the world independently.
Sex workers know they are objectified; they move in the world as women too, and through their work they have to become fluent in the narrow and kaleidoscopic visions through which men would like to relate to them as sexual fantasies embodied. They know they also serve as objects of fantasy for women: as the bad girls to fear and keep far from and, on occasion, to furtively imagine themselves as.
It’s objectification, too, when these “supporters” represent sex workers as degraded, as victims, and as titillating object lessons, and render sex workers’ whole selves invisible. Their capacity for social relations is dismissed, their lives understood to be organized almost entirely around what others call their sexual availability and what sex workers call their labor.
Witholding Consent
Sex work is not simply sex; it is a performance, it is playing a role, demonstrating a skill, developing empathy within a set of professional boundaries. All this could be more easily recognized and respected as labor were it the labor of a nurse, a therapist, or a nanny. To insist that sex work is work is alsoto affirm there is a difference between a sexualized form of labor and sexuality itself.
Opponents attack sex workers who view their work in this way. “The only analogy I can think of concerning prostitution is that it is more like gang rape than it is like anything else,” antiporn feminist Andrea Dworkin offered in a lecture at the University of Michigan Law School in 1992. “The gang rape is punctuated by a money exchange. That’s all. That’s the only difference.” Taking it a bit further, antiprostitution activist Evelina Giobbe refers to prostitution, in a publication of the same name, as “buying the right to rape.” If this is a right, why must men purchase it?
When anti–sex work activists claim that all sex work is rape, they don’t just ignore the labor; they excuse the actual rape of sex workers. If men can do whatever they want when they buy sex, the rape of sex workers, of those who are thought to have no consent to give anyway, isn’t understood by opponents as an aberration but as somehow intrinsic and inevitable.
Consent in sex work, as in noncommercial sex, is more complex than a simple binary yes/no contract. Sex workers negotiate based not only on a willingness to perform a sex act but on the conditions under which their labor is performed:
Yes, I will give you a lap dance for $20. If you want me to stay for another song after the first one has ended, it will be another $20. If you want your dance in the private room, that will be $150.
Or:
I’ll come to your motel room for a half an hour, and that will cost $150. If you want me to strip, you need to tip me, and tips start at $50. If you want me to give you a massage, that’s $100 tip.
Or maybe:
I’ll give you a blow job in your car for $40, but you need to drive over to this spot (where I know my friends can write down your license plate, and they know that I will be leaving your car as soon as you come, and if you drive away before I get out they will know something is wrong and come after me).
The presence of money does not remove one’s ability to consent. Consent, in and out of sex work, is not just given but constructed, and from multiple factors: setting, time, emotional state, trust,
and
desire. Desire is contingent on all of these. Consent and desire aren’t states frozen in our bodies, tapped into and felt or offered. They are formed.
Money, rather than serving as a tangible symbol of consent, clarifies that consent to any sexual interaction isn’t a token given from one person to another like a few bills changing hands. Money is just one factor, even if it is in many cases the most important one, in constructing consent.
It would be a mistake, then, to confuse desire with consent. There is much that sex workers do in their work that they willnot enjoy doing, and yet they do consent and have
Sex workers know they are objectified; they move in the world as women too, and through their work they have to become fluent in the narrow and kaleidoscopic visions through which men would like to relate to them as sexual fantasies embodied. They know they also serve as objects of fantasy for women: as the bad girls to fear and keep far from and, on occasion, to furtively imagine themselves as.
It’s objectification, too, when these “supporters” represent sex workers as degraded, as victims, and as titillating object lessons, and render sex workers’ whole selves invisible. Their capacity for social relations is dismissed, their lives understood to be organized almost entirely around what others call their sexual availability and what sex workers call their labor.
Witholding Consent
Sex work is not simply sex; it is a performance, it is playing a role, demonstrating a skill, developing empathy within a set of professional boundaries. All this could be more easily recognized and respected as labor were it the labor of a nurse, a therapist, or a nanny. To insist that sex work is work is alsoto affirm there is a difference between a sexualized form of labor and sexuality itself.
Opponents attack sex workers who view their work in this way. “The only analogy I can think of concerning prostitution is that it is more like gang rape than it is like anything else,” antiporn feminist Andrea Dworkin offered in a lecture at the University of Michigan Law School in 1992. “The gang rape is punctuated by a money exchange. That’s all. That’s the only difference.” Taking it a bit further, antiprostitution activist Evelina Giobbe refers to prostitution, in a publication of the same name, as “buying the right to rape.” If this is a right, why must men purchase it?
When anti–sex work activists claim that all sex work is rape, they don’t just ignore the labor; they excuse the actual rape of sex workers. If men can do whatever they want when they buy sex, the rape of sex workers, of those who are thought to have no consent to give anyway, isn’t understood by opponents as an aberration but as somehow intrinsic and inevitable.
Consent in sex work, as in noncommercial sex, is more complex than a simple binary yes/no contract. Sex workers negotiate based not only on a willingness to perform a sex act but on the conditions under which their labor is performed:
Yes, I will give you a lap dance for $20. If you want me to stay for another song after the first one has ended, it will be another $20. If you want your dance in the private room, that will be $150.
Or:
I’ll come to your motel room for a half an hour, and that will cost $150. If you want me to strip, you need to tip me, and tips start at $50. If you want me to give you a massage, that’s $100 tip.
Or maybe:
I’ll give you a blow job in your car for $40, but you need to drive over to this spot (where I know my friends can write down your license plate, and they know that I will be leaving your car as soon as you come, and if you drive away before I get out they will know something is wrong and come after me).
The presence of money does not remove one’s ability to consent. Consent, in and out of sex work, is not just given but constructed, and from multiple factors: setting, time, emotional state, trust,
and
desire. Desire is contingent on all of these. Consent and desire aren’t states frozen in our bodies, tapped into and felt or offered. They are formed.
Money, rather than serving as a tangible symbol of consent, clarifies that consent to any sexual interaction isn’t a token given from one person to another like a few bills changing hands. Money is just one factor, even if it is in many cases the most important one, in constructing consent.
It would be a mistake, then, to confuse desire with consent. There is much that sex workers do in their work that they willnot enjoy doing, and yet they do consent and have
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