Dykes and Whores: Girls Gone Bad

I was a dyke long before I became a whore, but first I was a slut. All three identities, whether embraced by me or imposed from outside, bring stigma, reducible to my failure or refusal to conform to behavior expected of “good” women. Whores, sluts and dykes are bad girls, bad because we’re sexually deviant. (In fact, the two fundamental bases on which women are judged in this culture are sexual and maternal, and as every slut, dyke or whore who’s ever been involved in a custody battle knows, be a deviant or failure at the first and you’re assumed to be a failure at the second.)

I first fucked—not for love, but for desire—twenty-four years ago. I first fucked a woman three years later. I fucked for money for the first time when I was over thirty. I have thought a lot about sexual stigma, women’s in particular, since my days as a teenaged slut. Each time I experience and assimilate into my identity a new stigmatized sexual behavior, I am forced to think some more.

Slut stigma and its meaning are in the process of some social reconstruction—many men and women (some of them feminist) no longer devalue a woman who fucks for fun and pleasure. Many men, in fact, would prefer more women to behave this way. Sluts do not challenge the tenet of “good” female behavior that Adrienne Rich has termed “compulsory heterosexuality;” they remain sexually available to men. Dykes do not. Whores do, but on their own terms: only for a price.

I have repeatedly heard the myth that “Most prostitutes are lesbians—they hate men so much that the only way they can find satisfaction is in the arms of a woman.” I had heard this myth long before I knew any whores, long before I became a whore myself. It describes some women, I suppose, perfectly. But it is also a great fallacy; “most” prostitutes are not lesbian, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the majority are bisexual; a great many prostitutes do not hate men at all (including some who are lesbian). What is most wrong with this myth is its dependence on the greatest myth about lesbianism: “They hate men so much that….” In each case the women are defined in terms of their relationships to men, not to other women.

Some lesbians, and some prostitutes, do feel contempt for men. So do some heterosexual women and some cocktail waitresses and some attorneys. To discuss either dykes or whores (not to mention the dyke whores themselves) intelligently, one must understand that the lesbian community is diverse, filled with women who come to it from a variety of different directions: some Kinsey sixes, some dykes by choice, some who turned to women after rejecting men, some lesbians only because they love one particular woman, some bisexual but feeling allegiance to the dyke community. Whores, too, are a diverse lot: Lower-class street prostitutes live a very different life than well-educated call girls; the experience of whoring differs from brothel to massage parlor to hotel suite, from Manhattan to Bangkok, from bitter survivor to sexual adventurer. Some whores are heterosexual to the point of being homophobic. Some whores are queer.

Anyone presuming to speak for dykes or whores who does not acknowledge this diversity proves herself immediately incompetent. A weapon consistently used against the sexually marginalized is this insidious myth-making, leading outsiders to believe things about individuals, based on their group status, that may not be true. We do each other no favors when we turn this weapon on ourselves.

It is not enough that we struggle with the stigma imposed on us from outsiders; frequently we invent canon based on our own and our friends’ experiences (perhaps with some of the outsiders’ opprobrium mixed in) and then proceed to apply these lifestyle rules and compulsory beliefs to each other. Dykes do this to dykes, whores to whores, and often we judge other sexual minorities as quickly and harshly as the larger society presumes to judge us.

This tendency has colored the experience of countless lesbian and les-bi sex workers. When oppressions intersect (this topic is most eloquently addressed by lesbians of color), one’s community of real peers shrinks to fit the shaded area of the Venn diagram, the sometimes rarified place where uncommon experience is shared and understood. When those who share some, but not all, of our experience are educable, willing to hear about and honor our differences, we can usually live comfortably with them. When they evaluate and criticize our differences—when our sister whores are homophobic, our dyke friends and lovers contemptuous and judgmental of our work in the sex industry—the rejection feels bitter indeed.

It is stupid, too, because we have a great deal to teach each other. No bad girl, no sexually deviant woman, can afford in a misogynistic and sex-negative society to ignore the lessons learned by the other bad ones. The treatments historically and/or currently meted out to whores, spinsters, queers, adulteresses, hysterics, masturbators, witches and other female deviants interrelate. (So do the treatments meted out to male sexual deviants and the intermediately gendered—that’s another essay, but it’s important to note especially for those women who think only women are oppressed, only women’s oppression important, as well as for those who have somehow managed to understand their lesbianism in terms of feminism, without acknowledging it as sexually deviant.)

Dykes can teach sex workers about identity politics and how to view their oppression through the lens of a sexual-minority analysis. When whores see their experiences in prostitution as work, divorced from their own sexuality, they have fewer tools to understand the source of their stigma and less power to openly stand up to it. Whore stigma is stronger than lesbian stigma today not only because prostitution remains more universally criminalized than lesbianism, but also because so many sex workers remain in the closet, hiding from friends’ and families’ reactions and often cut off even from other whores, their first logical source of support. Because the average person thinks s/he does not know any prostitutes, sex workers remain marginalized and mythologized and find it harder to break through the wall of stereotypes that separate them from others. When whores do come out and talk—publicly, or privately with selected friends—their accounts of their feelings and experiences are frequently denied because they don’t mesh with people’s preconceived ideas about prostitution. They are accused of being in denial about how damaging their lifestyle is.

If this scenario sounds familiar, it should. Replace all references to sex workers in the previous paragraph with “lesbian” and you have a description of the pre-Gay Liberation dyke’s plight, a situation that was radically changed through the consciousness-raising, agitation and support of queer identity politics. The transition from a fearful and closeted existence to “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” assertiveness was made possible by activist communities whose advocacy politics was fueled by a developing analysis of the role of homophobia in shoring up social structures that oppressed nonheterosexuals. From the education-and-support-based strategies of the homophile movement to Gay and Lesbian Liberation and Queer Nation, adherents of identity politics have emphasized looking at the lived experience of the sexually marginalized and either carving out a place in mainstream culture or developing an alternative one.

Insisting that sex work be seen as choice-based and worthy (instead of debased, something that women are “driven” to out of necessity and dysfunction) demands that we confront not only our stereotypes about prostitutes (and clients) but also our culture’s demonization of nonprocreative, nonmonogamous sex. Sex-negativity is not only the public’s greatest impediment to understanding the diverse experiences of whores, it is one of the biggest problems whores themselves have to face. If we haven’t confronted our (to coin a new phrase) “internalized whorephobia,” most likely we will be unable to move outsiders to confront theirs. Coming from a place of guilt and “I shouldn’t be doing this” is no more empowering for a sex worker than for a dyke, and in both communities, this sort of internalized opprobrium is dangerous.

Dyke whores have a special challenge here, though they also have the conceptual tools (if they have been influenced by sexual-identity politics) to deal with it. Rare is the woman who is able to make her living in the sex industry catering only or even mostly to other women. Women don’t buy as much sex as men; they can afford it less, in the aggregate, and have less social permission to do so. Consequently a dyke whore does all or most of her business with men. Her sex work requires her to cross the lines of her sexual orientation, which heterosexual prostitutes and gay men who do sex for money need not do. Some dykes keep the sex as far from their sex work as possible—they work in peep shows, as strippers, or doing phone fantasy, so they need not be intimately touched by their clients. Others assiduously think of their contact with clients as work, not sex. But still others—and this is scarcely ever discussed, even among ourselves—like having sex with men, as long as it’s for money and fenced off from the terrain of emotional relationships and love. Are these women bisexual? Many of them don’t self-identify that way.

Many of their sisters in the lesbian community are quick to label them, however, and one clear reason dyke whores are often viewed with suspicion or outright hostility in the lesbian community is that “Lesbians don’t have sex with men” (or “Women who have sex with men should not be part of the lesbian community”—this is the excuse most often provided for attempts to exclude bi-dykes and bisexual women, including prostitutes). Their identity—lesbian—coupled with their sexual behavior—heterosexual, when on the job—brings up our discomfort with the question of sexuality as choice versus sexuality as innate.

Another source of potential friction for the lesbian whore is femme stigma. Femme presentation is likely to be important to a lesbian or bi-les prostitute if for no other reason than that a butchy or androgynous presentation will attract fewer clients. In a lesbian community which devalues or maligns femme, she will carry yet another layer of stigma and difference. Since such communities today are influenced by an anti-butch/femme theory emerging from white, middle-class feminism, a lower class and/or of color femme prostitute may be subject to several intersecting sources of oppression.

This reading of feminist theory has already decided, without giving dyke prostitutes their say, that sex with men and even being sexually appealing to men is oppressive—even if the sex is commodified and the woman in question is equally, if not more, appealing to women. This serves to denigrate (among other things) a common economic strategy in femme/butch relationships in which the femme can command a higher income (perhaps through sex work, perhaps not) because she “passes.” This scenario was even more common in more homophobic days than these, and it is important to stress that before the advent of cultural feminism, with its disapproval of commodified sex and female gender roles, lesbian sex workers had in some communities a more accepted place than they have in many women’s communities today.

As a result of the femme and whore stigmas that permeate many, especially feminist, lesbian communities, lesbian sex workers have gotten as much support from gay men as from other lesbians. Gay men and whores historically have shared the fringes of urban public space, the parks and the red-light districts, as well as the concept of “tricking.” The hustler is part of gay male iconography and history; he does not have a lesbian equivalent. This is another result of the boundaries of sexual orientation that lesbian prostitutes have to cross and that gay or bisexual men having sex for money do not. Gay men, with their historically greater ease about casual sex, have provided a touchstone of identity and connection for some lesbian whores; women can share stories with them without being denigrated as “not really gay.” Gay men also gave me encouragement for my femme identity; coming out post-Stonewall, I found no dykes who took femme seriously but plenty of faggots who did.

The influence of feminism on the lesbian community has, of course, not been monolithic. Cultural feminism’s anti-pornography, anti-prostitution discourse (which amounts to a vilification of male sexuality, saying little or nothing about proactive female sexuality) is only one of several voices. Its chief oppositions have come to be termed sex-radical feminism and sex-positive feminism. Sex radicalism—for a thorough introduction see Gayle Rubin’s Thinking Sex—explores oppression based on “the stigma of erotic dissidence” (Rubin’s phrase), paralleling homosexuality, prostitution and other deviant behaviors and/or lifestyles, and identifies mainstream feminism as, among other things, “a system of sexual judgment.”

“Sex-positive feminism” is a liberal version of this. It has been especially associated with a group of sex-industry workers and their supporters who identify as feminist and who work within traditional feminist organizations to advance a choice-based agenda. Influenced by early Women’s Liberation Movement tenets of sexual freedom and control over our own bodies, sex-positive feminists, many of whom are lesbian or bi-les, reject the polarization around gender encouraged by some radical feminists and anti-porn-and-prostitution feminists. As women who identify their sex-work experiences as neutral to positive, they see their role as educational, reminding other feminists that diverse experiences of sex work can and do exist, and as advocacy-based, encouraging feminists to dialogue about these issues, to oppose censorship and to support the decriminalization of prostitution.

This fragmentation of the feminist movement(s) around issues of sex and representation is not surprising. Women come to feminism from various backgrounds, each of which has its own take on sexuality. Since feminism is, as Rubin notes, a theoretical attempt to come to terms with gender oppression, it has no position on sex except where sexual issues are seen as devolving from gender oppression. Both sex-positive feminism—“Women should have the same sexual opportunities as men, and control over our bodies”—and “sex-negative” feminism—“Sexuality is a locus of women’s oppression”—share a common jumping-off point, with no consensus on where to jump to. Consequently the various feminisms have absorbed very different belief systems regarding sexual behavior, male sexuality and female sexuality. The early seventies saw the feminist movement split over issues of homophobia; in the nineties, the issue of “whorephobia” has yet to be resolved, and feminism finds itself struggling with a tendency it attacks in patriarchy: the good girl/bad girl split.

Sex-radical and sex-positive feminists would rather turn their attention to developing a positive analysis of sex work than to defending it against attack. The commodification of sexuality is no longer centered around whores, dirty books and porno movies; a post-modern cultural shift finds these things sharing the economy with Madonna, Calvin Klein ads and On Our Backs magazine. We are still criminalized and stigmatized, but we are operating in a social climate in which representations of sex and their various meanings are in a state of flux, and we are hardly the only women representing sex. The street-walker flagging down passing cars, the dyke donning makeup and wig in preparation to enter her booth in the peep show, and the conservatively suited call girl with condoms and dildos in her briefcase waiting for the hotel elevator are only a few of many disparate faces a sex worker can wear. The phone sex worker represents as many faces of sex as she can conjure—she is the real shape-shifter, whose age, hair color and sexual preference may change with every call she takes.

Whores sell an image of femaleness, an image of idealized sexual interaction (women as desirous and willing), which some men have difficulty finding outside the fantasy-based world of commodification. Not insignificantly, whores sell sexual pleasure and release. In their dealings with a variety of clients, they find this takes a multitude of forms, so in essence they are being paid to explore sexuality. This way of thinking represents a shift; there have always been whores who enjoyed their work, including often the sex itself, but today, under the influence of the sex-positive, feminist sex workers, who believe women should have the opportunity to be sexual adventurers if they desire, this exploration of sexuality has liberating potential.

Whether an individual sex worker can achieve that potential depends on a variety of circumstances, which intersect with other liberation issues and cannot be separated from them. First, has she willingly chosen sex work? If she works because someone else expects or forces her to, or because she simply has no other economic alternatives (and remember that there are few nonprofessional forms of work available to women in this society that pay as well as sex work can), the likelihood increases that she will experience whoring as oppressive. Is she comfortable with her own sexuality, and is she happy with the quality of her sexual relationships outside of whoring?

Is she educated about sexuality and sexual variation? Will she honor the desires of her clients or trash them as perverted? Does she believe everyone has the right to access sexual satisfaction? Does she honor sexual service and feel positive about providing it? I have heard too many whores put down clients for sexual desires that are common (or uncommon, it doesn’t matter); how must it affect their self-esteem to be the ones to provide that sort of sexual release? The extreme version of this, of course, is the whore who does not like or respect sex at all: who thinks sex is dirty or at least overrated and men are pigs. This may be the perspective of a woman who has always experienced sex in an abusive context, or who thinks her own sexuality is fine, but judges other peoples’.

The latter is a special danger for whores who are dykes, since the polarization of sexual identities is maintained in this culture by distancing from and labeling other people’s sexual behavior and desire: We maintain our subcultures by essentially doing the same thing to the heterosexuals that they do to us, and it may be especially difficult for a dyke whore to feel good about male sexual desire. Yet plenty of dykes, it must be emphasized, do feel this acceptance, either by emphasizing to themselves that they are doing a particular kind of work or simply because they are sex-positive enough to respect others’ desire.

For me, this level of acceptance was a process: First, I needed to get over my own erotophobia about my own desires, then other lesbians’, then bisexual women’s, then gay men’s, then bi men’s, then heterosexual women’s and finally heterosexual men’s. Whoring has given me more access to my ability to honor desires that don’t mesh with mine than I think I would have developed otherwise—just because I’m not attracted to the client doesn’t mean the sex is bad. I strongly believe that oppression based on sexual behavior will not cease until all persons’ desires for consensual sex are viewed as equal, and it feels hypocritical to me that we who demand the right to our non-normative desires would not allow other people their own.

Thinking about the issues surrounding the exchange of sex for money, especially when factoring sexual orientation into the analysis, has to be done complexly. Pieces of the puzzle may lend themselves to understanding through simplistic analysis, but the whole does not. My understanding of whoring is based on my own experiences and those of women (and men) I know, and I am strongly influenced by the tenets of identity politics and a sex-radical analysis. I also have a background in sex education. This differentiates my voice from many others: from the researchers whose subjects, incarcerated whores, are less likely to represent the educated sex workers whose experience reflects both politics and privilege; from the former or current sex workers whose experiences reflected their expectations of degradation, or whose working conditions allowed for nothing but oppression; from the feminists who are convinced that male sexual desires represent a desire to degrade or hurt women in the abstract if not in the particular.

I am quite aware that the components of my individual analysis reflect privilege, as I am aware that I can’t speak directly for those whose experience is very different from mine. Would that more commentators on the sex industry understood where their own biases lie. The complexity of the larger picture is assured by whores who are sex-positive and adventurous, who find permission in the sex industry to explore sex in at least a limited way. Some of these women are lesbian or bi-les; the queer whores seem most likely to define sex work as part of their sexuality, acknowledging the sex they have for money as desirable and one component of their sexual makeup.

The story these women tell does not jibe very well with the “whoredom as degradation” perspective that gets so much more press. There are many possible explanations for this. The sex-positive whores complain that their voices are systematically ignored in mainstream feminist circles whose missionary zeal on behalf of sex workers does not extend to women who like and accept what they’re doing. The hegemonic heterosexual culture would rather not encourage women to charge money for sexual services, and women who have had negative experiences in sex work may become defensive at the suggestion that others’ experiences have not been so bitter.

When the full range of sex workers’ experience is acknowledged, we can begin to ask what elements contribute to making it positive or negative. Since the pronouncements of “whorephobia” are made based on assumptions about women and female sexuality that, many whores tell us, are simply incomplete, we need to reevaluate our understandings of the psychology of women and the psychology of sex. What do the whores who are content with sex work like about it? Besides the most obvious answer (the money), the sex-positive, feminist sex worker may cite flexibility and independence, working for herself, the recognition of her sexual power, getting to have sex outside the confines of a relationship, having a lot of sex and/or sexual variety, pride in stepping outside the restrictions imposed on “good girls,” pride in sexual prowess or exhibitionism, an increased ability to set limits, and opportunities to explore her sexuality through roles and fantasy.

Only in the sex industry do we find relationship, erotic play, and work intersecting. Whoring is not the same as casual sex; it is more structured temporally and behaviorally, and money is exchanged. Commodified sex throws up barriers between people, certainly, but it can also bring barriers down: most of us have sex with people we wouldn’t interact with in our nonwork lives, especially whores who are dykes. Many of us have experimented with sexual behaviors for money that we wouldn’t otherwise have explored. Often clients appreciate us for our very differences: A client with a non-normative sexual interest may feel more comfortable and accepted with a queer whore than anyone else, for she may give him permission to be “deviant” in a much more positive way than others do. I have been sought out by clients precisely for my queerness; in a sense I have marketed my self-acceptance, my acceptance of others’ erotic diversity and, certainly, my comfort with sex.

There have always been women who were cut out for prostitution, for sex work. My list of things one might like about it is not new. What is new is a weaving-in of sexual liberation issues, identity politics’ stamp on whoredom. While queer-identified whores have not single-handedly brought about this change, our effect is indelible. What is also new is a reading of sex as play, absorbed from the other sexual scenes many of us affiliate with or are influenced by: S/M, gay men, queer women, group sex. When sex is seen as play or adventure, not degradation, queer and sex-positive whores are, not surprisingly, the most successful at throwing off our internalized sexual stigma—and our politics reflect it.