Dead Heat
Yet again, a sex worker has gone missing and ended up dead. Some experts believe that murder is the leading cause of death among prostitutes. Usually, we don’t hear about it. This time, the identity and life circumstances of Emily Sander — a white college student leading a double life as an internet porn star — combined to excite media attention to the case of what otherwise would have been just another dead prostitute.
(Prostitute? Didn’t I say she was an internet porn star? Pornography is prostitution. Even thought the consumers of pornography don’t touch the people who have been made into objects for their sexual pleasure, they still pay money for sexual access which otherwise would not have been granted to them. Furthermore, pornography often requires its objects to touch or be touched by one another in sexually intimate ways that they would not otherwise have allowed. Being paid to touch or be touched by someone sexually is prostitution.)
Prostitution is inherently dangerous work. Study after study shows what those of us who have worked or lived within the sex trades already know: Sex workers are routinely sexually and physically assaulted. Many are murdered. Many more go missing.
A majority of prostitutes endure rape (penetration without consent) while virtually all encounter other forms of sexual assault (e.g., touching breasts or genitals without consent). One study of prostitutes in San Francisco found that 82% had been physically assaulted since entering prostitution, 68% had been raped since entering protitution, and 48% had been raped more than five times. A study of prostitutes in Chicago found that 50% of women working for escort services had been raped by clients and 24% of street prostitutes had been raped by police offficers.
Rape can feel like murder. I remember, when I was dealing with the aftermath of a rape, telling people that I felt like “I’ve been murdered but still have to get up and walk around every day.” (Anthropologist Cathy Winkler has written an extraordinarily insightful article entitled Rape as Social Murder [pdf].)
Many sex workers are murdered. In one long-term study of women working as prostitutes, “murder accounted for 50 percent of the deaths among presumed-active prostitutes.” In other studies of mortality among sex workers, murder has been the cause of anywhere from 29% to 100% of deaths.
Rape and murder are not simply the occupational hazards of an otherwise benign field of endeavor. Prostitution Is Sexual Violence, argues researcher Melissa Farley in a Psychiatric Times article. (Please don’t leave me sarcastic comments about the absurdity of that statement unless you’ve read that article and the others to which I’ve linked in this post.)
Women who enter this dangerous field of endeavor usually do so as a result of past or present trauma. The San Francisco study found that 57% of responding prostitutes had been sexually assaulted as children (by an average of three (!) perpetrators), 84% were or had been homeless, and 75% struggled with drug addiction. The researchers report that, because of the high rates of both physical and sexual abuse in childhood, “many seemed profoundly uncertain as to just what ‘abuse’ is” and often failed to recognize their own victimization as such.
This helps us to understand why women who are still engaged in forms of sex work where non-rape sexual assaults are routine (e.g., erotic dancers who endure nightly unwanted groping of their breasts, crotch, and buttocks) will sometimes assert that their work is not psychologically dangerous and does not subject them to assault. They are so used to being treated as sexualized objects that being treated as such feels normal rather than oppressive.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t listen to such women when they speak about their work? Not at all! It just means that we listen with the same careful empathic attention to what they don’t say as well as what they say, in the same way that we might listen to a friend who is caught up drug use, an abusive dating relationship, gang membership, military service, or any other occupation or life circumstance that hurts people in ways that they often are not able to see while in the midst of it. And we should listen most carefully to women who, after surviving sex work, have had some time to reflect on their own experiences and the experiences of their peers.
Most importantly, we must listen closely to the voices of the murdered and the missing. We cannot allow the loud rationalizations of the defenders of prostitution and pornography to drown out their resounding silence. The spaces where their words should be tell us what we need to know about the unspeakable violence inherent in the commodification of our bodies and our sexuality.
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:44 pm
If the profession of food serving was made illegal and demonized, due to the neuroses of barbaric religion and the ruling class, it would suffer the same amount of abuse and violence.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Wow, so a college student poses nude for a website and she’s a prostitute? Pretty extreme view there. Are you sure you’re not a right-wing Bible-thumper?
Just because you blur the line between prostitutes, porn actresses, nude models, and college students who pose nude for websites, doesn’t mean statisticans do.
And as Johnny mentioned, the illegality of prostitution makes it more dangerous. How many prostitutes go missing from or are murdered at brothels? If you make prostitutes feel they can’t go to the police, and push their trade to alleys, side roads, and seedy motels, you make them vulnerable. And it doesn’t help that right-wingers and anti-sex feminists make it seem like sex workers are immoral sinners.
Lastly, there is no proof at this time that her disappearance had anything to do with her posing nude for a website. Let the evidence play out before you jump to conclusions.
December 6th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
I’m always perplexed when men accuse me of being hostile to sex workers whenever I speak out against the violence directed at sex workers. When I was 15, a sex worker — a street prostitute — bravely and generously saved me from being raped by her abusive pimp/boyfriend. Later in my teens, I was a sex worker myself. And, yes, I was sexually assaulted in the course of that work. I have appeared in pornography. For four years, in my late teens and early 20s, my lover was a sex worker who worked out of our shared home. A number of the most beloved friends of my youth were sex workers. Today, a couple of my closest friends are former sex workers and one of my favorite acquaintances is a young woman I wish would quit endangering herself and other women through her participation in sex work.
So, Paul, when I say that pornography is prostitution, I am simply making the logical point that selling sex is selling sex. It’s you who assume that I am putting down women who appear in pornography by making that point. I’m not clear how it is that speaking frankly about the ways that sex work — by its very nature — endangers sex workers makes somebody the equivalent of a bible-thumping, whore-hating prude. Feminists like me aren’t anti-sex or anti-sex worker. What we oppose is the violence inherent in the commodification of bodies and sexuality in the context of patriarchy. What we hate is the violence: the violence that sex work visits on sex workers themselves; the violence done to women and children assaulted by pornography consumers; the violence done to the psyches of girls and boys who grow up in a culture in which violence has been sexualized and sex had been commodified; and the violence that all of this does to everybody’s sexuality.
No young girl grows up thinking “I want to be a prostitute/stripper/porn star when I grow up” unless she is being (or has been) sexually abused. No grown woman chooses sex work unless she is tricked, forced (by poverty, drug addiction, the demands of an abusive partner, etc), or is still acting from within the damage done to her identity by prior sexual assault/abuse. I suppose it is possible for a quasi-grown (i.e. adolescent) woman who is not a survivor of childhood sexual abuse to be so confused by pro-porn rhetoric that she believes she can make easy money without risk by stripping or appearing in pornography but, in my experience, it’s always the girls who are already hurt in some way who fall into that trap.
Do you really care about those girls? Really? Then, first, quit acting like the consumers of their bodies are their friends. Next, quit denying the very grave physical and psychological danger and damage to which sex work invariably exposes them. Rape and murder are occupational hazards of sex work, which is inherently psychologically damaging. A very few sex workers get lucky and get out without damage to body or mind but they are, truly, the exceptions to the rule.
Johnny, I agree that prostitutes are demonised by our culture and I’m sure that such demonisation leads some men to feel more free to violate those particular women. But to attribute all of the violence against sex workers to that one contributing factor is kind of like attributing all drunk driving deaths to vodka. Instead, we need to see that demonisation in context. Demonisation of prostitutes is just one of many ways that our culture uses the bodies of sex workers as receptacles into and onto which forbidden fantasies may be projected and acted out with impunity. Clients gape at, grope, and thrust themselves into the bodies of sex workers as if those bodies were abstract objects rather than the living, breathing embodiments of people with thoughts, feelings, and histories of their own.
Sex workers cope with these violations of their bodies and individuality mostly by feeling numb or feeling nothing at all, in other words, by making their bodies insensate objects. They are generally so used to feeling numb/nothing that this feels normal to them. Having developed the habit of numbness when being touched intimately in the course of childhood sexual abuse, most don’t register the damage that the violations and the numbness itself does to them. Some never stop feeling numb, never recover the fullness of feeling that is every animal’s birthright. Twenty and thirty years later they are still wondering why their relationships feel so empty or their lives so meaningless. They may still be unable to recognize danger or to distinguish affection from abuse and thus may repeatedly find themselves in hazardous relationships or situations. Others are luckier and are able, in the context of safe relationships and stable life circumstances, to begin to perceive and work through the damage that their years “in the life” did to them.
Let’s not compound the violation by abstracting the violence done to sex workers from the context in which it occurs. The violence is made possible by the objectification and commodification of sex workers’ bodies. Objectification of women’s bodies is a key component of patriarchy. Commodification of bodies is a key component of capitalism. The proximate causes of involvement in sex work include, not surprisingly, child sexual abuse (patriarchy) and poverty (capitalism). Of course, we have to do what we can to support sex workers in the current context, including supporting their own efforts to organize and providing educational and occupational opportunities to sex workers who want to get out. But we do them no favors by pretending that the inherent hazards of sex work don’t exist. Certainly, we have an obligation to the girls who are being sexually abused tonight to make sure that prostitution/pornography doesn’t look like a safe profession for them tomorrow.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
I agree that the distinctions between a porn performer and a prostitute are largely imaginary. However, there certainly is a distinction between a soft pornographic model and the other two. In the latter, there may not be any sex involved at all, just nudity (and masturbation). I haven’t followed this case too closely, but the article I read did not say she was being photographed during sexual acts with another person.
Not that I think someone who engages in sex is worse than someone who just poses for soft porn pics, but I don’t think the alleged statistics you quoted include soft porn photography. I think the sex workers most vulnerable are the prostitutes, as the illegality of their trade makes them particularly vulnerable. Any woman who goes somewhere secluded with a strange man, for business or pleasure, is vulnerable.
I don’t think we are getting rid of sex for money and nude photography anytime soon, I am not clear what solution you propose.
Also, as I mentioned, there has not been any indication yet that this particular woman’s death had anything to do with the Internet porn. She was at a bar, left with some guy (a guy she knew I seem to recall), disappeared, and was found dead. (Some women, of course, are beat or raped or killed without having had any involvement in porn or sex work.)
Any way, pretty intense experiences you have had, I am sorry you went through such hard times, thanks for sharing that.