Sex workers, the vast majority of whom are women, are stigmatized and devalued by society for the work that they do. When they try to move into other careers, their new lines of work are often devalued and their only choice seems to be to keep doing sex work to supplement their income.
In a new anthology, sex workers write about their transition out of sex work into mainstream jobs, reflecting on how their past experiences in sex work informed their views on joining the conventional workplace.
In January, I wrote about how sex workers are represented in mainstream feminist Canadian literature. Today, I’m going to discuss sex workers speaking for themselves in the anthology Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex, edited by Matilda Bickers with peech breshears and Janis Luna. The book is both edited and written by current or former sex workers.
The contributors are taking back the narrative. We are so often imagined by others, and while there are some great representations of sex workers in mainstream literature, they are few and far between. For every When we Lost our Heads, there are at least five books that reduce us to one-dimensional characters. Nothing beats lived experience. This is especially true when the writing is about marginalized communities.
The collection includes poems, interviews, essays, and even some visual art! The topics are also wide-ranging — we learn what it’s like to be an Indigenous survivor of the foster-care system in Sudbury, who aged out of the system and started sex work. We hear about sex workers’ first realizations that they can use their bodies and charm to make money and earn a living. We learn about what it’s like to come from a long line of sex workers. We get a history lesson in stripper labour organizing in the U.S.
Although the contributions cover a variety of subjects, the stories about transitioning out of sex work will be my focus for this review.
Who can afford to retire?
While there isn’t a lot of research about sex workers “retiring,” there is a theory that sex workers don’t retire in the same way that other workers do. If you’re a banker or a teacher, you get a party with a sheet cake and start collecting your pension. While some sex workers retire, never to return, many of us retire partially or very gradually. This could mean only dancing once in a blue moon when you’re busy with a day job or not taking any new clients.
In this book, many of the contributors went back to sex work for money to live on while doing clinical placements in school — there are jokes about the social-work-student-to-sex-work pipeline. Others moved on to nursing or care work; both also require unpaid clinical placements. All of these jobs are traditionally coded as women’s work.
I believe that all tuition should be free, to encourage low-income and otherwise marginalized folks to pursue education and graduate without student debt. I also firmly believe that all students on placements and internships should be paid at least minimum wage, and ideally a living wage. But unfortunately, our neoliberal capitalist system doesn’t agree with me.
It seems like traditionally male occupations pay their students — most apprentices in the skilled trades are paid, as are engineering students. But future teachers, nurses, social workers and other health-care professionals (with the exception of doctors, who were traditionally male) are expected to work for free for a thousand-plus hours and still pay for the pleasure in tuition fees.
In Waiting to be Rescued from my Office Job (the title itself is a sarcastic jab at prohibitionists who want to “rescue” sex workers), Emily Warfield writes about her job as a legal secretary. She’s of the opinion that the 9-5 grind slowly kills you and I agree! She misses having free time for herself; now she only has a couple of hours in the evening to eat dinner and prepare for the next day. The boredom and monotony of never-ending spreadsheets and the literal backache she gets from her office job grind away at her sense of self.
She’s looking forward to going back to school and becoming a social worker, but to pay her bills during placements she’s going back to sex work, because it’s a job that fits her life in a way that few jobs do. Janis, one of the book’s editors, replies with her own story: she turned to sex work to pay for grad school because her job as a youth counsellor for LGBTQ+ students didn’t pay a living wage.
Sex work and emotional labour
How I Ended Up Being a Social Worker at the Veterans Administration, a conversation with Eden, was the piece that I felt most personally. Like Eden, who worked at a strip club close to Fort Hood, I also spent years working at a strip club close to a military base in small-town Ontario. Like her, I noticed a lack of mental health supports for soldiers, and while dancing for these men, I sometimes took on an informal counsellor role.
It’s heartbreaking to dance for a 19-year-old boy, who grew up in the Maritimes with no real job prospects so he joined the army. Only this Saturday, he has fear in his eyes because on Monday he learns what war zone they’re shipping him off to. I took off his baseball cap and kissed his forehead. I told him I’m a good witch and my kiss will protect him. He was comforted.
I’ve also seen men and boys who came back and their eyes told me they saw things in Iraq or Afghanistan that they couldn’t unsee. Like Eden, I think those conflicts were bullshit “wars” that were really about imperialist attempts to control the global oil supply.
There were, of course, times when I told soldiers that I’m not qualified to give advice, but I’m happy to listen. But in my heart, I was mad about it. Why am I doing unlicensed emotional labour when this should be the military’s job? Why are women always left to pick up the pieces?
Eden eventually retires from dancing and becomes a social worker who works with soldiers and veterans. As time passes, she’s unable to reconcile helping soldiers while knowing that although they are often from vulnerable backgrounds, part of being a soldier involves going to places with even more vulnerable people and inflicting trauma on them.
No such thing as unskilled work
The piece Intimate Labor by Matilda Bikers was my favourite. It is so well written! She begins by talking about her “maddening hobby,” which is to ask “civilians” (what we often call non-sex workers), mainly strip club customers, what amount of money it would take for them to give a lap dance. The sums are always absurdly high, and it seems like the drunk patrons who try to get on stage and spin around the pole don’t understand the concept of actual stripper math — which entails converting your $100 hydro bill into five dances, the duration of 15 to 20 minutes of non-stop lap dancing, if you dance $100 worth of $20 lap dances for one client.
I’ve had versions of this conversation with my civilian friends when they tell me they’re broke and want to get into sex work. They fail to understand that their idea of sex work is more of an erotic fantasy than actual work. You can’t magically conjure up a series of regular, respectful clients. They don’t understand when I tell them that scenario entails kissing many frogs and that kind of clientele takes years to build.
Bickers moves on from dancing into full-service sex work, then into care work. She denounces the idea that sex work and care work are unskilled jobs. And I agree with her: the barriers to entry into both are relatively low, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of skill to do the job.
At her care work job, she has a particularly gross and boundary-pushing patient who sexually harasses her while she changes his diaper. Her male supervisor gaslights her when she brings it up, in the same way that many club managers often dismiss strippers’ complaints about difficult customers. She finds herself doing math in her head, asking how much money she could charge this boundary-pushing patient if he was her client and she was a sex worker. Would she even want to take this man as a client?
A while back, I read a series of open letters in support of sex workers written by mainstream feminist organizations in the 1970s, which denounced the violence sex workers face. The letters are called “All the Work We do as Women.” Since then, that phrase has been in the back of my thoughts.
Sex workers are pursuing education, we are volunteering and doing community work, we are caring for our children and sick relatives. Sex work is a way to have the time to do all these things and still have time to rest and pay your bills.
It’s not us who should face widespread stigma and condemnation — what should be condemned and criticized is a system that devalues all the work we do as women.
The book is all sorts of amazing, with beautifully written firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a sex worker and how sex work informs workers’ outlook on conventional jobs they have later in life. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore to buy Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex!
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
