Day fifteen of @whumpuary - came back wrong

The focus in this era was on censoring porn and ‘raising awareness’ rather than addressing prostitution through criminal law directly, but a nonetheless vehement anti-prostitution stance became commonplace in the feminist movement. Writer Janice Raymond stated that ‘prostitution is rape that’s paid for’, while Kathleen Barry said buying and selling sex was ‘destructive of human life’.

The defence of porn and prostitution that followed in response was based on ideas of sexual liberation through nonconformist sexual expression, such as BDSM and the ‘queering’ of lesbian and gay identities. Many ‘pro-sex’ or ‘sex-radical’ feminists posited that not only could watching porn be gratifying and educational, it could upend patriarchal control over women’s sexual expression. Moreover, that the sex industry was sticking two fingers up at the institution of marriage, highlighting the hypocrisy of conservative, monogamous heteronormativity. While some people who fought for sexual liberation were sex workers – such as LGBTQ and AIDS activist Amber Hollibaugh – many sex radicals advanced their arguments from a non–sex worker perspective. Defending porn often meant defending watching it, rather than performing in it.

Radical feminists famously described sex radicals as ‘Uncle Toms’* pandering to the primacy of male sexuality, while they in turn were derided as ‘prudes’ invested in preserving sexual puritanism. Rather than focussing on the ‘work’ of sex work, both pro-sex feminists and anti-prostitution feminists concerned themselves with sex as symbol. Both groups questioned what the existence of the sex industry implied for their own positions as women; both groups prioritised those questions over what material improvements could be made in the lives of the sex workers in their communities. Stuck in the domain of sex and whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women (and adamant that it could only be one or the other) it was all too easy for feminists to think of The Prostitute only in terms of what she represented to them. They claimed ownership of sex worker experiences in order to make sense of their own.

Anti-prostitution activist Dorchen Leidholdt spoke to this feminist impulse; ‘this de-individualized, de-humanized being has the function of representing generic woman … She stands in for all of us, and she takes the abuse that we are beginning to resist.’ It was in this context that former prostitute Andrea Dworkin’s work became highly influential in the movement, and set a new tone for criticism of sex work. The Prostitute, she said

lives the literal reality of being the dirty woman. There is no metaphor. She is the woman covered in dirt, which is to say that every man who has ever been on top of her has left a piece of himself behind … She is perceived as, treated as – and I want you to remember this, this is real – vaginal slime.

Her confrontational writing style – and her experiences in the sex trade – helped to legitimise and normalise similar usage of graphic and misogynist language in ‘feminist’ discussions of sex workers and their bodies. Barry, a contemporary of Dworkin, likened prostitutes to blow-up dolls, ‘complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation’, while Leidholdt wrote that ‘stranger after stranger use[s] her body as a seminal spittoon … What other job is so deeply gendered that one’s breasts, vagina and rectum constitute the working equipment?’ Academics Cecilie Høigård and Liv Finstad wrote of women who sell sex that ‘at the core they experience themselves as only cheap whores’.

Sex working feminists have long found themselves harshly excluded, and not only by de-humanising language in academia, but by explicit lack of invitation into spaces. Kate Millett recalls a feminist conference on prostitution, held in 1971. Disgruntled working women arrived to demand a seat at the table: An inadvertent masterpiece of tactless precipitance, the title of the day’s program was inscribed on leaflets for our benefit: ‘Towards the Elimination of Prostitution’. The panel of experts included everyone but prostitutes … all hell broke loose – between the prostitute and the movement. Because, against all likelihood, prostitutes did in fact attend the conference … They had a great deal to say about the presumption of straight women who fancied they could debate, decide or even discuss what was their situation and not ours.

Unlike the hostile environment of radical feminism, sex radicals were welcoming and supportive to sex workers. This influence helped shape the movement’s growth. In 1974, COYOTE hosted the first National Hookers’ Convention. The bright orange flyer nodded to the way prostitutes had been shunned from the women’s movement: emblazoned with a hand touching a vulva, it proclaimed, ‘Our Convention Is Different: We Want Everyone to Come’”]

black butch lesbian ira jeffries (far right) next to her femme girlfriend snowbaby, her mother bonita jeffries, and other friends, 1948.

memory is a strange thing.