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Coronavirus and the Predictable Unpredictability of Survival Sex Work

By
Laura LeMoon
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Social distancing.

With the coronavirus hitting a market which has still not recovered from SESTA/FOSTA and the Backpage seizure, sex work has taken a double whammy in a two year period, and it is most adversely affecting those of us who have the least power, influence, and resources. Still, for us survival sex workers—people who work just to survive or barely survive, people who aren’t making a revenue, people who may get one or two clients in a week even though we work tirelessly all day and night to hustle for clients—while this situation has only made it harder for us, it’s always been hard for us. When a reporter asked me recently how the coronavirus had affected my work, I told them that it’s hard out there right now, but low income, survival, and street-based workers have always struggled. Whether hardships come in the form of SESTA, coronavirus, scary/sketchy clients, or law enforcement stings, survival sex workers have always had to bear the worst of it. Along those lines, for example, sex work/tech collective Hacking/Hustling’s recent study “Erased: The Impact of SESTA/FOSTA And The Removal of Backpage” found that SESTA/FOSTA’s passing had very little effect on the lives of non-internet-using street and survival sex workers of Whose Corner Is It Anyway in Western MA, whose work was already fraught with vulnerability, surveillance, and criminalization and whose earnings were already meager.

In this way, experiencing a drastic change in circumstance because of the coronavirus is in many cases a sign of how good someone has it in the whorearchy. Recent articles in publications like Buzzfeed News or the Huffington Post focus on interviewing sex workers who have experienced a severe and swift change in their economic stability as a result of COVID-19. Of course, the negative impacts of coronavirus on sex workers are tragic and warrant the public’s and the greater sex working community’s compassion. However, the unspoken truth about many more upwardly mobile workers who’ve experienced these negative impacts is that for them, life and death struggles for survival may only just recently have become a reality. I.e.—one has to be up before they can come down.

This isn’t to dismiss or make light of the real pain many workers are feeling now. It just hurts my heart that I feel like nobody—not even other sex workers—cares about the survival workers for whom things are perennially difficult no matter what. I hear other workers complaining about the low ball offers they are now getting from clients and I think to myself that I’ve never had the luxury of setting a target fee and turning away anyone who won’t meet it. Before this whole coronavirus thing started, I was offering bareback anal for $40, because that was all I could get and I didn’t have the luxury of telling guys to fuck off. I still can’t say with certainty what my HIV or STI status is because all of my clients wanted bareback and I was too scared they wouldn’t want to see me if I made them wear a condom. I feel like mainstream society gives zero fucks about those of us for whom this has always been a reality, and sometimes I feel like a lot of sex workers who aren’t survival or street give zero fucks too.

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International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers: Reliving the Decade You Survived

By
suzyhooker
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(Photo by Steve Rhodes of International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers 2010, via Flickr and the Creative Commons.)

By Caty Simon and Josephine

Ten years ago, the remains of four sex workers — Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Amber Lynn Overstreet Costello — were found close to Gilgo Beach, near Long Island, New York. The bodies were unearthed after a frantic 911 call from another worker: Shannan Gilbert spent 21 minutes telling a dispatcher a man was trying to kill her, then she disappeared. It became evident that a serial killer was targeting area sex workers he met on Craigslist, so the Suffolk County police commissioner asked the community for help. In response, the local SWOP demanded amnesty for sex workers, a request  the police department scoffed at. The case featured multiple suspects — including a former Suffolk County police chief — and remains ongoing.

That case, which came to be known as the Long Island Serial Killer case as it expanded to 10 victims, demonstrated how the internet revolutionized sex work, taking it online and out of the shadows without the help of pimps and traffickers. The public, however, interpreted the case differently; Craigslist made sex-for-money easy and accessible — and dangerous, it was surmised. The notion that the police department had erred couldn’t compete against the lurid narrative of sex workers naively meeting their killers online. Robert Kolker, who wrote a book on the subject, told TAS in 2013 that he was certain that the case might have unfolded differently if  the women weren’t sex workers, or “a different class of people” as he put it. Either way, Craigslist’s Adult ads section shuttered soon after, marking the beginning of the end of the internet as a safe haven. 

Today is Dec. 17, the annual day we rally to end violence against sex workers, and the last such day in this decade. The environmental changes sex workers have endured are too many to list but, in the day’s spirit of reflection and rememberance, we’re certain it’s paramount to revisit the challenges we’ve faced and the hard work we’ve endured.

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Hustlers (2019)

By
Bubbles
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Ramona teaches pole tricks to Destiny, no licking

It’s been 24 years since Elizabeth Berkley licked the pole in Showgirls and I’m still mad about it, so I understand the mixture of anticipation and dread with which strippers await Hustlers. What stupid misconceptions will it leave the audience with? How many years will it be the general public’s touchstone for what we do? Will it portray all strippers as one national financial collapse away from forming a ring to drug customers, then max out their credit cards, as they did in the real-life criminal cases at the center of the New York story on which the movie is based?

Hustlers addresses that last question head-on. The film’s framing device is an interview of Destiny (Constance Wu), the character based on Roslyn Keo, by Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), a stand-in for journalist Jessica Pressler. Destiny asks Elizabeth what’s going into the story, and says she doesn’t want it to be a hit piece about how all strippers are thieves, because it’s not like that.

If you, like Destiny, don’t want to see another story paint strippers as ripoff artists, are left unable to enjoy the movie because of the real stigma faced by strippers, because FOSTA has made your life harder while movie stars build award-contending performances on our stories, or because it doesn’t resemble your experience remotely, I absolutely get it. But one reason sex workers feel our depiction in Hustlers is a high-stakes issue is the low rate of representation of strippers and sex workers as leads in major motion pictures. We’re accustomed to being props, punchlines, victims or villians, and we know that it’s going to be a long time before another stripper story is allowed to take center stage. Shouldn’t this one do something good for us? Is it good for the strippers?

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Naked Music Monday: Megan Thee Stallion

By
Adrie
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Fever was a long-awaited gift for rap fans, (literal) hoes, and anime fans alike. The first full-length project from Houston native Megan thee Stallion (Megan Pete) is a 14-track thrill ride that starts high and only continues to ascend. My personal favorite on the album is the third track, “Pimpin’”, three-and-a-half minutes of Juicy-J-produced greatness, positively dripping with the sexual aggression and braggadocio traditionally reserved for male rappers relaying their conquests and bank balances.

Throughout the album, Pete gives us quotable gems such as:

“Damn, I want some head, but I chose the dough instead. I could never ever let a nigga fuck me out my bread,”

“Call him a trick and he don’t get offended. He know he giving his money to Megan,” and,
“Nigga actin’ like he player when he really just a play. It’s some hoes in this house and they goin’ through your safe, ah.”

On its own, the lyrical content of Pete’s music is fun, raunchy, and ratchet. It’s nothing more than a good time on an album of certified thot bops specifically created to cater to an audience of “Hot Girls” and “Hot Boys” looking to turn up all summer long. But Pete’s persona, crafted or real, is one clearly derived from the work and subjugation of sex workers and women.

As much fun as it is to quote lines about Pete, a woman, calling herself a pimp, it’s impossible to divorce the word from a long history of violence and brutality against sex working women and femmes. Perhaps an argument could be made for reclamation of the word “pimp”, but Pete is not a sex worker of any kind. It’s not her word to reclaim.

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Shadowbans: Secret Policies Depriving Sex Workers of Income and Community

By
suzyhooker
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Written collaboratively by Juniper Fitzgerald and Jessie Sage

Several months ago, we attended the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, which included the Adult Video Network (AVN awards). The problematic aspects of such conventions notwithstanding—for example, a panel of “industry leaders” at the Expo admitted to never hearing of FOSTA—it is an event many sex workers count on for networking. This year, one thing stood out at the various parties and meetups: none of the people in attendance, from well-known porn stars to newly minted cam girls, could find each other on social media platforms. So we—your very much alive and visible authors—decided to search for one another. Sure enough, even typing our exact handles into Twitter’s search bar yielded “no results.”

Since AEE/AVN, other sex workers have publicly addressed shadowbanning. The day after International Whores’ Day on June 2, NYC-based Dominatrix Mistress Blunt tweeted, “It’s really upsetting that when I go to tweet about #IWD everyone is #shadowbanned and I can’t find them to tag and I can’t livestream important speeches because I’ve been banned from that feature too.” Sex workers are finding that Twitter and other platforms have shadowbanned a significant portion of our community. Shadowbanning is the increasingly common practice of social media platforms silently censoring a user’s content without either the user or her potential followers knowing. In the The Economist, the anonymous writer G.F. describes Twitter shadowbanning:

Shadowbanned users are not told that they have been affected. They can continue to post messages, add new followers and comment on or reply to other posts. But their messages may not appear in the feed, their replies may be suppressed and they may not show up in searches for their usernames. The only hint that such a thing is happening would be a dip in likes, favourites or retweets—or an ally alerting them to their disappearance.

In the year since The Economist column was published, shadowban testers have been created. Shadowban testers are able to determine whether a Twitter user is banned in search suggestions, general searches, and/or in their thread. Essentially, the test detects whether a user’s Twitter handle is suggested to others, whether their handle pops up in a general search, and/or if the user’s entire thread is invisible to other users.

In the column, G.F. further maintains that “the currency of social networks is attention.” While there may be some truth in this statement, for sex workers, the currency of social networks is also, well, currency. Accessing community and clients translates to income for people like us who are marginalized, stigmatized, and criminalized. So, when sex workers lose access to social media, we lose access to income. Shadowbanning, then, is an opaque practice that effectively denies sex workers their livelihood. Sex worker Leana Lane tells us over Twitter DM, “I suspect that fewer clients are seeing and booking me than they would otherwise [because of it].”

Realizing how pervasive shadowbanning had become, we began to ask questions: What exactly is shadowbanning? How do sex workers on Twitter know that they’ve been shadowbanned? What have sex workers tried to do to get around shadowbanning? And, perhaps most importantly, how has it impacted their businesses and their community?

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