In looking at the sex industry through the specific lens of
gender, some very compelling contradictions can arise. Take, for instance, the
fact that the website Pornhub got an
average of 2.1 million visits per hour in 2014, but when it was discovered that
a Duke University student was performing in scenes to pay her tuition under the
name Belle Knox, she faced abuse and harassment from newspapers, classmates,
and the internet at large after the story went viral. Apparently women can be
filmed having sex and that’s all fine and dandy, but do it while also trying to
go to school and then it’s a news story, complete with threats of rape and
death. Here we have another example of a situation in which people are obsessed
with the sexualization of women’s bodies and how that can so often turn
negative, through violence, intimidation, and endless cyberbullying.
This is no less true for transwomen, who likewise find their
bodies caught between sexualization and violence. For many transwomen on and
off-screen, sex work can be a method of survival in a world that has made it
extremely hard (and sometimes a fireable offense) to both work and live as
their authentic selves. Janet Mock, and even VICE have written on how men (who
identify as straight) find themselves attracted to transwomen, and the backlash
that can ensue as both these men and the society we all live in struggles to
categorize them. From that same Pornhub
Year In Review, the phrase that placed second for Top Gaining Search Term was
“[derogatory word for a transwoman] fuck girl” with a gain of 191% in searches
in 2014. At this point, I feel compelled to point out that that same year, The Advocate noted that approximately every two days,
someone in the world died for expressing gender non-conformity. Let that
juxtaposition sit with you for a minute. Contemplate how yet again, sex and
violence find themselves side by side.
Sex as an industry is a very contentious issue within social
justice spaces, and I can very much see why. On one hand, even when we
sexualize transwomen, we do so with epithets and slurs, and there is no
shortage of stories about abuse occurring in this industry. On the other hand,
who are we to be controlling women’s bodies and telling them not to do this? I
want to name that this writing would be woefully incomplete without the naming
of race as a factor. As Janet Mock notes on her website, it is predominantly
trans people of color who are making their money in “underground” economies
such as sex work. Indeed, she writes, it is through sex work that she (and many
others) have found sex work necessary and even empowering.
Personally, in developing my own thoughts on this, I know
there’s no simple way to look at this, and certainly in ~750 words. Though many
people are more comfortable with absolutist declarations of right and wrong, I
embrace the complexity of the issue. I’m not supportive of the ways the sex industry
can dehumanize and mistreat women, but at the same time I think that a
puritanical declaration of wrong-ness is inappropriate, and also not something that
I, as someone who is middle class, the recipient of both white and cis man
privilege* and not a sex worker, should feel entitled to comment on. I
think it can sometimes be easy for people involved in social justice to turn our noses up
at something and declare it problematic without looking deeper, and I don’t
want that to happen here.
In summary, if I were to have to deem something problematic,
it would be how we as a culture relate to women’s bodies, and not the women who
find themselves in circumstances in which sex work is the most viable option.
In unpacking this issue, the ways in which SES, Gender, and Race are in play
need to be accounted for. It is no accident that so many trans women of color
make their living through sex work, just as it is no coincidence that as an
identity group they are the targets of abuse and violence in ways that white
and/or cis people do not face, in addition to the poverty that so often leads
to sex work. This week, like my two lovely co-writers, I am interested in your
thoughts on this issue. I want to think critically about something that we as a
culture can barely talk about. I’m excited to get into this on Monday with y’all.
*I make this distinction because I want to name my strange
relationships with whiteness and being a man while also naming that despite my
own internal complexities and questions, I still receive privilege in these
areas.
Thank you all for tackling this "sensitive" topic. Alex, just like you post suggest, it is only sensitive when we want it to be. It is oh so sensitive when we talk about it but not so sensitive when people are indulging and engaging in pornography. I think the discussion about trans women of color seeing sex work as necessary and empowering is an important one. I think it is so crazy how quickly this type of work escalates to violence. So I would say that I want to explore of the ways that this is labeled wrong, while sites like pornhub in review has numbers that show otherwise in a sense (the demand for it is still there). Btw, who knew that pornhub did their own statistics. What role do they play in this culture of gendered shame?
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