Work, Shame, and Money:
Modern Sex work/ Fetish/ history and response

By Kai Kiernan

Before reading forward, the reader should know that this story will address sex work, sexuality, a graphic story about injury to a sex organ. This will contain a variety of opinions about the ethics of sex work, from sex workers/ members of the LGBT community/ and everyday people. Names have been made anonymous for the comfort of the people being interviewed. This is done out of respect for the interviewees, and the author wishes that the reader carries that same respect for those involved. 

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While walking down a cobbled side street in New Hope, Pennsylvania, a woman is walking outside of an underground store with a discreet black bag containing a 5 inch blue phallic vibrator. She was messaging her friends about it on her phone, the entire time, shoving her iPhone into her baggy parka, where she had a bag of jerky that she had picked up before across the street. It was all being reported in real time, where her friends new about every anxiety she had in the exchange, and also every peculiar thing that popped into her head while being distracted in a sex shop. She described nerves she felt as “a moment of slight panic that should not really not be”. She was slightly worried about leaving and that the sweet old man who owned the jerky store across the street would see her; How many others had also been afraid of the random shop owner’s hypothetical judgement?

The history of sex and sex work in public discourse is one where religious confusion and the back and forth conversations between whether to shame or to praise sex has resulted in a general confusion about the guidelines on what is normal and right in sex and by extension those who work in sex work.   

 
In a collection of six interviews collected, three women, two nonbinary people, and one man described talking about sexuality in general or in public as uncomfortable. They used words like “taboo”, “unconventional”, “overly sexualized”, “suppressed”, or “just not talked about” to explain this discomfort, but ultimately all admitted that talking about sex was sometimes unsettling. But after two or three questions, most people opened up and would be willing to discuss almost everything. The topic is not brought up frequently, but when it is in a comfortable space, the response is typically filled with laughs, and wide-eyed excitement.

Many of the people who were interviewed did not know a sex worker personally, and often times when they spoke about the sex workers themselves, it was in a worried tone. They never blamed sex workers for being in their position, and in fact even those who were “against sex work” were more adamantly against a system that forces people in to sex work.

Sex workers on the other hand, spoke about their experiences openly with nuanced opinions on their work. This story will go into depth on some of those stories, while also speaking about the long history of sex work and shame throughout the world. It will then be ended with anonymous thoughts from some brave interviewees.

THE WORKERS

Grace 

 “When I first sold pictures of my feet, it started from a joke. I tweeted about it one day, and then someone who I matched with on tinder, said he would pay me 50 dollars per picture.” She said over the phone. She sounds different then she did 3 months ago after getting a nose job in Syria. 

“I started getting direct messaged from complete strangers who would ask for them”. 

She loves meme culture, and frequently refers to six second vines that she had watched in high school. She is now 23 with student debt and is frequently mad at the thought that she is expected to pay off nearly $100,000 with a job that doesn’t even pay $30,000 a year.

“Sorry if I’m getting distracted. I’m so tired, I just got back from the gym”. She said.

She’s tired, but her gym routine is consistent, her membership paid for, and her loan payments on time.

She’s small with bottle blond hair and has mentioned how her friends think her hands are adorable because of how small they are in comparison to their own.

Grace talked about being able to look up advice on how to sell pictures of her feet online and would look up YouTube tutorials and Q+A’s for further information. It’s a lucrative business for some. It could sometimes be as easy as taking two photos and selling it to as many as 10 different paying customers, to make a profit of 500 dollars in what took an hour of work. 

“It’s not really empowering, but I get money.”

She has also curated her community on Twitter to be extremely sex positive. Her dashboard is  full of women who sell pictures of themselves for various reasons, who are sugar babies, who regularly uses their sexuality for profit. They are friends financed through fetish and F words. Grace likes it this way. 

“I always have to remind myself that people who hate on sex workers, and call them awful names, are almost always secretly watching porn. Their hypocrites who consume content from sex workers, and then think they’re better than other people.”

Sidney

 Sidney is recognized by many for playing in house shows and small cafes across the US and some of Canada. She’s from Albuquerque, New Mexico and spent the ages between 19 and 22 in a beat-up car, where she played her banjo and sang songs about trouble with authority, loneliness, drug abuse, and her struggles as a survivor of abuse. She also likes hiking in the mountains when she can. She has matted red hair to her shoulders, a piercing through the bridge of her nose, and frequently wears a black hat. If you look up at her from two feet lower than her eye line, the circular brim looks like a blackened equivalent of renaissance paintings of Christ’s halo. 

“How come no one ever bugs baristas about their work? I deal with shitty men just like they do, but I get blamed for messing up some one’s marriage? That’s stupid” she said.

 “I’m a stripper who’s going to school for philosophy.” She said over the phone. She found time to speak to me before her shift at the club, instead of doing a reading for a class. She is 24 and finishing up college.

She has a song where she says her backpack is too small for her bookshelf. She reads feverishly, and often reads on her breaks.

“People have this weird habit where they like to tell me what my ethics should be.”

She has a capital A sowed into a black denim jacket she wears regularly. She carries a knife on her and is covered with tattoos; both of which she picked up when she was on the road.  

Felix

Felix is a non-binary person who recently got a cat with their girlfriend Victoria and is a phenomenal student. They feel like neither a man nor woman, so go by neither he or she, and instead opt for they. They’ve had a 4.0 GPA their entire time they’ve been at the University of Albany. They study women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the school.

They also occasionally demean men over a web cam for money. Recently, being a dominatrix in training has also been paying pretty well.

“I am on webcams from time to time, and have been asked to yell at people before…” They said with their new kitten scratching at the couch in the background. They have long blue hair that is shaved on the sides. There are six different types of plants in frame of the skype call.

“He wanted me to do it so that he could cry. He said he really wanted that release and had just not had it in a long time. He couldn’t focus on anything but feeling bad, so I demeaned him so that he could get off to it.”

 They spend a significant amount of time researching and talking about kink. They work in and are a member of a BDSM training house, where groups of adults consensually get together to be a part of a BDSM community. There are leather outfits, kink workshops, flogging, clamps, restraints, and also forms of aftercare.

Jess

Jess is a glasses wearing asexual women. She is not the focus of this story, but she is the narrator.

“I knew someone who worked in the office of a male strip club. She was mainly filing paperwork for tax purposes, dealing with W-2s, writing up contracts with customers, taking calls, and doing whatever else she needed her to do (sometimes she would pick lunch up).”

Jess was sitting down and telling this story in the middle of a student apartment living room, sitting in a red chair that was lifted from a dumpster a half mile away, with two men and a woman listening up in wild surprise at the sudden change in conversation.

“she was trained in first aid, and would deal with any health problems that would come up.
One time someone got hurt during a show, and it resulted in the stripper not being able to work for around two weeks after.”  The room was dead silent. Two men in the room looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. It was an uncomfortably extended moment where these two men at the age of 18 and 19 had no other alternative but to imagine the ways in which a male stripper might not be able to work. 

“One time one of the guys got a tiny cut on his penis, and it was just bleeding a whole lot. We don’t know how it happened, but he got clipped.”

She described having to get him to lie down, and to have him calm down in order to lessen the blood flow and keep it from bleeding much more. The ended up having to put a bandage on it, but in the beginning he had to be careful to not have any further erection to keep the bleeding down. The room with no decorations on the massive white brick walls, that was quintessentially quiet before the story, was laughing hysterically at the absurdity of it all.

The shock of the story, the multiple levels of relatability of character and the ease in which it can be imagined is something that seems so natural. Where does that sense come from? Why are dramatic stories about sex able to make a room respond so easily? What is the history to these hysterics?


  

The History

Early civilization had churches built to celebrate goddesses who were female prostitutes, and even Greek and Roman cultures had cults formed around prostitution, such as “the cult of venus.” In the book Prostitution: Sex work, Policy and Politics authors Teela Sanders, Maggie O’Neill and Jan Pitcher explain in great depth the reasons for why there is so much stigma around sex work now.

Prostitution has been around possibly as early as 5000 BCE in Mesopotamia. There were churches where people would go to have sex, and it was seen as a religious practice. The denouncing of prostitution on the other hand has only been  around since 1200 BCE, where members of ancient Israel disapproved of the ‘erotic religions’ in surrounding society. This was still just an idea though. It was not until 350 CE with the Roman catholic faith, where having sex with a prostitute inside the church was officially forbade.  

It’s in this connection to the church that there begins to be an effect on a worldwide culture. Gail Pheterson sees the archaic representation of ‘the Whore’ as a prototype for the idea of the ‘stigmatized woman’.  

“The ‘prostitute’, or the ‘whore’, is contrasted to the female mirror image of the ‘Madonna’ which portrays the image of pure femininity: that is, sacred and holy. The ‘Madonna/whore’ binary projects the status of the prostitute woman as a failed example of womanhood, defined by her immoral sexual behaviors, and someone to be avoided.”

The caricature of the prostitute is one of the many ways that the ‘pure’ female body is further culturally idealized, and thus implicitly controlled. When the bible is the definition for what is right, it is the people in charge of the bible who have the power, and when that goes unchecked and it sources are not cited and checked, that’s a warning sign of over simplification.

Trans- performance artist and public speaker Alok Vaid Menon said in an interview “Always check the citations and look further into those.”
 
The power is always in who is making the media, and who’s story is being seen. Power is in resource and representation, and the interplay of those two forces.

Comments from Anonymous interviews:

Is sex/ sexuality empowering?

“I think sex work can be extremely empowering. It is reclaiming over one’s body to gain cultural and financial capital.”

Do you think sex work is financially lucrative?

“I do not believe that women should have to sell their bodies in order to make a living, and that should not be as much of a radical statement as it is in 2019.”

                                                                                                                                      -RC

Have you ever thought to, or felt pressure to sell sex?

“I never feel pressured to sell sexual services, but sometimes it is a very appealing option that is reconsidered every so often when financial struggles arise. I’d say the option of sex work is more appealing than selling my plasma lol”

                                                                                                                                      -M

Do you feel as though sex/ sexuality is empowering? 

“Yes, I feel that people should enjoy having sex and it’s healthy to enjoy sex and being sexual as long as no party is being forced, hurt, or abused. It’s really scary to think of how often that must happen”

                                                                                                                                      – ASM

Have you ever thought of being a sex worker of any type?

“I’ve thought about doing it a lot. I know there is a market for young men, and I’d like to have a job where I just really need to get really fit. I would love that… I feel like if I made good enough money, my girlfriend would be ok with it.”

                                                                                                                                      -GB

Does being a sex worker scare you?

I don’t think it’s scary. There are ways to maintain your anonymity, but with anything like this there are dangers to consider. Many aspects of sex work are illegal if you don’t cover your bases with loopholes in the legal language. There’s the chance of people you know in real life finding out and judging you. If you have sex with clients you face the risk of STIs, pregnancy if you have a uterus, and abuse/stalking from clients. You could also have people stalk you online. These are the worst-case scenarios but it’s best to consider them beforehand and be prepared. I usually try to get an understanding of how my audience feels about sex work before stating my opinion. Being very open and educational as possible is my goal whenever I talk about it. Of course, you will find people who look down on sex workers and overlook the consumers of sex work. Getting people to think differently about sex work can be difficult yet it’s very important to understand that sex work is work too and sex workers are human and deserve respect.