BY Lux Alptraum
May 21, 2007
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I just picked up (and then read) Grant Stoddard’s book, Working Stiff. It’s a good read (and not just because I know a bunch of the people he writes about). Grant offers his readers an honest (and not always flattering) account of his time as an “accidental sexpert,” chronicling his voyage from life as a sexually inexperienced metal fan from a small town in London to life as a sexually experienced columnist who’d seen it all, done it all, and reported back to the masses on his experiences.

There was one thing that, though it didn’t exactly bother me, definitely didn’t sit quite right. On more than one occasion, Grant refers to himself as a sex worker.

I met Grant Stoddard back in late summer of 2002, when I was starting up as an energetic and eager Nerve intern. I was about a year into my porn career, he was about a year into his time as Nerve’s sexual guinea pig. At the time, I was heavily invested in my sex worker identity, interested in seeking out and connecting with other sex workers, interested in building a community with other people who did this kind of work.

It never occurred to me to think of Grant as one of my people. I mean, he didn’t even know the secret sex worker handshake.

I’m of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, I feel uncomfortable making judgments about someone else’s identity: who am I to say whether or not Grant is a sex worker? Who am I to make that call about him? There are certainly people who would argue that I’m not a sex worker — that pornography isn’t up close and personal enough to count as “real” sex work — and I’ve never felt the need to listen to them.

And anyway: if Grant Stoddard wants to identify as a sex worker, wants to align himself with the sex work cause, isn’t that fine and dandy anyway? Ho solidarity, etc.: more voices added to the cause, more visibility for all.

Except. Except there’s another part of me that doesn’t feel that way, not at all.

There’s a certain cachet to the sex worker label — a certain mystique, a certain cool factor (at least in some circles) — and it makes me uncomfortable to see it casually adopted. To put it bluntly: I don’t feel that Grant Stoddard really earned the right to don the sex worker label.

What it comes down to is this: in my mind, Grant’s work — much as it involved sex, and oftentimes sex he wasn’t completely comfortable with — was ultimately about writing. Grant was paid for turning in columns, even columns about abandoned or failed attempts at his assignments.

Grant was not paid for the sex he was having, not directly: and Grant’s livelihood was not based on his ability to make people orgasm, to turn people on. Grant’s work was more literary than erotic, more about getting a laugh than getting someone off.

Of course, that definition is problematic. Erotica writers are, quite bluntly, paid for their ability to induce orgasm, yet I’d hesitate to include them under the umbrella of sex work. A part of me wants to say that erotica writers aren’t sex workers because they’re not using their body, not getting naked — but phone sex workers remain clothed and untouched, and I’d have a hard time justifying their exclusion from the world of sex work.

Where do you draw the line? Is there a way to define a sex worker, a hard and fast litmus test for who can and can’t use this label? Or is sex work something that we have to judge on an individual basis, something that — though undefinable — we just know when we see?