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

I’m going to skip ahead to the chapter I’d mentioned was most interesting in Augustin’ book, _Sex on the Margins_, which comes toward the end of the book. This is partly because I figure I won’t have time to get to the rest of the book before it’s due back from interlibrary loan. But it’s also because this chapter is the most interesting from my perspective. The rest of the book covers ground I’ve already covered in my own research and thinking on the topic, so it kind of had a ho-hum feeling to it.

And while what she talks about in this chapter, ‘From Charity to Solidarity: In the Field with Helpers,’ won’t be especially surprising to most folks who are sex positive feminists and sex radicals who care about these issues, Agustin does provide an interesting, I don’t know, morality tale about who/what groups appear to be most helpful to sex workers.

I confess, too, that I felt the section was rather self-serving. I have no doubt it was true; but knowledge is, as Agustin herself acknowledges, socially constituted. She decided what stories to tell as exemplary of her fieldwork. She decided what stories to leave out. These are important issues and I don’t think she did her methodological discussion a service by not taking them on head on. Nonetheless, the illustrations from the fieldwork are interesting points of departure from what we are usually told.

Which is typically nothing, actually. As most of us know from participating in the sex worker wars, so much of the discussion takes place in a vacuum: the lives of women in sex work are ignored. And even when sex workers do show up to the conversation, they are invariable ignored, dismissed, told they are over-privileged (sic) and not representative, male-identified, mind-warped by the patriarchy, and sometimes simply told they are liars or really men just posing as women.

As I pointed out earlier, a lot of people started to feel that maybe this kind of behavior was peculiar to the particular radical and liberal feminists involved in the discussion. But one of the reasons why you *must* read Agustin is that she provides illustration after illustration, ethnographic interview quote after quote, fieldnotes after fieldnotes that demonstrate that this dynamic happens all the time.

There is something else going on here than simply the oddities of individual personalities. It is not about the weirdness of the Internet or of the peculiar propensities of women engaged in too much discoursin’ and not enough activism.

It is, rather, the systematic silencing and erasure of women sex workers themselves. And this systematicity comes, Agustin says, from a colonializing history of women who position themselves as ‘helpers’ coming to the aid of a certain category of women, prostitutes, who are conceived of as victims without any agency.

And as Agustin points out further, the tragedy of this silencing and erasure, and the dominance of this tendency among helpers is that the people who view these women as victims are in powerful positions: they have the power to decide who gets to speak, who gets to publish, who gets funding, who gets heard, what gets said:

“problems can arise when individuals influenced by such an ideology (she’s calling it fundamentalist feminism as opposed to radical feminism or abolitionism) occupy for many years posts dedicating to improving the situation of women. Such jobs can involve the funding of women’s project, publications, conferences and events, and what those in charge do not like may not get funded. Money may only be given to projects that define ‘prostitution’ as sexual exploitation and gender violence. For a year or so, one prominent campaigner held meetings of all funded project related to ‘prostitution’ for the purpose of leaving no one in doubt about what positions, actions and services would be approved.

The attendees at these meetings always remained silent, because they felt safer not speaking than running the risk of saying the wrong thing and losing subsidies. One project was allegedly excluded because of its director’s failure to denounce ‘prostitution.’ In this way, one campaigner has directly affected the history of a particular social movement.” (p 163, Sex at the Margins, Laura Agustin)

I will turn to the specific of this chapter in part 2 shortly, “We Don’t have to talk to prostitutes to know what prostitution is.”