On the occasion of being used: speaking back to feminist men

This is the preamble where I wave my cred around for a second. It’s over quick. Because I can’t even recall my feminist “awakening.” It may have been standing up to a kid in my eighth grade class who dropped an Adam-and-Steve joke in response to a teacher’s discussion around Magic Johnson coming out as HIV positive. (And I was still innocently shocked that the teacher didn’t call him out!) Maybe it was asking my mother why she never explained to me what an orgasm was, or, still pressing her after she replied, that yes, women could have one before marriage. My paste-up riot grrrl inflected underground newspaper in high school may have been the first time hundreds of people around me hung on my every political (ranted) word. I’ve got a huge mouth. I like to use it. Hanging in feminist political and social circles was the first time I was ever encouraged to just get louder until we got what we wanted.

(That isn’t to say I always feel welcome in those circles.)

And I’ve always had feminist men and feminist boys in my life. There was Darryl, who was a human rights activist at 14, and the first straight kid to step up and loudly support the Gay/Straight Alliance in my high school. Andy is the guy who took the Gay/Straight Alliance over from me, and he turned me on to Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, and Huggy Bear the summer before I moved away from all those kids (and he also was totally patient when I figured out that I only wanted to play bass in his band because of my girl bassist idols, not any real talent). The dude at the Minuteman copy shop in my home town, he could have been a feminist: that he didn’t refuse outright to photocopy my zine when it had stories about sex in it written by me, a fifteen year old, was pretty, if not accidentally, political. It’s also no accident that the feminist men in my life are really immersed in other stuff besides “the men’s movement” — if that’s of interest to them at all, which I don’t think it is. They make music and media with women without lording their expertise. They go to rallies with women and make connections between what goes on out there and in our own bedrooms without wanting a big gold star for it. They are sexy. Sometimes, they’re queer, they’ve been around, they’ve been the one to take the 3am phone call coming home from the party gone wrong or the tears after sex when something really old and really painful came back, and they don’t expect approval for that giving or loving. The good ones, anyway. The ones I still add back on Facebook even if we haven’t seen each other in a decade and would gladly curl up with and run around with after diving through those dark nights and hard conversations.

So. The other night. I turned out for a panel of feminist men, organized by Paradigm Shift NYC, “New York City’s feminist community.” I knew what I was getting into. One of the panelists, Bob Brannon, is the co-founder of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, is the leader of their Task Group on Pornography and Prostitution. He’s also the co-chair of the National Organization for Women (New York state chapter) Task Force on Trafficking, Pornography and Prostitution. People who combine advocacy around porn, prostitution, and trafficking tend not to ally themselves with people who advocate for sex workers’ rights. This is a huge mess for sex workers and for feminists right now, as recently as this summer’s fight in Rhode Island over re-criminalizing indoor prostitution, where people calling themselves feminists in a fight against violence against women (they usually leave out the men and transgender folks in the sex industry) are saying some pretty ruthlessly stupid stuff, and just flat out lying, about sex workers actual lives. My life. My life was the one I put on the table, and didn’t really want to.

To say I have a complicated relationship to the sex industry is really just to sum up my professional life. (That, and a lack of health insurance.) Thanks to the insufficient privacy of San Francisco blog & activist life, it was rare that I met anyone socially or politically who didn’t know that I’ve done sex work. Now that I’ve settled in New York, I’ve forgotten what it is to come out. So when I prepared my question for Brannon, after he’d taken his fifteen minutes to talk about what an amazing victory for feminists that intensified anti-trafficking laws are, laws that hand even more power and control over to the police when it comes to ensuring the safety and rights of people who sell sex — which the police don’t historically and actually do such a great job at — I was not going to couch my question in terms of my sex work experience. It’s just not relevant. It was also likely to frame me up in a convenient box in which he could dismiss me. I mean, these so-called “anti-trafficking” people actually believe there is a well-funded pro-sex work political lobby, backed by the industry (as if the big players in the sex business, the strip club owners and porn production companies, could get that big a PR act together), that any sex worker who speaks back to them is a part of.

And the truth is, for at least the last two years, I’ve spent more time reporting on the sex industry than being part of it. My life has shifted to a different disreputable course.

Whatever happened when I asked Brannon my question, I knew I didn’t want to have the first question. But the Q&A got off to a jolt when a lawyer who defends sex workers — and that was his term, sex workers — asked Brannon about the implications of the trafficking law for his law practice. Was it true that sex workers who were arrested could be treated as victims, rather than criminals, by claiming they had been forced into sex work? What possibilities for a new sort of defense did this leave open? (And in fact, a law passed in New York in June does allow victims of human trafficking to have any prostitution convictions removed from their records.)

Brannon dodged the questions almost entirely, saying he’d be glad to discuss it later, that this wasn’t really his area of concern, and that also, he wanted to “draw [the lawyer's] attention” to his “language.” Brannon continued, taking up more airspace with this semantic argument than he did with the question at hand, that “some people” are trying to use the terminology “sex work” but that he and his movement believed this was incorrect and obscured the “real issues.” When the lawyer asked what the preferred nomenclature was, Brannon replied that the proper term should be “women who have been used in prostitution.”

This is where I was so glad I was sitting next to Audacia Ray, longtime activist friend and blogger-in-arms, former sex worker, and all around rock who could see the “oh no HE DIDN’T” on my face and echo it back without even moving a muscle.

I raised my hand to make sure I had the next spot, and I changed my question.

And I got it.

I stole a play from the book of the Latin American sex worker activists, who open every critical statement with a bit of gratitude before launching into their take. (And this mostly works, even for long meetings, conducted with simultaneous English/Spanish translation, in headsets. It was like the sex worker UN up in there some days at the AIDS Conference in Mexico City last summer. It was fantastic.) I said to Brannon that I was sure I was the beneficiary of some of his good work, the year I joined a community advocacy program against violence against women in college, we just integrated men into the group. That it was so valuable to work together with men. But that I had real concerns for how his group addresses trafficking without including the people most impacted by their advocacy around trafficking: people in the sex industry. Had they spoken to people who had been raped and assaulted by the police when they were arrested for prostitution? Because to hear him just speak, I didn’t feel that he had. And to hear him just speak, it made asking this question of him that much more challenging, as I, a sex worker, actually did prefer to be called a sex worker, and that for anyone else in the room curious about how to refer to someone who sells sex, they should defer to what people call themselves and want to be called by others. Did they understand (I continued, I mean, I really continued and graciously, no one cut me off) that relying on police to arrest people who sell sex was therefore problematic, and that the raids and “rescue” missions themselves are traumatic and re-victimizing? What was his group doing to ensure that sex workers had access to housing, health care, and education? Rather than focus on what they believed was the inherent abuse in selling sex, how were they working to end the rape and abuse of sex workers at the hands of the people that his group believe can “protect” them — the police? Had they listened to sex workers at all?

Brannon again claimed that this wasn’t really his issue, or his concern, and that though his people had worked with people who had left the sex industry and were trying to “make a fresh start” (or some similar metaphor, which I forget, at this point, not having had a notebook out to record anything so much as I was just trying to hold my ground and his eyes) but that he “didn’t believe that sex workers [were] the experts” on these issues or deserved a place at the policy table.

So here we are again. None of this is surprising. I have friends in the community of sex worker advocates who do this all the time: try to get on some common ground with the “anti-trafficking” people in the feminist movement, go to their events, ask questions. It may seem like sanctimonious barnstorming, to show up where they show up, but some of these “anti-trafficking” activists are not people who respond to kind emails or invitations to debate or discuss. They use scare tactics and smear campaigns, and frankly, I don’t feel all that safe in one-on-one discussions with them. I preferred the open forum of this panel as a way to ask for some accountability, and I knew full well I probably wouldn’t get a response that even shimmied near anything resembling ethical consideration.

So how does one even respond to someone that a feminist organization has pitched up on a pedestal for a moment as “the good guy” telling you, for your own good, that you have been used and to just be quiet and let him get back to work?

It certainly would be sanctimonious of me to imply, oh god well what sort of man does that sound like!, because for me the answer is, countless crap bosses I had as a teenager, and a handful of jurassic-era teachers, and my still-living-at-home fifty-something uncle and my own abusive, rapist father.

But you know. Having men tell me how powerless I am is why I turned to a life of contracting with them the specific terms under which I could give them attention, and also under which I would ask them to treat me.

Even after that lovely assessment of my and hundreds of thousands of other women’s morals and political abilities, I did stay to the end. I made an effort to “network” — which meant taking questions from the men who now, after my speaking up, considered me the safe person to talk about sex with in the room. I thanked Dacia and Nancy Schwartzman (who I’ve been working with on a sex-positive advocacy campaign for her film, The Line), who gave me a sincere shout-out to the panel as someone who was her ally in anti-violence work, thank you very much, no matter how “used” one of them just told everyone I was. I imagined how I might write this up and knew that I’d have to, after having told Twitter about the night up to that point.

So here’s the pull-quote:

If men like Brannon want to do right by women, if they want what they tell women they want, they need to do what men are socialized (sorry, guys!) to be really lousy at: ask before doing something that takes such control of our bodies and our lives, ask and listen and not in some awful “active listening” way that really just reminds us of yet another guy wanting to get down our pants, ask and listen and don’t you dare tell another woman she has nothing worth listening to because she has been “used” by the system or by men or whoever, when what you really mean is, “let me use you for myself, for my own career and my own political ends.” How wonderful, a voiceless mass of women to invoke as your beneficiaries. How awful, when any of us do show up.