I hate the term “sex work” not only because it tries to deny that the people, mostly women, involved are being prostituted and that is is often something done do people, not chosen freely, but because it lumps everything into one.
There is a difference between a middle-class white girl in college working as a cam girl or making some spending money as a phone sex or chat operator, or even as a sugar baby or part-time escort and a women who is working on the street because of addiction, homelessness, a boyfriend/husband who doubles as a pimp, or because it’s the only job she can get that pays enough to provide food and housing.
And as long as we lump it all together as “sex work” the ones on the bottom, who are already usually oppressed in other ways, who are less likely to have the time and money to blog or chat about it online and whose voices won’t be heard in either the mainstream or academic spaces that debate their lives, and who are at the most risk of abuse, arrest, and death, continue to be pushed aside, endangered, and talked over by those who have privileges that allow them to see it as fun, empowering, and temporary adventure or choice on their way to better things.
First of all, I don’t know what planet you live on where sex workers in college are middle class, because I’m scraping by trying to make ends meet working two jobs, on top of going to school, and I barely have enough money to eat a lot of the time. Not saying I have it as bad as a full service sex worker, but I’m not fucking middle class. And I have yet to encounter a cyber sex worker who’s middle class, let alone a cyber sex worker who’s middle class AND trying to pay for college, so if you could go ahead and show me this mystical creature, I would love to see them.
Second of all: slurs! Again!
Third of all: The fact that you radfems ignore the huge community of full service sex workers on Tumblr is amazing to me. The only ones silencing them are you. Time and time again you speak over them, continue to use slurs against them, are pro-laws that would harm them… it just amazes me that you accuse cyber sex workers of speaking over them when that’s ALL YOU PEOPLE DO.
We have street workers, we have full service workers, we have full service street worker drug users, and they still have voices and you STILL refuse to listen.
Also “middle class” is an imaginary class that obscures how class relates to relationship to capital.
I’ve been a street worker & a full service & BDSM worker, but even when I was involved with sex work supportive groups in the past, the conversations were dominated by cyber workers and people who fancied themselves “high class” escorts precisely because of their class background & the accoutrements they could afford.
I’ve been on the receiving end of people in sex positive groups trying to silence me, as a sex-worker, because I got food stamps and I worked the streets and didn’t have a nice manicure and apartment, so they assumed I was some sort of low-class, low rent drug addicted type. I also experienced sliencing because they didn’t want anyone talking about how many people in that position did start working underage and/or because of force or abuse, because it would have hurt their “it’s a free choice” manta.
So don’t even try to tell me how much y’all support all sex workers. There is some limited support, one-on-one, in private. But when it comes to anything that might affect the sex-positive image that talks about free choices, empowerment, etc it was very much “Shut up and hide back there, so nobody sees you bunch of trash. Let’s push the pretty girls working their way through med school up to the front again and let them talk about how in charge and empowered their work makes them”.
I don’t think the work is empowering or choice based, anymore than any other job under capitalism. It’s shit work, but that doesn’t mean it should be criminalized, or workers marginalized
. Fuck the idea that my work needs to be empowering to be legitimate. Most human trafficking occurs for domestic not sexual labor and you don’t see people trying to tell cleaning ladies their work isn’t real. I am not for the empowerment narrative, I am for the labor narrative. Directly coerced sex work is slavery, economically coerced sex work is wage slavery. Their work is still work, their labor power still labor power. Men forcibly extracting labor from women is hardly unique to the sex industry
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 