In which sex work is work

I admit that I decided to read this book largely because I am trying to alternate reading fiction and nonfiction but when I went to look at my nonfiction shelves I was basically like “Feeling dumb, what have I got that’s short?” and my copy of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work looked nice and pocket-sized. I’ve also been following her journalism for a while via Twitter so I sort of knew what to expect, which might not be the most educational approach in the world, but whatever, it’s what I can do right now. 

 

I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised that a decent amount of the material was already familiar to me, as sex work decriminalization is an issue that people discuss in my organizing circles sometimes and, as I mentioned, I’ve been following Grant on Twitter for a few years now. But I was nonetheless vaguely surprised that it would appear I have in fact picked up a certain amount of 101-level knowledge about sex work as a labor issue that is still not what you’d call “common knowledge” in the political mainstream (e.g. SESTA/FOSTA is bad, “anti-trafficking” orgs are scams). 

 

One aspect that Grant talks about a decent amount in this book that I hadn’t had as much familiarity with from, say, the SESTA/FOSTA news coverage, and that I really appreciated her theorizing, is the imagery of sex work--the issues of presentation and objectification and performance that frame how we are taught to think about both the sex trade and the “rescue” industry, and in particular the way that the figure of the prostitute is objectified by the people and organizations that purport to be the ones who care about sex workers. What stories are allowed to get told, and by who and to whom and in what way and for what purpose, is something that I find both very interesting and, frankly, comprehensible in a way that whatever the appeal of commercial sex is supposed to be isn’t. Grant has a good eye for media shenanigans (which all journalists should, although not all of them do) and is able to explain them in a pretty grounded way. I’d have loved a little more exploration of how the myths and arguments we employ when we talk about sex work--especially the language around work that’s supposed to be “empowering”--illustrate our beliefs about work more broadly, but I think she’s written more on that elsewhere. 

 

I’m grateful for the work of activists and writers like Grant in providing clear and well-researched arguments about sex work in part because I recognize that I am instinctually susceptible to the arguments of the antis; it’s very, very easy to fall into moralizing against something just because you personally can’t grok it--while this is the basis of the entire conservative worldview, the rest of us aren’t necessarily immune, either. With the whole business of commercial sex filed firmly in my head under Sounds Fake But OK, I am naturally inclined to find it perfectly believable that the whole business is run by monsters/aliens/some other kind of not-the-same-species-as-me creature and that for a human person (i.e., one the same species as me) to get involved must necessarily be unexpected and traumatic, like getting beamed out of your bed at night by little green men with big heads and subjected to probes for some kind of unfathomable alien research. Breaking down not only that sex work is work, but specifically that it is skilled labor, and looking at what kinds of skills it requires and what other fields of work use those same skills, not only reminds me that I’m the weird one here, but also gives me a framework for understanding my own distance from the subject in terms of both my class privilege and my particular skills and... anti-skills? Idunno if that’s a real word but I’m not sure what the word is for “things one is unusually bad at and can’t seem to improve,” but that’s where we’re going to put such staples of affective labor such as “being nice and friendly to strangers for extended periods of time” and “pretending to care about men’s opinions.” Anyway, due to the hard work of writers like Grant in educating dumbasses like me, I now at least understand the appeal of dating men for money more than I understand the appeal of dating them not for money. I hope I never have to do any kind of customer service work at all ever again in my life. 

 

Another big chunk of the book is dedicated to chronicling police brutality against sex workers, including and especially by organizations and governments that are supposedly “rescuing” sex workers from trafficking. The focus here is not just on illustrating the outrages--an approach that can easily turn into trauma-spectacle itself--but particularly on explaining how it functions and to what ends (as well as highlighting the cloying nonsensicality of the various institutions that purport to be using policing for socially progressive goals), how it is used to turn a behavior into a type of person and subject that class of person to specific forms of social control. If you’ve read Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, which contains a chapter on sex work, you’ll find some of this familiar, not just in regard to sex workers but to other criminalized classes of people. 

 

There are also some interesting historical tidbits as Grant chronicles the rise of anti-prostitution activism in the feminist mainstream, a departure from the more radical early days, and the history of uneasy solidarity between sex worker activists and other stripes of feminists. The lessons to be learned from them are fairly obvious.

 

Overall it’s a good, easy read, you will probably learn a thing or two, highly recommended.

 

 

In which there are gay cowgirl librarians

 Sarah Gailey is best known to me as the person who wrote the epic Twitter thread about the (thankfully scrapped) 19th century plan to farm hippos in the Mississippi River for meat, and who then wrote two novellas on the same theme. I read the Twitter thread but have not yet read the novellas, although I keep intending to, as the thread was very funny. But then a comrade recommended Upright Women Wanted, their post-apocalyptic Western about queer librarians. As I enjoy post-apocalyptic stuff and Westerns and many of my favorite people are queer librarians, I decided to read this one first.

 

This is a “high-concept” novella, in that it is very definitely and extremely a post-apocalyptic Western about queer librarians! Everything that happens in it is very much squarely within those things. The Librarians are tasked with distributing Approved Materials to far-flung outposts of what’s left of the United States a la the Pony Express, and while the story takes place in the future, the material conditions of life have regressed to a 19th-century frontier vibe because a forever war about nothing in particular has sucked up all the money and most of the petroleum-based products are diverted for military use only. This leaves us with an enjoyably mixed-time-period vibe to the worldbuilding, where people ride horses instead of cars because fuel is expensive, but every now and again something like a pair of latex gloves shows up.

 

While the Librarians are only supposed to distribute Approved Materials it turns out that they also secretly distribute Unapproved Materials, and also they are lesbians (all of them, as far as I can tell). This is very convenient for our protagonist, Esther, who has run away to join the Librarians in an attempt to basically get herself to a nunnery following the public execution of her girlfriend Beatriz, for deviant acts and possession of subversive literature. Esther is very sheltered and her dad is some sort of local political bigshot, and she has a lot of internalized queerphobia and is essentially ignorant of the existence of other queer people. The character development arc of the story is basically Esther coming to accept that she is not terrible and broken and learning that there are actually lots of other lesbians out there. Honestly I found it a little cheesy when we hit the emotional denouement and it was basically like “AND THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS: LESBIANS ARE EVERYWHERE,” although I did think it was cheesy in a very funny way, and I cannot argue with its truth value. 

 

What did annoy me a little bit is that, although the story is basically about finding out that lesbians exist and the cast of characters is about 90% lesbians, the story not only never uses the word “lesbian,” it never uses any name at all for any kind of queer people, instead repeatedly having characters talk about “people like us.” Like you don’t need to go down the discourse rabbit hole of laboriously coming up with a different noun for every single possible variation of human sexuality--microlabels are fine if you want to use them, but they aren’t necessary and they aren’t usually real useful for communicating with other people--but it’s a bit weird to have the whole story be about a thing and to never name the thing. Please just name the thing; there are like five billion extremely charming historical terms for lesbianism you could dig up to play with. 

 

I also was not real sold on the romance and I cannot tell if it is because it was too sweet and wholesome or if it really was kind of perfunctory; looking through some other Goodreads reviews it seems at least a few other people also weren’t real into it because it happened so quickly after Esther’s last girlfriend being publicly executed by her own father, so it appears that this actually isn’t the world’s most well-developed romance. I thought it was just me being incorrigibly aro again. But perhaps it also seems a bit rushed because this is a pretty short book and MOST of it is blessedly taken up with proper Western shenanigans like learning about the different colors of horsies and getting into dramatic shootouts in the desert.

 

The actual plot of the novella is a good time; it involves politics and murder and smuggling and all the kinds of stuff I like in adventure stories, although they are a bit strung together (there is a reason that all the summaries and blurbs and stuff focus on the themes and not the plot; it’s like, they’re journeying somewhere Esther doesn’t know to do a thing she’s not been told what it is, hijinks ensue). My favorite character is inarguably the charming, friendly, and emotionally supportive assassin, because of course it is. At one point our intrepid heroes shoot a cop and his entire posse, which is a satisfying thing to read these days. Overall I feel like this world could easily be expanded into a novel but it’d have to really go a lot deeper for the novel to be worth being a novel; as a novella it was a pretty fun popcorn read but if it were longer with the same level of cartoonishness I think that’d get old fairly fast. As it is, the thing takes like an hour to read, and it’s a pretty fun hour.