“Meet, Pay, Love”—that's the name of the review of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys by Toni Bentley in The New York Times. A very clever spin on Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love.
“Why is sex supposed to be free?” Bentley asks in the opening. “It never is. Ask anyone. Like Sebastian Horsley, England’s low-rent Oscar Wilde. 'The difference between sex for money and sex for free,' he writes, 'is that sex for money always costs a lot less.' Money is the elephant in every bedroom, making your parents’ constant presence look positively bourgeois... The collective cry for identity found in this unsentimental compilation will resonate deeply — even, I suspect, with those among us who pretend not to pay for sex.”
I had issues with the angle that we're all paying for sex, one way or another, not because I particularly disagree with that statement (I am divorced after all), but because it ignores a very crucial fact: people outside the sex industry are free to expect something from their exchanges with other people, be it dinner, gifts, alimony, the house, the boat, etc. Sex workers, on the other hand, are criminalized for being upfront about the exchange.
There may be an elephant in every bedroom, but in a sex worker's room, there's also a wolf.
When I started writing this column, I made a little promise to myself: I would not get political. I would keep Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the City near my heart.
But I have to confess it's hard to ignore politics. While I'm railing about the failed institution of marriage, some people are fighting to be able to enjoy the same privilege with their partners. While I discuss how important it is to get tested for HIV and STIs regularly, I'm stumped when someone messages me asking if I know any free clinics because they don't have health insurance.
I'm privileged socioeconomically, I'm privileged in my career choice, I'm privileged in my heteronormality. I'm privileged that I live in an age that doesn't see my sexual proclivities as paraphilias.
With that privilege comes the responsibility of remembering not everyone may as free as you are.
GARAPAN GEESE
I grew up in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth in the Pacific. It's perfectly all right if you have never heard of them. Unless you’re in the Navy or Marine Corps, a WWII Pacific Stage veteran or trivia junky, the unassuming dots on your map east of the Philippines have no reason to mean anything to you.
So let me tell you a story—and it is a story, as it goes way back before my childhood. During that epic race for the Spice Islands between Spain and Portugal, Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” the archipelago. Skirmishes with the unruly locals who were fond of thieving from the intruders led the expedition to dub these islands “the Isles of the Thieves.” It wasn’t until Spain claimed them formally nearly 150 years later that they were named for then Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria.
Post-Magellan, the islands were the possession of the crown until Spain sold them to Germany in 1899. After WWI, when a defeated Germany was stripped of all overseas possessions, the Marianas were turned over to the League of Nations to be administered by Japan. Less than two decades later, Japan annexed the islands and withdrew from the League of Nations. By the time war cast another shadow over the Pacific, some 29,692 Japanese military personnel were already stationed on Saipan, the main island of the archipelago.
Located at a strategic position, the United States wasted no time taking over. On June 15, 1944, they assaulted, leading to one of the most brutal and decisive battles of the Pacific Stage of WWII. American forces eventually gained control and a year later a B-29 named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian, also in the Marianas, and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
At war’s end, the islands were devastated. They, along with other islands in the region, (collectively known as Micronesia), became the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in the care of the U.S., which had no idea what to do with them. (Kissinger, in fact, while discussing the fate of the islands at the time, quipped, “We’re only talking about 90 thousand people—who gives a damn?”)
Located 6,000 miles west of Los Angeles, 3,700 miles west of Hawaii, and having too small a workforce, the islands were difficult to develop, much less made self-sufficient. Soon, they were almost entirely dependent on the U.S. to keep them afloat with monetary aid, SPAM and other non-perishable goods. They became the ultimate charity case.
In the mid 60s, the U.N. admitted the islands were so remote as to be almost impossible to manage. E. J. Kahn wrote that a visitor was “likely to be struck less by their innate tropical beauty than by the shabbiness of their man-made establishments.” By the 70s, the United States was encouraging them to determine their political status: did they want independence? Did they want to be federalized completely?
The island of Guam, also in the archipelago of the Mariana Islands chose to defect and become federalized. The rest of the island chain chose to do things their way and become a commonwealth, which means they are technically ruled by the U.S. and must abide by the Constitution, but are exempt from all manner of taxes and duties and have retained control of their immigration, wage laws, and land ownership laws as specified in the Covenant, a nifty document drafted up while the U.S. was still feeling pretty guilty about practically destroying the archipelago’s ecosystem and frail infrastructure.
In fairness to all those involved, the labor, immigration and wage provisions were largely an effort to assist in the development of the islands: in allowing for foreign laborers from Asia to come and work, they were massively increasing the otherwise tiny and unskilled workforce native to the islands. The idea was that this effort would result in the rebuilding of an infrastructure and assist the islands in embracing modernity and thus moving into the future.
That was the idea, anyway. Things don’t always go as planned. Seeing an opportunity in what could only be described as the perfect environment for businesses, a lot of retailers began to move their factories to the islands. In the Marianas, they could pay people relatively little—$3.05 an hour was the minimum wage when I was growing up there—and not be forced to deal with any quotas or duties. And tags on garments could say “Made in the USA,” because technically, it is the USA—as a business, what’s not to love about this set-up?
By the late 90s, the islands were the now-disgraced former congressman Tom Delay’s so-called “perfect petri dish of capitalism.” He and Jack Abramoff were up to their eyeballs in moves to protect the islands from full federalization that would raise wages and endanger the excellent business environment. Congressmen came and went on fact-finding junkets during this time and into the 00s, seldom doing more than golfing and partying (“The Came, They Saw, They Golfed,” as The New York Times put it).
The islands were rolling in cash. Life was good. For 20 percent of the population, anyway. The other 80 percent, comprised of foreign workers, slaved away day in and day out, making what most of us would call a pittance.
People who argue that it’s better to earn $3.05 an hour than, say, a dollar a day are right. This is not in question. If that’s the argument, they’ve failed to understand the most basic principles of democracy. See, it’s not really about money, it’s about rights. If you have a place and over three-fourths of the people who live there are foreign and therefore not eligible to vote or really effect any kind of change in their benefit, you don't really have a democracy. These people—mostly women—hardly know the language, don't know their rights, and don’t understand the law. Essentially, they’re second-class citizens.
In the ideal world it could work. We could host guest workers and treat them with dignity and be treated with dignity as a host country and all live like shiny, happy people holding hands. Sadly, our world is far from ideal. And so in the 00s, the Northern Mariana Islands were ground zero for forced labor in the United States of America and its outlying islands and territories. Workers were locked in their barracks at night, women were forced to make a choice between abortions and deportations, wages were garnished for things employers were legally responsible for—the works.
And so many women left the garment industry and took to the streets. Sex work, which had been somewhat prevalent already, what with all the congressmen visiting and what-have-you, exploded. At one point you could get a blowjob in the Garapan district of Saipan for six dollars. Thus the islands formerly known as the Isles of Thieves, the petri dish, ground zero for forced labor, became the Sex Islands.
In his book Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, my friend John Bowe writes:
Three or four blowjobs into Saipan, most white men’s reactions to the island evolve from, “Gee, this is wrong” to “Well, it’s complicated.” I sat in on countless and endless conversations comparing the sexual merits of Thais versus Filipinas, Russians versus Chinese, replete with body parts and the likening of women to various breeds of dog and sex acts to animal behavior. Were people so bored by the smallness of island life that they had nothing else to talk about or do? I asked a friend of mine—a white guy from the mainland whom I’ll call Fred—about this…. He laughed at my confusion. What was it about Saipan that made everyone, particularly the men, obsess, dream, and talk about sex all the time? He grinned and barked like an old man, “It’s kulcha!” It took me a year to get what he was talking about. During that time, I met a Bangladeshi who, in his own words, spelled out the same patently obvious thing: Saipan’s primary appeal wasn’t that you could exploit poor Asians. It was that you could fuck them. What was wrong with Saipan if not a sort of ravenous celebration of enhanced sexual power? Did I see it now? The Bangladeshi asked. “It’s not really about dollarland. It’s all about sexland.”
Sexland it was and still is, despite changes (on April 10, 2008, the Senate passed S. 2739, to federalize the islands' immigration and minimum wage laws. It passed the House on April 29 and was signed into law by Bush on May 8. The law was supposed to take effect mid-summer, but it's been delayed to the end of November of this year).
On any given night out on the town (namely, the tourism district of Garapan), you'd see the girls running in and out of vans as they were taken to the different hotels. Locals referred to them fondly as the “Garapan geese” and joked that it didn't matter when you visited: they were always in season.
Bowe describes the bust of a Garapan karaoke bar in his book and follows the trial and deportation of a Chinese garment worker-turned-sex worker. There were many such busts in the time I lived there, targeting largely the non-resident population, not their patrons. What bothers me most about the situation is not the sex work, but the idea of a population already made vulnerable by their nonresident status, compounded by the dangers of being in an industry that, while largely supported by the community itself, is so ruthlessly criminalized.
“Since sex—for free, for trade, for love, for fun, and for sale—permeated every level of life on Saipan, the idea that anyone on the entire island had the gumption to make a big deal about prostitution struck me as laughingly hypocritical,” Bowe writes. It is.
SEX WORK AND THE MEDIA
Melissa Gira Grant is a former sex worker, activist and writer. She's written for the tech blog Valleywag, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and $pread magazine, a publication by sex workers tired of being misrepresented in the mainstream media, among others.
After reading the review of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys in The New York Times, I contacted her to ask her thoughts on it.
“I may be harboring some cynicism, but when I heard that the NYTBR [New York Times Book Review] was doing this, I didn't think the result would be so un-scandalized by the notion that sex workers can write,” Gira Grant told me over IM. “There was very little judgment, I thought, and quite a lot of praise. The same paper devoted its Sunday Magazine section to an advance bit of a book by a man who has made his career on 'rescuing' sex workers. To then flip to the BR, and see this—on the front page no less—that's commendable. It would be incorrect to say I had no problem with the review—I just don't believe it was mocking, or exploitative, and in context, it's quite a success in terms of challenging the stereotypes around sex workers' ability to tell their own truth. Sex workers rarely make the news unless they're found dead or to have been in a politician's hotel room. That, and endless litanies of arrests.”
I tried to remember the coverage of sex workers on Saipan. I remembered two stories: one about a murder of a woman suspected of being a sex worker and another that ran on the front page of the Saipan Tribune about the changing migratory patterns of the Garapan geese. To do my due diligence, I ran a search on said daily's online archives for “prostitution” and “sex work.” The stories were mostly—surprise, surprise—about stings, arrests and coercion.
“The assumption is that nobody really cares, nobody picking up or clicking on a news story, about the lives of sex workers beyond keeping them away from 'respectable' people,” Gira Grant told me. “I think the mechanics of getting decent news coverage of sex work is more complicated. Editors want news hooks, and scandals work, to a degree. The people who would be lobbying for better coverage that doesn't defame sex workers—well, the sex worker community is only just organizing as other marginalized groups have, to demand fairness in the media.”
To get a picture of what sex workers are doing to this end, I contacted Audacia Ray, a former sex worker, former editor-in-chief of $pread, an adjunct professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University, and co-founder of Sex Work Awareness, a project that offers media training seminars for sex workers.
“Sex workers, like many other marginalized communities, find the mainstream media a crucial site of resistance due to the harmful misrepresentations and stereotypes that it promulgates,” the Sex Workers Awareness site reads. “This is especially true when the job the sex worker does is illegal and becomes further compounded by factors such as race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, relative poverty, drug use, family status, immigration status, and age. All too often, sex workers simply choose not to engage with the media due to potential social and legal repercussions or sex workers get in over their heads and are unwittingly exploited by the media without getting anything out of it.”
The seminar, called “Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker,” teaches sex workers how to evaluate and respond to media requests and become pro-active in telling their stories by writing press releases, op-eds and letters to the editor, pitch to a reporter, and pitch their own work to an editor.
“How can a journalist or a blogger avoid being exploitative? What angle should they pursue?” I asked Ray via e-mail.
“I think its not so much about angle but the completeness of representation and the respect given to sex workers in the writing,” Ray responded. “Sex workers are whole people and should be treated as such; moreover, the sex industry isn't a monolith. Journalists should take the time to make sure they have the terminology correct for the part of the industry being covered—i.e. issues affecting exotic dancers (and the language of their work) is very different than escorts.”
Ray linked me to Sex Worker 101, a comprehensive list of terms and aspects of sex work. In a post on the same blog, Ray lists things for the media to consider when sending an inquiry to a sex worker:
- How can you protect the sex worker’s job and identity? Does the media outlet you work for require people interviewed to give their full legal names? Be upfront about this.
- How will you conduct your fact-checking? How can the sex worker assist you without risk of exposure?
- How can you make yourself accountable to the people you interview? If a person you interview is upset about the way you represented him or her, how will you act to rectify the situation
“What are the stories the media should be watching for?” I asked her.
“I'd love to see more feature stories with nuance that are about sex workers and sex work organizing, and that tease out the complexities of the sex industry beyond 'is the sex industry empowering or degrading?'” Ray replied. “I don't find that question especially helpful, and it leads to the same kind of circular arguments. In general, I'd like to see people in the sex industry treated as experts on their own lives and the issues that affect them. In most articles about the sex industry, other people speak for sex workers, and this is really problematic.”
“Imagining I had my own news room,” Gira Grant said when I asked her the same question. “Investigative reporting: how much money do we actually spend, state by state, enforcing prostitution laws? Health: what's the global public health impact of policies originated by the Bush administration, and still in practice, that withhold foreign aid from NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that make free condoms available to sex workers on the grounds that this 'supports' prostitution? Law: a day in the life a public attorney defending those accused of committing prostitution related offenses. More broadly, I want stories about the role that race and gender plays in how prostitution law is enforced. Most of the mugshots of alleged prostitutes that I see published in news stories are of women of color. I want to reporters to ask why. It's not because there's a majority of women of color in prostitution. It's in part because of who police target. These aren't stories about hot sex. These are stories about bias and corruption.”
VICE CYCLE
Last week, I went to Las Vegas to visit with an old friend. Katya had turned to exotic dancing as a means to support herself while she got her Master's degree and moved to Las Vegas when she found the adult entertainment industry suited her.
“There are raids at the club all the time now,” she told me. “Vice is hungry and busting girls who are soliciting on the floor is good business. That's an eleven hundred dollar penalty right there. They don't want to eradicate prostitution. They wanna milk it for all it's worth. And that's a lot.”
She introduced me to her friend Edie, who works with her and is an independent sex worker.
“What bothers me about the media is that they have an incomplete picture of the sex worker because they're limited by the stories,” she told me when I asked her about media representation. “It's a poor street worker getting busted, or a politician with a GFE [girlfriend experience] type of high class escort who went to Swiss boarding schools. You don't see the thousands of women—and men—in-between. Maybe you don't want to see them. Maybe you don't want to imagine that your friend or colleague is selling sex for money. But we are.”
SEX WORKER LITERATI
At the center of the effort to bring the conversation of sex work to the table and allow all the sex workers themselves to tell their stories, is Sex Worker Literati, a monthly performance series featuring sex workers, former sex workers, and people with stories about the sex industry.
“It's unpretentious and humanizing, to get to spend time with sex workers outside a commercial interaction,” says Gira Grant, who performed at their event on September 3rd. “I mean, people do that every day. But they don't often know that their neighbors or co-workers or family members are sex workers. Recognition of the cultural impact of sex work will precede the meatier stories that do really need to come out to change mass perception of sex workers. And the contributions of sex workers.”
She adds going back to the review in the New York Times, “If we're going to talk shifting perceptions, this review more resembles the day-after press on Diablo Cody's Oscar win—which had basically nothing to do with telling legit stories about sex work, which this book [Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys] actually succeeds at.”
“Diablo Cody's win as in 'wow, strippers can write'?” I ask.
“Exactly.”
AROUND THE WEB
Sex Worker's Awareness has made their media training manual for sex workers available in PDF format. It includes examples of stories that draw media attention, their respective press cycle, the usual angle journalists are looking for, questions to ask journalists who seek a sex worker's opinion and many more pointers.
The Sex Worker's Project offers a resource kit for journalists focusing on three areas: "Demand" for sex work, confusing sex work and trafficking as being the same, and the U.S. administration's anti-prostitution pledge.
The Prostitute's Education Network is an information service about legislative and cultural issues as they affect prostitutes and other sex workers.
In Naturally Indignant, former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant writes about The Post's effort to verify Ashley Dupré's comments about how all women exchange sex for something at least sometimes, and lists a few careers women have the right to be indignant about.
In 7 Key American Sex Worker Activist Projects, Audacia Ray lists seven areas in which projects to support sex workers need to be developed in the U.S.
The Sex Workers Outreach Project USA is a national social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of sex workers and their communities, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education and advocacy.
Sex Economics is an independent, disinterested and impartial economic and social science survey of sex, sex work and sexual services.
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