Yay, Dead Hookers!

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.

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