pread magazine for three years, and I organized art shows, performances, and other public events to raise funds for the magazine. Over the last few years, as I have dug deeper into providing peer support and trainings in media, storytelling, and legislative advocacy for people in the sex industry via my work at the Red Umbrella Project, I have been critically examining the ways that the sex worker rights community talks about what we do and what we want to see change. I have been looking hard and close at who this “we” of the sex worker rights community is, and I have been listening hard to people who feel excluded by that “we.” Some of the points I make in this essay might be a bitter pill to swallow, or may make you feel defensive, or like I am pointing fingers. But it’s important for you to know that I am very much culpable in this, too.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a fierce defender of sex positive feminism. When I was working in the sex industry, sex positivity was an important value of mine, one that in some ways gave me the skills to cope with a physically and emotionally demanding job. However, the more I step back from that time in my life, and the more I am willing to look critically at things I have held dear, the more obvious it is to me that my experience of sex positivity and the sex industry are not anywhere near universal, they are just the most visible to me, because I fit the mold as described above. The audience for this essay is very much my peers, people who have had experiences and privileges similar to mine. Beyond our circles, most of what I’ll write here is glaringly obvious, and in communities of color, for people with disabilities, as well as among trans women and men, and other groups we aspire to but do not actively include, this is not news.
Sex Positive Feminism and Sex Work: A Quick Overview
The sex worker rights movements in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have been, for the last forty years, very entangled with feminist movements. Though there is, certainly, a history of disagreement between feminists and supporters of sex workers’ rights, there are also many feminists who support the rights of sex workers. The phrase “sex work” first came into use in the late 1970s, has made its way into official channels, and today is used by the United Nations. The feminist value of bodily autonomy, or the ability to choose what to do with one’s body, figures most prominently in feminist support for sex workers’ rights. The link with feminism in these geographic contexts aligns sex workers’ rights with the rights of usually white, cisgender women and often links it to reproductive rights and health.
This, however, creates a chain of denial – many feminists who focus on reproductive rights do not value the contributions of sex workers to their movement, and many sex worker rights advocates who focus on bodily autonomy do not value the particular issues faced by people who do sex work because of coercion or dire economic circumstances. Or, perhaps a fairer way to put this is not that these things are not “valued,” but that there isn’t an active effort made to make space for a multitude of concerns. In action, this looks the same. And so, while sex positive sex workers focus on trying to get a seat at the table of reproductive rights, they simultaneously deny other people in sex work a space at their table.
Certainly, there are other global movements based around the rights of sex workers, though their cultural and activist histories are different and less rooted in feminism. The Latin American sex worker rights movement is large and powerful, especially in places like Brazil and Argentina, and it is a working class movement that has been developed largely by street based workers and uses aggressive tactics to ensure that their members’ voices are heard. In India, there are sex worker rights groups that count thousands in their memberships, and for whom the process of collectivization is key to getting a response from state and national governments, particularly on the issue of access to unbiased health care. In other places in Asia, sex workers have organized alongside garment factory workers to ensure that their rights as workers are protected. Of course, a paragraph devoted to the global movement does it no justice, except to make the point that there are different ways of organizing sex worker movements, beyond feminism.
The Dominion of SEX over work
In the 1997 anthology Whores and Other Feminists, edited by Jill Nagle, Carol Queen’s essay “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma,” set the stage for the feminist sex positive perspective on sex work that has been so prevalent over the past decade and a half. In Queen’s essay, the sex positive feminist perspective on sex work is very much a reactive one that was generated in opposition to what she refers to as the “‘poor abused whores’ lobby.” Queen argues that sex workers who enjoy their work and “live well, with no loss of self-esteem” have “sufficient sex information and are sex-positive [sic]” (p. 129). But as big a part of the job as it is, sex work is not all about sex for many people who do it. The emphasis on sexuality unfairly erases the other half of the equation: work. Queen asserts that:
No one should ever, by economic constraint or any kind of interpersonal force, have to do sex work who does not like sex, who is not cut out for a life of sexual generosity (however attractively high the fee charged for it). (p. 134)
But the reality is that people who don’t like sex, or don’t like having sex with strangers, or aren’t sexually oriented toward the gender of the clients they see, or don’t like doing sexualized performances, work in the sex industry every day. And it is just that parenthetical “attractively high [fee]” that is the reason for their actions. For the majority of people who work in the sex industry, money, not sex, is the driving factor. Until a day comes when jobs are available that have wages that are competitive with the sex industry, particularly for cis and trans women, people of color, and young people who need to get out of unstable or violent housing situations, many people will sell or trade sex.
Emphasizing sex and pleasure harms the sex workers who aren’t firmly in the self-defined population of being sex positive and sexually educated, by unintentionally shaming them for not being enthusiastic participants in the sex they have at work. When engaging in the trade or sale of sex is helping an individual to meet their basic physiological needs, they often do not have the personal resources to channel energy into making the experience of transactional sex perfectly pleasurable for either themselves or their client. Not every sexual experience, whether paid or not, has to be perfectly erotic. This is an unreasonable expectation, and one that makes it more difficult for people who have negative experiences to speak openly about their truths with sex work or sexuality more generally.
The “‘poor abused whores’ lobby” spews plenty of toxic garbage about the experiences of people coerced into the sex industry and their preferred (unattainable, abolitionist) solutions, often without letting people with those experiences speak for themselves. However, if feminist sex positive sex workers also silence these voices, we are not contributing as positively to the cause of sex workers’ rights as we want to believe.
“Happy Hooker” vs “Exploited Victim”: Defeating the Dichotomy
In the media trainings I do, I ask the participants to come up with a main message that, if they had two minutes, they want their audience to receive. They then need to back up this message with two or three talking points, one sentence statements that can be evidence-based, use logic or other rhetorical devices to give the audience a different perspective. Every time I have done the training, someone is eager to express the message that sex workers are average people with many dimensions: we are mothers, brothers, taxpayers, neighbors, pet enthusiasts, gourmet cooks, etc. Inevitably, one of the supporting talking points they come up with is, “You wouldn’t be able to distinguish me from anyone else you walk by; I’m not a street worker or a junkie.” But some sex workers – maybe not sex workers in your immediate circle – are street workers and junkies, and we cannot throw them under the bus as we have been doing. To define oneself as essentially normal, in opposition to drug-using, street based workers, is to imply that they are not as worthy as rights as those of us who fit better into society. Furthermore, when we define ourselves in opposition to what we view as negative portrayals of sex work, we silence people who have had these experiences, and we communicate to them that they are not welcome in our community.
During the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the struggle to define sex positivity with respect to sex work served a purpose. To say that not all people have a horrendous experience of the sex industry, and that many sex workers value sexuality and see themselves as complex sexual beings as well as sex educators was an important statement to make, and one that had not been spoken before. However, it is essential to put this statement in historical context. To continue making the statement that many sex workers have a good experience of the sex industry without also including those whose experiences are negative and making space for them to speak up reveals a deep doubt about the validity of the sex positive argument. If we believe in the positive power of sexuality, we must also examine what happens when people’s lives are infused with sex negativity, and we must listen and support people with this experience in sharing their personal truths.
If we put aside our attachment to the sex positive construction of sex work, we will certainly hear things that will be hard to sit with. But for sex positivity to be a useful framework, one that encourages the pursuit of social justice, it must also engage with the ugly pieces of sexuality, and not in a simplistically reactive way. Otherwise, the concept of being a sex positive sex worker is a self-serving marketing practice, in which the enjoyment of sexuality is being sold as a product to both workers and our clients.
I haven’t given up on the radical potential of sex and pleasure, but now I see these pursuits as being very different from the task of promoting and protecting the rights of people who are in the sex industry by choice, circumstance, or coercion. For me, it is no longer acceptable to maintain a barrier between conversations about the positive potential of the choice to do transactional sex and the injustices many people face when they do sex work because of circumstance or coercion. To do so is to maintain a class divide that is wide and deep. The sex industry is extremely complex, and attempting to make tidy arguments about the positive and negative sides of the business discredits both sides of the argument. It’s time to find a new paradigm, one that will allow for a more authentic pursuit of the human rights of sex workers and will be more inclusive of the broad spectrum of experiences of people in the sex industry.
