Working Sex

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O
ne time in the olden days when I was working at the peep show (gateway drug to prostitution) a man came in who’d made the rounds of most of the girls but never seen me. I walked into my side of the scrubby booth known as the Victorian Parlor (complete with ye olde lounge-style lawn chair) and started the lame boob-rubbing moves that were always the prequel to the removal of my shirt. The guy wasn’t interested and motioned for me to knock it off and come closer to the glass. He had some greasy piece of paper that he was fiddling with. It looked like it was about a thousand years old
and had been used to wrap a hamburger. He unfolded it and pressed it to the glass for me to squint at.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, looking at me intently and already rubbing his crotch through his jeans. It was some kind of clipping from a magazine, folded so many times that only mere molecules of the photo were left in between the web of white creases. I couldn’t even muster a guess.

“It’s the Partridge Family school bus! I want you to pretend like you’re driving the Partridge Family school bus!” Not naked, not speaking lewdly about Danny Partridge, just with my feet on the glass and my hand on the invisible gearshift, making motor sounds. It was an easy $20 for five minutes of my time, and eventually he got passed off onto Carrie, a nightshift girl who really did drive a school bus during the day. Jackpot.

That’s the story I used to trot out when people would ask me what was the weirdest customer experience I’d ever had. Which was always the first question they’d ask upon finding out what I did for a living (if they didn’t immediately change the subject), followed closely by “How much do you make?” The Partridge Family guy wasn’t even really the weirdest, but the real answer would’ve been a lot less interesting, and clearly people were digging for the entertaining. It made the job sound funny and light, like I spent the
whole day indulging harmless adult children (hey . . . wait . . . ). The kooky specificity of a Partridge Family bus fetish let them off the hook somehow, reassured them that their own weird desires were at least not that weird, and freed them from having to imagine themselves in the customer’s role. Titillation without incrimination. This is the kind of story that Americans most want to hear from people who work in the sex trade, and consequently this is the kind of story that most often gets told, when anything gets told at all.

There are a few different ways one’s story is allowed to be entertaining: funny, sexy, tragic, scandalous. Repentance, marriage, college graduation, lurid death, or a piece of investigative journalism are the favored endings. The rigid boundaries of archetype, be they happy hooker or downtrodden whore, are a kind of invisibility. They are one-dimensional. Should the story twist to the side you’ll see nothing at all. Once marked by telling the story, you are branded for life. Your credibility is gone, you are forever seen in the context of the work. You don’t get to go back to being a civilian. Who needs that kind of shit? People remain silent. This silence, this invisibility, is the linchpin upon which rests the glorious suspension of disbelief that is at the core of nearly every transaction in a service economy. It’s the intellectual sleight of hand where one denies oneself knowledge of the essential personhood of the provider of a service or the maker of a product so
as not to impede one’s enjoyment of the product or service. In this way one avoids being implicated in the boredom, poverty, or ugliness of the work of the service provider. In late capitalist America under the rule of market logic, suspension of disbelief becomes almost a survival skill.

The sex industry is a huge industry. Think of all the venues: Internet porn, magazines, phone sex, dirty movies, strip clubs, peep shows, and hookers from the street, upscale agency, or the ad in the back of your edgy local weekly. Estimates put the U.S. sex industry at around $12 billion annually and growing rapidly, and the number of people presently employed in it at upwards of six million. To say nothing of those who have been a part of it in the past. What are the implications of the invisibility of such a huge segment of the population? What does it say about us as sexual consumers that we prefer our product to be anonymous? In a probably accidental rare moment of lucidity, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop observed to ABC News that the sex industry “is making billions of dollars a year, is spreading to cable television and to the Internet, and yet their employees are considered to be throwaway people.” When you refuse to recognize someone’s humanity, you don’t have to worry about their working conditions, their safety, their health, their ability to make a decent living. Thus the cops, pimps, club owners, and minimoguls at the head of petty fiefdoms like the Girls Gone
Wild porn empire get to run the industry with little outside interference or regulation. Not only is this bad for the people who work in the industry, but are pimps, police, and Joe Francis who you really want to trust with the shaping of the national libido?

Sex workers telling stories, humanizing ourselves through the sharing of experience and insight, punctures the bloated dream of consumption without consequence. It puts a real face on the mythological creatures that are the subject of so much fantasizing and demonizing. It moves us from a weird landscape populated by the iconography of people’s fears and desires to a tangible, relatable reality; and only from there can we begin to be taken seriously as people deserving of safety, agency, and respect.

 

a
t one point when I was taking a break from the sex industry, I became a housecleaner. My friend and I worked together, cleaning up after grown adults and fomenting cheerful resentment. It wasn’t long before we knew who among our clients had an alcohol problem, who refused to have sex with her husband, who wore a padded-butt mangirdle, who was trying his hand at the newspaper personal ads. Nobody ever told us these personal details, nobody ever really told us much besides when to show up and what to use on the floors. A lot of stuff becomes obvious quickly when
you’re observing people to whom you’re invisible—and when you occasionally go through their drawers. The point is, the help always knows more about the boss than the boss knows about them. Sex workers are in a unique position to observe. The work takes place in a freakish crucible of the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The fact that, by and large, we are relegated to a simple mascot position in public dialogue about these dynamics is a critical mistake.

Occasionally an academic will be thrown our way to spend a year slumming for a story, or someone will publish a memoir, but more frequently self-representation is a luxury we are denied. How would we represent ourselves if given the opportunity? In ten years of working in the business and meeting other whores, the one thing that’s become apparent is that none of us can agree on a take on any aspect of the work. Even within ourselves, feelings and convictions can shift several times over the course of a night. Sometimes you see the best of people and yourself, and everything seems so easy and attainable, and the money feels like it’s rolling in for free. Other times it’s the worst job you’ve ever had and you can’t believe the ugliness of humanity and you want to get out and never come back. The sex industry encompasses so many variations on how to get to the punchline of ass showing (domination! hooking! lap dances! let me count the ways!) and so many kinds of people who get into it for such
different reasons and with different options for getting out. The possible experiences in the sex industry are so complicated and contradictory, there is no way to describe it without a multiplicity of voices.
Working Sex
includes pieces that clash not just in content but also in form. Experienced or experimental, poetic or pornographic, angry or academic, the pieces complement each other, and through their differences begin to articulate a fuller picture of the amazing humans who populate the mysterious landscape of this business.

Y
ou can sit in a whorehouse and breathe, until the stink of cigarette smoke and fried delivery food, of rubbing alcohol and latex and cheap scented candles, of hairspray and afro sheen, of cock and cunt everywhere disappears, and you think you are breathing fresh air.

You can talk with the girl wearing only a bra and panties while she dumps Cover-Girl foundation over her stretch marks (from childbearing), two scars (botched boob job), and knife wound (compliments of her man) about matters of the heart and decide that she is definitely, yes definitely, giving you sound advice.

You can help that same girl lift a drunken man off of the bed and carry his sloppy body out the door into the parking lot. You can watch her rifle through his pockets for money before leaning him up against the hood of his own car.