10
Mar
09

Yay, Dead Hookers!

By whore2culture 9 Comments
Categories: BDSM workers, books, comics, erotic masseuse, male workers, movies, prostitutes, strippers and television shows
Tags: , , ,

One of the more common tropes used in regards to sex work in media, is the good old dead hooker. This trope can be manifested in various ways – on SVU and similar shows, it’s always some poor, strung-out hooker whose body shows up to motivate events. In other ways, the whore is sort of the token heroine of the story, and dies in order to redeem herself (this is a pretty common plot device for fallen women in general – women who had sex and/or children out of wedlock, lesbians, hookers, etc…). In those cases, it’s especially awesome if she kills herself or sacrifices herself for the sake of another. And by ‘awesome’ I mean ‘completely fucked thoroughly ingrained symptom of misogyny in Western media’. But it adds pathos! And dra-mah! And sends a subtle message that if you’re a dirty whore, you WILL die. Preferably horribly.

Of course, misogyny is not the only facet of this trope. Homophobia and transphobia can be and are significant elements too, though less common. Gay and trans hookers also get systematically punished for their depraved lifestyles by winding up beaten to a bloody pulp and garrotted. It’s just as sickening and just as wrong.

Recently, a sex worker friend of mine had to deal with a revolting comment that informed her she shouldn’t bitch about dead hookers in shows and books because hookers really DO get killed/abused “all the time”. The kicker? This was said in a feminist community.

I’m not going to dignify the idiot behind that piece of asshattery with a link, but this argument is a total fallacy.

It is a total fallacy because well, it’s not true (1 – jerk clients can manifest in many more ways than abusers/killers, 2 – it pathologises all clients as abusers/killers, 3 – there are sex workers who have never encountered any sort of violence or jerk client during the years they’ve done sex work) but also when it DOES happen it is not something exclusive to hookers. It is something that happens to WOMEN. It is a women’s issue.

I would challenge you to get a group of five women, just five, from any number of backgrounds and cultures and, without trying, get a group of five women none of whom have experienced some sort of violence or abuse. This is the thing. Violence and abuse against women is COMMON. Hell, it’s PREVALENT.

Due to intersectionality, violence against women from some backgrounds may be even more prevalent; that doesn’t change the fact it happens to all women because it’s part of an ingrained sexist psychology we are still, as a species, trying to shake off.

This is my issue with these types of hegemony. The idea violence is something that happens mostly to hookers as part and parcel of their job is part of an attempt to make it seem like by not doing certain things, being certain places, wearing certain clothes – not being BAD – women can avoid violence. Violence only happens to “some” women – the “wrong” kind of women.

It’s not true and it’s not acceptable. And the belief that it IS true allows the ongoing blaming of the victim.

No reasonable, intelligent person would agree that a gay male deserves to be bashed for glancing at a heterosexual man, or that a person of colour should be assaulted for getting “above themselves” or that a woman deserves to be raped for wearing a low cut dress. The obvious homophobia, racism and sexism in those arguments have long been acknowledged as fact and unacceptable. Once again, those attitudes are about justifying unacceptable violence as being the fault of those who the violence is directed towards.

What is at fault is a systemic culture that privileges certain people over others and consequently enables, supports and even condones violence against marginalised people. A culture that involves characterising some groups of people as inferior and therefore deserving of treatment that significantly disadvantages them – that kills them.

To say it is acceptable to depict hookers as always being brutally murdered or dying is nothing more nor less than complacency with the status quo. It indicates a mute agreement with the pervasive attitude there is something about sex work that inherently attracts violence, instead of it being the fact sexphobia leads to stigma and discrimination thereby creating an environment in which violence against sex workers is seen as okay. You know. The same kinda flawed thinking that for so long and still so often says a woman can’t change her mind “half-way through”.

We all know that constant depictions of dead transpeople and dead PoC are not useful or helpful to eradicating stigma and discrimination against them. These are two groups who are also subjected to a great deal of hate violence again because we live in a world that has normalised violence against these marginalised groups. But we all know how reductionist and petty and dismissive it is, how infuriating and how it simply reinforces the idea that this is simply something that “happens” to you if you belong to those marginalised groups and you better just learn to accept it, keep your head down and shut up.

We understand that media depictions reflect real world convictions and act as a catalyst and perpetuator of them. The same is true of sex workers. It is not useful, it is not helpful and it is not okay.

To hold this belief about sex work and sex workers, to believe that institutionalised violence against sex workers should continue to be reinforced through media representation, is virulently anti-feminist and misogynistic.

And as stated, it very much perpetuates the division between “good women” and “bad women” and the false belief violence only happens to the bad ones instead of being a prominent symptom of a sexist and patriarchal society.

The thing is, this theme is going to come up often in this blog and already I’m feeling exhausted about that. There’s no end to dead hookers in media and I get angry every time. Consider this post something of a preliminary introduction to the issue and to my feelings on it.

If you don’t understand, go back to Feminism 101 and try again.

21
Feb
09

More Than Just A Whore: Sex Work, Firefly and Audience Engagement

By starletharlot 37 Comments
Categories: cult, prostitutes and television shows
Tags: , , , ,

Whores have long been a popular trope in various media: from literature to television and film, the whore is an iconic and instantly recognisable part of our culture and will often make an appearance in one form or another.
Unfortunately, these appearances are, more often than not, based on the worst sort of Othering. A process that objectifies, stigmatises, exoticses and dehumanises us.
But now and again, there comes an attempt to counteract that negativity, to show the whore for the complex, diverse and fascinating creatures we are.
The degrees to which such attempts can be successful rely on a variety of factors: Who’s doing the attempting, and what is their objective? Who is their intended audience? What background baggage do they bring with them? What cultural mores have they been inured in and how do these impact their misguided if well-intentioned efforts?
And so we come to Joss Whedon, self-proclaimed feminist sci-fi fantasy hero to geeks everywhere, and his short-lived show, Firefly.
Whedon has long been touted – and, indeed, promotes himself – as an advocate of feminist, female-positive representation within geek culture. The creator of the hit show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he is revered for his efforts to write strong female characters with dynamic personality and stories that revolve around them.

One could wonder why greater efforts by actual female writers have not garnered the same attention (or been afforded the same opportunity), but those ponderings could fill a book, as could the discourse criticising his treatment of female characters, which often aligns with tired old tropes of sexism and misogyny, though very well-concealed (even to the creator himself).

Right now we’re here to discuss Whedon’s efforts to positively represent sex work and sex workers.
For within the world of Firefly, one of the main characters of the show, Inara Serra, is what’s known as a “Companion” – a sex worker.

Before I go further I should state myself here as being a generally-admiring yet critical fan of Whedon and his body of work. There can be no doubt that he is putting genuine effort into presenting women as complex and multi-dimensional characters and that Inara herself succeeds as being sympathetic, likeable, engaging and generally well-portrayed.
However, this does not mean Whedon, as a heterosexual white man, is going to succeed fully in his efforts. People far more qualified than I have noted his failings when it comes to representation of People of Colour and certainly his representation of women and varying classes do fall into tiresome stereotypical tropes at times. I feel that, for all the good work he does, Whedon gets a free pass on his failings because of his loftier efforts and I don’t believe this is constructive or conducive to his improving as a creator.
It is my opinion that, if you champion yourself as an advocate of issues for one marginalised group, you have more responsibility to be aware of the issues that other marginalised groups face, and to take care in your representation of them. Otherwise it is hypocritical at best and outrightly privilege promoting at worst. The fact of the matter is, deconstructing a lifetime of embedded education is a subsequently lifelong task. Whedon’s ability to perceive, identify and critique discrimination and prejudice within the genre he writes does not mean he’s going to do it right or perfectly every single time. This is true of anyone with privilege.
I expect more from Whedon because he has named himself as someone desirous of dismantling a lot of negative tropes within the sci-fi/fantasy arena and who has tried to do so.
With that contextualising out of the way, let’s move onto the show and its vision on a particular aspect of sex work in a theoretical future.
The issues with Inara’s characterisation and the way she is contextualised within the world of Firefly are many and varied and have to do with equally complex race and gender issues in addition to those of sex workers. To explore them fully would require a great deal more space and time and this is not the appropriate forum.

But perhaps my greatest objections can all be summed up in the following three aspects of the vision of sex work Firefly presents. These aspects struck me most vividly as being problematic and are the ones that, more often than not, are used by non-sex working fans to argue for how progressive Whedon’s vision is.

Continue reading ‘More Than Just A Whore: Sex Work, Firefly and Audience Engagement’

13
Feb
09

Whore to Culture: Become A Contributor

By starletharlot Leave a Comment
Categories: whore to culture
Tags:

Whore to Culture is always interested in new contributors.

If you are a sex worker of any sort of experience – prostitution, BDSM work, peepshow, stripping, PSO, porn, etc – and are a fan involved in any sort of geek or pop culture – then I’d love to hear from you. Also, there is no gender bias here – male, trans and gender queer sex workers are also invited to contribute.

Geek/pop culture is widely defined, since the rise of the internet means that significant fandoms for a wide variety of genres in literature, film and television are active. Sex work is also widely defined but does exclude operators. Sex industry business owners are not the intended voice of this project. Sex workers only, please.

To apply, please email me at starletharlot@gmail.com briefly outlining your sex work experience, what arouses your interest about the project, what fandoms you are involved in, and a brief overview of something you’d like to contribute.

All backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome. You are free to be as political and ranty as you want, or to celebrate the affirmative and positive. Remember that racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination and prejudice have no place in this blog.

13
Feb
09

Whore to Culture: The Name

By starletharlot 2 Comments
Categories: whore to culture
Tags:

The name of this blog is taken from the old joke: “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think”, which is a pun on the adage: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”.

Like any offensive joke that relies on prejudice against a marginalised group to be funny, it’s belittling, base and outright nasty.

It’s also just plain wrong.

Whores are invariably Othered as a group of people. Part and parcel with this is the perception we do what we do because we’re too stupid, ignorant or desperate to do anything else. Which has a nice healthy dose of sex stigma attached to it too, doesn’t it?

This blog takes its name from that nasty joke to at once acknowledge that we are Othered, and point out that we shouldn’t be. We’ve got as many interests, hobbies, goals and ambitions as any other people. And just like any other people, regardless of what our background is, we are more than adequately capable of absorbing and dissecting the media, culture and pop culture of our societies, whether that’s in the formal jargon of the academic or the colloquial of the lay person.

13
Feb
09

Whore to Culture: Introduction

By starletharlot Leave a Comment
Categories: whore to culture
Tags:

First and foremost: This blog will assume you have some awareness of issues such as sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and various types of privileges. This blog will assume you understand the term “male privilege”, know the difference between identifying as transgendered vs. transsexual, and that you know WHY something like “reverse racism” cannot exist.
The contributors on this blog are not here to give you Feminism 101 lectures in every single post we make, we’re not here to educate you on the finer nuances of Racism and white privilege and we don’t want to spend precious time dwelling on the basics when we could be ranting atop our soap boxes.

Due to intersectionality, all of the above listed issues (plus several more) play a large part in discussing the issues of sex workers, as sex workers come from every demographic you can conceive of. And when you belong to one marginalised group, sex work can be a refuge – flexible working hours for handsome remuneration in an industry you will never be out of work in can be extremely attractive to scores of people for a variety of reasons.

But not only this, having an understanding – or even a passion for – of the political issues of marginalised groups will potentially enable you to better understand the issues of sex workers and what we’re so damned angry about anyway.

I have always found analogies to be a useful tool, but before I employ them here I want to make it very clear that while there are significant similarities between the discrimination and oppression faced by sex workers to those faced by other marginalised groups, and consequently similar issues, belonging to one marginalised group does not automatically mean a person will understand fully the issues and needs of another. It may give someone greater capacity to emphasise, but nothing compares to lived experience. Let me repeat that: NOTHING compares to lived experience.

If you are here because you are a geek interested in political issues, particularly those concerning privilege in fandom, but perhaps you don’t get what us mouthy whores are all riled up about, here’s that disclaimed analogy:
Let’s say you’re surfing the net and you come across yet another repetitive, racist discussion about why the next regeneration of the Doctor could not be played by a POC, or your favourite show introduces yet another character played by a POC and you start counting the days until that character is brutally killed off, how do you feel?
Well, let me tell you how I feel whenever I read yet another fan fiction in which a poor oppressed whore is rescued by the writer‘s favourite character, or read a comic in which a crack addict street hooker is abused by her pimp or watch a show where a supposedly ‘radical’ depiction of whores is all the rage but is actually elitist and classist and sets up ideas of ‘good whores’ and how ‘sex work would be ok if only it was ALL like THIS!’ (Joss Whedon, I‘m looking at YOU and I ain‘t smiling), I feel: angry. No, make that infuriated. I feel a bone-aching weariness, a sense of despair, imploring my friends: ‘sweet Jesus, does it ever END?’ I feel depressed and futile and frustrated. I feel sickened that there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of people out there swallowing this goop and taking it on as representative of my identity. I feel indignant, and righteous and like I don’t know how I can keep on ploughing on with this anger every single day because society is so screwed up about sex that it wants to fetishise, objectify and exploit me by misrepresenting me as some grotesque stereotype or cliché to further some trite, unimaginative plot.

Because make no mistake about it: when it’s me who’s watching or reading, the whore represented is not an archetype or some unconnected plot device. It’s me. It’s my life. The life of so many of my friends. Our profession. Our profession just also happens to have a vast amount of stigma attached to it that makes our lives tend to be a series of tricky negotiations. We don’t really want to see further reinforcement of that poppycock when we switch on our televisions to relax. But, lucky us…

Like women, like queers, like the disabled, like POC, whores are subjected to a white, male and heterosexually dominated system that exoticises us and represents us poorly at best and usually highly offensively even when the objective is well meaning (JOSS WHEDON). Again, the specific and individual issues encountered by each group is highly unique and cannot be fully comprehended by anything but lived experience; nonetheless there are parallels and intersectionality is a significant player. As just an example, I am a queer female whore.

There are some amazing resources out there dedicated to issues in fandom such as privilege, racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, classism, and transphobia where some seriously awesome discussion happens. I’m a devourer of these resources because I’m passionate about these issues AND I’m a geek and I’m passionately interested in how greater cultural tropes manifest themselves within subcultures and how we, as a community, can deconstruct them.

And then I noticed that there was nothing dedicated to whores in pop and geek culture.

I certainly knew this was not due to any shortage of geek whores out there. Geek whores are everywhere. And it’s certainly not due to any shortage of representations of whores in pop and geek culture.

It’s an interesting thing about being a whore. I’ve always said it’s the last test of how radical someone truly is. Sex-positive feminists, gay rights activists, devoted anarchists – all of them have stopped, choked, turned a funny colour and then showed their prejudice to learn that yes, indeed, there is a whore in their midst. They can get uncomfortable or outright hostile. Some just get thoughtlessly inquisitive, forgetting entirely that they don’t particularly enjoy it when they go to Cousin Sue’s wedding and all their relatives want to know in blow-by-blow detail what gay sex is really like. Some say it’s completely awesome and, in a sad way, they really mean it although the truth is you’ve changed in their eyes. You’re no longer you, you’re a Whore. You’re not awesome because you just are, your awesomeness is intrinsically attached to your Whoredom. This is the moment when you begin to understand what it might feel like to be the Token. The Token Gay Friend or the Token POC Friend.
It doesn’t matter what sort of reaction they have to you, their perspective of you has altered. More often than not, it is tainted, because they are as much victims of a sexphobic society as any of us, and even as “cool” as they might think it is, they’re thinking to themselves: “but I don’t understand how you can do it. I could never do it.”

But damn, you’re a great person to have at parties. You’ve got Stories.

So I’m not all that surprised to see there’s not too much discussion by whores on the representation of whores in pop and geek culture. There can be just as much reluctance to out oneself on line as in any other situation.

But I think it needs to start happening.

Geeks, like greater society, are endlessly fascinated by whores. Why?

Well, to put it simply: whores have sex. LOTS of sex.

Not all of this sex is typical penis-in-vagina sex. Some of this sex is fist up arse, or ritualised boot polishing or naughty words cooed down phone lines or gyrating groin in slack-jawed face.

Regardless, the whore manifests sexual energy in all her/his many forms and types.

And, as it turns out, society has this small hangup about sex.

Most people love sex, or like it, or at the very least want to like it. Many people spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Still other people spend a lot of time working out how to get more of it. Then there are those who have plenty but don’t like what they’re getting but put up with it cos they think they should. Then there are those who won’t stop until they get exactly what they want. Sex sells, as the saying goes, and never mind the sex industry – just take a look at any dozens of magazine covers, advertisements, television programming and all the other various media we’re constantly inundated with. And yes, most of these highly sexualised images focus on women, which is a whole other loaded issue on its own.

Yet at the same time this cultural obsession with sex dominates our consciousness, it is still vastly stigmatised. There is an enormous sense of shame and inhibition around sex, largely focused on either eliminating the desire for it or making sure it only happens in the appropriate ways. The appropriate ways, of course, have largely been dictated by religious bodies led by men with the objective of controlling people. As a consequence, these mandates have become intrinsically intertwined with sexism, racism and heteronormatism. Although men certainly do not escape the burden of guilt attached to sex, it is primarily focused on women. The whole “virgin/whore” dichotomy no woman can ever seem to escape for any reason, anywhere, ever. The cultural image of a whore is usually female. But you can add in hefty doses of stigma against homosexuals and transsexuals too and anyone else who doesn’t fit the heteronormative aspirational standard, like the disabled (mental or physical – towards whom there is a truly revolting and highly oppressive attitude of ‘those people shouldn’t be having sex‘!!) and you will find all of these people working within the sex industry. They have the double burden of being seen as “abnormal” by the majority of society and sexually vilified accordingly (if you must be gay, can’t you at least be celibate about it?) and so the concept they charge for sex is received with increased outrage but also with that delightful double standard attitude of “well, what else could such degenerates do, anyway?”

That’s the final insult, really: we are in a job because there’s a need. But goddamn if any “decent” person is going to admit to that, even as they’re sneaking out the backdoor of the local brothel.

Sex work is work. It can be good work, boring work or lousy work and sometimes all three in one shift, just like any other job. It is a job like any other. Sex work can be confronting or empowering. Sex work can be frustrating or touching. Sex work can be exhausting, educational, depressing, inspirational, fun, tiresome, hilarious or infuriating. If this sounds like your work experience, maybe you’re beginning to get it.

But more than anything else?

Sex workers are people.

We are not stereotypes. We are not cliches or plot devices. We are not tokens.

And here, in this blog, is where a bunch of rowdy geek whores are going to get angry every time we’re treated as though we are in our fandoms of choice.