NATALIE WEST
It’s 2012. I’m in my midtwenties, struggling to pay my not-yet-skyrocketing Los Angeles rent. I’ve recently moved from the Midwest, where things weren’t really any easier. I’m in graduate school, getting a degree that is unlikely to end in a career that will garner an income high enough to make a dent in the student loans I’m taking out to supplement my meager TA salary. I don’t know that yet. Well-meaning people have told me that I will be an exception and I believe them. I’m the first in my family to have gone to college. My mom and dad are excited that, in a few years, they’ll be able to call me “Dr.”
I meet a woman on a dating site who, an hour into a first date, tells me that she’s a professional dominatrix. We kiss. I go home and google “dominatrix.” I ask my grad school friends if they think I should actually consider dating a dominatrix. They tell me not to be a SWERF. I go home and google “SWERF.” It means “Sex Worker Exclusive Radical Feminist.”
Spring turns to summer and academic work has dried up, as academic work dries up every summer. I date the dominatrix. I can’t make rent. I resent my colleagues whose parents send them checks in the mail to cover happy hour tapas and new laptops when old laptops break and research trips to the Beinecke Library at Yale. I get bitter, start smoking again, learn to pull a decent shot of espresso, and do that for minimum wage.
I meet my dominatrix girlfriend’s best friend: a middle-aged man who calls himself a fetish photographer but doesn’t appear to work much at all. On his desktop computer, he shows me photographs of blonds in motorcycle jackets and cheesy red press-on nails. They remind me of the girls in hair metal videos my older brother watched on MTV when I was a kid. The fetish photographer used to be in a hair metal band. Now he’s bald. My dominatrix girlfriend often goes over to his house in the afternoon and doesn’t come back until two a.m., complaining she was exhausted but he wouldn’t let her leave. You’re the fucking dominatrix, I think but don’t say.
“YOU CAN WEAR a wig in your sessions,” the photographer tells me. “There are no good blond dommes in LA right now. You’ll make a killing.” My hair is dark, short, boyish. “Men wouldn’t pay for it,” he says. I had never worked as a domme and he had supposedly trained half a dozen, so I listen to his advice. He pulls one of his finest blond wigs down over the wig cap he’s placed on my head. I look in the mirror and, surprisingly, like it. I look like a Texas beauty queen. I take a sip of the prosecco he’s poured me, set it down carefully, and start smoothing down the wig with the palms of my hands. It doesn’t shift, but it’s hot as hell.
“I’ll teach you everything you need to know.” He says this nonchalantly, like I should recognize I’m being done a favor, but the man offering doesn’t want too much credit for his generosity.
I go alone to the photographer’s house to “train,” the first time I’ve been alone with him. He’s got a large metal dog cage set out waiting. He’s wearing nothing but black boxer briefs and his prescription eyeglasses with transition lenses that have stopped working and never adjust to clear, even inside, even at night. He tells me he wants to assist me in putting on makeup. I already have makeup on—my girlfriend applied some before I left the house because makeup is not yet a dominatrix skill I’ve acquired—but I acquiesce: I am training, after all. We go into the bathroom and he drops to his knees. He picks up a tray lined with orangey makeup, far too dark for my complexion, and holds it out in front of him.
“I’m here to serve, Mistress. To help you get ready,” he whimpers.
I grab the foundation. He lowers the tray, pulls down his boxers, and places his hard cock onto it, its distinct curve to the right making it point directly at a cheap palette of shimmery eye shadows.
“You’re so helpful,” I say, holding back the urge to laugh.
I realize at once that professional domination is, indeed, a facet of the service industry. That sex work, as the protest signs say, would be real work.
I’M STANDING IN front of the elevator to the fourth floor of a university building that houses the administration offices for the graduate program I’ve been attending for four years, with two to go. I usually take the stairs, but I’m already sweating. I rehearse my lines in my head before pushing the button to ascend: “He’s a jealous ex. No, I don’t think he’s dangerous.”
After the years he spent coercing me into free play by saying it would help “launch” my side hustle in professional domination—and also advance the career of my much-more-established dominatrix girlfriend—the fetish photographer snapped, ended our friendship, and went on a mission to end our professional lives. Jilted on a vacation he attended with her and me and two paying clients—imagine feeling entitled to more attention than the guys who were paying for it!—he returned from paradise to purchase some domain names. He bought NatalieWest.com and redirected it to my grad school student profile, where my legal name appeared alongside a photo of me smiling in front of a bookcase, wearing glasses and the blazer I bought for academic conferences, trying my best to look the part of the young professor. He bought the URL of my legal name and redirected it to my dominatrix website, outing me to anyone who cared to google my name or work.
I knock timidly at the door of the university administrator’s office. Going into as little detail as possible, I tell her, “I have a jealous ex.” I tell her that he’s harassing me online and possibly stalking me and definitely trying to ruin my reputation. I tell her he’s taken my photograph. He’s taken many photographs. I cry and think that, because she’s a woman, she’s likely to have been stalked too and so maybe she won’t investigate further.
I make it past this incident and out of graduate school, earning a degree they can’t take away from me, even if they find the photos of me, even if they find out what I did to feed myself, even well sometimes, and pay my bills while I was there.
READING THE OUTPOURING of #MeToo stories on Twitter and across the media landscape in 2017, I immediately thought of the fetish photographer. And then I thought of the kitchen manager at the corporate chain restaurant where I worked during undergrad, who cornered me in a walk-in freezer and forced me to kiss him and feel his erection through his pants. When I filed a complaint, they transferred me to a location forty minutes away and told me he just wanted to take me out on a date. I thought of the BDSM client who pushed his fingers inside me without my consent. I had experienced sexual harassment and abuse in nearly all the jobs I had done—sex work or otherwise—throughout my working life. I didn’t tell any of these stories in 2017, when the #MeToo movement gained traction on social media. I didn’t use the hashtag at all.
Many of us—workers in various aspects of the sex industries—didn’t use the hashtag. There’s a great risk in telling stories like mine. Like ours. But we too live in a world marked indelibly by sexual harassment and abuse. And as sex workers, who among us hasn’t been told that we were asking for it?
In the wake of #MeToo, there have been numerous accounts of those workers left out of conversations about workplace sexual violence, and we have been mentioned in those accounts alongside women of color, poor women, domestic workers, and women working in various low-profile industries. In a 2018 Time magazine piece titled “‘They Don’t Want to Include Women Like Me’: Sex Workers Say They’re Being Left Out of the #MeToo Movement,” Samantha Cooney addresses the pernicious myth that sex workers cannot be sexually assaulted. One sex worker who used the hashtag in an act of solidarity reported getting messages saying she deserved to be raped, and numerous iterations of the question, “How can you sexually assault a whore?”
If you think this is the type of question that could only come from some virulent strain of misogyny found in the bowels of the online “incel”1 community, think again. Consider the 2007 rape of a sex worker in Philadelphia and Judge Teresa Carr Deni’s reduction of her sexual assault to “theft of services.” After hearing the case of the nineteen-year-old woman who arranged to exchange $150 for an hour of sex with one client, but arrived at the address he gave her to find an abandoned building where she would be gang-raped by four men at gunpoint, Judge Carr Deni justified her court decision by saying, “She consented and she didn’t get paid … I thought it was a robbery.”2 Clearly our absence from movements against sexual violence isn’t simply due to a lack of public attention. The dehumanization of sex workers can render us impossible to victimize, or else it can render us the ultimate victims. This anthology was conceived in response to the outpouring of responses to workplace sexual harassment and violence that began with the revival of the #MeToo movement in 2017,3 but as sex workers with particular experiences that complicate that movement, we also want to move beyond it. For us, that means we must first move past a number of myths about sex working people and activists engaged in the sex workers’ rights movement.
A COMMON REFRAIN in the sex workers’ rights movement is “sex work is not trafficking.” The reason that this refrain is common is that anti-trafficking organizations justify police raids and arrests of sex workers as part of a larger fight against sex trafficking, which US law broadly defines in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 as the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” While it’s key to keep in mind as you read this collection that we all have varying relationships to trafficking, pimps, management, and other forms of alliance or association that may be swept under the umbrella of trafficking, we do not advocate for the criminalization of sex work as a means of “rescuing” those populations that are being trafficked in the US and globally.
The term “trafficking” has become too broad to actually help those individuals who most people think of when they hear the term. Most people think of white teenage girls in the suburbs, kidnapped, bound, and taken across state lines, then forced into drug addiction and sexual labor. And it’s not as if this type of horror has never happened, but these are not the cases of human trafficking reflected in the numbers that anti-trafficking NGOs often cite. Polaris Project, the central NGO with a mission to end human trafficking, claims that forty million people worldwide are victims of the crime. However, that figure includes people who are participating in arranged marriages and anyone who is working in a foreign country to pay off a debt of any kind. While there certainly are predatory referral agencies that exploit migrants working abroad, these are issues of borders and immigration, not necessarily trafficking—at least trafficking as it is commonly perceived. Even more pertinent to the essays you’re about to read in this collection: sex workers who share safety-related information with other sex workers, especially underage sex workers—who are always already considered victims of trafficking, even if their age is unknown to the supporting parties—can be charged and convicted of trafficking or trafficking a minor.4
Liam Neeson and the Taken movies aren’t all we have to blame for these misconceptions of trafficking. Anti-trafficking NGOs rose to power alongside politicized conservative Christianity, antiimmigrant and nationalist responses to globalization, and the radical feminist position that sex work is inherently violence against women. All of these ideologies frame sex work as “modern slavery.”5 As you’ll read in personal accounts from sex workers in this collection, those “rescued” from trafficking most often do not get support and safety, but “detention, court fees, and criminal records that only make their lives more difficult.”6
Anti-trafficking NGOs have worked for decades to convince the public that “if we could abolish prostitution through criminalizing clients and managers, the trafficking of women would end, as there would be no sex trade to traffic them into.”7 This argument ignores the economic need that drives people to enter the sex industries of their own free will, or at the will of another. In the United States, one result of the conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is a 2018 law that attempts to stop sex workers from communicating online with potential clients or within their own communities, putting workers into greater danger without safe outlets for screening potential clients.8 But beyond the fact that anti-trafficking campaigns do not use their vast resources to support survivors, anti-trafficking efforts are inherently carceral.9
Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s chapter on “Borders” in Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights problematizes the move to categorically differentiate between sex work and trafficking. Instead, they urge those of us involved in the sex workers’ rights movement to welcome conversations about human trafficking that would take up “how border enforcement makes people more vulnerable to exploitation and violence as they seek to migrate.”10 The problem, then, is the border and the state itself. Melissa Gira Grant, in Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, urges readers to question and complicate outsider narratives about the horrors experienced by “prostituted” girls and women: “The experience of sex work is more than just the experience of violence; to reduce all sex work to such an experience is to deny that anything but violence is even possible. By doing so, there is no need to listen to sex workers” who can never transcend their conception as victims.11 For the purposes of approaching the stories in this anthology, non–sex working readers should keep in mind that we all have different relationships to what the state defines as trafficking, but that we as a collective agree on one central point: criminalizing sex work does nothing to mitigate the exploitation and violence that the most vulnerable among us experience; indeed, criminalization increases violence against us.
THE UMBRELLA TERM “sex work” encompasses a variety of acts, gigs, and professions, with different levels of vulnerability to law enforcement and the criminal legal system: escorts, hoes, dominatrices and fetish professionals, people in the trade, massage parlor workers, porn performers, cam models, strippers, and others who trade in sex and sexuality for money. Many sex workers face the criminalization of their work, and because women of color face the criminalization of their bodies, sex workers of color live at a particularly violent intersection of these processes. As such, the sex workers’ rights movement has sought to legitimize our work to the wider public, defend our choices, and fight for our right to make them—all as part of a battle for decriminalization. This fight makes it difficult to make a complaint, to allow the non–sex working public to see the problems within the sex industries, especially when that allowance may confirm what they thought they knew, when what they think they know comes from a culture that stigmatizes sex and criminalizes sex work.
These differences between sex work and other forms of work render movements against workplace sexual harassment and violence particularly vexed terrains for sex workers. The public often considers abuse a natural outcome of sexualized labor, and because sex work is criminalized, sex workers have no access to workers’ rights that might mitigate those abuses when they do occur. If you’ve encountered the movement for sex workers’ rights, you’ve likely heard the refrain “Sex work is real work.” Without seeing sex work as work, sex workers cannot be seen as laboring subjects in need of rights, not rescue. This refrain reverberates throughout this collection. As sex workers, we know that sex work is work, and as such, this book makes space for us to speak openly about the harms we have experienced on the job, whatever the job might be. For our non–sex working readers, this may be a new experience. You will hear about labor rights violations, sexual assaults, and shit days with shit managers in shit clubs on shit porn sets. We ask that you to resist the urge to use our stories as symbols through which to criminalize our work, or to turn us into victims in need of rescue. The answer to labor rights violations, sexual assaults, and shit days at work is not criminalization or (re)victimization: putting us in prison or taking away our incomes would not right the wrongs in the stories you’re about to read. As Mac and Smith explain in Revolting Prostitutes, “In being candid about bad workplace conditions, sex workers fear handing a weapon to political opponents; their complaints about work paradoxically becoming ‘justification’ to dismiss them as not ‘real workers.’”12
For the sex worker readers and writers in this collection, the stories here will, unfortunately, come as no surprise.
As sex workers, we are taking a big risk by sharing our stories with “civilians.” “Civilian” is the in-group term we use to describe non–sex working people—this book will introduce you to many such words, but it will rarely slow down to explain them to you. We trust that if you can’t pick up our language with context clues, you’ll do the work of looking it up. The “happy hooker” narrative is the one we have typically reserved for civilians, restricting our complaints about bad working conditions to private conversations among ourselves. That happy hooker narrative is one that works in tandem with sex positivity, and it’s worked to yoke the sex workers’ rights movement to sex-positive formations in third wave feminism. Mac and Smith describe this narrative as one that blurs the line between paid and recreational sex, creating “the illusion that worker and client are united in their interests.” This is a narrative with which many sex workers are familiar, even beyond the bounds of activist practice, because it’s a narrative we use in our advertising to clients: “The bored, libidinous housewife, the authentic ‘girlfriend experience,’ … and the powerful, formidable dominatrix are socially palatable fantasy characters designed to entice and impress customers.”13 Certainly, there can be a kernel of truth in these fantasy characters, but there must be room in our narratives for the unhappy hooker: the sex worker who chooses to work in the sex industries—compelled by the same economic necessity to work as any other type of worker—but who wants to improve the material conditions of their labor. If we cannot discuss the material conditions of our work, we cannot decrease violence in our industries. If we want to address the problems that sex workers face, we have to stop thinking of sex workers simply as self-directed individuals choosing sex work as a joyful project of selfhood (the sex-positive liberal model), or as victim-criminals in need of carceral reform.
Sex workers in the United States, and in many other places that criminalize sex work, live in fear. But those fears might not be the fears that we, in a culture unaccustomed to listening to sex workers, expect to hear: The pimp. The bad date. The good client gone bad. The sleazy producer on the casting room couch. The exploitative strip club manager. Living in a culture in which sex work is vilified, we all know the stories about what goes wrong in the sex industry and which figures perpetrate those harms. You will encounter these figures in the narratives that make up this anthology. Yet there are other fears within the sex industries that you might not hear about if you’re a non–sex working person: The leak in the strip club ceiling, causing you to twist your ankle and lose a week of wages. The cops. The fetish photographer calling himself a BDSM “trainer.” The client who tries to slip off a condom. The child welfare court. The fucking cops. The criminal status of many forms of sex work—and the stigmatized status of the rest—makes it difficult for sex workers to take action to mitigate the harms we experience at work. We try our best to protect each other—through community support networks, bad client lists, and sharing best practices to keep us safe from law enforcement—but the state seems hell-bent on passing legislation that keeps us from doing so. But again, we ask you to approach these issues with an open mind: we are not asking for rescue. In this book, we are, as contributor Lina Bembe says, “demystifying” our industries for ourselves. We are allowing our non–sex working readers to sit with us as we do so across the pages of this collection, but the collection itself is for us. We hope that giving voice to our individual experiences as a collective will allow us to heal, and to continue our work toward transforming our industries to become safer, saner, and more supportive in the face of the violence we endure.
This anthology will not offer readers direct argumentation against the criminalization of sex work, but it will offer personal narratives that undergird the logic of decriminalization. Decriminalizing the facets of the industry that are currently criminalized—and destigmatizing the rest—is central to a movement toward compassion and humanity. However, this collection does not exist to convince non–sex workers that we deserve to be treated with compassion and humanity. We have written to and for those who would deny our humanity for far too long.
We have come together to collect the personal narrative essays that make up this collection because we—current and former sex workers—are the experts on the working conditions in the sex industries, and yet our voices are often ignored in favor of politicians, celebrities, law enforcement, and NGOs that claim to know what is best for us. As a collective of voices, we can move beyond the #MeToo movement and other movements to decrease workplace sexual harassment and violence that do not serve us or value our stories. We can build a movement toward healing, by and for sex workers.
Implicating anti–sex work feminism in the dehumanization of sex workers, contributor Lorelei Lee explains, “I’m angry that I could not talk about violence without fueling descriptions of me as an object, written by women claiming to be my allies.” This collection seeks to change those conversations in which sex workers are the objects, not the subjects, of their own stories. Listening to the polyvocality of experiences in the sex industries is the first step toward decreasing violence, and that is precisely We Too.
NOTES
1. “Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate,” a community of men, facilitated by online community forums, who define themselves by their perceived unjust rejection by women.
2. Catherine Plato, “Escort Rape Case Causes Uproar in Philadelphia,” in $pread: The Best of the Magazine That Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution, eds. Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, and Audacia Ray (New York: Feminist Press, 2015), 250–52.
3. Me Too is a movement founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly women of color from low-wealth communities, and bring healing and allyship to the trauma of sexual assault and violence.
4. Ine Vanwesenbeeck, “The Making of ‘The Trafficking Problem,’” Archives of Sexual Behavior, no. 48 (October 2019): 1961–67.
5. Vanwesenbeeck, “The Making of ‘The Trafficking Problem,’” 1965.
6. Vanwesenbeeck, “The Making of ‘The Trafficking Problem,’” 1964.
7. Molly Smith and Juno Mac, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (New York: Verso Books, 2018), 59.
8. The House bill, Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act—known as the package deal FOSTA-SESTA—serve to make websites liable for what users say and do on their platforms. Intended to curb sex trafficking—despite law enforcement agencies and trafficking survivors claiming that the shutdown of online platforms like Backpage would make it more difficult to arrest traffickers and find survivors—sex workers could find independence, safety, and community online prior to the passage of this law.
9. Jennifer Lynne Musto provides a history of restrictions placed on NGOs receiving state funding and argues that, because the terms of their funding require them to take a stance against decriminalization, these NGOs are necessarily carceral institutions. Musto, “The NGO-ification of the Anti-Trafficking Movement in the United States: A Case Study of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking,” Wagadu: a Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, vol. 5 (2008): 6–20.
10. Smith and Mac, Revolting Prostitutes, 85.
11. Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 102.
12. Smith and Mac, Revolting Prostitutes, 45.
13. Smith and Mac, Revolting Prostitutes, 32.