THE CUTTING EDGE: ON SEX WORKERS, SERIAL KILLERS, AND SWITCHBLADES

       Sarah Stillman

       ISSUE 3.2 (2007)

I remember how Ronnie, my third-grade playground crush, used to whisper that illicit little ditty from the top of the jungle gym as if it might be the secret password to the gates of American manhood: “Lorena, Lorena, the nightmare wife . . . sliced her husband’s hot dog with a butcher knife!”

I remember, too, how it made me giggle hysterically—not just Ronnie’s homespun folk song, but the deluge of cartoons, media wisecracks, T-shirt slogans, and weenie-whacking tunes that flooded my nine-year-old head in the months after John Wayne Bobbitt lost his penis to the glimmering knife of his then-wife, Lorena.

No one in the national press bothered to mention that the infamous deed had occurred only after John Wayne, an ex-marine with a history of domestic violence, allegedly returned from a drinking binge, raped Lorena, and then fell fast asleep in their bed. Between chuckles, no one read me Lorena Bobbitt’s courtroom testimony, in which the Ecuadorian immigrant described the “beating, kicking, punching, shoving, slapping, dragging, [and] choking” she suffered at her husband’s hand in the preceding years of economic dependency. Instead, I heard mostly of limericks and advertising gimmicks, like the radio disc jockey who offered free Slice soda and cocktail weenies with ketchup from a booth nearby the courthouse where Lorena was eventually acquitted of “malicious wounding” charges—not in the name of self-defense, but rather on a diagnosis of temporary insanity that required a stint in a mental hospital.

It was only a decade later, under the guidance of a wise feminist or two, that I discovered the bizarre story of John Wayne Bobbitt’s rise—no pun intended—to stardom as an accused rapist-turned-pornstar. Following his debut in such hardcore hits as Frankenpenis and John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, Mr. Bobbitt eventually moved on to an equally illustrious career as an evangelical minister. By then, however, he’d already taught me a valuable lesson about gender, sex, and knives: white men who use violence get to be porn stars and preachers (not to mention presidents), while women of color and low-income women who use violence get shipped off to the cuckoo’s nest.

Recently, I’ve been thinking yet again about Lorena Bobbitt because I’ve been brooding even harder about a woman named Tonya Richardson. A self-described “working girl” with a Lara Croft air about her, Richardson walks the streets and jack-shacks of Daytona Beach, Florida, “specializing” in the notoriously bottle-strewn expanse of Ridgewood Avenue. She boasts a Southern twang that’s just slightly more ass-kicker than sleep-walker—like a woman who’s mastered Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous art of righteous rage but who’s starting to feel the wear and tear of it. She dresses in simple collared shirts. She warms to churchgoers. And, most relevant to the story at hand, she carries a sharpened switchblade with the intent to kill.

I first encountered Richardson on Florida’s Local 6 nightly news, amidst reports back in March 2006 of a serial killer on the prowl. Three women, described in the press only as “addicts and prostitutes,” had been murdered in the previous months near Richardson’s Daytona Beach stomping grounds. As spring emerged, the silence enveloping their deaths thawed, largely due to fears that “innocent” spring break vacationers might now be at risk alongside their whoring counterparts. While Fox News dispensed footage of gyrating, bikini-clad college girls in reference to this possible threat—as if the killings only merited coverage now that attractive state school students were arriving in droves—Local 6 had a very different story to tell.

“Daytona Prostitutes Hunting Serial Killer” read the title on the monitor. “Rather than run from the man police labeled a serial killer,” Local 6 reporter Tarik Minor began, “streetwalkers here in Daytona Beach along Ridgewood Avenue say they are seeking the serial killer out.” As cameras panned the palm-lined street, Minor continued, “They believe the man responsible for murdering three women here is someone they have come in contact with.”

Within no time, Tonya Richardson commanded the screen, framed in that familiar tight-angle crop of a politician or a spokeswoman for an international NGO. “We’ll get him first,” she declared of the serial killer. She nodded vigorously, “Yeah, we are going to get him first. When we find him, he is going to be sorry. It is as simple as that.”

My jaw fell slack. It wasn’t the extremity of Richardson’s pledge that took me by surprise; her words fell miles away from “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but her seriousness matched the gravity of the threat she faced. Nor was it the melodramatic buzz of the broadcast that struck me, although it was certainly the stuff of a Hollywood screenwriter’s wet dream. Instead, the straightforward way the details were presented—right from Richardson’s confident lips—brought me to a striking realization: never before on mainstream TV had I seen a story about sex workers’ resistance told with this brand of matter-of-fact simplicity. Or even, come to think of it, told at all. This insight sparked my curiosity: How often have women like Richardson and her Daytona Beach cohorts taken up arms, and what kind of portrayals await them when they do? Where do sex workers and their allies turn in times of heightened violence—when a serial killer, for instance, is at large?

Since hearing about Tonya Richardson’s case in the spring of 2006, I’ve set out to look for answers from those who know best: not news anchors or crime beat reporters, but self-identified street-walkers, call girls, strippers, dommes, and sex workers of various stripes. And what I’ve collected over the past year are strategies for self-protection that run the gamut from the mundane to the no-holds-barred, the indulgently commercial to the intensely practical. Not far from my home in England, for example, I discovered a group of sex workers and their allies who took to the streets of Ipswich after a serial killer murdered five sex workers there in December: resisting national broadcasters’ entreaties that women stay inside their homes until the “Ipswich Ripper” could be apprehended, the protestors stormed the area, chanting, “We don’t need protection, we need a revolution.” On the other side of the ocean, not far from a Canadian pig farm where more than two dozen indigenous sex workers were brutally murdered over a period of twenty-five years, I encountered a group of prostitutes in thigh-high boots who offered me a copy of their low-budget zine targeting johns, which, they explained, is meant to curb violence by communicating their standards for personal safety directly to the most relevant audience.

Street-savvy technologies and products seem to be the saving grace for many sex workers these days: everything from cell phones to bras with secret linings for hiding the evening’s earnings. True, some examples are rather pricey and elaborate; a stripper named Veronica at the Catwalk in New Haven told me about a new kind of platform shoe for urban sex workers that has a built-in alarm system, a GPS receiver, and emergency buttons that signal both law enforcement and local sex workers’ rights groups. But other ideas cooked up by women and transgender folks are more accessible to those with minimal resources at their disposal—from cheap rape alarms purchased in bulk to entirely cost-free practices like buddy systems. Some sex workers train together at firing ranges while others study non-violent strategies of conflict de-escalation; some rely on end-of-the-night text messaging while there are others still who have perfected the 100 percent free strategy of license-plate memorization.

More interesting than the individual, consumption-based strategies tend to be the collective ones. Groups like the Sex Workers Alliance of Toronto (SWAT) publish an annual “bad date booklet,” where sex workers can anonymously report assaults, rip-offs, or harassment from clients (as well as from police, neighborhood groups, and stalkers) in order to help others avoid similar situations. Another Canadian initiative fights for “safe zones” in Vancouver—special areas of shops and buildings clearly marked with window stickers where sex workers of all gender identities can run if they’re in danger, or if they simply want to use a phone or kick back with some coffee.

Then there are more broad-based co-ops like Nevada’s Sex Workers Outreach Project or Seattle’s Home Alive, whose mission is to fuel “a cultural and social movement that puts violence in a context of political, economic, and social oppression and frames safety as a human right.” Founded in the wake of several brutal rapes and murders of women in the city, Home Alive organizes everything from self-defense classes and boundary-setting workshops to public chalking events and community conversations. In a single year, the non-profit offered more than one hundred presentations to schools, workplaces, and low-income housing projects and shelters. Their analysis continues to help place the struggle against sexual violence in a larger political framework. “We believe that debunking stereotypes grounded in sexism and racism is one of the keys to ensuring sex workers’ safety,” says Home Alive director Becka Tilsen. “This is why we advocate a community response to violence that targets all forms of institutional oppression, but also gives people the tools they need to defend themselves.”

Returning to Tonya Richardson’s story, it’s worth noting that this, too, was an example of community mobilization and not an individual crusade. Richardson always spoke to reporters in the plural—“We will get him,” not “I will get him”—and one doubts this detail was accidental. Some of the sex workers’ commentary on the killer may have sounded individualist, like a woman cited only as Shalonda who told the Orlando Sentinel, “I don’t go nowhere without my knife . . . [because] if nobody ain’t gonna protect me, I gotta protect me.” Ultimately, however, most women along Ridgewood Avenue took up arms as part of an informal communal strategy to both protect themselves and watch each others’ backs.

And if it takes a village to thwart a serial killer, then sex worker allies in Daytona Beach have also played an important role in that task. Extremely problematic as the history of religious interventions might be, it’s worth noting that the Halifax Urban Ministry’s volunteers rallied to sex workers’ defense with a streetwalking program of their own—going out to talk with sex workers about potential threats, providing space for them to brainstorm modes of self-protection, lobbying for better lighting on dangerous avenues, and reminding the wider community that the saintly Mary Magdalene herself was none other than a prostitute.

In each of the individual and collective examples of creative resistance I’ve cited so far, catching word of silenced stories is only half the battle. Next comes the challenge of representation. How do sex workers get their voices back into the public sphere, while also addressing difficult internal debates about, for instance, violent versus non-violent means of seeking change? On the one hand, sex workers’ resistance is often ignored within or actively erased from our public records. On the other hand, it’s sometimes scrawled in bright red ink on billboards and tabloids all across America: sexualized, sensationalized, glamorized, and repackaged for the highest bidder.

Nowhere is this truer than in Hollywood, where few things sell better or titillate more than the cocktail of sex, women, and weaponry. Directors often want to have their stories both ways: cashing in on the tear-jerking image of the helpless female victim, while also harnessing the energy of the hysterical whore. A clear case in point is that of Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker in Florida who earned infamy as “the first female serial killer” after murdering seven johns whom she accused of rape or attempted rape. In a searing documentary called, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Nick Broom-field shows how Wuornos’s own lawyer showed more interest in auctioning off the film rights to his client’s life than in saving her from death row. A decade later, when Charlize Theron’s portrayal of Wuornos in the Hollywood film Monster won her an Academy Award for Best Actress, more dicey questions about Wuornos’s commodification arose. It was hard not to wonder what most gushing moviegoers who wept at Theron’s on-screen demise and rallied to her character’s imaginary defense were busy doing on the morning of October 9, 2002, when the “real” Wuornos was sent to her death by lethal injection.

On the rare occasions when women who employ extreme means of self-defense aren’t depicted as stark-raving loonies, they still tend to be punished in the end—think Thelma and Louise or Madame Butterfly. Frankly, Pedro Almodóvar’s recent box office hit, Volver, is the first movie I’ve seen in which a young woman’s retaliation against sexual violence doesn’t ultimately boomerang around to destroy her, too. But this plot anomaly is possible only because the doe-eyed teenage daughter with the kitchen knife in hand is not, in fact, a sex worker. To the contrary, she is still young and virginal enough to be considered an “innocent” victim—one who has not yet compromised her right to be surprised by male violence due to the clothes she wears, the streets she walks, or the hours she walks them.

Not true of Tonya Richardson. In a country of criminalized prostitution, in which women in Richardson’s line of work supposedly forfeit their entitlement to safety, she demands it anyway, with a switchblade. And that’s why I return to her story again and again, filled with a deep and contradictory swirl of emotions: My admiration for a woman and her colleagues who have stood up for themselves against a serial killer who “left three women with their pants down in a ditch.” My surprise that a mainstream media source dared to cover their collective action so straightforwardly. My anger and heartbreak that a group of women—or, for that matter, people—would ever be placed in a circumstance where wielding a switchblade felt “necessary.” Or, perhaps more inexcusable, where the burden of finding and restraining a person who wants to mutilate their bodies would be thrust on an already disenfranchised group instead of being considered a collective, societal priority. And of course, my awareness that, as a privileged white woman, I owe Richardson and her colleagues far more by way of solidarity than I’ve offered—pulling my weight in pursuit of a world where safety is considered a sex worker’s basic human right.

SARAH STILLMAN is a staff writer for The New Yorker and visiting scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.