The Morality of Sex Work
Fall Nights in the Midwest and Feminist Ideology
The night is gorgeous and crisp. It’s one of those nights in the Midwest that suggests an impending Fall. The days are sticky and humid but after the sun sets, the breeze and the crickets sing songs of change. Orb spiders build their webs in the turning leaves, flirting with oranges and yellows.
I’m working at this new place, this new bar, after several false starts of a second job: the casino, substitute teaching, and other jobs that likewise cater to the infinitely transient. But this job is different. I’ve met so many incredible humans here, humans who seem to “get” me, including a badass boss babe who’s 21 with a sordid past.
It is, perhaps, a strange comparison, but my new job reminds me of being almost twenty years old and walking into an Omaha strip club with my thrifted dress and hairy armpits. In my interview, then—and yes, I did get interviewed!— I remember being transfixed by the dancing thongs on stage. As my eyes adjusted to the black light, I saw So. Many. Women. So many different sizes and shapes. And so many different ways of dancing. I was struck in that moment by how deeply I love/d women.
Prior to stripping, I thought my value could be measured by my allegiance to indie rock beauty standards—I was skinny as fuck and allowed myself 1600 calories of broccoli and brown rice a day. But at the strip club, I learned what it meant to love my body. I remember being naked in front of my locker at the end of a shift and another stripper said, “You know it’s ok to eat fried food, right?”
This is not to say that sex work is especially liberating or that it is some kind of feminist dream. Quite to the contrary. I have experienced this particular form of labor as difficult and indeed mind-bending. To speak to its nuance: I remember the time I sucked a man’s dick for $200 and cried and cried and gagged after. I remember the dude to whom I gave a lap dance, who pissed himself as I was dancing, effectively covering me in his urine. I remember the cab I took after making just twenty dollars at the dive strip club where I worked in Las Vegas. When I gave the cabby said twenty as a tip, he asked if he could hug me and proceeded to sexually assault me.
Obviously, this shit is fucked up. And I know I am immensely privileged in my stories about just how problematic the sex industry is because so many other sex workers have more horrifying stories.
All of this to say, anti-sex work “feminists” are correct in so far as they assume sex work to be hard, embarrassing, stigmatizing, unpredictable, etc etc etc. But also! It is a job where neurodivergent, queer, and otherwise ostracized people can find community. It is a job, however problematic, where femme-presenting people can make *almost* as much as the white men who surround us.
The club where I worked twenty years ago is now bulldozed. I often drive past the lot and still feel a sense of belonging; kindred. Breaking stripper code, perhaps, I also continue to maintain a beautiful friendship with the former manager of the club.
My experience of place, of being a part of something inherently femme, was the catalyst for my mother disowning me in my twenties
“Get out of my house and don’t ever come back,” she said when I told her I was a stripper. It was ironic then, just as it is now, that my mother made her living working for a credit card company. Gorwing up, she often lamented the lack of catcalling and sexual harassment in the workplace as an aging women. As she used to say: “I’m too old and fat to be seuxally harassed.” As if, of course, this kind of abuse is a compliment. It reminds me of the time I broke a man’s nose at the strip club because he touched me in a way I did not want him to. I feared that I would be fired, but instead, the manager and a few bouncers assured me that they “roughed him up” in the alleyway outside of the club. I felt so fucking seen.
I do not blame my mother for her harsh sentiments or the ways she finds me and my “lifestyle” to be utterly triggering. Instead, I blame patriarchy. I also blame patriarchy for the liberal perspective that sex work is somehow more immoral, somehow more anti-feminist, than a job in which women sell plastics and mourn the loss of gendered abuse.
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So much contemporary discourse on the sex industry is based on so-called second-wave feminism. It’s almost as if the third wave hasn’t hit the collective consciousness yet. It makes sense to me, however—even other women are reluctant to support sex workers because they are so enmeshed in patriarchal conceptions of self. If there is not a whore by which they might gauge their own performances and showcase their allegiance to white womanhood, then what do they have? In a society wherein women’s relation to men translates to “goodness” or “badness,” then it seems an obvious and even logical choice for other women to call sex workers like me “immoral.” Literally their life depends on it.
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It's weird to even mention socialism and communism in a discussion on sex work because I’m not entirely convinced that either sociopolitical structure has *ever* supported sex workers. Indeed, when I lived in Olomouc, The Czech Republic, I learned that under communism, sociology as a discipline was outlawed. It’s funny to me, having a PhD in sociology, when baby commies on the internet ask me if my job would still “be around” after the communist revolution. Of course, they are referring to my work as a sex worker. But as a trained sociologist, my answer is “no.” No, my job as a sociologist would not be around after the revolution. Baby commies and liberals and conservatives alike never think to question sociology because it’s somehow more “respectable” than sex work.
The question of whether or not a job will exist under a more equitable society is full of a priori assumptions about value and labor. No one ever asks if Starbucks will exist post-revolution, for example. No one ever thinks to question the role of sociology under different socioeconomic structures.
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Sex workers have long endured the cultural burden of social and interpersonal conceptions of morality—not just morality in the relativistic sense, but social morality writ large. Just look at the ways right-wing pundits as well as so-called leftists talk about Stormy Daniels—her labor as a sex worker is front and center in any and all discussions about Trump, as if *his* moral character can be gauged by *her* work. Even so-called feminists *still* believe that a woman is somehow responsible for the behavior of a gross man.
So much white feminist and liberal ideology claims to protect women, to love women, to hear and see women, but in the end, this empathy is rooted in white supremacist conceptions of womanhood as an inherently victimized social position (and second-wave feminist ideology upholds this value); white women are celebrated for the ways they/we uphold patriarchy and are thus given proximity to the power they (seemingly) desperately seek. The white woman tied to the railroad tracks, the woman in Birth of a Nation who throws herself off a cliff—all of these images sit in the collective consciousness about what constitutes a “good,” moral woman. Indeed, the “moral” woman in second wave feminism, leftist ideology, and right-wing rhetoric alike is a woman whose behavior makes heroes of men. If she can’t be saved from the quickly approaching train, it is her fault and hers alone, never mind the person (or social structure) that tied her the rails in the first place.
The stench of white womanhood reminds me, fondly, of Emma Lee, the Seattle barista who smashed in a guy’s windshield after he assaulted her. She said, “Women are allowed to respond when there is danger in ways other than crying.”
She’s so right. Sometimes, we break men’s noses with our seven-inch heels or take a hammer to their glass. Sometimes, we sell the performance of femininity because it’s the only way we can access what men have always had. We will trade perceptions of our moral character for a shot at bodily autonomy.
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Is sex work moral?
The question is a kind of burden that we, collectively, do not saddle other laborers with.
Is sex work a product of patriarchy?
Yes, maybe?
I am compelled— but not entirely convinced— by Pat Califia’s essay, Whoring in Utopia.
I think it is important to name the misogynistic imperatives inherit in the capitalistic exchange of feminine intimacy for money, to name the aspects of *every* social institution that relies on men seeing women as objects of consumption. It is equally important, I believe, to see sex workers as complicated human beings who are making difficult decisions about labor under patriarchy and capitalism. Like Emma Lee, we are smashing glass—maybe not glass ceilings, but certainly glass windshields and anything else that brings us one step closer to enjoying the economic freedom that many white men enjoy. And barring “freedom,” we will take simply surviving.
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I love the Fall in the Midwest because it is, in a word, complicated. Beautiful Catalpas, with their enormous leaves and sturdy branches, turn into spooky silhouettes with browning seed pods. Coneflowers turn in on themselves, their petals become knife-like corpses. Sunflowers burst and then die, wilting, their leaves speckled and their seed pods prickly. Pumpkins and other squash take over, hanging precariously from trellises.
I always think of Octavia Butler in the Fall and her contention that “God is change.”
Perhaps the godly, moral imperative is to shift our consciousness about womanhood-as-necessarily-victimized to a collective understanding of sex workers specifically and women + non binary folks more generally as complicated, nuanced humans who aren’t always willing to sacrifice autonomy for men to be the heros in their own dossiers.
Just like the Catalpa unfurrows, revealing—and revelling in—its shadowy parts, so too should so-called feminists unpack their internalized sexism masquerading as whorephobia. This godly change is essential, I believe, if we are to truly see gender parity in our lifetime.
If god is change, then we must change or collective and epiplexis rhetoric from “is sex work moral?” to “am I a moral person when I contribute to the stigmatiziation of sex workers?”
The moral imperative seems obvious.
Fabulous