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.

More Than Just A Whore: Sex Work, Firefly and Audience Engagement

Whores have long been a popular trope in various media: from literature to television and film, the whore is an iconic and instantly recognisable part of our culture and will often make an appearance in one form or another.
Unfortunately, these appearances are, more often than not, based on the worst sort of Othering. A process that objectifies, stigmatises, exoticses and dehumanises us.
But now and again, there comes an attempt to counteract that negativity, to show the whore for the complex, diverse and fascinating creatures we are.
The degrees to which such attempts can be successful rely on a variety of factors: Who’s doing the attempting, and what is their objective? Who is their intended audience? What background baggage do they bring with them? What cultural mores have they been inured in and how do these impact their misguided if well-intentioned efforts?
And so we come to Joss Whedon, self-proclaimed feminist sci-fi fantasy hero to geeks everywhere, and his short-lived show, Firefly.
Whedon has long been touted – and, indeed, promotes himself – as an advocate of feminist, female-positive representation within geek culture. The creator of the hit show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he is revered for his efforts to write strong female characters with dynamic personality and stories that revolve around them.

One could wonder why greater efforts by actual female writers have not garnered the same attention (or been afforded the same opportunity), but those ponderings could fill a book, as could the discourse criticising his treatment of female characters, which often aligns with tired old tropes of sexism and misogyny, though very well-concealed (even to the creator himself).

Right now we’re here to discuss Whedon’s efforts to positively represent sex work and sex workers.
For within the world of Firefly, one of the main characters of the show, Inara Serra, is what’s known as a “Companion” – a sex worker.

Before I go further I should state myself here as being a generally-admiring yet critical fan of Whedon and his body of work. There can be no doubt that he is putting genuine effort into presenting women as complex and multi-dimensional characters and that Inara herself succeeds as being sympathetic, likeable, engaging and generally well-portrayed.
However, this does not mean Whedon, as a heterosexual white man, is going to succeed fully in his efforts. People far more qualified than I have noted his failings when it comes to representation of People of Colour and certainly his representation of women and varying classes do fall into tiresome stereotypical tropes at times. I feel that, for all the good work he does, Whedon gets a free pass on his failings because of his loftier efforts and I don’t believe this is constructive or conducive to his improving as a creator.
It is my opinion that, if you champion yourself as an advocate of issues for one marginalised group, you have more responsibility to be aware of the issues that other marginalised groups face, and to take care in your representation of them. Otherwise it is hypocritical at best and outrightly privilege promoting at worst. The fact of the matter is, deconstructing a lifetime of embedded education is a subsequently lifelong task. Whedon’s ability to perceive, identify and critique discrimination and prejudice within the genre he writes does not mean he’s going to do it right or perfectly every single time. This is true of anyone with privilege.
I expect more from Whedon because he has named himself as someone desirous of dismantling a lot of negative tropes within the sci-fi/fantasy arena and who has tried to do so.
With that contextualising out of the way, let’s move onto the show and its vision on a particular aspect of sex work in a theoretical future.
The issues with Inara’s characterisation and the way she is contextualised within the world of Firefly are many and varied and have to do with equally complex race and gender issues in addition to those of sex workers. To explore them fully would require a great deal more space and time and this is not the appropriate forum.

But perhaps my greatest objections can all be summed up in the following three aspects of the vision of sex work Firefly presents. These aspects struck me most vividly as being problematic and are the ones that, more often than not, are used by non-sex working fans to argue for how progressive Whedon’s vision is.