Free Sex Free

Grounded in sex worker theory, this essay explores paid sex as a confrontation with free sex. Sex worker theorists name an ambivalent relationship to radical feminist thought, finding theoretical affinities in radical feminism's critiques of unpaid heterosexuality while also disidentifying with its whorephobia, whiteness, gender essentialism, and narratives of false conscious. In an invitation for a radical feminism that commits to radical politics, they frame unpaid heterosexuality as a site of exploitation and romance as a bad deal. They articulate a critique of free sex with cis men, but one that is rigorously attentive both to questions of subjectivity and to the inadequacy of gender as a coherent analytic.

A poet, a sex worker, and an anti-capitalist, Charlotte Shane thinks a lot about money and politics. What makes getting paid a political act, especially for someone who knows that waged work fuels capitalism rather than threatens it? Shane's (2020) answer is also a story about feminist genealogy: “I'm still hopelessly influenced by older feminisms that focused on how this world wants all of us as women to be used sexually without actually benefitting from that use. It doesn't want us to say, ‘here's how much it costs, and here's exactly what you're gonna get when you pay.’” Saying the thing that should not be said is a way of doing politics. Charging for sex is not the most crucial form of resistance we have, Shane adds, nor is it a tidy one—commodification feels bad for many people, and it sometimes feels bad for her too. And still, “I do think that sex work is the—or a—key to totally blowing open the whole heterosexual dynamic.”

“Of course, not all sex workers are women. Not all clients are men,” she adds. Thinkers on the sex worker left echo the same caveat while also pushing back against allies’ interest in exceptional counterexamples to this gendered dynamic. A focus away from sex work as a space where struggles over heterosexuality are waged contests anti–sex worker narratives by relocating the terms of debate, but many sex worker radicals want to dwell in that terrain. Most clients are cis, straight men, they reminded, and most hire people they believe are women (i.e., cis and trans women and genderqueer people and trans men who advertise as women for work). Left sex worker thinkers are, by and large, more interested than their contemporary allies in retaining “older feminisms’” sense that the exchange has something to say about heterosexual life. Their conclusions about what this something is take us places those feminisms were unable to go.

This essay explores left sex worker theorizing about sex work as a confrontation with unpaid heterosexuality, and it sits with the uneasy affinity with “older feminisms” Shane marks. Here, as for Shane, “older feminisms” evoke the radical feminism of the long 1970s. They carry that tradition's expansive political horizon and also the whiteness, gender essentialism, and whorephobia that violently foreshortened it. The feminists Shane gestures to never saw sex workers’ struggles as bound up with theirs, and their politics around race, class, and transness make it risky for a community that is disproportionately non-white, poor, and gender nonconforming to share conceptual space. But thinkers in this archive insist on risking that close contact, finding moments of recognition in a framework that was not built for them. To radical feminist claims that the expectation of free hetero sex is one engine of patriarchal capitalism, they theorize demands for pay as one mode of confrontation. They also grapple with the limits of that confrontation: commodification is the norm for life lived under this system, how could it be its undoing? The money flows across the usual hierarchies of race and nation, and it is never enough to make the right people go broke. And still, the force of the confrontation can be measured by the extent to which demands for pay are violently policed, and by how the demand changes things for those who make it.

Methodology of a Bad Object

This essay is grounded in interviews with fifty-nine left-identified sex workers. For some, sexual labor was a radicalizing encounter with white supremacy, wealth inequality, state violence, and masculinities at turns violent and pitiable. Others came to sex work after they came to their politics, finding there a job where one might be free of bosses without having to become one, downwardly redistribute wealth, and refuse sex that takes more than it gives. Interviewees echoed Sonya Aragon's (2021: 111) invitation to think about “whore [as] an orientation. Not a sexual one; a political one.” This essay considers unpaid hetero sex from the perspective of that orientation. In so doing, it engages two bad feminist objects: the critique of unpaid hetero sex alongside the “older feminisms” associated with its most explicit critique.

Negativity about free hetero sex is a “bad object” for sex workers who speak publicly. They know that spectators are eager for confirmation that sex workers have broken relationships to men and sex either because of the work or as an explanation for having done it. Q (2020) described conservative (and here included sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, or “SWERF”) readers as always “waiting” for evidence. “I imagine hungry dogs watching you cut up a steak.” Sex workers confront the threat that negativity about sex with clients, or even men as such, will be taken out of the context that police (also frequent agents of sexual violence) earn more negativity still—none of these critiques posed protection from a violent state as the solution. Sex worker sex positivity emerges as an attempt to intervene in these overdetermined debates (Swift 2021). But our conversations came at a moment in sex worker politics when sex worker thinkers are increasingly fatigued with trying to frame their stories to guard against anti–sex workers’ appropriation.

I am running up against my own sense, as someone disciplined in feminist studies, that the language I am using here is “out of time” with the field. To talk about “men” as such and about hetero sex through the lens of negativity summons radical feminist anachronisms, ones that “‘fail’ to recognize sexual subjectivity” (Hemmings 2011: 49). They also trade in essentialism (Wiegman 2001: 359; Weeks 2015: 735) that gives way to trans exclusion and overestimates both solidarities among women (across race, class, and nation) and the homogeneity of male dominance. Left feminists have always had good reason to be wary of what Claudia Jones (1949: 13) called the “the rotten bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’”

Workers in this archive—all leftists and most sharply critical of self-defined radical feminists—shared these concerns. And yet many did talk about masculinity (as such) as a problem, and one concentrated in the relations of unpaid hetero sex. Sex worker radicals articulate a critique of free sex with cis men, but one that is rigorously attentive both to questions of sexual subjectivity and to the inadequacy of gender as a coherent analytic. Most of the workers included in the archive are part of the working class and poor, Black and brown, disabled, and queer and gender nonconforming communities who have historically found little relief in solidarities among “women.” They come knowing exactly how much harm sex workers have experienced at the hands of elite women “helpers” (Agustín 2007). Sex worker critiques of straight masculinity do not come from the usual place of assuming sisterhood on the other side.

While radical feminists have largely abandoned straightforward critiques of free sex with men in favor of paid sexual labor as the site of patriarchal domination, many of the sex workers in this archive pushed to keep some version of those critiques in our sights. In an invitation for a radical feminism that commits to its own politics, they frame unpaid heterosexuality as a site of exploitation and romance as a bad deal. Before we get there, I want to pause to recall the radical feminisms with which the thinkers in this archive find some common cause, and think about what it means that the critiques they advanced are now self-consciously “out of time” even for the political tradition that once claimed them.

Those Older Feminisms

Nineteen seventies radical feminists engaged paid sex first and foremost through its proximity to the unpaid hetero sex that sustains the nuclear family. For Ti-Grace Atkinson, “The suppression of women is synonymous with being forced into prostitution, but if that's the way it is, I say, let's not go for free, let's up the charge” (Fosburgh 1970). “Prostitutes are the only honest women, because they charge for their services, rather than submitting to a marriage contract which forces them to work for life without pay.” Atkinson's invitation to “up the charge” is particular in making explicit the idea that paid sex might pose a challenge to its alternatives, but a critique of unpaid hetero sex and the mystifying affects that prop it up was standard among radical feminists of her time (see Jackson 1995: 113). Most famously, Shulamith Firestone took aim at romance as a tool for reinforcing the failing institution of heterosexual monogamy. It was “a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions” (1970: 131), and one that undermined solidarity through the “privatization” of women (133). That privatization was most pronounced in the marriage contract. Romantic love was the bait and free sex outside marriage a kind of training.

While Firestone is never able to articulate anything like solidarity with sex workers—this is one place in which her dialectical commitments break down and shared struggle disappears—her account makes clear that anything the reader finds troubling about prostitution is also true of unpaid hetero sex—sex that is not actually for free but to “gain other ends” (Firestone 1970: 126). Likewise, for Kate Millett (1970: 62), a true sexual revolution would destroy heterosexual monogamy, unremunerated exploitation as it was, together with prostitution. Neither had a place in the futures early radical feminists were dreaming up. During the same period, Wages for Housework feminists were plotting a parallel critique that explicitly named the housewife as performing a kind of unwaged prostitution (New York Wages for Housework 1976).

But sex work appears for self-defined radical feminist thinkers as an adjunct to the exploitation of the marriage contract rather than as a confrontation with it. This is strange given how central the unpaid work of hetero sex is to these critiques. “The conventions of romantic love are drenched in appeals to the ‘natural . . . [they] evoke this aura of a little world immune from the vulgar cash-nexus of modern society,’” wrote Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1982: 27). But marriage is, at its core, “a form that conflates the sexual with the economic” (56). For Monique Wittig ([1982] 1992: 54), “unpaid work” is one of the chief stipulations of the marriage contract that structures heterosexual life, and unpaid sex—the “obligation of coitus”—is key to the job description.

If early radical feminists made a case for how “the ethic of service to men” (Jackson 1995: 23) was fundamental to the status quo, they under theorized the extent to which pay matters. What could be less romantic than the exchange of pre-negotiated sexual services for cold, hard cash? These critiques were unable to imagine paid sex as the sexual form that most obviously laid bare “the vulgar cash-nexus.” Instead, sex work appears as support for radical feminists’ racist fantasies about Black women's misplaced “envy” for white women's economic security (Firestone 1970: 112); a symbolic “warning” (Wittig [1982] 1992: 53) to non–sex working women; or exceptional evidence of male entitlement (Barrett and McIntosh 1982: 73). These thinkers are not able to ask, what becomes of the obligation Wittig names when we charge, screen, negotiate, and sometimes decline? Nor are they able to imagine that anxieties about sex work and (interpersonal and state) violence against sex workers might have something to do with the threat it poses to the bourgeois family form. Nonetheless, and without knowing it, they help lay the theoretical groundwork for that conclusion. As Firestone (1970: 113) herself writes, “The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance.” How else to read whorephobia?

For all their missed opportunities at sex worker solidarity, early radical feminists are refreshing in their targeting romance and unpaid hetero sex for critique. This is remarkable especially because it feels so distant from contemporary radical feminist thinking. Today, what we can expect from dominant voices who place themselves in the tradition is a laser focus on paid sex as the evidence of patriarchy's harms. In her postmortem for 1960s and 1970s radical feminism, Alice Echols (2002: 108) writes that “as feminism found harbor inside the academy, theoretical moves too often became career moves”; theoretical risk taking “was the casualty.” This does not map on to contemporary feminist thought writ large, where there is a rich archive of risky critiques of white supremacist, bourgeois sexual forms (see Rodríguez 2014; Horton-Stallings 2015; Willey 2016; TallBear 2018). But I do think it helps explain how a self-defined radical feminist tradition moved from trenchant critiques of romantic—that is, unpaid—heterosexual love and the family to ones that implicitly seek to shore them up.

If early radical feminists framed unpaid sex as a problem because it looked like prostitution, those who claim the title today mark prostitution as a problem because it does not look like free sex. This mirrors a conservative trend in radical feminist theorizing about the reproductive family more generally. If, per Sophie Lewis's (2019: 45) analysis of the surrogacy question, these feminists are “too busy, worrying about what surrogacy being pregnancy makes surrogacy, to think about what that very same realization makes pregnancy,” the same is true of what anxieties about paid sex obscure about sex for free. All that separates the two, after all “is the possibility of a wage” (2019: 44). With Lewis, sex worker radicals find themselves looking backward to a feminism radical enough to dream up the abolition of both. Sex worker radicals look backward (but at a slant) because contemporary alternatives leave their questions unanswered. Today's vanguard in queer sexuality studies shares sex workers’ critique of hetero sex but does not take aim at unpaid-ness as one of its primary faults. Where it posits nonnormative—but still routinely nonpaid—sex as the alternative, it falls short of answering sex worker radicals’ desires to put questions of economy front and center. And where queer thought freely assigns radical potential to nonnormative sex, it departs from sex worker radicals’ interest (one for which some find recognition in feminist anachronisms) in the ambivalences of sex that is within as much as it is against the systems that structure it.

If I am flirting here with a kind of “loss narrative” (Hemmings 2011) it is because I cannot find another explanation for how a tradition that once illuminated its harms came to so violently defend unpaid sex. It is true, as Kathi Weeks outlines in her meditation on Firestone's work, that “feminist theorists seem today more reticent to level their critical gaze at ‘private’ life and institutions like marriage and motherhood for fear that some will ‘take it personally’” (Weeks 2015: 742). Those someones might be other feminists who bristle at the suggestion of false consciousness. They are as likely to be the moneyed, conservative power brokers with whom radical feminists increasingly find “easy agreement,” not least around questions of family values (Bernstein 2018: 36). For robust critiques of unpaid hetero sex, then, one would have to turn to the very sex workers that radical feminists have long since disavowed any kind of kinship with. This might be because radical sex workers have less to lose in taking aim at “these shibboleths of bourgeois propriety” (Weeks 2015: 741).

Commodification as Confrontation

“Within heterosexuality, women really get a bad deal,” said Jessie Sage (2020). She wondered if this sounded silly coming from a twice married mother of three, but joked that this was perhaps why she was qualified to say it. This bad deal is not something we can simply opt out of, she said, and it is not made better by having a partner who does more of the work. And so, “it makes a lot of sense to me to say, ‘why not use sexuality to your own economic advantage?’ You have more control in sex work than you do in monogamous heterosexual relationships.” For Sage as for early radical feminist thinkers, this bad deal was epitomized in the marriage contract but also extended beyond to free hetero sex more broadly.

Where early radical feminists placed prostitution alongside unpaid romantic hetero sex, sex worker radicals articulate the distance between the two. Money brings freedom to maneuver, not least to leave homes (and couplings) that harm. It can also bring boundedness (see Bernstein 2007) and space to negotiate. Where romantic couplings tend to entrench raced and classed hierarchy for those who enter into it—most people make horizontal moves—sex worker radicals talk about the redistributive power of pay, directing cash to people and communities who are not supposed to have it. And, demands for pay reveal all the work we do for free.

Again and again, the thinkers in this archive name an alienated affinity with radical feminist critiques of unpaid feminized labor. Cybèle Lespérance (2020) describes a draw to early radical feminist theorizing, especially writing from lesbian feminists who argued that, having refused the performance attached to womanhood, they were “not women” at all. “I like that idea,” she said, having found it in her search for “radical feminists that don't make me hate radical feminists.” This search came from a desire for mutual understanding:

Her critique offers something that readers so often found missing in early radical feminist writing on free sex—a set of clues about what it might look like to live (maybe thrive!) under systems as they are, but one that also offers the hope of changing the rules as we go. Crucially, Lespérance's is a frame that does not assume the theorist is herself capable of opting out of those systems through force of will. There is a deep humility, and solidaristic impulse, in her “we're trying.” It is this combination of an incisive critique of free hetero sex and estrangement with the theoretical tradition that once named it most explicitly that makes sex worker radicalism such a rich place to turn.

In reappropriating rules in hopes of undermining them, sex worker radicals find kinship with other queer and feminist thinkers who play with the politics of confrontation. This is part of a world of tactics that include what José Muñoz (1999) calls “disidentification” and what Verónica Gago describes as “flight at the same moment as recognition,” “contempt at the same time as counting” (Gago 2020: 35). Such confrontations are a way of doing politics for those who, unable to access what Sarah Sharma (2020: 121) calls the “patriarchal penchant and inclination towards exit,” cannot afford to simply take their leave. When Nick Mitchell (Ben-Moshe et al. 2015: 271) invites us to “inhabit normativity in ways that are corrosive to it,” I see sex worker radicals acting in the spirit of this call.

Sex worker critiques of free sex articulate a contempt/counting dialectic in a particularly sharp way. And sex work's uneasy proximity to sex that is unpaid but, as Marxist feminists have long insisted (see New York Wages for Housework [1975] 2018), nonetheless work, reveals questions here that are more submerged in other forms of labor: can paid sex be work and a refusal of work at the same time? Is sex work a space in which reproductive labor has been, per the demand, waged? If it is true that counting is, under capitalism, the best way to make work visible as work (Gallant 2019: 187), does it follow that visibility paves the way for refusal?

Maya Andrea Gonzalez and Cassandra Troyan (2016) answer this way: “When love and care are exploited under the conditions of erasure, to continue to labor is to continue to struggle.” To do care is to do work; to charge is to make that visible. Later, they figure paid sex as a kind of “human strike,” one that lays bare the work of heterosexuality. This kind of making visible does answer Wages for Housework feminists’ calls to make gendered labor count (Nayar 2017: 10). “Only though a clear identification of sex work will women then have the power to refuse it,” writes Morgane Merteuil (2015), situating this within the broader Wages for Housework tradition.

But sex workers have more theoretical work to do here, because Wages for Housework under-theorized the precise connection between counting and strike. It is a tradition that forgets that Black and brown women have long been paid for housework and in ways that reproduce rather than transform capitalist social relations (Davis 1983: 237). It is also a tradition that might suggest too tidy a connection between housewives and sex workers (see Federici 2012; Fortunati 1981), over-reading the extent to which these workers do social reproduction in similar ways (Kotiswaran 2011: 60). And so, sex worker radicals are drawn to the potential of charging-as-strike, but they also caution against celebratory readings (including those from other sex workers) that overestimate the transformative potential of charging.

The sex worker writer Irene Silt (2020: 18) brings us exactly here, recalling these lines from Wages for Housework's classic document: “More smiles? More money.” She writes about the brief satisfaction that comes from the demand, but also the “solitude that we face on the other side of refusal.” The demand is only a provocation. Its unanswered question, “How do we take our refusal so seriously that we do not return to business as usual—ever?” Sex worker radicals grapple with just this—how to escalate the provocation that is sex for pay, a form of refusal and also a service people with money get to buy.

These positions only sometimes represent two poles within the sex worker left. Deep ambivalence marks most of the analyses around this theme, and the same thinkers articulate counting's confrontational potential and the ways it can preserve the status quo. Lucia Rey (2020) talked about how, for some sex workers, charging is “like seeing the matrix,” revealing all the ways that sex is transactional in civilian life. Just a few minutes later, they said, “I don't think there's anything inherently radical about sex work, and it goes back to sex work being work, but I think that sex work can oftentimes radicalize people.” Rey situated the work alongside other service labors dominated by working-class women and queers of color like them—for some clients, paying for sex is like paying for dry cleaning. Taking men's money can feel empowering, “but there's no politics to that.” My inclination as an ethnographer informed by queer and autonomist thought is to say that there are politics to everything. Some workers are not so sure. They are not sure, at least, that those politics are radical ones.

Many thinkers in this archive qualified statements about sex work's transformative potential with the caveat that this operates on an individual, rather than a structural level. Fatigued by empowerment narratives in sex work discourse, they wanted to be clear that the sense of power the work can confer is often brittle, and fleeting. At stake is whether counting is itself a confrontation with the status quo of hetero sex. When I asked Allie (2020) whether making men pay works this way, they responded, flatly, “It doesn't at all. [Clients] revel in their purchasing power.” White, monied men like Allie's clients “have set up a society where they have the money. . . . All we have is our labor to sell.” Sex worker radicals caution against a tendency to pretend this is not true.

Having only our labor to sell is the status quo for working-class and poor women and queers, especially (trans and cis) women of color and those struggling against colonial domination. In her critique of Wages for Housework, Angela Davis (1983: 337) reminds: if counting were radical on its own terms, it would not have such a long history of easy assimilation into the daily life of racial capitalism. Paid sex is also the norm, rather than the exception, in trans women's encounters with waged work and sexual life (Gabriel 2020). And the way the counting happens reinscribes capitalist logics in a particularly bald way; raced, cissexist, and classed differentials in pay, working conditions, and exposure to client and state violence unsettle any conclusion that counting will, on its own, bring us closer to justice.

And still, sex workers’ critics and their clients (sometimes the same people) see a connection between the charge and the threat of refusal. Why else would individual men, together with state agents and concerned outsiders, react so hatefully? For Chanelle Gallant (2020), the answer is that sex work “forces the conversation about sex as a form of labor.” This is why, when I asked Kiarra Thomas (2020) whether she thought charging was disruptive or just another way that men with money get to buy the services they want, she reminded that this is not true: “They get what I give them.” Charging is “a power grab, because men all think that we should just be free to them.” “Bad johns are like incels,” she said, both share a sharp hatred for sex workers who grab power in this way. She confronted such hatred routinely. And still, “grabbing that power feels good.”

In our conversations, cis, white sex worker leftists often articulated a similar sense that the charge is a power grab for them, but offered the caveat that this is only true for those with race privilege and for whom sex work's pay was not necessary to immediate survival. I asked Thomas, a Black trans woman who runs a safe house for other trans sex workers, about this, and she talked about how frustrating it was for “ivory tower girls, sitting up in the condos away from the real concerns that street-based sex workers have . . . to say that they have some sort of kinship with us, or understanding.” They did not know her concerns, but they were not in a position to diminish her power grabs, either. Counterclaims about the impossibility of taking power through counting should be very careful not to assume that the capacity for grabbing power is limited to those who already have more of it. “Pleasure is a regulatory regime,” writes Angela Jones (2020: 24), and one of unequal access, and yet people struggle against its hierarchies all the time. Sometimes the pleasure they find is sexual, and sometimes it comes from taking power, or money. Jones (38) argues that sex work prohibitions emerge precisely to control pleasure's insurgent potential.

Even when the work is shaped by violent hierarchy, and even when the pay is sorely needed, the question remains, if paid sex really does simply re-inscribe the status quo, why is it so violently policed? For Sybil Fury (2020), if it were true that sex work is “just another service that was provided, and if it did effectively reproduce the worker, then it should be fine. It should be, in fact, welcomed.” It is not, nor has it reliably been in the history of global capitalism. Alongside individuals’ anxiety about what it means to make sexual labor count, elites have long understood that sex work can be politically explosive (even when the people who do it are already marked as available for work and for sexual access). In the transition to capitalism, paid sex posed the threat of visible—and messy—interclass relations (Chitty 2020: 71), and in the colonial context it embodied “the perils of deracinating modernity . . . [creating] dissonant spaces of possibility, zones of instability where hierarchies were unsettled” (Macharia 2019: 99). The history of US anti–sex worker law is bound up in attempts to control sex work's capacity to destabilize racial apartheid and women's mobility (Pliley 2014; Lee 2021). Contemporary panics around sexual labor bear the traces of these histories, and the contemporary social relations of sex work carry this destabilizing promise.

Closer to home, the charge also threatens to do something to the couple form. L. H. Stallings (2015: 122) makes explicit the connection between “funk”—tethered in the public imagination to “sexual barter” in all sorts of ways—and trouble for the couple form. “What does funk do to love?” she asks. “The marriage industrial complex remains a sex industry regulated by sexual morals and work ethics that center monogamy, coupling, and heterosexuality as less illicit than other trade activities” (123). Here writing against the project to “save” marriage in Black communities, she takes on its own terms the fear that “funky love”—“undomesticated female sexuality”—is dangerous to the couple form (123). For Stallings, and for many sex worker radicals too, this is a good thing.

Counting as Refusal

The stakes shift when the question turns inward. The charge that feels potentially incendiary from the distance of history or abstraction can feel less so when it pays the bills in the here and now. And so even thinkers who theorize counting as a kind of political confrontation talk about how, in everyday life, charging can feel just like working a job, and paid hetero sex can feel like a variation on the rule rather than an inversion of it. For others (and, again, sometimes for the same people at different times) charging does make a difference, operating as a regular practice of refusing compulsory free sex and its gendered attachments. That refusal can shift subjectivity, making one queerer over time. Sex worker radicals grapple with the question of whether that counts as political.

“It's a nice idea, but I do not claim to be bringing down the pillars of Western society one marriage at a time,” writes Celeste (2015:116). “Frankly, I don't think straight people need my help destroying the institution of marriage or the nuclear family.” She echoes others quoted here who find in the charge a provocative kind of counting, but also refuses to take on the burdens of making a living and toppling the hetero family at the same time: “I don't trick as a tactic to start some kind of sexual/social revolt or to change my johns in any intentional way. I don't trick out of pity, desperation, or joy. At the end of the day, I trick for the alms. I do it for money and autonomy.” Previously in my writing I have focused on the alms piece of sex work—the money—and the autonomy it confers. Like many thinkers in this archive, this came from a place of fatigue with civilians’ inordinate interest in the sexual subjectivity of a community of working-class people who overwhelmingly trick for the alms. But the autonomy Celeste gestures to can bleed into sexual life. Whether or not sex work's counting gives way to structural transformation, it does often change how individual sex workers understand the labor of sex. Following Gago's (2020: 11) theorizing of the strike's capacity to serve both immediate ends and generate analytical perspectives that have a broader horizon, I do want to argue that there is a “politics to that” (Rey 2020).

After theorizing civilian reactivity to commodification, Zila (2020) talked about how seismically sex working shifted her own thinking about gendered labor. This is not the cliché—“the jaded, bitter sex worker who sees everybody as a walking wallet,” she said. Instead, “I see power dynamics, I see exchange, I see transactions all the time.” She said that sex work had queering potential even for cis, straight sex workers, joking, “Are there even any? I guess!” Sex working teaches how much gender is a performance we do for other people. Having learned this, Zila said, it is easier to choose when we do it, and for what returns. Sometimes, though, the reverse is also true: “Work follows me home,” writes the poet Kay Kassirer (2019: 76),

The distance between charging and more durable refusal can feel like a chasm. And still, for others or for the same people at different times, the work does help us learn the difference between sex and acting. Juliet (2020) framed sex working as a healing encounter with past selves that “couldn't say ‘no’ in the right way . . . couldn't defend ourselves. . . . In this job, I can really put my own limits.” Charging makes the difference, and even when clients are callous or cruel, she thinks, “At least I'm gonna take their money.” Against the anti–sex work narrative that such cruelty is unique to paid sexual labor, Juliet added, “Inside us [there is] that girl or woman that was suffering because a man was abusive. Probably that part of me feels like, ‘Okay, now give me your money.’” This sense of taking power is, again, not limited to sex workers who have particularly great working conditions or who do not need the cash. Undocumented and a recent migrant, Juliet works by the hour at a massage parlor. It is possible to work at healing and hustle for rent at the same time.

It is to risk engaging a bad, appropriable object from the perspective of sex worker activism to acknowledge that the work can tap into trauma, or even deep rage. Mistress X (2020) talked about their work as a dominatrix as an avenue for doing something with that rage. “People like me”—Black women and gender-nonconforming femmes—are “always expected to settle for less, to deprive ourselves, to do without. That transitioned me into becoming a dom.” Domming helped X heal their relationship to sex, one of many places in which others expected them to settle for less, and it changed how they navigated the rest of their life: “It informed my politics, it has made me increasingly radical and a lot less tolerant of other people's intolerance.” X is also a scientist, and brought this shifted perspective to interactions in that job as well as in their dominatrix work. Refusing to repeat the party line that domming is about care, not the desire to harm, they added, “I used to try to sit and listen to people who would say something racist or homophobic, and I'd be like, oh, ‘it's my job to change their mind.’ And at this point, I'm like, ‘no, it's my job to make you hurt and then maybe we'll figure it out.” X's clients, mostly white men, are people “directly benefiting from the fact that [I] have less.” It felt good to make them pay.

White women, socialized in a different way to politely accept too little, also talked about how the work “completely changed my relationship with sex” (Fury 2020). “I think that it's done this for most people that I know,” Sybil Fury added. This is because sex work pushes you to confront trauma, “not because sex workers have more than anyone else, but because doing the work that we do forces you, at some point, to confront the sexual trauma that you inevitably have.” The “inevitably” is doing a lot of work here. It gestures again to sex worker radicalism's uneasy affinity with radical feminists who theorized trauma as constitutive of living in a feminized body. Where the affinity breaks down is, again, at the moment where sex workers say that counting can be harm reduction under this system. Negotiating with clients, and sometimes telling them “no,” has made it easier to negotiate with other partners in her unpaid sexual life, Fury said. Now, rather than watch the clock and wait for bad Tinder sex to be over, she tells people to leave. “That has made an enormous difference in my sense of self,” she said.

Sex worker radicals talk about how charging can teach them to refuse sex that takes more than it gives, but also how it moves them to pursue the opposite. Many said that sex work made them queerer. “It's not that I want all my relationships to be sex work relationships,” Q (2020) said. Getting paid to have sex with men, and to perform womanhood during sessions, helped Q refine their relationship to both. Over time, Q moved toward genderqueer identification and a preference for unpaid relationships with other women and genderqueer people. This was not because sex with clients or other men was particularly traumatic—Q talked about dynamics of friendship and care—sex working just helped reveal how much of this sex, whether or not it was paid, was labored. Others echoed this, though some articulated something closer to fatigued pity at confronting the deep, sometimes clumsy, need clients bring to what is for many the only space they allow themselves vulnerability. For Q, over time, “when I did start sleeping with a cis guy and I realized that I wasn't getting anything out of it, I just realized in my head, ‘he should just be a client.’” And clients could reciprocate for sexual labor in material ways that made the exchange feel worthwhile. Q and their partner were expecting their first child when we spoke, and money from sex working would fund this queer family. Sex work can enable queerness in this more direct way, too.

Again and again, thinkers in this archive talked about how the charge helped them refine their own desires, and often in ways that led toward queerness. “Because I have so many interactions with cis men,” Yaz (2020) said, “‘if you want me, you're gonna have to pay.’ If you're a woman, though, ‘what's good?’” Again, this spoke to the asymmetrical tedium of straight sex rather than (as anti–sex worker feminist frames would suggest) exceptional trauma within it. “If I don't cum, it's like, ‘well, I have 200 euros, so good for me.’ It's not that big of a deal. . . . If I'm getting money for it. I don't mind doing the emotional labor.” “Money makes me cum,” say sex workers in earnest and in jest. Sometimes this is literal—the money itself has an erotic charge—and sometimes the money makes other pleasures possible (see Glover 2021; McClanahan and Settell 2021; Walters 2016). The charge's capacity here follows Jennifer Nash's (2012: 514) call for ways of thinking pleasure that is “experienced in a multiplicity of ways, including those that were not sexual.” Charging can be pleasureful and so too can the things that follow it.

I asked Vanessa Carlisle (2020) about the phrase “money makes me cum,” and she talked about it as a referendum on heterosexual relations. Under current conditions “getting paid makes sense. And it definitely revealed to me what parts of heteronorms I was willing to play out for free and which ones I wasn't. And it turns out I'm not interested in most of them, I'm not straight.” When they do have sex with men for free, “I'm not interested in playing out hetero norms with them.” Others echoed this—those who pursue unpaid sex with men come with a shifted sense of what those dynamics can or should look like. In taking the performance of hetero norms to their logical limit, sex working reveals their constructedness, and this opens up some options as much as it fatigues us of others. “It shows you the falsity of the fixed meaning, but also the beautiful possibility of a constructed reality,” Lorelei Lee (2020) told me. That constructed reality is, for Lee, “essential to my understanding of my own gender and my understanding of my own queerness. Early on, I found huge value in artifice as a space for understanding, possibility . . . and the more I did sex work the less I had sex with men for free.” Artifice, and together with it explicit exchange, can have its own pleasures.

Sex worker radicals’ analyses of desire-as-process and play are somewhat “out of time” for sexuality studies, too, discordant with the field's preference for viewing sex through the “domesticating lenses of identity” (Dean 2015: 623). Visiting one kind of sexuality can refine wants for alternatives. Sex working is “like being a tourist to heterosexuality,” said Eloise M (2021), who echoed others in the sense that sex working made her less interested in free hetero sex over time. Now, she said, she had “fine” experiences with straight men clients and “then I go home, and I get to be an out dyke having great sex and living my life.” “I'm so glad that this is my work and not the life that I live,” she said. “I get to try it on, and remember that this is the life I fought so hard not to have. This sex is not what I want.” This is not the political lesbianism of “those older feminists.” But it is, to be sure, lesbianism that is political.

Conclusion

Yearning for a hard break with the status quo and at once hopeful and restrained about the possibility that charging might make that break come sooner, sex worker radicals refuse easy answers about the meaning of the charge. After talking about the radical difference sex working made in her “sense of self,” Sybil Fury (2020) added, “in terms of fighting the patriarchy, this I'm less convinced of.” This might be a place where sex work is just another service labor, and one that requires us to go to great lengths “to help our clients forget about the fact that they're paying us.” The force of the confrontation is limited when the charge itself has to be so laboriously obscured. And it is not obvious that anything disruptive happens for clients when they pay. Then, we return to the question of prohibitions against paid sex, and to Fury's own words: if sex work did preserve the status quo, it would be welcomed rather than harshly punished. And still, sex worker radicals are not convinced that prohibitions against the work reflect its insurgent potential.

Sex workers’ ambivalence here brings us back into uneasy affinity with “those older feminists.” Thinking together—and at odds—these traditions grapple a shared set of questions: Does a change to one's “sense of self” do much to fight the patriarchy? How do the social and the state work together to preserve the status quo? If people in power hate what we are doing, is that evidence that we are doing the right thing? Sex worker radicals refuse to leave these questions in the past. Theorizing and also trying to survive (maybe even thrive!) in real time, they sap resources from the same system they hope to one day see crumble. Experimenting at the intersection of hopes for a radical otherwise and everyday labors that can feel very much stuck in the now, thinkers on the sex worker left are not so sure that that sapping—charging—will make that crumbling come sooner. But maybe, sometimes, it provokes.

References