Reader Submitted
June 18, 2008
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SUBMITTED BY $PREAD MAGAZINE: [H]ow about the possibility that some of us have professional-strength sex drives?

The above quote, courtesy of ever-amazing Debauchette, may be the only good thing to come out of all the hype for the new TV show, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. (I guess “Clandestine Journal Of A Woman Who Gets Paid For Sex” was ruled out as being too clunky.) Every newspaper, culture website, personal blog, etc. has had something to say about the premiere (including, of course, our blog) and much of what’s being said is predictable nonsense summed up as follows:

• this show glamorizes prostitution because the prostitute isn’t addicted to drugs, working on the street, or quietly crying while she cuts herself in the bathroom after an appointment.

I’m sick to death of all of this and I know I’m not alone. By “this” I mean the media’s inexcusable, habitual refusal to acknowledge any sex worker books, blogs, and activism that don’t fit into the dichotomy they’ve promoted and canonized. In the American mind, a prostitute is either a bedraggled street worker starving in a gutter or vapid “high class” whore who occasionally enjoys the sex and always enjoys the designer goods it buys her. (As you know, the jury’s still out on if such creatures actually exist or if they are the sex work equivalent of bigfoot. Let’s ignore Veronica Monet and Xaviera Hollander and just focus on the fact that Belle Du Jour is anonymous and therefore must be a fake.)

If your study doesn’t confirm the stereotype that sex workers are victims from childhood to eventual drug overdose, you can forget about it getting picked up as national news. (Sudhir Venkatesh found that clients often want “comfort and a conversational partner” in lieu of sex. Weirdly enough, he is not cited in any of these “Secret Diary” write ups. I guess they just haven’t heard about the research he’s been doing since the mid-90s.) That nuanced biography where you delivered the truth more beautifully and fully than most non-prositution work memoirs? As far as The Prospect and the (far stupider) piece it spawned in Utne are concerned, your book doesn’t even exist.

Strip City is, in my experience, the book most revered and appreciated by sex workers in a variety of arenas, but as far as mainstream media is concerned, it’s irrelevant.Wendy Chapkis, sure, you present level-headed assessments of various sex work studies and stereotypes, and never shy away from actually listening to sex workers tell their own stories, but until Melissa Farley dies or retires (I bet I know which will come first) don’t expect any reporters calling you up for a quote.

I am so angry about this it is all I can do to stop myself from sending emails on the $pread letterhead to every newspaper and magazine editor in the country screaming “WE’RE HERE, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES, WE’RE RIGHT HERE!” Here being not just $pread, but SWOP, Bound Not Gagged, Desiree Alliance, Audacia Ray, etc. Debauchette expresses a similar sentiment in a much more dignified way, as is befitting a former “high class” call girl - and, for the record, she is most definitely not a fake:

Are journalists so incompetent, so incapable of carrying out the most basic research, that they can only assume that sex, for us, is intolerable? […] And why aren’t they capable of parsing the differences among sex workers, between those who have financial leverage and those who do not, those who are trafficked and those who act out of choice […]? This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t even advanced sociology.

In conclusion, The New York Times in particular is all about this shiz, with two different articles dissecting the show here and here. There’s fluffy piece on Radar about the reaction of other working girls, a flippant write up about how “we’re all whores because we all have jobs” by Salon.com’s TV critic Heather Havrilesky, and the Reverse Cowgirlhas a great post up (and a follow up post here) that almost beats out Debauchette for quote of the week:

Women want to be them. Men want to be with them. Too bad nobody’s willing to admit it.

WORD! If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the angry dome.