Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

there’s this guy on lbo who spend 99% of the time pulling stuff out of his ass and flinging it around so everyone else can enjoy the stench. which is to say, he’s almost always writing from the cuff, asking questions that would have been answered had he actually bothered to read the post or the link to an article or blog posts. or, he asks questions that he doesn’t really want an answer to, he’s just asking them because he’s got some preconceived notion and no matter what you say, no matter how ridiculous he ends up sounding, he just keeps right on plugging away.

drives me batshit around the bend-a-roonie.

i was going to respond to the quy, who’d ask a question about why people use the term sex worker. a question, of course, prefaced by the fact that *he* doesn’t like it. it was clue number one to ignore the muthafuckin twerp. but i didn’t. because, fact is, although this trait annoys me, he’s not a bad guy. i just wish his actual, you know, curiosity would be accompanied by a lot more initiative to get answers on his own and make decent arguments, without dicking around with everyone for the sake of a little entertainment for him. apparently, as an expat, he must be muthafookin bored, the amount he posts!

anyway, toward the end of it, i just gave up and dished out a flamey retort because, honestly, not worth my time. i was only motivated to reply because someone else might be reading and find my response helpful or thought-provoking. so as to not waste the reply i had written, here ’tis:

Chris wrote (in italics):I’ll call them anything they want, but is it true that the majority of SWs use the word? Oddly, it sounds kind of elitist. Is that what the, err, working girls on the corner in the bad part of town call themselves, or is it a term thought up by somebody like Susie Bright? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

LOL

anyway, despite the stupidity of the question — think a little harder about what you’re asking, as if there’s a survey of sex workers out there to consult?!

OK. so your first qualm was that it encompasses so many different kinds of workers — which kind of ignores that “tech workers”, “IT workers”, “service workers” etc. etc. encompass so many different kinds of workers.

having gotten the answer, what do they share in common — the common experience of being marginalized and stigmatized — you’ve moved on to a vague claim about elitism.

never mind the fact that susie bright was a sex worker?!

the terms emerged in the later 1970s during a peak of uniozation for sex workers (hence the strong desire to call them workers! b/c there are marxists who don’t think they should be organized on the grounds that its unproductive labor!) and a very active drive to de-stigmatize sex work in general.

The term was coined by the sex worker Carol Leigh who used the term precisely because people in the rest of the sex industry didn’t want to associate with prostitutes because, shockingly, internalized bigotry exists within the sex industry.

“I never imagined it would be the only term we could use to refer to prostitutes. As a matter of fact, sex worker describes the entire range. It helps unify peep show dancers, strippers, and prostitutes. Prior to this, other workers in the sex industry would not identify with prostitutes. This is a term invented so we could have some solidarity.”[2]

One important theoretical consequence of the political term sex worker is that it re-frames the debate around the sex industry and those who are employed by it, whether legally or illegally, as primarily one of labor and human rights rather than one of criminality, deviance or morality. The term also serves to create a political and cultural community across a vast array of work and life experiences.

Also, you might be interested in the first part of this, where Chris wants to know why the term sex worker isn’t just stupid, from his pov:

Chris wrote (in italics):
It seems to lump together people, a lot of whom really wouldn’t want to be lumped together. (What exactly does a stripper have in common with a prostitute, other than nudity usually being part of the job?)

I think it’s, uh, complicated — and not it a facebook relationship status way :). rather, i don’t think there’s anything wrong per se with the word prostitute. i do think that, if people who work in the sex industry ask you to use the word sex worker, then you should probably at least listen to their reasons and be open to what they have to say. i mean, what does it hurt *you* to call people by the names they want to be called. this is particularly true if you’re speaking to activists who work in the sex industry. because, seriously?, why the fuck would they be unaware that the category lumps a lot of different jobs together? given that, they would probably have already thought it through and your criticism comes off as disrespecting the work they do on the topic already.

but to complicate things: of course the problem then is the same one we have with other words: blacks v African Americans v Blacks, transman/transwoman v trans man/trans woman, trannies v transgenders, latino/a v hispanic. and that problem is: it depends on which person you ask, which political ideologies they affiliate with, etc.

but as to your question: they have in common fighting against the moralizing about sex that marginalizes their way of making a living. (For a discussion of that, see Agustin’s chapter on the invention of the prostitute and “the rise of the social” (which, dayum, I’m hoping I can write about before this book is due back to interlibrary loan. they have me running two projects, back to back, both due last week. :)

BUT! consider one of the points raised by Agustin in the chapter, A World of Services and in a section called ‘The Argument for Labour Rights and the Problem of Migration’.

Traditional legal proposals, Agustin points out, are systems for controlling prostitution and they do not recognize the work or the demands workers are actually making. Workers’ rights organization in the sex industry have shifted the focus, raising awareness of and fomenting movements that demand that their work be recognized as an occupation with all the attendant rights associated with ‘legitimate’ work.

While women she interviewed generally supported such measures — either by being actively involved, supportive of the work others were doing, or simply being aware but uninterested in getting involved. *However* migrants who didn’t have the security of residency status and work permits often felt such projects were irrelevant to their lives.

She’s emphasizing something that rights advocates sometimes fail to remember (and you see same dynamic in any activist outfit):

“Those who want to support migrants should not forget that most knew they would be traveling and earning money illegally, which neither calling them victims nor normalising sex work can overcome.” (p. 73)

In other words, there are subtle status differences among sex workers that the typically more privileged activists can sometimes be unaware of. Building solidarity would require also working on the issues important to migrant sex workers without residency or work permits.