This year, at the Speak Up! Media Training that Red Umbrella...
This year, at the Speak Up! Media Training that Red Umbrella Project / Sex Work Awareness did back in April, participants contributed to growing the I Am A Sex Worker public service announcement - and here's the result. Please share it, screen it at events as a conversation-starter, talk about it, et cetera. It's a tiny contribution toward the behemoth task of humanizing sex workers. (It also debuts the new Red Umbrella Project logo - fuller identity design revamp is on its way).
And now I want to use this post to deconstruct the phrases "sex work" and "sex workers."
"Sex work" is a politicized phrase, one that has been very important in our movement since it was coined in late 1970s. It's now a widely used phrase - activists have used it enough and advocated for this phrase enough that the United Nations uses it. Journalists sort of use it - though usually editors write slangy puns for headlines, the phrase shows up in articles more and more. "Sex work," especially in the international context, has aligned our movement with labor rights and has been used as a tool against the stigmatization and disrespect that sex workers face in civil society and in legal and health institutions big and small. Today, the commitment to the political understanding that sex work is work is a major underpinning of the international sex worker rights movement. That phrase is part of the push to legitimize sex work as a form of labor that people engage in, by choice and circumstance, to make a living.
"Sex worker" is (obviously) a related term, used to mean a person who exchanges their own erotic labor for money, goods, or services. In the North American context, the phrase is an umbrella term, which means that sex workers don't necessarily have genital contact with anyone, and they can include prostitutes, porn performers, phone sex operators, fetish workers, exotic dancers, and many others. In the international policy context, sex workers refers to people who exchange physical sexual acts. A lot of this has to do with the fact that international policy that affects sex workers is Last week GOOD magazine published a piece called Whore, Prostitute, Hooker, or Sex Worker: What Would You Say? and Melissa Gira Grant wrote Why did I call them "prostitutes"? Both are worth reading to get a feel of the current state of the discussion around these words (in short: confused and nuanced, respectively).
In North America, the gap I see ever widening is between people who adopt the phrase "sex worker" to identify themselves and align themselves with the movement, and people who would never use this identity phrase but do or have done transactional sex. The gap has a lot to do with privilege: people showing their faces and publicly identifying as sex workers are most frequently white, able bodied, cisgender, middle class, educated, and sometimes also retired from sex work. Yes, I've just described myself, and many of the folks who are likewise visible and outspoken are a lot like me. See the above video, or also Furry Girl's new project SWAAY (though she's really focused on having current sex workers represent).
I've been slowly steering myself away from using the phrase "sex workers", because more and more I am seeing these divides and I'm listening more deeply to the language other groups use - and it's significant that they are using different words. In a response to a Colorlines article on sex trafficking, an affiliate of the INCITE! collective kicks off with this paragraph:
As a collective of radical women and queer people of color and Indigenous people who identify as sex workers, people in the sex trades, people doing what we have to do to survive, and people who have been trafficked into sex work and other forms of labor, we wanted to respond to Rinku Sen's recent Colorlines blog post The Complexities of Sex Trafficking, and Some Simple Solutions because, for us, there are no simple solutions to the complex circumstances that inform our lives. Simplified responses do not do justice to our lived realities, or to the systemic conditions that inform them. While we appreciate Sen's distinction between trade and trafficking, unfortunately this distinction is not made within the laws currently being promoted to respond to harms experienced by people in the sex trades. In fact we believe that in all too many cases these laws increase harm to the very people they intend to help.
Other phrases I'm seeing include:
people who exchange sex for something they need (HIPS uses this one)
transactional sex
something for something love (see this campaign by a youth org in Uganda)
experience in street and informal economies (YWEP uses this, and it can also be inclusive of people who use drugs)
There are certainly more. Any other phrases you've been seeing?
I don't think that "sex work" and "sex worker" have outlived their usefulness as terms, but I do think its important to consider the impact of the language we use and really listen to how other people frame their conversations around this challenging issue. The fact remains that not all people who do transactional sex call themselves sex workers. Many people don't have language for it at all, or they would prefer not to think about it as an identity, but rather as a thing they do. Though everyone who tangles with sex, money, and survival should be welcomed under the big red umbrella, calling people by a name they don't embrace is problematic, disrespectful, and could put them at risk of harm.
Whew, that's a lot to chew on. Let me leave you with this: last October, the lovely Ducky Doolittle performed at the Red Umbrella Diaries, and in her story she talked a little about resisting the identity of sex worker. For many other reasons as well, her story is well worth a listen. It's called "Dominoes and Backbone" - click to listen.
