The popularity of the sugar baby/sugar daddy relationship in the media is a bit of a recession phenomenon. It’s a grey-area of sex work lite that women with no experience in the sex industry can dip their toes into before they realize that if something sounds too good to be true, it is. The odds of finding an asexual millionaire benefactor are not good, but that won’t stop those with student loans or retail addictions from signing up on sites like Seeking Arrangement, Sugar Daddy For Me, Whats Your Price, and the like. MTV’s True Life follows twenty-one year-olds GG and Olivia, and twenty-two year-old Steve on their quests for financial dependence. Despite silly narration like, “They’re willing to ignore their hearts for the Benjamins,” I thought this was an accurate portrayal of what happens when young laypeople make an attempt at dancing the tango of conflicting interests.
One of my favorite male sex worker movies is The Great Happiness Space. The documentary film from 2006 follows the work lives of the staff members of Stylish Club, Rakkyo, one of the top host clubs in Osaka, Japan. The film was shot at a time when male host clubs were becoming more popular and attracting increased media attention. I was interested in the film as I had spent some time between 1998 and 2007 working in hostess clubs in Tokyo.
Friends back home had been indignant when I explained to them the nature of a hostess’ work. By performing a subservient role, they had argued, I was enforcing gender oppression, and shouldn’t I feel bad about that? I was curious to see the flipside, expecting to see a subversion of the gender roles played out in the hostess club where the woman dotes on the male customer. Perhaps I was looking for something to point at to say: Look: it’s OK; the industry caters for women too. I came away from the film thinking more about women in the sex industry, however, than men.
Farley in action, probably explaining how all prostitutes are "slaves"
It’s common knowledge ’round these parts, and in every sex worker activist circle I’ve ever bumped up against, that the work Melissa Farley does is misleading, ill-intentioned, and downright vile in the way it determinedly misrepresents the whole truth. She’s a self professed “abolitionist,” meaning she wants sex work (and by necessary extension, sex workers) to be eradicated, and everything she’s ever done in this arena has been deliberately intended to further her point of view. This is not how real academics are trusted to work; like scientists, they’re expected to go after information in an attempt to minimize their own bias, not cater to it. And, as was true in the case of Ashton Kutcher, real activists deal with complex realities. They don’t require and supply a histrionic alterna-world where there’s only one story.
It’s always easy to spot the glaring flaws in Farley’s “reasoning.” She habitually ignores the existence of men who sell sex or women who buy it. (That includes porn, lap dances, etc.) She relies on emotional appeal. She draws from self-selected and otherwise skewed populations and treats them as definitive, expansive samples. She equivocates to serve her ideology. (Prostitutes are raped because they are in a job that “exposes them” to rape, not because laws around that job make them unusually vulnerable.) This is a woman who once called indoor sex workers “house ni****s.” You could play a “spot the logical fallacy” drinking game with almost any one of her articles and end up with your stomach pumped.
Miss Farley called us terrible names and accused us of being like toilets! She never talked to any us for her research […] We wish powerful women like you would stand beside us instead of against us. Many other professions have developed from slave like conditions into occupations we all respect today like wife, child care, soldiering, construction, farming, domestic worker and nursing. Why won’t you respect us?
It’s a question Farley is not inclined to answer. She’s very much in favor of dominating the discussion, and she often gets away with it.* She won’t acknowledge sex workers who want rights, because giving us the ability to better control our own labor is not the equivalent of halting that labor altogether. And now Newsweek has given her the floor.
Susannah Breslin inspires strong reactions. Three times I have mentioned her to friends and received a variation on this response: “She’s mean.” We don’t even agree about her at Tits and Sass! Since I’m prone to being wrongly interpreted as mean at times, I feel a kinship with her. Full disclosure: Breslin employed me as a freelancer during her time at another site.
Right now she’s writing the Pink Slipped blog at Forbes.com and is chronicling her work writing a story about the economics of strip clubs in a series called “How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made”. She started this series back in April, and picks it up again today with an interview with a dancer named Cash. This series is geared towards journalists and is a detailed look at the work of reporting a story; being cockblocked by those who control access, finding alternate sources of information and means of entry, allowing what the story actually is to reveal itself to you instead of going in trying to prove the one you’ve already written.
One way—and possibly the biggest—journalists get sex work wrong is by neglecting its economics and focusing on the social factors. Missing the money is missing the point! If there wasn’t any money involved, it wouldn’t be sex work. It would just be sex. Of course, there’s no accurate way to report on the income of individual dancers. Most dancers either exaggerate or lowball their income or don’t track it to begin with, so even “honest” self-reporting isn’t going to reflect actual income. And clubowners are unlikely to report actual income, although in Texas, the tax revenues from sales of alcoholic beverages are a matter of public record, so these can be used to arrive at a rough estimate of what kind of drink volume a club is doing. If Breslin actually gets some hard data out of this series, I’ll be delighted.
There are some friends of Tits and Sass out there who wanted to contribute photos for Cats & Stacks, except for one problem: their cats are dogs. So for our inaugural Dogs & Dollars, welcome Ecowhore’s pal. “I think my dog meets the legal definition of being my pimp,” she says.
