We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival

Essays on Sex Work and Survival

Natalie West

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781558612877
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry—hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike—complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

Writing across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, and toxic masculinity, We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival gives voice to the fight for agency and accountability across sex industries. With contributions by leading voices in the movement such as Melissa Gira Grant, Ceyenne Doroshow, Audacia Ray, femi babylon, April Flores, and Yin Q, this anthology explores sex work as work, and sex workers as laboring subjects in need of respect—not rescue.

A portion of this book's net proceeds will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars (SBB).

THE STATE

How to Rape a Sex Worker

AK SAINI

FANTASY

Richard was my favorite client. He hired me twice a month and paid extra to pretend to rape me. He enjoyed the struggle but I refused to risk injury by staging a fight. My body is not in small part how I earn my income. Moreover, there is an element of trauma, even when you know it’s pretend. The extra money would not compensate for the lost income I would endure if I found myself physically or emotionally immobilized by his fantasy.

We negotiated scenarios that played more to my interests: submission, taboo, and the lazy luxury of playing unconscious on the job. We played make-believe that he slipped a drug into my drink, that he used a rag of chloroform to force me to sleep. Once, he got creative and used his doctor privileges to supply needles for a staged injection. When he pulled them out of his bag mid-session I panicked without breaking character. I wrenched the still-packaged needles from his hands and threw them into the abyss of a bedroom dimmed for seductive effect. He could not know, I rationalized, of my needle phobia. He represented too much of my income to even consider ending the session. When I raised the issue of my phobia during our post-session pillow-talk debrief, his response was simply, “I figured.” I told him in the future I don’t want any more surprises.

He complied. For a while. Until, like many men, he chose to stop complying. A few sessions later I was splayed wide with my hands tied above my head. He placed an exposed switchblade on my chest in between my two breasts bouncing from the cowardly force of his fucking. I knew he would not hurt me and yet I knew he already had.

FETISH

The best and worst thing about working at an agency is that you never talk to the client until he shows up at your door. The “agency girl” takes care of answering phone calls and booking your clients. You’d like to think the agency girls thoroughly screen everyone but you also know that they work mostly—if not entirely—off of commission, so their primary goal is to close the deal. She will likely never meet you—much less care about you—and probably feel little to no accountability for whatever happens to you as long as she gets her cut.

When my agency girl tries to set me up with a trick that I don’t want, it turns into a grudge match. “I’ve got a great client for you,” she says as a preface to giving me a client that she knows I’ll find undesirable. “An easy domination guy.” I don’t do domination. She knows this about me, and I know she knows this about me, but I tell her again. “Oh c’mon,” she says. “You don’t even have to do anything. Just hit him and call him names. You really want to say no to easy money?”

Yes, I reiterate, I really want to say no to “easy” money. I don’t explain why or why not, I never explain why or why not—it should be enough for her to know my boundary. She responds too quickly that it’s all good and he will come see me anyway, meaning she went ahead and booked him without telling him anything about my boundaries, and I would just have to deal.

“I don’t do domination.” As soon as he walks through the door I tell him and can see in the expression on his face that he was not informed of this fact prior to arrival. “Oh c’mon,” he says. “You don’t even have to do anything. Just hit me and call me names. You really want to say no to easy money?”

Yes, I reiterate, I really want to say no to “easy” money. He responds too quickly that it’s all good and let’s do the session anyway, meaning he will spend the next hour pushing my boundaries, and I would just have to deal. But I don’t do domination; it triggers memories of child abuse, so I tell him to leave.

There is a glint in his eye, and with it I now know that he’s folded my resistance into his fetish. He says he won’t leave, asks me what am I going to do about it, tells me he won’t leave unless I do something about it. He reaches into me to extract the rage he wanted all along, using a combination of aggressive obnoxiousness—repeating that he wouldn’t go no matter what I said—and passive-aggressive feigned ignorance—pretending he didn’t understand that I ordered him to leave at all. I know what he is doing, and I know he knows I know what he’s doing, but it is still working.

Finally I give in, everything blurs, I am my father, I am the abuser, I hit until he is on the floor, then I kick and kick, until I am sick and sick wells up from inside and overflows along with the rage, and I vomit and vomit. He leaves satisfied. He tips extra for the vomit.

BAREBACK

The wealthiest people are the ones who will haggle with you the most. This one is relentless. I wrench an hour-long booking from him with a fifty-dollar discount. For screening purposes, he provides his name and instructs that I call him through the front desk at the Four Seasons to confirm it is real. It checks out.

He doesn’t seem as much of an asshole in person. He sports a long mustache curled at both ends. He spends the first half of our session telling me of his rise from the slums to riches.

Once in bed he immediately tries to enter me bareback. I block him with one hand and use the other to toss a condom at his dick, which is instantaneously rendered flaccid. “But why can’t I??” I just glare at him. “Please??”

I tell him either fuck me with a condom on or I’m leaving, and I make it clear that even that is a gift. “Okay, fine,” he says, and turns me onto my side to spoon. I let him rub his raw cock between my asscheeks long enough for him to get hard and then reach back to put on the condom with or without his support. I feel his erection fizzle again, him fumbling to jack it hard again, eventually giving up, removing the condom, and again trying to enter me bareback. “Are you fucking serious!?” I exclaim and pick up the semi-used condom to slap him with it several times in the face. Furious, I dress, take my money, and leave while he pleads with down-turned eyes for me to stay and pretend what he did was not a violation.

I get to the exit and realize my coat is still upstairs. I consider leaving it up there in spite of subzero Toronto winter temperatures, but my phone is in the pocket. I never want to see him and his stupid mustache again, but my phone is the foundation of my business.

I can’t remember his room number. I am in shock. This is what shock feels like, I contemplate at this most inappropriate moment, you can’t remember basic things like the number of the room in which you were just sexually assaulted. I go to the front desk and ask that they direct me up to his room. I am visibly shaken and stuttering about my missing coat with the phone in the pocket. The front desk person calls up and, to both our surprise, he agrees to have me come back up to collect my coat.

When I get back to him, he is waiting at the door with my coat and a look of guilt, but not remorse. He is sad that he was caught and about the potential consequences. He says he is sorry for upsetting me and wishes me the best. The shock has yet to wear off, I think, so I just grab my coat and go.

A couple months later I am with my “Captain-Save-A-Ho” client. A “Good Guy”^TM who asks with saccharine concern whether I’ve ever been raped in this line of work, as if discussing such topics in the company of virtual strangers is the kind of intimacy for which you can pay. I shrug, shake my head no, and say, “That must be awful, though. I’m thankful it’s never happened to me.”

When the Captain is in the shower, I glance over to the bedside table and see Stupid Mustache staring back at me from the cover of a magazine, featured as a paragon of the Horatio Alger Myth of the American Dream^TM, an immigrant who built himself up from the working-class slums of his home country in the Third World^TM to becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

ENFORCEMENT

He emails saying he wants to see me for the whole night at the Ritz. He says he doesn’t have references but I can meet him at the bar in lieu of screening. Typically I require at least one reference from another escort to verify that the client is safe but I am too broke to be picky so agree even though I know no legitimate client would book at the Ritz (the room is too expensive to waste on a date with a hooker you’ve never met) and I doubt this will end well.

Without the luxury of feeling overwhelmed, I navigate the chandeliers and marble of the expansive Ritz lobby to the hotel bar with an artifice of self-confidence. I saddle up beside the one single man that I profile as my guy—dressed business casual and conspicuously alone among a panel of couples—and ask him if he is waiting to meet me. He says no, he is not who I think he is, but let’s have a drink. I tell him no thank you, I’m waiting on someone, and relocate to a seat on the other side of the bar. Over the course of the next hour, diners ebb and flow from the surrounding stools, none of them there for me, and it becomes clear that he is almost certainly my guy. I sit back down beside him and ask, “Are you sure you’re not looking for me?”

Again he says no but with the open-ended intonation of someone with an agenda. He’s too calculating to be a trick. He’s a cop, I realize on a subconscious level. I can’t let myself know this in real life because I want the money bad.

We spar back and forth about whether he will buy me dinner or if we will proceed directly to his room. Of course, he needs to not have dinner with me, because it muddles the prostitution charge the more it looks like we are on a date rather than a simple exchange of sex for money. And he needs me to name my price, to solicit him, because the criminal justice system will call what he’s doing to me entrapment only in the narrow circumstance that he explicitly proposes we engage in criminal prostitution. Still not having named a price, I follow him up to his room. I rationalize I am safe as long I don’t initiate anything, knowing full well that this idealized sense of safety is a chimera in a reality of crooked cops.

On the couch of his suite at the Ritz, my mind’s eye confirms everything my conscious mind was denying: this is a sting operation. They were, and are, common in Michigan. Exhausted, worn down by the dance we were doing, the swirling temptation of a payoff in the context of poverty, I name a price. I mutter it, let it trail off my tongue at the end of a run-on sentence.

He leans in and asks me to confirm my fate, “Did you say you want XXX dollars for us to spend the night?” Everything stops now, whirs to a halt. I disassociate and float overhead to observe the situation. From this bird’s eye view I can see the rest of his team poised to act in the adjoining bedroom of the suite. I could see that they might take turns raping me before taking me to the station, where they would realize I am an undocumented immigrant and I would face the threat of deportation or jail time, or jail time followed by deportation. I saw my life further unravel from there into homelessness and, when there was finally nothing left, suicide. I was not going out like that, I decided, and sprang into action.

I knew the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I knew that if I stopped to look back at the scene of sin, these ignorable boars foraging for an innocent kill, I would dissolve into a pillar of salt, finished. And I knew, just as when you are dealing with a wild animal, not to run away or signify fear.

I walked briskly out of the suite and down the hall as his calls for me to return burned into my back. I willed the elevator to arrive before he could catch up to me and before I could look back or run or signify fear. I didn’t look at myself in the mirrored elevator; I just stared at the numbers as they approached “G” for the ground floor and when the doors opened I kept my pace and gaze forward, nodded goodbye to the concierge, and pushed forward to the parking lot. Good I didn’t valet my car, I thought, otherwise …

But I couldn’t consider that, couldn’t look back, couldn’t signify fear.

Victim-Defendant: Women of Color Complicating Stories about Human Trafficking

CHRISTA MARIE SACCO

Current discourse around prostitution forces people who work in the sex industries to identify as either passive victims of sexual slavery, or as happy and empowered sex workers. The following stories are intended to envision sex worker self-determination for the purposes of building new social identities that honor our embodied and experiential ways of knowing. They challenge the victimized/empowered binary.

The three vignettes that follow are partially fictionalized accounts of real people in real situations, each of which, according to current definitions in a US context, could be considered “human trafficking victims.” They consist of my own narrative of sex work and critical feminist ethnographies of others. They are partially fictionalized to protect those involved; there could be consequences for survival if street workers come forward for a standard interview. Character vignettes illustrate the issues faced by these populations while also protecting research participants who have little to gain and much to lose from openly and directly telling their stories. I collected these stories as a peer member in various support circles of people with experience in the sex industries, as well as various annual and one-time events for current and former sex workers, including dinners, summits, and vigils. I also collected stories through my professional role as an outreach worker, group facilitator, advocate, and peer counselor for women with experiences in the sex industries at a local rape crisis center, as well as participation on Los Angeles’s human trafficking task forces. These stories are meant to provide a counternarrative to mainstream accounts of human trafficking.

These sketches are the stories of at least three real people whom the media, social service providers, or legal professionals might label as human trafficking victims or survivors. However, when we hear their stories, they present complex identities and define themselves very differently than the media hysteria surrounding them does. They identify as a singer, a ho, a student, an entertainer, a hustler, a condom lady, and more. Each person I have met in the sex industries has their own worldview, their own world, their own ethics and imagination, and we who wish to learn from them have to take time to appreciate the nuance and the wisdom in their different perspectives. After the sketches, I have included a conclusion to this essay that puts the narratives into a framework for understanding why mainstream narratives about human trafficking “victim-defendants” harm women of color like those whose voices can be heard here.

SMOKE BREAK, 2017

I’m just here in the park smoking. Haven’t seen a trick in the park since the early morning. I think the last tipo was from Guatemala or somewhere like that. Not that that matters anymore. All that matters is he came quick. I want to go take a break but I can’t leave the park right now. Even though it’s not really safe in the park anymore. I haven’t felt the same since Lucy died. I feel fucked up now. I have this repeat dream now, like there’s some urgent crisis that I am forgetting about and sometimes I’m in the back seat of a car that has no driver. Lucy got stabbed to death by a rapist in the park. I think I was in a car with someone when it happened. She probably thought he was a trick. He slit her throat wide open. The day we all found out, the cops came and questioned us about it. We tried to hold a little vigil for her in the park a couple nights later. The condom lady came. She was the only one. We’re not really safe to talk to anyone else. Now, when I don’t feel safe at night, I talk to Lucy.

I glance over toward the bus stop and there she is, the condom lady sitting on the bench like a fuckin’ mirage or something. I learned that in eighth grade. We had this science teacher who told us about mirages and shit. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a mirage and I’m just gonna wisp away like vapor if people come too close. Fuck if I don’t need some condoms right now, but I don’t want to approach her. My folks is watchin’. Then I see the end of my cigarette getting small and I think, Might be worth it to see if she has a cigarette. So I throw my eyes over at her and catch her attention and lean toward the bus station. She doesn’t nod back or anything, but I know that she understood and sure enough after a few minutes, she starts to shuffle off to the bus station. She gets there and leans up against a bench and lights up a cigarette. As I watch her smoke, she kind of reminds me of some of those cholas on my old block. After I approach and ask for a cigarette, I stand a little away from her and we face away from the park so no one can see that we are talking. Just sharing a smoke, waiting on the bus.

I saw her get stopped by the cops the other week. They fucked wit her and asked for her ID and work badge and questioned her like she was breaking the law. Then she said they told her some shit about how she has to keep those condoms hidden away, and if she gives them out, only one or two at a time and the person who receives them has to put it away immediately, otherwise it’s solicitation. Fucked up that this little piece of latex that saves lives could become such a deadly weapon in the hands of the puercos.

I can’t afford to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Stigma
• The State
• The Workplace
• Family
• Survival
• Healing
• Contributor Biographies
• Also Available from the Feminist Press
• More Activist Anthologies from the Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press