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.

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.

There can be no doubt Whedon has made an effort to represent sex work in a positive fashion and to present a sex worker as a very human and sympathetic character. However, despite the best of intentions an unfortunate “positive stereotyping” has been enacted and one that feeds into many of the prejudices and discriminations held by the audiences of shows such as Firefly. Audiences that include large numbers of non-sex workers labouring under misperceptions of the industry.

Ultimately all of these issues represent society’s conflict around sex work, particularly amongst those who “would-be” advocates. There are many, many people who have no true objection to sex work except for the ways they perceive it to be practiced which directly contradict prominent ethical, moral and political convictions they have been brought up to have. Their belief is if only sex work aligned with these convictions, then it would be “okay”, failing to understand that the reality of sex work does indeed align with them, although it also doesn’t in more challenging ways (eg: sex work challenges heteronormative convictions).

This belief is what we see most prominently presented in Firefly. I feel that Whedon himself was trying to present his personal idealised vision of sex work that invariably drew from his own convictions and privilege (as a heterosexual white male self-identifying as a feminist interested in presenting empowered women, and so necessarily having a limited and even tunnel-vision perspective on what that entails) and so subsequently mirrored and reinforced those of his greater audience.

Perhaps this unconscious stigmatising is most apparent in the appellation proscribed to Inara’s profession: Companion.

It’s a name curiously devoid of intimacy, isn’t it? Of any sense of sexuality or even sensuality. It is likely this observation would be countered by the argument that Companions offer much more than simply sex. But what this reflects simply is writer/audience ignorance, because sex work in most forms already involves much more than “simply” sex.

It also implies that any service that does involve sex alone is somehow less, or poorer as a service, which betrays common-spread sex-phobia: the belief is that sex as a commercial activity is somehow tawdry and must be attached to greater intimacy in various ways to be elevated. The truth is that while sex work generally involves much more than just sex, all some clients want is just sex. And what on earth is wrong with that? I suspect the perception that there is, is tied to the pervasive belief that somehow a sex worker’s body is violated through their work, that sex for the sake of sex is viewed with conflicted feelings in society, particularly when women are involved.

If Whedon was truly sincere in promoting a different, more respectful, perspective of prostitution, he should’ve done his research on this point – and then taken it one step further by using a traditional term. Firefly may be set in the future, but its audience is a contemporary one.

By using a contemporary term reinforced with the positive images Inara is intended to send, Whedon would make a far stronger statement in his supposed message of whore-positivity. After all, in interviews Whedon has made note of the fact Inara should be seen as an almost religious figure, providing a sacred service and worthy of the most respect out of anyone on board the ship Serenity.

For in juxtaposition to these claims and to the general presentation of Companionship, whore is still a term used in a degrading way. It is a term used at times to differentiate Companions from those “other” sex workers and is used frequently as an insult.

While this does reflect contemporary reality in that they are an array of different terms with attached understandings to them, it is not useful from a perspective seeking to challenge audiences’ prejudices. Whore is today used as a derogatory, but the sex worker rights movement is actively reclaiming it.

While I appreciate there was a certain subtextual critique of the usage of the word occurring, I felt the overall point would’ve been far stronger if a less distanced term had been employed to describe Inara’s particular participation in sex work,. The problem was compounded in that distanced term being attached to a type of sex work seen as “elite”. It reinforced social associations to what, exactly, a “whore” is – and most do not perceive it as a positive.

As a result, it does not ultimately challenge the audience’s preconceived notions (this type of sex work is “good”, this type is “bad”), simply affirms them.

After all, it’s a well-known fact that “upper-class” Burlesque star, Gypsy Rose Lee, despised the word “ecdysiast” – in her eyes, she was a stripper and damned if she’d be known as anything else. The need to employ a word distanced from its meaning by lack of common use reflects an awareness of stigma – and of pandering to that stigma.

Furthermore, it is noted Inara is a Registered Companion. In order to be a member of the Guild of Companions, she must be registered with them.

If there’s one thing we all know it’s this: whores do not like registration.

Why?

Because registration is, more often than not, used to control us by corrupt officials with access to the information. Because registration is patronising – ostensibly, for “our protection” it assumes whatever measures we take to protect ourselves or practice our profession is not sufficient – we need the paternalistic government overseeing us with its benevolent, authoritative eye.

Often, registration is forever – it’s extremely hard to get yourself removed from a database once you’re on it.

Within the Firefly context, it means you must abide by certain rules and standards set by the Guild but it is never truly made clear whether this is a co-operative effort by Companions, or laid out by a governing body.

One could easily argue that registration is an aspect inherent only to the Guild and does not preclude sex work in other contexts. This is certainly true, and certainly reflects reality to some degree. However, what works against this argument is the contemporary political reality that registration is often argued for as a benefit to sex workers, despite sex workers being largely uncomfortable with the concept. Placed further within the future that Firefly presents, the topic of Guild Registration seems to align with this outsider mentality: hey this wonderful ideal system includes registration, which protects you!

The issue of registration, specifically within Firefly, additionally sets up a classist infrastructure between “good whores” and “bad whores”. To be registered with the Guild of Companions is a privilege and indicates you as a particular “sort” of sex worker – in combination with many of the other criteria set for Companions, this “sort” translates to “upper class” which is problematic in many ways, not least of which is contemporary audience interpretation, which I will come to shortly. Essentially, it reinforces that “positive stereotyping” I referred to earlier which tends to be hegemonic and limiting.

The biggest issue of all arises in how Companions are, as an industry, characterised and how, once again, that intersects with audience’s preconceptions of “good” sex work and “bad”.

Firefly is set in a future where China is a super power and so many aspects of cultural appropriation and “chinoserie” are woven into the fabric of the storytelling. It is possible that Whedon therefore modelled Companionship after Geishas, however I sincerely hope he understood that Geishas are part of Japanese culture and Chinese and Japanese culture are not interchangeable and that a future where the Chinese are a major presence (though few, if any, ever appear on the show) does not automatically mean widespread examples of vague “Orientalism” in action.
Certainly, what we learn of Companionship culture and tradition has similarities with that of the Geisha, and also of Renaissance Courtesans. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in fandom resources, fans have automatically made the link between them and extrapolated that Companionship involves the same sort of training and criteria. In several different conversations I have had with fans of the show, and in several different online fan-created resources I have seen the following stated as essential components of Companionship based on inferences drawn from the show:
Companions must be highly intelligent and educated, conform to a certain standard of beauty and be trained in performing arts, social grace and psychology. She must also undergo a yearly physical exam in order to keep her licence, and work from within a house led by a house madam. Trainees must also come from “good” families.
These same factors are cited by fans as evidence that Whedon was doing an amazing and wonderful job at presenting an ideal of sex work.
It is unfortunate therefore, that ultimately Companionship in Whedon’s mythology reinforces deeply ingrained classist convictions, elitism and social hegemony.
Once again we are subjected to the paternalistic institution of enforced health checks, of which the failure to comply will lead to being forbidden from practicing our work. Much like registration, requisite health checks have long been a matter of contention and frustration for sex workers: inherent to the legislation is the perception we are incapable of enforcing safe work practices, or that we won’t submit voluntarily to health checks.

It is also a practice that submit’s the whore’s body to ownership by another: they are not our bodies to do with as we please, they belong to the governing body, who demands we comply to standards set often without our input and consultation. It is a system used to control and belittle us.

What we know is this: our bodies are our livelihood. More important even than physical beauty (which in itself is a highly subjective and often culturally-cultivated concept), is our bodies’ health.

Furthermore, whores are extremely intimate with our bodies, day in and day out.

We are more than capable of assessing when our health needs to be “checked”. We know what our work practices are and trained to take care of ourselves in a variety of ways overt – the employment of condoms – and covert – keeping one hand for the client, and the other for ourselves.

They are also practices which put the onus of responsibility back onto the whore. But sex is not a solitary activity. It takes two to tango, so the saying goes, and the client has as much responsibility for the exchange that takes place.

So if we are talking about a world of registration and obligatory health checks for Companions, in a supposed future where within that Guild sex work is taking place in an ideal way – why are clients of the Guild not submitted to the same? Particularly in a world in which seeing a whore is characterised as an almost “religious” experience (providing you’re seeing one of the educated, talented ones, of course).

This imbalance reflects the persistent associations society has about the whore and is intrinsically tied to our societal perception that the whore is public property because of our work. We do not deserve even the same dignity and privacy that our clients receive.

And it is worthwhile noting that a Companion will lose her licence if she fails to take this yearly health test.

So what happens then if she continues to practice her work?

Why, then she’s working outside the Guild – outside of the respectable and revered network of sex workers. She’s reduced to a more common status of “whore”, and once again negative associations with that term and the particular “type” of sex work it implies, are reinforced.

And so once again, we come full circle to where whores must comply with a paternalistic rule in order to be allowed to work. To go against the grain – to, in fact, take full ownership of our work practices and the choices we make in regards to them – results in a demoted position within the world of Firefly.

Another prized and oft-touted facet of Companionship is the prerogative to choose or refuse one’s clients.

This is another problematic aspect of Whedon’s writing because it again connects with a widespread societal perception: the average, contemporary sex worker does not already choose their clients.

Reality could not be further from the truth. There are very few situations in which sex workers are genuinely forced into seeing clients concertedly against their will. Most sex workers you encounter will tell you in no uncertain terms they do not see clients they do not choose to. It is one of the most irritating, patronising and stupid misperceptions we are constantly coming up against.

Reality is, sex workers provide a service, not our souls. Each of us sets our own specific boundaries and then applies rules to our services based on those boundaries. Clients are informed of those rules and then either choose to see us, or choose to see another sex worker with a different set of rules. The vast majority of clients know and understand they either abide by those rules, or go elsewhere.

The common belief that a sex worker cannot refuse a client (particularly if they work within a brothel or agency) is reflective of society’s general difficulty with understanding sex work as work. Society has so many negative associations surrounding the exchange of sex for cash that its understanding of the way it functions as a business are extremely poor and that these misunderstandings are constantly reinforced in unrealistic media representation only compounds the problem.

Nonetheless, having a wad of cash does not automatically give you access to a sex worker’s body and, indeed, handing over that cash? Does not entitle you to do whatever you damn well please. Once again, negotiation is an essential component of sex work and each sex worker will decide and define their own boundaries.

Touting the “capacity to choose/refuse” without appropriate qualifiers also strikes me as disengaged from the socioeconomic reality of every day life. The pressing need of bills, and rent and mortgage and car repayments and food for example. The notion of a whore being able to willy-nilly reject a client simply because they don’t wish to see them is one steeped in the privilege of the non-worker, a person whose livelihood does not rely on an irregular and at times unreliable source of income.

While it is made clear at several points that Inara must work as she does need the money, the emphasis on choice of clients again engages audience perception that this is not common practice, further deepening the common-held prejudices about contemporary sex work. It implies that choosing clients out of necessity rather than desire is somehow a degrading experience.

The fact is that choice is a spectrum, not a binary – it is not simply “yes I want to” or “no I don’t”. A host of variable factors are involved in the selection of and agreement to see clients.

Further, the idea of binary choice is used to minimise the experiences of many sex workers. It presents the idea that sex workers who choose their clients based on factors like purely monetary ones are somehow victims.

This ultimately does not contribute to greater understanding of the business because it’s affirming subtle connections in audiences’ minds that sex work and sex are the same thing. There have been times where my gut instinct has told me not to see a particular client – not because of a sense of danger, but simply because I’m damned tired or I can tell we won’t gel. Sometimes I have obeyed this instinct. And sometimes, when my needs were more pressing, I pushed on and got the job done. Everyone’s done it before, no matter what industry they were in. That’s life when the world revolves around money.

However, once again it shouldn’t indicate any confusion between sex and work. While I appreciate it is difficult for an outsider to comprehend, the sex that sex workers have on the job is entirely different to that which takes place in a personal context.

Seeing a client because rent is due rather than because we’re really in the mood does not make it a soul-sucking experience.

It makes it a job. Like any other.
But further, Companions reinforce ideology about “good whores” and “bad whores”. That Companions evoke connections to Geishas and Courtesans and have been clearly modelled after these systems, present an array of troubling issues which assist in perpetuating the negative binary perception of sex work.
Good whores, you see, have Education. They are refined and classy and sophisticated. Also multi-talented. They are registered, and get checked once a year to ensure they’re not vectors of disease.
Bad whores are, presumably, everyone else.
This leads me to ask: what is the set criteria for becoming a Companion? How is one chosen to be a Companion? What if you can’t conform to that criteria although you have begun your training – are you simply cast out? And what options exist for you then? And who the heck is defining this criteria anyway?
Who defines the standard of beauty? Does that standard take into account ethnic diversity? Inara is a woman of colour, yet she clearly conforms to Westernised beauty ideals, with a little fetishised “Orientalism” thrown in for that “exotic” flavour.

This notion of “education” is in itself a highly divisive and categorising one. It reinforces a cultural ideal that formal education is more valuable and representative of an individual’s intellect than life experience and/or self-gained knowledge. It is a highly Westernised ideal employed to maintain class distinctions, attached to which are usually a whole array of gender and race privileges as well.

It is stated that Companions receive training in psychology, which again implies that this is not already an established tenet of sex work and one that sex workers become skilled in whilst working. Much like the issue of choice of clients, singling out training in things like psychology and counselling, comfort and healing suggests that these are not very common factors of sex work as it currently exists and would exist outside of the Guild. Once again, the opposite is true – they are critical skills and revolve around the capacity to manage the client and assess situations as well as provide a satisfying service.

The notion that formalised training is required to become adept at these skills also betrays a very elitist and white academic perception of ability as well as a general lack of knowledge about what actual sex work involves. A whore is more likely to heal and counsel their client by helping them live out a long-concealed fantasy, rather than holding their hand and asking them how they feel (although that can happen too). Based on my own experience, and the experiences of my peers, I would argue for the former being more powerful than the latter, and very few, if any of us, have had formal tertiary training in that area – but we’ve had years of it in observation of and empathy with our clients and our experience of sex work runs the gamult from street-based to Pro-Domme to escort to phone sex.

It is also a commonly held fandom perception that only a person from a “good family” may become a Companion, further underscoring the classism that is often attached to perceptions of “good” sex work and “bad”.

Classism does not simply hold that some people are more superior to others; it aggressively attempts to maintain that status quo by denying people of lower classes access to the same options and opportunities, regardless of ability.

Furthermore, the underlying association is that of whores with degraded behaviour, usually also associated with the “lower classes”. By suggesting a Companion may only be someone of “good birth” the implicit message is that Whedon and his fans believe an industry that has traditionally been open to people of all backgrounds should be confined to those who align to the criteria they prize, thus elevating it as a profession. The over-emphasis on the education and training of Companions, within the show which follows into fan discourse, sets up a clear separation between “them” and “us”.

Unfortunately, in doing so, he apes an unfortunate practice of division that occurs within the sex worker community today. And it occurs because sex workers are the subject of so much discrimination and stigma that we often seek to differentiate ourselves from those who practice behaviours we consider “worse” than ours in the effort to be viewed by the world with a little more respect, consideration and justice. The cruel double-edge of that sword is that, in trying to get that respect for ourselves, we reinforce these stigmatic heirarchies.

So unfortunately with this classist structure of Companions and whores, Firefly reinforces that stigma. It is a stigma I have felt when talking to non-sex working fans of the show who emphasise again and again that Companions are different because they are educated. It is a stigma that is intrinsic to the way our culture views sex workers. A university educated escort worker is often the subject of such mixed messages as “you’re too smart to be doing this” alongside “at least you’re not on drugs or working on the streets”. Never mind a university education does not preclude the capacity to do street work and private escorts are invariably confronted time and again with hard drugs being used by the clients whilst on the job.

Firefly, in the subtle ways it engages with audiences on these issues and through its chosen emphasis on a particular type of sex worker, one who conforms to “positive stereotyping”, is complicit in continuing the projection of this stigma, therefore only contributing to it.

I have no doubt that Joss Whedon’s intentions when he conceived the idea of Companionship and Inara were good ones. I’m sure he thought he was doing something revolutionary, something splendid and positive, from his white, heterosexual, male’s concept of feminism.

I’m sure he wanted to challenge audiences about perceptions of female sexuality, sex work and a woman’s ownership of both.

But due to the weighty stigma sex work already bears in the eyes of the world, his capacity to do this successfully is hindered by his own unconscious prejudices interacting with those of the audience. In an online overview of Inara’s character, the following comment is made, a comment that sums up all that is negative in Whedon’s idealised sex work depiction:

“Inara is sometimes mistaken for a prostitute”.

The distinction is again drawn between classes – prostitution is an activity of degradation, companionship of elevation. A simple yet grotesque misunderstanding of what is involved in sex work is perpetuated through unconscious engagement with pre-existing beliefs.

Prostitutes are those icky people who have sex for money.

Companions are those educated, sophisticated, charming people who have sex for money.

Whorephobic stigma is reinforced by the categorisations of the whore within this infrastructure under the guise of promoting whore positivity.

If Inara has sex for money she’s a prostitute.

There is really no issue with that. The real issue is people believing that it’s a problem and promoting that error of thought, thus reinforcing it. This prejudice is subtly communicated within Firefly. Inara may be a prostitute, but she’s a high class one, so it’s okay. She provides more than “just” sex.

But as established within this article, this is true of sex workers everywhere, of all classes and types.

And truly?

What is so bad about just providing sex, anyway?

So herein lies the truth: sex phobia. Sex phobia specifically centred around female sexuality. A woman cannot simply own her sexuality in its purest form and employ it with a mercenary objective: financial gain.

Time and again it is reinforced, in interviews, in commentary, in fan conversations: As a Companion, Inara enjoys high social standing.

But why?

Because it differentiates her from “other” types of sex workers. It elevates her above them.

For her to be elevated, a negative perception of sex work must first be in place.

That is the perception the audience holds, and the one it must justify by creating standards of sex work. The hooker with a heart of gold must necessarily be above her peers; she cannot simply be average, she must exceed or she is worthless.

The truth is that Inara is not actually different at all from almost any sex worker you would encounter today. Just like any other person, sex workers have a variety of backgrounds and skills. Inara is not “atypical” because she is intelligent, witty, charming and compassionate.

If anything, she is very, very typical.

It could be argued, consequently, that Firefly‘s depiction of sex work is an authentic one. On some levels, it is. Certainly, in Inara he created a vivid and well-rounded character.

Unfortunately, the societal perception is that what we see of sex work in Firefly is not realistic and not evocative of the experience of sex workers – that it is a hypothetical ideal. Ultimately, Firefly is not aware or critical enough of the common social consciousness around sex work to fully deconstruct it; instead it engages with established misperceptions and subtly promotes them.

It is not the worst depiction of sex work in media today; but it is far from ideal.

If you are a sex worker of any sort of experience – prostitution, BDSM work, peepshow, stripping, PSO, porn, etc – and are a fan involved in any sort of geek or pop culture – then I’d love to hear from you. Also, there is no gender bias here – male, trans and gender queer sex workers are also invited to contribute.

Geek/pop culture is widely defined, since the rise of the internet means that significant fandoms for a wide variety of genres in literature, film and television are active. Sex work is also widely defined but does exclude operators. Sex industry business owners are not the intended voice of this project. Sex workers only, please.

To apply, please email me at starletharlot@gmail.com briefly outlining your sex work experience, what arouses your interest about the project, what fandoms you are involved in, and a brief overview of something you’d like to contribute.

All backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome. You are free to be as political and ranty as you want, or to celebrate the affirmative and positive. Remember that racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination and prejudice have no place in this blog.

Like any offensive joke that relies on prejudice against a marginalised group to be funny, it’s belittling, base and outright nasty.

It’s also just plain wrong.

Whores are invariably Othered as a group of people. Part and parcel with this is the perception we do what we do because we’re too stupid, ignorant or desperate to do anything else. Which has a nice healthy dose of sex stigma attached to it too, doesn’t it?

This blog takes its name from that nasty joke to at once acknowledge that we are Othered, and point out that we shouldn’t be. We’ve got as many interests, hobbies, goals and ambitions as any other people. And just like any other people, regardless of what our background is, we are more than adequately capable of absorbing and dissecting the media, culture and pop culture of our societies, whether that’s in the formal jargon of the academic or the colloquial of the lay person.

Due to intersectionality, all of the above listed issues (plus several more) play a large part in discussing the issues of sex workers, as sex workers come from every demographic you can conceive of. And when you belong to one marginalised group, sex work can be a refuge – flexible working hours for handsome remuneration in an industry you will never be out of work in can be extremely attractive to scores of people for a variety of reasons.

But not only this, having an understanding – or even a passion for – of the political issues of marginalised groups will potentially enable you to better understand the issues of sex workers and what we’re so damned angry about anyway.

I have always found analogies to be a useful tool, but before I employ them here I want to make it very clear that while there are significant similarities between the discrimination and oppression faced by sex workers to those faced by other marginalised groups, and consequently similar issues, belonging to one marginalised group does not automatically mean a person will understand fully the issues and needs of another. It may give someone greater capacity to emphasise, but nothing compares to lived experience. Let me repeat that: NOTHING compares to lived experience.

If you are here because you are a geek interested in political issues, particularly those concerning privilege in fandom, but perhaps you don’t get what us mouthy whores are all riled up about, here’s that disclaimed analogy:
Let’s say you’re surfing the net and you come across yet another repetitive, racist discussion about why the next regeneration of the Doctor could not be played by a POC, or your favourite show introduces yet another character played by a POC and you start counting the days until that character is brutally killed off, how do you feel?
Well, let me tell you how I feel whenever I read yet another fan fiction in which a poor oppressed whore is rescued by the writer‘s favourite character, or read a comic in which a crack addict street hooker is abused by her pimp or watch a show where a supposedly ‘radical’ depiction of whores is all the rage but is actually elitist and classist and sets up ideas of ‘good whores’ and how ‘sex work would be ok if only it was ALL like THIS!’ (Joss Whedon, I‘m looking at YOU and I ain‘t smiling), I feel: angry. No, make that infuriated. I feel a bone-aching weariness, a sense of despair, imploring my friends: ‘sweet Jesus, does it ever END?’ I feel depressed and futile and frustrated. I feel sickened that there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of people out there swallowing this goop and taking it on as representative of my identity. I feel indignant, and righteous and like I don’t know how I can keep on ploughing on with this anger every single day because society is so screwed up about sex that it wants to fetishise, objectify and exploit me by misrepresenting me as some grotesque stereotype or cliché to further some trite, unimaginative plot.

Because make no mistake about it: when it’s me who’s watching or reading, the whore represented is not an archetype or some unconnected plot device. It’s me. It’s my life. The life of so many of my friends. Our profession. Our profession just also happens to have a vast amount of stigma attached to it that makes our lives tend to be a series of tricky negotiations. We don’t really want to see further reinforcement of that poppycock when we switch on our televisions to relax. But, lucky us…

Like women, like queers, like the disabled, like POC, whores are subjected to a white, male and heterosexually dominated system that exoticises us and represents us poorly at best and usually highly offensively even when the objective is well meaning (JOSS WHEDON). Again, the specific and individual issues encountered by each group is highly unique and cannot be fully comprehended by anything but lived experience; nonetheless there are parallels and intersectionality is a significant player. As just an example, I am a queer female whore.

There are some amazing resources out there dedicated to issues in fandom such as privilege, racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, classism, and transphobia where some seriously awesome discussion happens. I’m a devourer of these resources because I’m passionate about these issues AND I’m a geek and I’m passionately interested in how greater cultural tropes manifest themselves within subcultures and how we, as a community, can deconstruct them.

And then I noticed that there was nothing dedicated to whores in pop and geek culture.

I certainly knew this was not due to any shortage of geek whores out there. Geek whores are everywhere. And it’s certainly not due to any shortage of representations of whores in pop and geek culture.

It’s an interesting thing about being a whore. I’ve always said it’s the last test of how radical someone truly is. Sex-positive feminists, gay rights activists, devoted anarchists – all of them have stopped, choked, turned a funny colour and then showed their prejudice to learn that yes, indeed, there is a whore in their midst. They can get uncomfortable or outright hostile. Some just get thoughtlessly inquisitive, forgetting entirely that they don’t particularly enjoy it when they go to Cousin Sue’s wedding and all their relatives want to know in blow-by-blow detail what gay sex is really like. Some say it’s completely awesome and, in a sad way, they really mean it although the truth is you’ve changed in their eyes. You’re no longer you, you’re a Whore. You’re not awesome because you just are, your awesomeness is intrinsically attached to your Whoredom. This is the moment when you begin to understand what it might feel like to be the Token. The Token Gay Friend or the Token POC Friend.
It doesn’t matter what sort of reaction they have to you, their perspective of you has altered. More often than not, it is tainted, because they are as much victims of a sexphobic society as any of us, and even as “cool” as they might think it is, they’re thinking to themselves: “but I don’t understand how you can do it. I could never do it.”

But damn, you’re a great person to have at parties. You’ve got Stories.

So I’m not all that surprised to see there’s not too much discussion by whores on the representation of whores in pop and geek culture. There can be just as much reluctance to out oneself on line as in any other situation.

But I think it needs to start happening.

Geeks, like greater society, are endlessly fascinated by whores. Why?

Well, to put it simply: whores have sex. LOTS of sex.

Not all of this sex is typical penis-in-vagina sex. Some of this sex is fist up arse, or ritualised boot polishing or naughty words cooed down phone lines or gyrating groin in slack-jawed face.

Regardless, the whore manifests sexual energy in all her/his many forms and types.

And, as it turns out, society has this small hangup about sex.

Most people love sex, or like it, or at the very least want to like it. Many people spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Still other people spend a lot of time working out how to get more of it. Then there are those who have plenty but don’t like what they’re getting but put up with it cos they think they should. Then there are those who won’t stop until they get exactly what they want. Sex sells, as the saying goes, and never mind the sex industry – just take a look at any dozens of magazine covers, advertisements, television programming and all the other various media we’re constantly inundated with. And yes, most of these highly sexualised images focus on women, which is a whole other loaded issue on its own.

Yet at the same time this cultural obsession with sex dominates our consciousness, it is still vastly stigmatised. There is an enormous sense of shame and inhibition around sex, largely focused on either eliminating the desire for it or making sure it only happens in the appropriate ways. The appropriate ways, of course, have largely been dictated by religious bodies led by men with the objective of controlling people. As a consequence, these mandates have become intrinsically intertwined with sexism, racism and heteronormatism. Although men certainly do not escape the burden of guilt attached to sex, it is primarily focused on women. The whole “virgin/whore” dichotomy no woman can ever seem to escape for any reason, anywhere, ever. The cultural image of a whore is usually female. But you can add in hefty doses of stigma against homosexuals and transsexuals too and anyone else who doesn’t fit the heteronormative aspirational standard, like the disabled (mental or physical – towards whom there is a truly revolting and highly oppressive attitude of ‘those people shouldn’t be having sex‘!!) and you will find all of these people working within the sex industry. They have the double burden of being seen as “abnormal” by the majority of society and sexually vilified accordingly (if you must be gay, can’t you at least be celibate about it?) and so the concept they charge for sex is received with increased outrage but also with that delightful double standard attitude of “well, what else could such degenerates do, anyway?”

That’s the final insult, really: we are in a job because there’s a need. But goddamn if any “decent” person is going to admit to that, even as they’re sneaking out the backdoor of the local brothel.

Sex work is work. It can be good work, boring work or lousy work and sometimes all three in one shift, just like any other job. It is a job like any other. Sex work can be confronting or empowering. Sex work can be frustrating or touching. Sex work can be exhausting, educational, depressing, inspirational, fun, tiresome, hilarious or infuriating. If this sounds like your work experience, maybe you’re beginning to get it.

But more than anything else?

Sex workers are people.

We are not stereotypes. We are not cliches or plot devices. We are not tokens.

And here, in this blog, is where a bunch of rowdy geek whores are going to get angry every time we’re treated as though we are in our fandoms of choice.