Mea Culpa to Sex Workers

Lady Aster http://www.escortblogs.net/ladyaster.htm gently chastised me for insensitivity to sex workers in a couple of my recent posts. In one, I perpetuated society’s irrational attitudes toward nudity. In another, I analogized GOP spending to a spree of drinking and patronizing prostitutes (I used the term “whore”) in a manner that might have implied that I believed engaging sex workers is inherently irresponsible. I do not believe this; rather, I just wanted to convey the idea that the GOP views its periods in power as an opportunity to have a big party at the country’s expense. I might have used any number of recreational activities to make this point, but I used the services of sex workers probably because its pejorative connotations cast the GOP in a worse light than, say, going to a baseball game or taking a cruise. I didn’t think this through, and I ought not to have insulted sex workers in this manner by perpetuating the pejoration of their trade. Associating sex workers with the GOP was probably insulting as well.

I am grateful for the chastisement. How else will I ever get “it” if no one will tell me what “it” is? I am a product of my upbringing, but I am sometimes capable of raising my consciousness and changing the way I think and speak about issues. Over the years, I have struggled with racism, sexism, classism, and a boatload of “isms” that have infected my thinking and attitudes. I expect that I have a long way to go and that there are “isms” lurking in the recesses of my mind that I don’t know about yet.

I was brought up to believe that sex was evil except between husband and wife for procreative purposes. Even then, it would be wrong to enjoy it. This really screws you up since you have sexual desires and sex is, in fact, pleasant and fun. Even when you get out of the Bible Belt, you come to associate sex with guilt and shame and self loathing. This takes a lot of the joy out of it, and I reckon the indoctrination is meant to do this.

The indoctrination included the concepts of sexual purity and pollution, especially for females. Girls who had sex were sullied forever, fallen from grace and not fit for marriage. Boys, not being in control of their urges so much, were expected to seek out such girls for gratification; however, they were also expected to repent and to settle down with a “nice” girl. I’m not making this up. This was how it was where I grew up, and this indoctrination has pretty much ruined sex for me. It will probably never be as satisfying as it would have been if the Baptists had not messed with my head.

When I went out into the world, I discovered sex workers, and I have patronized them over the years. I valued their services, and I hope that I valued them as human beings. I went from accepting that sex work was criminal to advocating decriminalization with regulation to advocating complete laissez faire. I came to see that the negative aspects of the trade were by and large artifacts of criminalization and marginalization.

One of my students was an exotic dancer part time in a club in Seattle, and she sometimes caught a ride with me to that city for the weekend. I once remarked to her that I worried about the men who spent their whole paycheck on table dances. She replied that she was worried about them, too, worried that they would come in when it was not her shift! I can trace to that moment a change in attitude about sex work to minding my own business. I wouldn’t have dreamed of regulating a man’s other spending habits. If he spent too much on lawn care, I reckoned that was beyond the control of government. Yet, I was ready to regulate his spending on table dances. Sex was still vice to me, and I reckon that I felt that men were not capable of moderating their spending, that they were helpless in the face of the wiles of those women and vulnerable to exploitation.

I came to realize that it was the sex workers who were exploited, not by virtue of their trade, but by club owners and by the police with arbitrary enforcement of idiotic laws against human contact. The workers did not have the benefit of the protection of the law and were the ones who were vulnerable to violence, harassment, and exploitive practices in the clubs.

God bless sex workers, say I. Now I need to make sure that I don’t contribute through my use of language to the perpetuation of myths about sex work and denigration of their trade. I will probably fail at this from time to time, and I welcome correction.