If you want to read more about FIGHT THE POWER, try:
• Invasion of Space by a Female BY COCO FUSCO
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
• Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry BY SUSAN LOPEZ, MARIKO PASSION, SAUNDRA
If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life BY LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
• When Sexual Autonomy Isn’t Enough: Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women in the United States BY MIRIAM ZOILA PÉREZ
• Trial by Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY
23
Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry
BY SUSAN LOPEZ, MARIKO PASSION, SAUNDRA
GIVEN THE SPARSE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE of the reality of sex work, the lives of sex workers are deconstructed and reconstructed in the public imagination—often with tragic inaccuracy. Reflecting on the assumptions much of the public makes about the industry, three female sex workers gathered to have a conversation around issues of sex work, sexuality, and the negative societal perceptions of sexually autonomous women.
Mariko Passion has ten years of experience in sex work, and has worked as a strip-club stripper, private dancer, agency escort, independent escort, mistress/dominant, and sensual masseuse. Susan Lopez was an exotic dancer for fifteen years in thirty-nine cities around the world. Saundra entered the sex industry as a nude model at nineteen, and worked as an exotic dancer before embarking on her current career as a high-end companion.
SUSAN: A common misperception of sex workers is that we have no boundaries, and that we will do anything for money. As such, we are considered fair game for all kinds of denigration, sadly, including rape. The women I have worked with over the years, however, have been some of the strongest women I have known when it comes to boundaries and personal sexual choices. Let’s explore notions of sexual consent in our private lives versus in our professional lives.
MARIKO: Once you’ve been paid extraordinarily for your
sexuality
—which could take form in listening, smiling, giving advice, engaging in conversation, sucking dick, taking it in the ass, or watching—without judgment or attachment—someone throw their life away in a dirty motel room smoking crack, there’s no looking back. Once you’ve been paid, it is really hard to go back to ever going through similar motions for free. You feel somewhat degraded every time you do. Unless it’s with someone you love, of course. But we don’t love our tricks. Some of us might love our jobs. But the majority of us
like and respect
our clients at best and hopefully get to a place where we feel the same way about our jobs. There are highs and lows, but like any other job, it’s not really the choice that other people make it out to be.
The choice argument gets to me on two levels. One, because working to earn a living is a necessity. Unless you want to give up on decent living standards and pursuing dreams, work is a must for most of us. Secondly, because I did not choose to be looked at sexually by the luring eyes of men and boys since my teens, I did not choose to learn the rules of the date rape game the hard way, and I did not create the conditions in the sexist and patriarchal world that I was born into. This world created me. This inequality was never a choice, and for me, too many times it was a hard lesson.
SAUNDRA: I can identify with Mariko as far as noncontractual, nontransactional sex goes; it is more difficult to deal with after having been a sex worker. I am far more particular and choosy about what’s going on around me now, whereas in college I was less so. It was more about experimenting and going with the flow. I wasn’t paying as much attention to what I was doing with my body and who I was doing it with.
MARIKO: I immediately felt that I didn’t want to do as much for free, and I felt a sense of power that I became very addicted to. It was life-changing, and an
immediate
change, whereas before, it would overpower
me.
So men’s sexualizing me
was
disempowering and now, suddenly, it became very empowering all at once.
SAUNDRA: I would definitely agree with that. I think it is much easier to compartmentalize something like that and control something you want to allow, versus something you don’t. When I think back to all the negative sexual experiences I had with men before I was in the sex industry, I remember feeling like I was just being swept down a river and that I had no control. When I look back, there was definitely a lack of power and control. That’s what haunts me the most. Now, in the sex industry, there are definite boundaries and parameters set, which give
me
the control.
SUSAN: Because I was a stripper, and was one for so long, you learn men: You learn their mentality, their ways, and their motives. And when you know this stuff, you negotiate so much better for yourself in the civilian world, because you no longer fear the unknown: men. Negotiation becomes second nature. In the civilian world, growing up, we are inundated with ideas of men as monsters who are only out to get us—to bed us—and as women or girls, we’re supposed to run away from this.
SAUNDRA: But at the same time, not—because there is so much pressure to get married. There is subjugation in terms of the fact that you’re expected to find one of those people and become the “ideal” wife.
MARIKO: Being a survivor of sexual assault, I wanted to reenact being able to say no over and over again, and while you’re a stripper, you get to do that several times in a night. I also think that, in a way, we have a false sense of superiority in a strip club, that when you’re dressed like a stripper, men don’t talk to you unless they want a lap dance. The regulars, et cetera, who are there won’t whistle at you, they won’t make comments . . . that was the first time in my life that that had happened. Every day that it would happen, I felt that
yeah,
sexuality is powerful, and you should shut up about it—this is the position you
should
be in. Experimenting with that superiority was really interesting for me—a good exercise in power. I felt in a strip club that if a guy tipped me in quarters, I could put my heel in his chest, and that would be acceptable. But as soon as you leave the club and the sweatpants go on, that curtain over reality is gone.
SAUNDRA: I think there is a built-in buffer if you are seeing clients who are higher-profile—screening can usually ensure that nothing bad happens, because if something goes wrong, you have that information to back you up. So nothing bad is likely to happen.
SUSAN: I am reading a book by Teela Sanders called
Sex Work: A Risky Business,
and she discusses these issues in depth. She refers to such screening of a client as making his “investment” in the transaction “expensive”; it is more costly to provide that info than to just see someone who demands nothing, and therefore violence is less likely to happen. She shows how different women approach their safety differently—some screen, some rely on instinct, and some rely on the self-defense techniques they’ve learned. But there is always some semblance of assessment of clients, and she says that the more information a client gives his entertainer, the less likely violence is to occur.
MARIKO: I go from one extreme to the other—I used to screen, used to take credit cards and check IDs, et cetera. Now I do instantaneous, spontaneous calls with minimum screening. Like, when I got robbed, he didn’t even pass my screening.
SUSAN: Why did you agree to meet him?
MARIKO: Because I needed money. I think your thoroughness with screening can fluctuate according to your finances. Financial pressures can compromise boundaries.
SUSAN: I agree—I noticed that as a stripper, too. When you’re in the industry, you learn to assess people instantaneously—especially when you’re dealing with so many people in a night on a continual basis. You have a sixth sense about each person immediately, and that tells you that this person will want to give you money, this one will want to give you a hard time, or that one isn’t safe to dance for, and this assessment takes place in a split second. So on a busy night, there are just some men you won’t approach, but on a slow night, when you need the money, you find yourself dancing for people that you would never have approached on a busy night. And as soon as you dance for them, you know exactly why you wouldn’t have approached them on a busy night.
SAUNDRA: Yes, there were times when I sensed that someone would be difficult, and I pushed it out of my head and I went ahead and engaged with them, and I always regretted it.
MARIKO: I think escorts deal with rude people as a norm, and so you put up with rudeness you would never normally put up with because you think about the money at the end of it.
SAUNDRA: I think that exists much more in strip clubs than with escorting. In strip clubs, you are already face-to-face with them, and you have to put up with it even if only for a few seconds while you move away or get a bouncer, but as an escort, you can determine by their email or phone call whether or not this is the type of person you want to spend time with. In escorting, it is never a good idea to even contemplate seeing someone who is already rubbing you the wrong way.
SUSAN: But, again, if someone really needs the money, their judgment will be compromised. What would you do if you really needed the money?
SAUNDRA: I’d probably just go to a club.
MARIKO: I find that men who are going to be violent prey on the vulnerabilities of others—their victims’ boundaries are dropped because of whatever is compromising them, and those are the people who get hurt most often. They are already down and out because of a bad relationship, lack of money, and they become a target. I find that this happens in strip clubs, because the guys really try to crawl inside my head and expose those vulnerabilities. You walk up to someone and before you have even made a dime off them, they’ve extracted so much information from you. I couldn’t handle that anymore, and that’s why I quit.
SUSAN: I dealt with that sort of thing in a very overt way. When I was working in the clubs, I would never just walk up to a man and say, “Do you want a dance?” I would walk up to him, jump in his lap, run my fingers through his hair, pull his head back, and nuzzle him with my nose, then whisper in his ear, “Would you like a dance?” This left no time for conversation, and the interaction between us was established as purely physical and erotic entertainment. If I assessed that a particular man was not someone I could take that approach with, I would sit next to him and introduce myself, then immediately start petting him, running my fingers through his hair, playing with his nipples, holding his hand, and asking him all sorts of questions. I would play a dumb blond, because she could get away with this. The men never thought of having an actual conversation with me, but were instead constantly fending off my advances (or eating them up). Either approach meant that I had all the control in the interaction. When they did succeed in having actual conversation with me after that (at
my
discretion), they were incredulous that I was actually somewhat intelligent. This was always amusing to me.
I think it was you, Mariko, who said that when you are feeling low, you are more vulnerable in a sex-work situation. I think that speaks to this whole idea of self-esteem, which I think is so important in sex work. This is all related to the shame and stigma-versus-empowerment question. The shame and stigma that come with sex work can modify a woman’s self-esteem if she doesn’t
own
the sex work, if she hasn’t deconstructed those negative societal views surrounding the work and the ideas of what a woman is supposed to be in our society.
MARIKO: It takes a lot to unpack that, though—I think it’s so thick; it takes a lot to unpack all those different layers of stigma.
SUSAN: It took me seven years.
MARIKO: It took me a long time, and I was stripping the whole time. You could still be working in the industry while you are unpacking all of that. I think it is a constant thing.
SAUNDRA: I think this process of unpacking can be generalized to
all
women—because as women, we are put in a position where wanting to empower oneself, especially sexually, is something that is always going to be troubling to society, to parents, to wives. The stigma that faces sex workers is something that is even more difficult to address, because the women are constantly having to suffer in silence—not just with sex, but with violence. They have to keep up the facade that everything is okay, when it might not be. You can’t ever really take your face off and address what is happening, because you are going to be questioned about what you are doing in the first place—the sex work—before you can get to what
all
women are facing: feelings of second-class citizenship next to men. It makes it a lot harder for women to say if they are forced or coerced in any way.