Not Your Straw Man

A Stripper’s Plea for Nuance in the Raging Sex Work Debate

Customers say the wildest shit about strippers. I’ve witnessed a dude, as big as his inflated ego and the brim of his tall-crowned straw hat, call us cows while mooing as he chucked actual pennies at the stage. Turns out he was buying himself drinks with a stolen credit card, so we didn’t have to chastise his ass for long before he was stuffed into a cop car like a circus clown act. Not that it matters but for the record, the girls on stage were snack-sized save for a visibly pregnant dancer who made a fortune off her unmistakable glow, and they were all gorgeous. So bewitching, in fact, that people often struggled to form coherent thoughts in their presence.

This is neither an endorsement of carceral feminism, which redoubles rather than resolves gender-based violence through police and prisons, nor a fatphobic quip about this man’s size—if in some twilight zone I were, say, a pickup artist, i.e., a creepy self-proclaimed strip mall wizard in a pleather jacket and plaid fedora, you’d find me lurking at the Big & Tall Outlet. But it is an indictment of how immature men—who wear blasphemous hats and declare cishet a slur—degrade beautiful women, with little self-awareness, to thinly veil their own insecurities.

I have no doubt customers have said worse things about me out of earshot than they have to my face, and I’ve been compared unfavorably to Stalin’s granddaughter. But to my surprise, the only customers who’ve ever pointed and laughed at me while I was on stage, as if I were a zoo animal, were a vicious gaggle of pearl-clutching suburban moms with teased asymmetrical bobs and tweed dresses. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the pecking order of capitalism, which seeks to fracture the power of our collectivity through conditions of division and alienation. But I did what anyone would do in response to such mean girl behavior: I scurried up to the very top of the pole and sat there frowning like an irate koala with oddly buff lats before displaying my rage and skill with a screeching death drop to let them know I saw their petty cruelty and had feelings about it. Problem is, I hurt my own ears.

I think I was more disappointed than surprised that these women, like so many women, leverage internalized misogyny laterally to do the work of patriarchy. Well, not quite laterally, as women create hierarchies within those of the world order, the virgin/whore dichotomy a zero-sum fight to the death for a weak power artificially engineered to be immovable. But this vampiric power requires the blood of the dead and dying so its weakness is its lack of true sovereignty despite those who worship at its altar. This parasitic power cannot sustain itself, unlike the vampire slayers who have no need or want of vampires.

Both in and beyond the club, I’ve witnessed insecure women project their shadows onto the unabashedly embodied femmes and nonbinary baddies who live out loud, especially sex workers and others who defy the reactionary gender wars that have thrown into sharp relief fascism’s rising tide over the past decade. This is the most basic context for current debates over all things gender and sexuality—from sex work to gender panic to heterosexual trouble to the MILF phenomenon of younger men dating older women. I for one am almost exclusively attracted to people my age or older—I love a silver fox—but I’ll confess to an accidental cougar era. Besides, I’m here for the revenge arc of scorned vampire slayers rising from their allotted graves to say, I’m not dead yet, fuckers.

Beneath the shiny veneer of self-righteous moralizing framed as political critique, lies a pervasive hatred of those at the margin who refuse to hate themselves, who don’t disguise their bodies or otherwise hide all the life springing from them.

And. By hate, I mean they both desire and fear us. Pleasure and danger. Attraction and repulsion. In the thesaurus, jealousy is a synonym for hate. So is malice. Humans are like magnets in a gravitational field whose natural state is attraction. Love is a mirror, which also reflects its absence. So the mirror is not dangerous in and of itself but in danger of being shattered by those who confuse it for their own reflection. Love’s presence requires, first, self-reckoning. Until then, love’s negation, which is a fear of love (also of death), masquerades as hatred. So.

People hate femmes and thems who, for example, dare to feel sexy in public when they’re past their so-called prime according to sick standards established by the likes of Pablo Picasso. Men rule over everything aesthetic, I guess, because I’m supposedly acquiescing to the male gaze by painting my face with a shimmering makeup palette when I goddamn feel like it. Does the same apply for interior design, then, since it’s another expression of my personal style? Maybe I’m clueless, but like Cher Horowitz, I don’t think so! If Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal is a statement piece, then I don’t see why I can’t be art on a regular Tuesday. I’m avant-garde, baby.

Look to nature as an example of deliciousness untethered from the male gaze. Marvel at the sunset’s slutty striation of neon sorbet melting into night’s calm haze.

People hate femmes and thems who flaunt their beauty like walking artistic statements, fluid and joyful in spite of the sharp statistical edges of the evil empire, which tries to obliterate them in the classed crosshairs of misogynistic, transphobic, whorephobic, ableist, xenophobic, colonialist, racialized sexual violence. I know this non-exhaustive list is a mouthful, but I value the precision of language as much as its poetry.

Feeling enraged by the material harms and legal violence of anti-sex worker stances, I have to remind myself that misogyny is a powerful poison, and part of its power lies in the buy-in. I know the raging sex work debate cannot be reduced to a psychoanalytic fable of envying and so reviling in others what one denies in oneself, but I think it’s worth pointing out that as any stripper knows, cishet women tend to exhibit erratic club behavior, which falls into two main categories but shares something in common: the refusal to acknowledge we exist and deserve to make a living.

The first form of acting out is through attention-seeking tantrums, trying for example to twerk and shimmy their tube tops off right in front of the stage as if to outperform the performer they can’t or won’t acknowledge as fully human. Emphasis on trying—the bouncer will stop them, but it’s cringey.

The second form is much quieter and more vicious. These women refuse to acknowledge us altogether. Walking up to a table with an exhilarated grin after an energizing stage set, I clock the visible disdain in a sideways glance and brusque hand wave, like dismissing the help, telling me everything I need to know in an instant. It stings a little, to be peremptorily rejected as a fellow human being. I wish they knew, although it might not make a difference, that if a woman is seated with a dude, I will approach her first and follow her lead—I promise I’m really good at ignoring men, which doesn’t mean I hate them! Awkward as I may be, I am emotionally attuned to others, warm, and a little weird, or maybe a lot, but not a monster.

***

There is another, much angrier, version of this essay that eviscerates, with devastating precision, the recent anti-sex work invectives of Clementine Morrigan, a “moral philosopher,” and Khara Jabola-Carolus, a “decolonial feminist.” But it’s not my style to publish unhinged response pieces, even if I lost sleep over the fury surging through my body when I saw them misinform or attack curious, earnest Substack readers trying to defend our right to exist.

In what follows, I still cite both writers to unpack the half-truths and baffling fictions, the false analogies and telling omissions—but only insofar as such logical fallacies are symptomatic of a broader culture of reactionary social discourse, public policy, and legal violence.

Morrigan and Jabola-Carolus have overlapping but distinct arguments. There is thus much to say, and another draft quickly grew so long Substack warned me it may have been truncated in some email clients. To avoid that unwieldiness, I’ll be releasing it in three installments, based on a Venn diagram of their ideas.

Part I starts in the center, where the arguments of both writers in question overlap. Here, my focus is on why language matters in social movements as it’s so often emptied of its original meaning then weaponized to perpetuate more violence. From stereotypes to straw men, I go in search of language’s shadows.

Part II, which is forthcoming, and that I’ll shorthand as “Bad Sex,” focuses on the limits of Morrigan’s sweeping critique of pornography as the “industrialized eroticization of misogyny.” The problem with armchair theorizing is stopping short of thinking through what something will look like in practice. Take the recent wave of legislation (i.e., the “Kids Act”) being pushed through Congress at an alarming rate to expand the scope and scale of an already dystopian Orwellian surveillance state in the name of protecting children. I’m less concerned with arguing against the unoriginal idea that porn = bad, and more with the broader social anxieties of which it is a harbinger. There is no silver-bullet solution to misogyny. The best of intentions produce unintended consequences when relying on the state as an arbiter of so-called justice.

Part III, which I’ve tentatively titled “Bad Math,” argues that sex work discourse has a class problem. This is evidenced by Jabola-Carolus’s bizarre claim that pro-sex work, which she conflates with human trafficking, is anti-labor. But broadly speaking, this discourse lacks nuance in an industry that arguably has more complicated class dynamics than most due to the broad spectrum of consensual sex trades it includes, as well as workers’ proximal stratification and relative access to wealth and resources.

I also discuss labor exploitation and economic precarity from the street to the screen, including how financial discrimination impacts sex workers, albeit in grossly disproportionate ways. Within these differential vulnerabilities I expose the thinly veiled saviorist logics underlying Jabola-Carolus’s push for sex work abolition. This is ironic since she suggests that SWers and those who support our right to make a living condone colonialism. This is rich coming from someone whose research has been quoted by the likes of former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who Trump recently fired, and not because she confessed to literally murdering her puppy. To be fair, Jabola-Carolus claims DHS twisted her research. Twisted, indeed.

But there is no version of this essay, unhinged or not, where I disrespect Morrigan’s decision to stop doing sex work or her personal reasons for it, as I deeply empathize with her trauma history, full stop, which also has some painful parallels to my own.

There are significant distinctions and departures, too. We’ve had different experiences of sex work and sex workers. I’m not pro-work, period, but if not for sex work it’s highly doubtful I’d have time to prioritize writing, which is beyond worth the trade-off to me. The fervor with which I love writing is matched only by the relationships I treasure—with animals and the ocean and constellations—of stars in the night sky, and of people I love, many of whom are sex workers. I love sex workers. They’ve held space for me when I felt most alone in this world, and had my back when others turned theirs on me. So I won’t sit idly by as rhetorical sleights of hand further stigmatize an already criminalized class. Sex workers are my people.

So I’m breaking the frame of my righteous rage to critique the larger picture, not leveraging it to attack individuals. I don’t think a line-by-line exegesis is necessary, anyway. To be frank I think my very existence undermines their arguments, because within their logic I am an impossibility. I don’t square with their narrow view of sex workers—neither victim nor villain, neither liberal choice feminist nor uncritically celebratory groomer, neither ignorant of labor history nor incapable of pointing out the irony of that accusation when they willfully erase ours at every turn of phrase.

I’m honest to god trying to engage in good faith here, so I hope you’ll indulge me in a little scrappy stripper humor to save me from crying and wringing my hands toward the heavens in an endless lament. This is why I avoid the rage bait of online silos because as an adult human person who has immediate problems that require my attention, like how I’m going to dig myself out of debt, I can’t afford to pontificate on vitriol that reduces entire groups of people to spiteful soundbites. Nor would I want to participate in the attention economy of hot takes because I worry it would drain the energy I reserve for, to summon James Baldwin, the effort of loving.

I’m just a writer asking questions, not dictating correct opinions like a court jester. But I don’t think it’s foolish to say that the sooner we realize our fates are linked, the sooner we can begin that most difficult task sex workers undertake all the time, as a matter of survival. To stare unflinchingly into the death-driven void of state violence, and still find magic that glistens like the fresh ink of fiery roses planted in a scar’s flowerbed just beyond it. To know—the phantom pain of scars on scars from surviving this violence—and not break.

And because as a writer, I’m drawn to desire’s ragged edges unraveling arguments. Fuck binaries and clean lines. I know we must account for the everyday brutalities waged in their name. And/also. I want to know the unlikely intimacies bridging impasses. Desire’s shadow undoes us, yes, but so does love, which is not the same thing as its perverse negation.

And now, onto the overlapping region where two minds meet, two spheres that pushed what’s at center to the periphery, now reduced to the curved lines fighting against their own erasure despite the fact that without them, the container would shatter and so couldn’t hold water. History is a palimpsest where what gets erased and written over holds the most meaning, which is precisely why it’s stolen and so the thieves must hide the evidence. But the evidence speaks, reflecting everything repressed.

Can you see me, beneath smudged lipstick and pencil shavings, casting back ghosted alphabets?

Look closely, I dare you.

***

Let’s dive into the terms some anti-sex work feminists seem confused about, shall we? #notallswerfs

Sex Work:

Sex work is the consensual exchange of money or valuable assets for services expressly created to elicit arousal (and so doesn’t include Heather Peace as Detective Murray in the TV show Lip Service, as one totally hypothetical example). It spans the slippery slope of legal/illegal labor, including but far from limited to OnlyFans, commercial erotic massage and domming, stripping, and street-based work, which both writers refer to as “prostitution.” As a legal term that criminalizes people, “prostitute” is a slur. A slur, it must be said, is attached to institutional violence, not an individualized invention to stave off critique. Discrimination is not the same as disagreement.

Sex Trafficking:

Human trafficking, child pornography, and other trades of coerced labor rooted in slavery and violence to profit predators are not sex work. While policy is often enacted in their name, trafficking victims are likelier to be arrested, sexually assaulted, prosecuted, and deported for the violence perpetrated against them than to be protected by the law. This is unsurprising given the legal system’s long history of criminalizing survivors of gender-based violence.

Sex Trade:

The sex trade(s) can encompass both consensual and coercive labor, which is why it’s Jabola-Carolus’s preferred term. Her fave trick is pretending sex trade and trafficking mean the same thing. They do not.

By Jabola-Carolus’s logic, there is no meaningful distinction between a job and, say, a Soviet labor camp. Wasn’t it Dostoevsky who wrote Another Day, Another Dollar at the Gulag, Amirite? Working 9-5, however soul-crushing and exploitative, should not be likened to the forced labor of, say, working on the chain gang. Dolly would never!

Neither sex work nor trade are synonymous with trafficking. Yet, countless people conflate these terms, often on a high-horse about how silly SWers don’t know a thing about internationalist labor struggles, as if we haven’t actively participated in and contributed to them. This baffling erasure of a robust history of grassroots organizing paves the way for critics to argue that our only supporters are white liberal allies, even though they’re just virtue signaling. As if we don’t advocate for ourselves or see our wins and losses as connected to the collective struggle for a livable planet.

Sex Work is Work:

This global call for sex workers’ labor rights is deeply rooted in our history. Yet anti-SW activists retool it toward their own ends, while willfully ignoring a robust legacy of organizers such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who fought against the violence of police and prisons, from protesting on the frontlines of the Stonewall uprising to cofounding STAR, which organized mutual aid and sheltered unhoused trans youth. Morrigan will hate this but (sorry not sorry) sex workers save lives, with autonomous networks of care that combat racist cops.

Or consider International Whore’s Day (IWD), which commemorates 1975 mass protests starting with a sex worker strike and occupation of the Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon, France. As Lorelei Lee explains, IWD also celebrates a long history of mobilizing against racism, gentrification, and criminalization, such as the 1917 sex worker march in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. I’ve just scratched the surface of this and other global sex worker-led liberation struggles, but such histories counter myths of sex workers as helpless victims or greedy girlbosses.

Morrigan’s beef with our rallying cry forgets that it was born of the fight for our right—not only to party à la Beastie Boys, but—to exist. Instead, she paints a sinister portrait of pro-sex work millennials (C’est moi?) grooming and corrupting the innocent youths. Mon dieu! To quote her at length:

In my mid twenties, in queer social justice world, there were a lot of women ten to fifteen years older than me promoting sex work as something empowering, healing, and good. Not only was the mantra “sex work is real work” repeated over and over, but sex work was presented as something more than other kinds of work.

More as in “special, spiritual, inherently good.” There’s no other mention of the phrase, aside from some variant or slippage into “sex work is love.” Never heard that one. And I don’t know a single sex worker who thinks this, or so simplistically in general. In Morrigan’s view pro-sex work peabrains can’t hold good and bad at once so—no bads allowed! Have you been to a strip club? After the things we’ve seen, you think we’re all rainbows and butterflies? This doesn’t mean we can’t find dignity in our work while the world denies we have any. Dignity and/or work.

Jabola-Carolus takes it up a notch by cheekily putting “sex work” in scare quotes. If sex work isn’t work, I guess I’m just exchanging services for money. You tell me, Jabola-Carolus, because I’m for sure the one who is, in your words, ignorant of “the history of the world.” Yikes!

But unlike Morrigan, her argument explicitly rests on the false premise of an enduring myth that sex work (with scare quotes) is mostly coercive. Quite the opposite, as this fallacious collapse of consensual and coercive sex trades is a favorite pastime of policymakers. Speech acts do things in the world. While anti-trafficking laws overwhelmingly target consenting adults, trafficking victims are routinely arrested, prosecuted, and deported as if they were. Looks like the cops and courts are confused, too! Language perhaps, is not so innocent. So it matters that we’re precise in order to avoid the ruse of amnesiac fictions.

You can’t just rewrite the historical record by asserting that, to quote Jabola-Carolus, the “liberal market reformist ‘sex work is work’ movement is a fire hydrant of propaganda and is not anti-imperialist.” How so, you might ask? According to her (buckle up folks, this gets rough):

When you say “sex work is work” you’re gaslighting millions of women from colonized nations. You’re disappearing anti-colonial revolutionary leaders. You’re erasing the history & present of the Philippines. You’re advocating settler sex. You’re destigmatizing genocide, not SWers.

On a positive note, she stops short of saying SWers are genocide, at least here. Pretty sure Marsha and Sylvia are rolling in their graves as I roll my eyes! By some strange statistical coincidence that has nothing to do with colonialism—the criminalization of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian women, particularly trans and queer femmes, primarily occurs through anti-SW laws, which also increase police sexual violence. Don’t take my word for it. I highly recommend Jabola-Carolus add to her summer beach reads Andrea J. Ritchie’s Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, especially the chapter on “Policing Sex.”

Dare I say that someone weaponizing ignorance or lacking basic knowledge of an international, intersectional movement for decriminalizing (not legalizing!) and destigmatizing sex work by first recognizing it as work, should maybe not write about it? Especially a former state agent with a public platform?

I find it curious, too, that both authors bemoan the online harassment and alleged physical threat of harm they’ve faced for brazenly speaking their version of truth to (those not in) power, or, as it were, sticking it to the SWer bullies who don’t actively organize against much less comprehend misogynistic colonial violence, poor unfortunate souls. But I digress.

Just as Pride started as a riot, not rainbow beer garden, our organizing tradition is thoroughly anti-capitalist and abolitionist. Abolitionist as in an on-the-ground strategy for addressing social, economic, and political problems at the root, and thus without recourse to the very systems of violence that give rise to them.

Not “abolitionist sex workers” as in colluding with cops to stop trafficking, the way Jabola-Carolus means, citing Buklod, which she describes as “a sex worker-led organization and drop-in center in Subic Bay that remains anti-imperialist and sex trade abolitionist to this day.” Buklod’s mission to “advance abolition and immediate transition for women” is not representative of our struggles. Far from it. For instance, Buklod would be ineligible for grants from the Red Umbrella Fund because as their application page unequivocally states, they don’t support organizations “that seek to abolish or criminalise sex work.” For a reason!

The fund’s network includes other SWer-led organizations and allies (e.g., the African Sex Worker Alliance, ACLU, and Amnesty International). Red Umbrella is not some rogue anomaly. Take the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance, which connects over 100 organizations in 30 countries across Europe and Central Asia. This SWer-led coalition also believes—you guessed it—sex work is work.

I could go on, but as far as I’m concerned any decolonial feminism that refuses to recognize the labor and autonomy of SWers is highly suspect. Every group mentioned here unambiguously affirms that sex work is work. Louder for those in the back!

You’re not supporting decriminalization if you want to belittle, erase, or save us. SW abolitionists are kind of like fake abortion providers that send unsuspecting seekers home with Jesus pamphlets. Jesus loves sex workers!

I hope I’ve made clear why I felt compelled to add some nuance to an echo chamber rife with logical fallacies, where any grey area is Fifty Shades of the same—like the movie that notoriously flattens an active erotic negotiation of power play between two consenting adults into a totalizing game of villain and victim. How unsexy, not kinky, familiar.

***

Watch out for wolves in sheep’s clothing. With trenchant tones and jargony prose dripping with disdain, anti-SW activists assert opinions as facts, exceptions as rules, anecdotes as generalizations. They may fool some, but they can’t fool us.

A former SWer, Morrigan seems to me earnest, writing from a place of dysregulation, maybe, but not malevolence. Jabola-Carolus, on the other hand, who is not a former sex worker (at least not publicly) but served as executive director of Hawai‘i’s State Commission on the Status of Women, is a different story. It’s hard to fathom that she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing, but I try not to speculate. I’m not insulting their intelligence; to the contrary, it’s what makes their distortions disturbing.

All of us, yours truly not excepted, can fall into ideological traps or, as Morrigan likes to say, lose the plot. But the plot isn’t just about narratives. To cite the (actually abolitionist) wisdom of organizer Mariame Kaba, it’s about relationships.

At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. Critique, unless in bad faith, is a gesture of respect, even an act of generosity—if you see lessons as gifts. We’re not sycophantic machines engineered to short-circuit each other’s growth by softening the edges, never offering any challenge to hegemonic ideas. How utterly patronizing. While we’re on the subject, I wonder if anti-SW feminists feel emboldened to make shit up about us on account of an insidious presumption that we don’t have the wherewithal to speak back.

To be sure, sex workers are not a monolith, and I would never presume to speak for our vastness. Because I am a sex worker who is also—it bears repeating—an adult human person, not a prop or pawn or powerless victim.

We need nuance as a bulwark against the tendency to depict SWers as victims of false consciousness—the archaic idea that people can’t think for themselves, hypnotized are we into submission masquerading as agency. By this logic, circling back to my makeup example, a little glamour is uncritically doing the devil’s work of pandering to patriarchy, which in the clean demure soft ballerina girl (hello, fascism!) era, or whatever, also casts lip liner as the new sorcery.

You got me! I have no powers of discernment. When I apply Ruby Woo, the same shade of matte red I’ve worn for nearly two decades, deep down—but not that deep—in the subterranean layers of my psyche, I seek the approval of the male gaze, which has captured all Venusian pleasures. If a femme falls (for this trap) in the forest, and no one is around to see it… IDK. Do we cease to exist when men aren’t around? Do we need the patriarchy to find meaning and purpose? Are these questions?

Between the manosphere and SWERFs, a witch can’t win! Oh wait, Morrigan declared that a slur now… so, let’s go with anti-pro-sex-work people. Moving on!

I know people find their own way, and it’s not my job as a writer to prove right from wrong or left from right. I’m more interested in why we humans unravel because the texture of a life points to something all its own and yet of us, surging with electricity known to souls remade in the wreckage of ruin.

Because I’m a logophile, I want to trace the ill-defined in-between of arguments and unravel knots. Like the life it always falls short of describing, language is an Etch a Sketch Venn diagram, a mangled helical spring toy—and, in the reaching—the gift of a desire with no end. Like life, language slinks sinuously toward pain and pleasure, beauty and brutality, holiness in and despite our human fallibility.

I have argued that the current sex work debate lacks nuance (even sprinkled some snark on top to make the process bearable) but I don’t think it’s because the people who misconstrue our labor are evil. Within and against technofascism’s new horrors, I think this is the same old moralizing sex panic, drowning in despair and the all too human desire to control existential dread in the wake of social upheaval. Not to mention the unbridled rage of trying to stay afloat under the weight of capitalism. What if we started there, in the contradictions of survival’s inevitable cognitive dissonance amid cataclysmic change?

Plus, I don’t ascribe to good/bad binaries. Aren’t we all a little evil, anyway, and still lovable? Not by nature, but just to get through the day.

Maybe I think so because I’m a cat lover. My fur baby is truly an angel with her precious floofy floof and bunny buttocks. She slow blinks at me with such sweetness, purrs when I sing for her, and stands guard when I’m vulnerable to predation (while on the toilet). She’s also exacting, a little judgy, possessive, prone to violence. Once she sneak attacked an ex’s postcoital penis by dive bombing from the little ledge on my upholstered headboard. I replaced it with wrought-iron, which is more fun for adult play, anyway, so it all worked out (except with the guy, whose junk was unharmed). She can be a little toxic, sure, but I love my cat unconditionally. She’s my favorite human, I mean being, in the whole wide world. And I mean that.

Said another way, is anyone good, only? I’m sure as hell not.

To be sure, I bristle at the arrogance of anti-SW feminists who can’t seem to acknowledge our humanness. I also understand the rage of former sex workers even if they oversimplify and critique our labor by positioning one story as the only correct one, while disallowing our hurt feelings over insult after insult. I get the deep despair of feeling like the traumas that could have killed you don’t matter, and the very real dangers of misplaced pain directed at sex workers instead of the structures that make it damn near impossible to live.

Where they say individuals, I say institutions. Where they say pornography, I say patriarchy. Where they say sex work, I say racial capitalism.

Where they say impossibility, I say magic.

Anti-SW activists, who are sort of obsessed with (hating) us, it seems, also balk at our alchemy. Why deny us a little romanticizing of our daily lives in a world that wants to disappear us? Has it occurred to them that we might find joy and pleasure in our work, loudly, publicly, as an antidote to the stigma and shame thrust upon us?

We know a thing or two about projections of power and powerlessness in our bones (a cheek, a collar)—and still find ways to make them glitter in the dark.

To quote Raechel Anne Jolie’s love poem to sex workers, who amid messy lived realities have the audacity to dream of—and struggle toward—a richness to life unbounded by money and the people who hoard it:

This is not a poem for the work—we do not dream of labor.

This is a poem for the girls, who—I won’t be sorry—do dream of adornment.

This is what I know is holy: poor femmes finding ways not to be poor.

Get me here, to this sacred criminal class, hallowed mini-skirts and lashes to the sky, get me to the altar of Sylvia & Marsha & Carol & Amber & Cecilia—

Get me to gods country,

it is where I find my girls.

Lord knows us sex workers are well-aware that feminism can mean anything these days. Jolie wrote a whole book about it, The New Sex Wars: Toward a Feminism with Teeth, which you should preorder immediately. To me feminism means just this—a love that has teeth, and the grit and glam of a sex worker. A love with a fury in house heels, with a burning desire for liberation and a devotion to the earth and its beings. Love as a commitment to nurturing relationships that render obsolete the hierarchies of value that benefit no one but billion-and-trillionaires. Not a sanitized tautology passed off as activism, but the love expressed in and through the gift of this poem, which is the practice of love as much as an ode to sex workers.

In a social order that systematically spurns our very existence, Jolie’s poem creates spaciousness for us sex workers. A poem can dream and it can build things unseen but not invisible. A poem can be magic. A poem can be a place to come home to.

***

Straw men are scapegoats. They are both logical fallacy and psychic defense. They protect a semblance of self-coherence by projecting a very real human confusion onto those trying to live, like us all, within a painfully unlivable system. Sex workers are an easy target because we’re just louder, more embodied and less embarrassed, maybe, by the messiness of contradictions, and blessed with the scrappiness born of fighting to exist in a world that finds you inconvenient if not destabilizing.

Mirrors lie when you look with unseeing eyes.

Capitalism teaches us to hate and discipline the body if not destroy it. Its wisdom poses a threat to the evil empire, which is why they want to erase us—sex workers and witches, artists, organizers, and rebels, doulas, children, and elders—who hold it. The body keeps the score but also points toward all that doesn’t.

We exist beyond puritanical binaries of angel and devil, virgin and whore, sinner and saint. I can’t imagine a life constrained by living on one side of these divides, and I don’t trust people who do. Polarities don’t exist independently of each other. Where there is darkness, there is light. This has absolutely nothing to do with race, by the way, until humans made it so. It has everything to do with unmaking and creating anew.

To do justice to the complexity of a life, we can’t package it in neat little boxes. I don’t wish to trauma dump to drive home my argument, because as a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse I know how it feels to be bombarded with the worst thing that’s ever happened to you for the sake of political analysis or another unfunny joke about pedophilia. Every punchline a gut punch.

But I’ll say this: I know shame. I have known shame since a home daycare provider’s husband molested me as a young child. That’s not the end, of course. There’s more violence—also, stories of how I fought to create a life not wholly defined by it.

So I refuse to be ashamed of a job that has helped me survive in a world that extinguishes the light in people’s eyes on purpose.

And I refuse to stop searching for that light, everywhere and in everyone, too.

That doesn’t make me a victim, or a martyr, or part of a “child sexual abuse survivor to sex worker pipeline,” according to Morrigan, or a naïve puppet of patriarchy, duped into believing that what people project onto me is mine to hold. Like when they deflect the impossible weight of what I was forced to endure by calling me resilient. I survived, but there were times I tried not to. I’m no saint, all love and light and courage. I’m both a human scarred by trauma and also something ineffable within yet far beyond my body, capable of a celestial kind of joy bordering on ecstasy. Meaning, I’m so fucking grateful some stubborn part of me never stopped believing in life after death. It’s said that the darker our depths, the mightier our light.

The human impulse to control arises, I think, from a fear of facing our vulnerability, and the ways we make ourselves small to avoid it. And so any mirror reflecting this back to us becomes the enemy, the straw man, the mortal error and monster of our own darkness. Our blocked inner vision frames a blurred periphery, a vignette of disavowed shadows. Until we’re willing to look and so to see the monster is a play of light.

This, my final confession: I got to the other side of shame through writing. So when I say sex work gave me the space to write, what I mean is—it saved my life.

☆ ☆ ☆

Stay tuned for Part II on bad sex & Part III on bad math… Plus the grand finale of The Strip Club Files!

AND! Annual subscriptions are still on sale for just $33/yr. Why not subscribe today?

OR! A monthly subscription is $5/mo FOR ONLY 24 MORE HOURS! In July I’m raising the price for new subs, so lock in this rate before it’s too late.

If a paid sub isn’t in the cards for you, I get it! Please consider supporting my work for free ninety nine by clicking that little heart button and sharing it with your people. Gestures like these truly mean the world to me. You can also throw some ones below.

Thxxx!

♡♡♡