Bitches and Foes: Girl-on-Girl Hate
This is a piece I wrote for my friend’s zine on girl-on-girl hate called Bitches and Foes. I will let you know when it comes out and how you can get a copy of the whole zine!
xxx
Lusty
Friday night, 10pm. My friends are going out to dance, drink and fuck. I’m arriving at work. In the back alley, I buzz the security door and smile for the camera. As I wait for the receptionist to let me into the brothel, I give myself a little pep talk: You kick ass. Every guy in here will want you. You are the most beautiful and sexy one here. You deserve respect. Don’t sell yourself short, charge extra for extra services…I’m going to need these words to keep my chin up.
The receptionist Amanda answers the door with Hello, gorgeous! and I squeeze through the big door as she holds it open. This comment is far from sexual harassment, because on this job the brothel staff KNOW that my hardworkingness depends on my sexual self-confidence. All night long Amanda will be encouraging me to hustle, which I will really appreciate around 4am when I’m dragging my ass. Her praise will be all the more needed as the hostility from the other girls will be heavy.
I walk through the client lounge area to the girls*** room to get primped up. Women in lingerie are draped over all the sofas, reading gossip mags, eating Chinese food, watching TV, and smoking cigarettes. No one even looks up when I walk in. I camp out in front of the mirror and start applying my make-up, stripping into my sexy duds, and the room is quiet ‘cept for the blaring TV. I see them slyly glancing over the tops of their magazines at me, icily assessing my looks. Am I more blonde, more tan, more toned, more skinny? Do I attract the same guys as them? Others allow their breath to slowly seep out from between their clenched teeth, telling me to stay on my toes. I do a quick count-up of 10 girls, and likely there’s a few more upstairs doing jobs. That’s heaps of girls. The brothel management doesn’t limit the numbers of workers on shift, because it looks good on them to have a wide variety of girls for the clients to choose from. It means that we will be fighting for the clients who show up, ’cause we all got to pay the rent, pay for fun, and enjoy our work instead of sitting in this pink windowless girls’ room cave watching bad Law and Order reruns.
Hardly any guys are coming in, there’s a big rugby game on, we all hope that they get drunk enough with their buddies at the pub to come here afterwards. We are crowded in here, everyone is chain smoking, and people are starting to talk. When Amy keeps getting every job that walks in, Scarlet claims she knows that Amy’s a total freaky slut when she gets ‘em upstairs and does it without a condom. (Which is against house rules.) No one wants to say the obvious: that Amy has a nice smile and attitude, the skinniest waist, and the best boob job. And of course she’s white and blond. Jody starts crying that she won’t have enough money to convince the judge to get her kids back, and everyone rolls their eyes, since the word on the couch is that she spends it all on drugs anyways. And then Valentina comes down from a job looking for a dish of the house dinner and it’s all gone: so she blames that fatty Mercedes for eating more than her fair share, and yells at me for not saving her a plate. Holy shit this brothel is tense!
Mostly I try to keep my head down and chalk up the cattiness to the real and mostly invisible foe: capitalism. We are WORKERS, like anyone else, and sex workers are people trying to feed themselves and their families, go on a holiday, or do whatever the fuck we want with our money. And if you think that the demands of market capitalism are fickle, you haven’t seen the most capricious demand side force around: the male penis. We get nasty when we don’t get work, when we get duped by the rules and laws, when we get ripped off, or when we get hurt/assaulted at work. We too are caught in this world that demands we sell our labour to have access to housing, to food, to sociality, to leisure, to community. Shit, to almost everything.
Why are we bitching at each other? It’s called horizontal hostility, my therapist tells me. Waaaay easier to hate on that slutty bitch in my face than on the intangible roots of our oppression as women, queers, people of colour, transpeople, poor people, and dis/abled people. To do so would demand more than just hard work but also critical self-reflection and I think that’s hard for sex workers. It’s hard to sit with your shit because we have some deep-seated SHAME about shaking ass and smiling when our mouths are full of bullshit. Reading rude comments online about you and your body, seeing other escorts get treated well or poorly, it makes you hate clients, and then you have to keep being nice to them to keep the work coming. For all the whore power we claim when we’ve got amazing Lucite heels strapped on and rich guys are tripping over themselves to worship us and FINALLY FUCKING PAY US a living wage as women workers….well it still sucks as a job, like most jobs do, and I don’t mean suck in a good way. It sucks because as a sex worker, you are considered the shit that people step in, you are the bad joke, you are the undate-able, and you’ve got no “real” skills. And that’s STILL the easy part – even worse, the whole world finds it acceptable that we are abused, assaulted and murdered because we dress slutty and put ourselves in harm’s way. We asked for it. When the world treats us as disposable, as less than human, we start thinking of ourselves like that. It sneaks in deep. It’s called internalized whorephobia.
And then unearthing that shame is hard work. Usually it just sits there in your belly. You start noticing other sex workers who charge less, and you get annoyed at them for undercutting you with bareback service. You see sex workers who make more money than you, and you hate their high-class attitude and privilege. You notice sex workers who make rad art, music and writing and you resent them, because you don’t have the self-worth or pride to make it for yourself. It hurts to see other people doing all those things when you feel like silence is often your best option for your safety and mental health and wellbeing. And when sex workers organize for sex worker rights, you get annoyed at the ones who always get the microphone, because no one ever asked you for your goddamn opinion, did they?
Whew. I hate writing this, especially thinking about non-sex workers reading it. I fear it will just reinforce a stereotype that we are all purse-slinging cat-fighting greedy slutty bitches who undermine each other. That we are all the world says we are. So I wanna switch gears, and say that yes, we are bitches, but in our frustration and anger, we are also lovers. Our work and community is not all happy rosewater enemas, but let me dream my dream and invite you all in.
Hooker-on-hooker competition stinks extra smelly because we really fucking NEED each other. Even as we hate on each other, the only way we stay ALIVE is by sticking together. There’s no Hustler University, only those already in the business. Many of us were turned out by a friend, and becoming a sex worker is an induction into a secret society of old-time knowledge not taught in any school. We are so often held and understood only by our own. Shunned, hated and treated as less than human, we turn to each other for support, knowledge, and survival.
Sex workers hustle together, push clients to hire us in duos, trios, and more for fun and safety. When a client calls for a service I don’t offer, I recommend a friend who does. In the snuggle bed, I dirty talk clients into the merits of other working girls who I know are not getting many calls. Dicks are fickle and wandering, so why not point them and their wallets to the pussies I respect?
Sex worker love looks like talking a girl down when a condom breaks. Giving her options, assessing the risks, saying it happened to me, too. Going with her to the clinic. Figuring out what to say and what not to say to asshat doctors and nurses.
Whore support is girls posting to mug lists, bad date books, and on elists about nasty-ass clients who do not respect you, who rip you off, and assault you. It’s other workers responding fast because we are often by our computers and phones waiting for work. We hold each other with trauma support and sexual health information when shit goes wrong. We post about which health care providers are whorephobic, dangerous cops, and legal changes that affect our criminalization.
We call each other when the job starts and when it ends in front of the clients so they know they can’t fuck with us.
Whore community asking asking other workers to fish menstrual sponges out of my cunt almost every month. This is just the way it works – I can’t get my hand in there, so will you? It’s like asking a co-worker to pick some lint off my business suit! I trust they will do it with respect, body knowledge, and also, some laughs. (Thanks everyone!)
Our meetings at Maggie’s are whore love, where we eat and snack and share what’s up. Whore love is me asking for everyone’s advice on how to do better dirty talk, and then choking on my tortilla chips as four girls autopilot raunch-talk simultaneously. The filth is amazing. The gutter is where we belong, and are also comfortable. Whore love is total non-judgement for this sex positivity.
Whore-time is our time: we have strange schedules that isolate us from the world. We work nights, we work alone, we are on call, we cancel plans so we can work at the last minute. Other whores get this, and don’t feel snubbed (and they don’t say: can’t you just not see him, aren’t you making enough money anyways with that hourly rate?). We find ways to hang out in inbetween times, when everyone else is doing something else 9-5. Sometimes we are together even while alone.
Whores are healers, and not just in that icky woo-woo culturally appropriative way (although yes, that’s there too). I know massage, shiatsu, acupuncture, herbs, tantric, talk and hydro therapists who are also sex workers. We give each other healing help that responds specifically to the needs of our working bodies.
Sex worker community is other sex workers nodding, hugging when you have a fight with your partner because he can’t accept your sex work.
Sex worker community is outrage and action when a sex worker is murdered, assaulted, abused, shamed, ostracized. It’s telling everyone that an injury to a sex worker, especially an assault or a rape, is rooted in the same shit as an assault on non sex working women – ie that we looked and acted too slutty, that we have to give it up to our boyfriends and partners because that’s what good girlfriends do.
We learn and love each other through sexual assault and abuse because we KNOW that we don’t deserve it and that another way of safe, consensual negotation around sex is possible, because we do it every day.
We don’t always have our shit together, but when we do, it’s so sweet and good.
***I work in indoor brothels and as an independent escort where the workers were all kinds of women, including transwomen and also transmen who worked as women. Just want to say here that there are plenty of transpeople and men working in the industry too, and I didn’t want to invisibilize them. Also, that my experience is totally based on my work as an indoor worker, I have never worked on the street.
Posted: January 8th, 2011 under Uncategorized - No Comments.
