Sep 28, 2019 09:29 PM
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2019/09/12/t...-so-did-i/
EXCERPT (Tamara MacLeod): . . . Humbert’s violence, his refusal to accept the whore, stands for the ages. From religious fundamentalists to certain kinds of radical feminists, a lot of different types of people agree that work is respectable and even noble, and that sex work is degraded and criminal. In truth, sometimes sex work is degrading, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is illegal, often it’s legally complex; but why is sex work not understood to be work?
I understand that sex work is work because it is the work I do. I watched Lolita long before I became a sex worker, but not long before I began exchanging sex for things: something to eat, something to smoke, a place to sleep, a job opportunity. I identified with Lolita; I also knew that I sympathised with Humbert. This is Vladimir Nabokov’s talent after all, to have us still torn apart well into the 21st century. I see the monstrosity of the man who abducts Lolita, but I am more interested in Lolita the sex worker. I read the book (originally published in 1955) when I was 14 and it made me uncomfortable, but I’ve always been comfortable with being made uncomfortable. The novel I read was about a young girl whose unfortunate circumstances forced her to grow up too fast, as they say; who was resourceful as much as she was a victim. Criticism of Lolita often demands that we make binary decisions: is Lolita a victim or a whore? Is Humbert tragic or a monster? Why can’t both be true? After all, I grew up in a world that insisted I occupy a sexualised body, and then punished me for doing so without shame.
The first time I noticed a grown man’s sexual interest in me, I was 11 years old. Something awoke in me that day, and I learned to flirt. I spent the next few years knowing that there was something I could gain in return if I stopped blushing and accepted my position as a sexualised body. I existed on the outskirts of abject poverty, and every prolonged glance, every catcall, became an opportunity. I became conscious of a world of men eager to provide money, comfort and an escape route in exchange for what I had: beauty and youth. Perhaps if I’d had a father, a stable home, the recognition of that first flirtation would have stopped there, but it didn’t. Circumstances made me a young woman with a firm grasp on the fact that my sexual appeal could get me what I needed to survive. I also had my own sexual desires in abundance, only twofold: once as desire, twice as currency.
Sex-positive feminism helped to guard me against the most corrosive shame, but I’m not ignorant of the structural reasons that led me to trade sex in the first place. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to do sex work, I wouldn’t have to do any work I didn’t really want to do. But we are a long way from Eden. It is perfectly consistent to be deeply critical of the economic and gender inequalities that give rise to sex work, and still advocate for sex workers. The way to deal with cognitive dissonance is to tilt your head a little.
In 2018, the US actress Ashley Judd, along with a number of wealthy celebrities, aligned herself with the movement to criminalise sex work. It’s an action that flouts the views of the overwhelming majority of current sex workers, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization. Judd made a statement on Facebook that is representative of a kind of feminism that generally excludes working-class women: ‘one cannot consent to one’s exploitation’. The statement equates consent with satisfaction, and exploitation with something like ‘less than I’m worth’. The reality, under capitalism, is that most of us consent to our own exploitation in order to survive. This is the nature of labour under capitalism. A preoccupation with how women use their own bodies should not blind us to the ways that sex work is like other work.
It is important to distinguish (sex) work from slavery, and what we do for pleasure from what we do to survive. We should understand that these things can intersect sometimes without being the same. This insight enables us to see the demands of current sex workers ... as righteous and urgent, while at the same time acknowledging that it is important to find effective ways to tackle sex trafficking. In her book Playing the Whore (2014), Melissa Gira Grant offers an excellent analysis of the ways in which the fight by 20th-century feminists to have the boundaries between the home and not-home dissolved, with both recognised as workplaces...
However, I think that it is the middle-class consciousness of liberal feminism that excluded sex work from its platform. After all, wealthier women didn’t need to do sex work as such; they operated within the state-sanctioned transactional boundaries of marriage. ... A distinction within women’s work emerged: if you don’t enjoy having sex with your husband, it’s just a problem with the marriage. If you don’t enjoy sex with a client, it’s because you can’t consent to your own exploitation. It is a binary view of sex and consent, work and not-work, when the reality is somewhat murkier. It is a stubborn blindness to the complexity of human relations, and maybe of human psychology itself, descending from the viscera-obsessed, radical absolutisms of Andrea Dworkin. (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Tamara MacLeod): . . . Humbert’s violence, his refusal to accept the whore, stands for the ages. From religious fundamentalists to certain kinds of radical feminists, a lot of different types of people agree that work is respectable and even noble, and that sex work is degraded and criminal. In truth, sometimes sex work is degrading, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is illegal, often it’s legally complex; but why is sex work not understood to be work?
I understand that sex work is work because it is the work I do. I watched Lolita long before I became a sex worker, but not long before I began exchanging sex for things: something to eat, something to smoke, a place to sleep, a job opportunity. I identified with Lolita; I also knew that I sympathised with Humbert. This is Vladimir Nabokov’s talent after all, to have us still torn apart well into the 21st century. I see the monstrosity of the man who abducts Lolita, but I am more interested in Lolita the sex worker. I read the book (originally published in 1955) when I was 14 and it made me uncomfortable, but I’ve always been comfortable with being made uncomfortable. The novel I read was about a young girl whose unfortunate circumstances forced her to grow up too fast, as they say; who was resourceful as much as she was a victim. Criticism of Lolita often demands that we make binary decisions: is Lolita a victim or a whore? Is Humbert tragic or a monster? Why can’t both be true? After all, I grew up in a world that insisted I occupy a sexualised body, and then punished me for doing so without shame.
The first time I noticed a grown man’s sexual interest in me, I was 11 years old. Something awoke in me that day, and I learned to flirt. I spent the next few years knowing that there was something I could gain in return if I stopped blushing and accepted my position as a sexualised body. I existed on the outskirts of abject poverty, and every prolonged glance, every catcall, became an opportunity. I became conscious of a world of men eager to provide money, comfort and an escape route in exchange for what I had: beauty and youth. Perhaps if I’d had a father, a stable home, the recognition of that first flirtation would have stopped there, but it didn’t. Circumstances made me a young woman with a firm grasp on the fact that my sexual appeal could get me what I needed to survive. I also had my own sexual desires in abundance, only twofold: once as desire, twice as currency.
Sex-positive feminism helped to guard me against the most corrosive shame, but I’m not ignorant of the structural reasons that led me to trade sex in the first place. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to do sex work, I wouldn’t have to do any work I didn’t really want to do. But we are a long way from Eden. It is perfectly consistent to be deeply critical of the economic and gender inequalities that give rise to sex work, and still advocate for sex workers. The way to deal with cognitive dissonance is to tilt your head a little.
In 2018, the US actress Ashley Judd, along with a number of wealthy celebrities, aligned herself with the movement to criminalise sex work. It’s an action that flouts the views of the overwhelming majority of current sex workers, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization. Judd made a statement on Facebook that is representative of a kind of feminism that generally excludes working-class women: ‘one cannot consent to one’s exploitation’. The statement equates consent with satisfaction, and exploitation with something like ‘less than I’m worth’. The reality, under capitalism, is that most of us consent to our own exploitation in order to survive. This is the nature of labour under capitalism. A preoccupation with how women use their own bodies should not blind us to the ways that sex work is like other work.
It is important to distinguish (sex) work from slavery, and what we do for pleasure from what we do to survive. We should understand that these things can intersect sometimes without being the same. This insight enables us to see the demands of current sex workers ... as righteous and urgent, while at the same time acknowledging that it is important to find effective ways to tackle sex trafficking. In her book Playing the Whore (2014), Melissa Gira Grant offers an excellent analysis of the ways in which the fight by 20th-century feminists to have the boundaries between the home and not-home dissolved, with both recognised as workplaces...
However, I think that it is the middle-class consciousness of liberal feminism that excluded sex work from its platform. After all, wealthier women didn’t need to do sex work as such; they operated within the state-sanctioned transactional boundaries of marriage. ... A distinction within women’s work emerged: if you don’t enjoy having sex with your husband, it’s just a problem with the marriage. If you don’t enjoy sex with a client, it’s because you can’t consent to your own exploitation. It is a binary view of sex and consent, work and not-work, when the reality is somewhat murkier. It is a stubborn blindness to the complexity of human relations, and maybe of human psychology itself, descending from the viscera-obsessed, radical absolutisms of Andrea Dworkin. (MORE - details)