Shaming Sex Workers Makes You a Bad Feminist

Nope, just nope.

It’s really annoying that we have to keep saying this but nevertheless we will persist in screaming: shaming sex workers doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a villain.

COVID 19 has disrupted national economies, thrown entire communities into turmoil, and has left our cities looking like wide-shots from I am Legend. Millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, while people employed in sectors of the economy that were previously ignored or taking for granted, such as grocery clerks, postal service workers, public transportation officers, and more are now finally being appreciated for their value to our societies as essential workers. The virus has highlighted the disparities between the people at the top, who are sheltering-in-place in country houses with swimming pools and an army of staff, and a struggling majority that now has to figure out how to pay rent or take care of children while trying to maintain jobs, if they're lucky enough to still have one. It has caused us to reexamine the weaknesses in our societies, such as the paper thin/non-existent social welfare nets we have in place, what access to healthcare should really look like, and how do we serve the most vulnerable in our communities.

Amongst some of those vulnerable are sex workers, many of whom rely on face-to-face meetings with their clients as their primary form of income. A lot of them now face eviction or worse as they make decisions between trying to earn their income and trying to keep themselves and their loved ones safe from the deadly virus. Online communities of sex workers have been thrown into a panic, of trying to develop new strategies to stay connected with their clients while riding out waves that, like the rest of us, seem to have no clear end in sight.

One strategy is that many in-person sex workers, many of whom already have large online followings, are moving towards digital work. In particular, many are flocking to OnlyFans.com, a platform sort of like instagram for which subscribes pay monthly fees to receive online content. In a recent company email, OnlyFans revealed that they’ve seen a 75% increase in signups since February, a huge upmarket tick, and many long-time established escorts on twitter have posted about starting new OnlyFans pages to help them continue to generate income.

It’s not just well-established sex workers though; many young women who’ve found themselves out of work because of Coronavirus are turning to online sex work for the first time as a way to make ends meet and put food on the table, according to this huffpost article.

Inevitably, the whorephobic backlash was quick and ruthless. This article by Julie Bindel in the Spectator glosses over the fact that sites like OnlyFans are taking the power back from big-porn moguls like XVIDEOS and Pornhub, where most content is free because it's illegally stripped from paid websites, a result of which is that very little of the money goes to content creators. and instead tries to inspire horror and disgust by describing the process of producing requested content (surprise! Sex work is work!) or exploits the fact that these women were already vulnerable because of the greater socio-economic shortcomings of our societies lack of fairly-distributed resources. Her attempt to put OnlyFans content creators in the same category as victims of sex trafficking is not only harmful, but downright degrading and dangerous to those who find empowerment from being able to earn an income during these hard times. As one twitter user commented on the article, 'there's nothing empowering about having no source of income during a pandemic."

This meme puts in simple relief the hypocrisy of many 'feminists' who think that by shooting down sex workers in the name of empowerment, they are helping them. But shaming sex workers doesn't make you a good feminist. Helping women in need who are struggling during a pandemic is. Supporting women who find their work empowering is. Supporting women who don't find their work empowering (who says work has to be empowering, and why do people mythologize sex work as HAVING to be an empowering act? Sometimes sex work is really rewarding, but sometimes sex work is just a job, just like any other job) is. Supporting work that keeps women in their homes is feminist.

In a time when we are seeing many of our most vulnerable populations being the ones at the most high-risk during this pandemic, is signaling your sense of moral superiority really the most productive use of your time? Shooting down people who are already struggling is hardly classy. It perpetuates the myth that sex workers are victims of sex trafficking (they are not, and in fact many of the loudest anti-sex trafficking voices are sex workers) or that sex work itself is not a valid form of labor. the SF Chronicle gave voice to several women last week in the ways in which OnlyFans and other online platforms have become places to give them financial stability and security during these times. Because you're in charge of your own content you can make your own decisions about what you feel comfortable posting, and at what sort of frequency. As one woman said, "“I think OnlyFans has this huge appeal because it feels very authentic. You follow me on Instagram, you see all the nonsexual content I post, you know my dog’s name and you know my band and now you get to see this other side of me.” If you are struggling and you have the energy and resources to generate some income during the worst recession since the Great Depression, then girl, you do you. And if you're not in the space to be able to do that, cheer on those that can. Feminists support each other. <3

Beginning in a Time of Corona

Photo credit to @cottonbro

The weekend before shelter-in-place, I went on four different dates with four different men. If sexual interactions could be saved up like water in a camel's hump, I wanted to make sure I was full up. I dated like I was going to be shot into space the next day. I kissed like I was getting shipped to war, and I had the feeling that, as I said goodbye to each man, I was obliged to light a candle in the window.

Living in San Francisco is like being a third grader at a school designed by drag queens. The city is obsessed with its own culture of work hard play harder. There are putt-putt golf courses featuring holeside bottle service, bowling alleys hidden underneath concert venues, and underground raves that take place in hastily rearranged WeWork spaces. At 29, the city made me feel ancient and out of touch. I was already falling behind in every aspect of my life, and my weekends had begun to revolve around avoiding missing out on the “Next Big Thing.” This desperation extended to the men in my life, who, while on dates with me, would always look over my right ear as if a slightly better, more successful or better-networked woman would appear out of nowhere that would be more worthwhile of their time. Dating was less about personal connection and romance as it was an algorithm that needed to be optimized. And I had fully bought into the system with a devil-may-care, volume-focused approach to tindering that would've put Mae West to shame.

There was a desperation and strange nostalgia that tinged my last four dates. Meeting up at bars felt tender and fragile. My boys and I would spend long silent minutes observing the chaos and camaraderie of people crowding in for their drink orders like we were watching black and white films of our grandparents dancing. Things used to be so good, we thought to ourselves, while still living it. We clutched at each other and squeezed hands like we'd just struck the iceberg, and later on in the night when we were in bed, we would face each other and cuddle, pretending we could feel the icy black water lap around our ankles.

The following Monday I opened the windows at midnight to listen to the city shut down. The streets had already been empty for hours, and for the first time since moving to the city, I could hear the birds. I went to bed alone, thinking that it would be a good time to masturbate, but not having the emotional energy to give myself that small reprieve.

The next weeks were strange ones. I started having incredibly vivid sex dreams about people I went to highschool with, but was too dorky to talk to. I started sexting with a guy I had hooked up with three years previously. I brutishly and forcefully sent unsolicited nudes to the guys I had been seeing, with varying levels of joy at one end of the scale to one guy on the other end telling me, 'I know you meant to cheer me up, but this is just more depressing.' I started to fantasize about elaborate rituals for washing hands in which men I couldn't see would come over and shower immediately, changing into sterilized robes that I had someho prepared. We would rub soap over our hands for hours on end and squirt purell into each others palms, gazing iris to iris while we rubbed it in and waited for it to dry. We would then carefully, delicately intertwine our fingers.

I started going for walks late at night so I could avoid as many people as possible, but walking past all the shuttered and boarded up restaurants and bars made me cry. I pictured the neighbors starting to refer to me as the weird sobbing girl. The highlight of the second week was starting to communicate with my neighbors across the street with post-it note missives and incredibly detailed drawings. I started to chat with the woman on the third floor, and found out her cat was named Oliver. One night at the end of one of my walks I stood under her window to feel a little closer to her and looked at my own dark apartment. I saw that my neighbors above and below me had all also been communicating with Oliver's owner, and I felt a deep sense of betrayal that could only be equaled by my childhood trauma of watching the Sonics move to Oklahoma City. A different neighbor across the street with a penchant for wandering around his apartment shirtless also caught my attention. He asked for my number via paper towel and permanent marker taped to his window, and we've been flirting ever since. I rearranged my desk for a better view, my apartment being higher than his I suddenly feel protective over him. I start doing my hair and posting more on instagram. I started walking around my apartment naked.

It's week three and I find myself unspooling gently. I feel constantly high, although it's been four days since my last edible. I've started to get to know my neighbors so intimately that now I feel like I can trust them with their own privacy again. They will be safe without my care, without my vigilent watching. I'm texting the boys less, and masturbating more. I've taken up painting more, and reading the books I always said I would read later. I started to write without irony about setting boundaries with men. And I started to gather little dust bunnies of courage from under all the responsibilities I had been ignoring and started planning this magazine.

This magazine was something I had wanted to do for a long time, and I had even had the name treasured since childhood, when my dad would let me read chain letters outloud to him while I spun around in his office chair. "You can lead a whorticulture," one read, "but you can't make her think." In another email, my dad chuckles as I say aloud, "a good cowgirl always keeps her calves together." It took me a long time to understand these jokes, to read these as ideals or cautionary tales, and I carefully grafted them onto my personality as a form of performative chasteness. It took me longer to shed that mantle in exchange for a short skirt and a pair of Docs. I think about feminist labor, and consider the pros and cons of charging my boyfriend for every time he has to ask when our anniversary is. I think about how much I spend on shampoo and then look up projected earnings for girls on onlyfans.com. I think about how I used to write but I've been too scared, and too traumatized, to write for years now. I think maybe this is the time to take the plunge. When the world is falling apart, the space is created for radical change. In this space, perhaps it is the time in which we can tend to and cultivate the cultural institutions we live under, and perhaps grow something a little more beautiful.