Sex Work on Campus

Terah J. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032046518
• eBook ISBN: 9781000607024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex Work On Campus examines the experiences of college students engaged in sex work and sparks dialogue about the ways educators might develop a deeper appreciation for—and praxis of—equity and justice on campus.

Analyzing a study conducted with seven college student sex workers, the book focuses on sex work histories, student motivations, and how power (or lack thereof) associated with social identity shape experiences of student sex work. It examines what these students learn because of sex work, and what college and university leaders can do to support them. These findings are combined in tandem with analysis of current research, popular culture, sex work rights movements, and exploration of legal contexts.

This fresh and important writing is suitable for students and scholars in sexuality studies, gender studies, sociology, and education.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003194101-1

Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

New International Version Bible, 2011, Matthew 21:31

The scripture above is from a story referred to as the “Parable of the Two Sons” in Christian theology. For context, the prophet Jesus was speaking directly to the elders and chief priests of Israel regarding their lack of belief in him. As a result of their choosing not to open their hearts to him, he warned that the “greedy” tax collectors and harlots (who were considered some of society’s worst type of people) would enter heaven ahead of them. The “Parable of the Two Sons” challenges societal assumptions about sin, judgment, and grace, given that those who believed in Jesus no longer lived under the law of the Old Testament. Implicit in the story is the belief that God’s grace should be admired given that he could forgive even the tax collectors and the sex workers, because they accepted the way of righteousness. For me, the parable also suggests that the elders and chief priests would do well to understand the gravity of their stubbornness because if the harlots were on better terms with God than they were, then they were definitely in trouble.

What I love about this story is that it situates sex work in a historical context that dates back to “biblical times,” which illustrates the reality that sex work is in no way a new occurrence and sex workers are likely to stick around for the foreseeable future. Often imprecisely lauded as the “world’s oldest profession,” people seem to have been engaging in sex work for as long as history has been documented. What I dislike about this story is that it also reveals sex workers have long been stigmatized throughout history and across time, and until we begin to interrogate our biases and discomfort about sex broadly and sex work specifically, we will continue to create violent experiences for an already vulnerable population.

My intention is to render sex workers visible in education as a way to highlight these vulnerabilities and situate their importance within higher education. In this chapter, I introduce important language, terminology, and concepts that are important to understand sex work and this research project. I then overview the study context, share my research positionality, and how I approach this work. Next, I detail the study design and theoretical framework that informed the study and the framing of this book. Finally, I close the chapter by introducing sex work and the connections between sex work and labor.

Language and terminology

Throughout this writing, I use various terms and concepts related to sex work, each of which has a deep and complex history and is interrelated to one another. I will describe each of these terms, how I have used them within the book, and how contexts inform the terms delineations and use. Note that while I attempt to offer clear and simple definitions, sex work is fluid and one type of sex work might seamlessly connect or be adjacent to another. Further, my definitions are not meant to be holistically definitive and infallible but instead they are meant to articulate how I understood them at the time of the study. My delineations should not be interpreted as hard boundaries between them.

The industry

Some individuals use the term “sex work” to mean sex in exchange for money—or prostitution as it has been known historically and contemporarily—and other times the meaning includes all sex work. However, sex work is a broad constellation of work that encompasses various types of engagement:

There is no one sex industry. Escorting, street hustling, hostessing, stripping, performing sex for videos and webcams—the range of labor makes speaking of just one feel too inadequate. To collapse all commercial sex that way would result in something so flat and shallow that it would only reinforce the insistence that all sex for sale results from the same phenomenon—violence, deviance, and desperation.

(Grant, 2014, p. 49)

Indeed, sex work is broad and vast and while Grant (2014) introduced a reality that I discuss later—views of sex work as always automatically oppression—the truth is that nearly all sex workers experience stigma as a result of their work and there are often varying degrees of consequences and risks depending on the type of sex work one might engage. The type of sex work a sex worker chooses informs their experiences and contexts.

Prostitution

Prostitution is the most widely known terminology as it pertains to sex work, specifically escorting and individuals who have sex for money (Roberts, 1992). “Prostitution” is a term that some sex workers avoid using because they view it as an incendiary and stigmatizing term (Breshears, 2017). Prostitution, or prostitute, as terminology often invokes negative images and framing of sex work rooted in despair and thus primes individuals to engage sex workers in paternalistic ways. However, some sex workers have pushed back on abandoning prostitute as language and identity when other terms—“whore,” “slut,” “hoe”—have proudly been reclaimed (thotscholar, this text). Where possible, I avoid using the term “prostitution” in this book. Where it appears, I have written it for any of the following reasons: because researchers or writers referred to sex workers as prostitutes in their writing, because sex workers themselves use the term, because it is a direct quote, or to illustrate a particular point in time (e.g., older texts and historical time-periods that predate “sex work/er” terminology; this would also include “harlot”). Finally, where and when I use prostitute/prostitution, I do not necessarily refer to all types of sex work. I only use it to refer to people who have sex for money, but other writers may have meant the term to refer to all or multiple types of sex work/sex workers.

Sex work

As Grant (2014) asserts, “sex work is a political identity” (p.20). The term “sex work(er)” did not enter public discourse until the mid-to-late 1970s and sex work as a term was reportedly published for the first time in the early 1980s (Leigh, 2004). Sex work terminology emerged concurrently with a wave of activism during the same time-period and for two reasons. First, some sex workers advocated for a language shift away from “sex use” to help manage the stigma associated with the work (Leigh, 2004). Destigmatizing language is an important endeavor because language can be used to create culture, shape discourse, and reinforce power. Black and African scholars have often argued that language is epistemic and possesses instrumentality, which is to say, words are often doing something toward informing knowledge and practice (Dillard, 2006). Some argue the term “sex work” is a strong alternative because it is more humanizing and affirming of sex worker realities and distinguishes sex workers apart from a “thing” or “item for sale” (Breshears, 2017). However, this history could also be interpreted as rooted in respectability through a desire to distance oneself from doing undesirable/immoral work/behavior.

In general, it is critical to resist the paradigm that sex workers “sell their bodies;” they do not. They sell a service or an experience. The second reason for this language shift was some activists hoped to situate and legitimize sex as work. As the wave of activism in the 1970s commenced, some believed it was critical to situate the lives, experiences, and choices of sex workers within a larger labor context—an important topic I take up later in this chapter. Where possible, I use the term “sex work” not only for some of these reasons but also for utility and simplicity. Further, when I use the term, unless otherwise stated, I typically refer to all types of sex work (such as stripping, camming, phone sex, pornography, escorting, prostitution, etc.). However, the genesis meaning of the term was used for people who exchange sex for money, its use as an umbrella term is a more contemporary manifestation.

Whore/Whore-stigma

In her text Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, Grant (2014) suggests that “being a woman is a pre-condition of the label ‘whore’ but never the sole justification” (p.75). This is to say, that irrespective of one’s identity or praxis as a sex worker, women generally tend to always be at risk of whore-stigma; it is a gendered stigma. Simpson (2021) who wrote about whorephobia within the context of higher education specifically defined it as “a term used to describe the hatred, disgust and fear of sex workers—that intersects with racism, xenophobia, classism, and transphobia—leading to structural and interpersonal discrimination, violence, abuse, and murder” (p. 4). Contemporarily, some sex workers have sought to reclaim the term “whore” to disarm the pejorative connotations it represents (Roberts, 1992). This reclamation has also extended to the milder pejorative “slut” as a rejection of “slut shaming,” of which Grant (2014) offers,

What is lost, however, in moving from whore stigma to slut shaming is the centrality of the people most harmed by this form of discrimination … Slut may seem to broaden the tent of those affected, but it makes the whore invisible. Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others. If woman is other, whore is the other’s other.

(p. 77)

For these reasons, I generally do not use the term “slut-shaming” in this writing and seek to focus on how whore-stigma impacts sex workers—especially those with minoritized identities. In general, I try not to use the term “whore” unless I am invoking an analysis of which I perceive whore-stigma animating a particular context or in direct quotes/citations.

Escorting

Escorts often focus on companionship and time with clients. They are paid to attend events—such as dinner, a night out, a wedding—and can include domestic and international travel. Escorts and clients sometimes have sex as part of the arrangement but not always. The exchange first and foremost is time for money (De Fay, 2017). Different types of escorting include working as a sugar baby or “sugaring” where typically an older financier (sugar daddy/mommy/parent) helps a younger person (sugar baby) who needs money. These particular arrangements can range from platonic friendships to full romantic and sexual relationships and many variations in between (De Fay, 2017)

Escorting as terminology is used for types of sex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by thotscholar
• Preface: The immortal spirit of wild women
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History, politics, law, and stigma
• 3 College students, sex work, and higher education
• 4 Letters to a young sex worker
• 5 Endarkened consciousness, the lessons of sex working
• 6 If sex workers were free: Toward a radical erotic politic in higher education
• Afterword by Raquel Savage
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Data analysis
• Index