Guest post: Sex worker hierarchy sucks

This is a guest post from a blogger who calls herself the Resident Hooker. In her own words:

My name is – well, that’s not important. What’s important is what I do! I write and I’m a feminist, obviously; but I’m also a sex worker. Here at Feministing.com we believe in engaging in critical analysis that prioritizes the voices of people living at important intersections, and that includes people like me who get paid to help people get their jollies off! To protect my identity, I’ll be posting under the alias the Resident Hooker. Enjoy!

On last week’s episode of Scandal, Pope & Associates were “cleaning up” after a married politician who was accused of murdering a younger woman that he’d been sexting. Strapped for cash and desperate to win “fix it”, Pope’s team stooped to “slut shame a dead girl” as Abbey so eloquently put it. It worked. The media ran with the young woman living lavishly as a sugar baby and reasonable doubt was planted.

Sugaring has always seemed to represent the blurred line between actually being a hooker and engaging in intentionally beneficial dating. Popular perception of sugar babies places them in a fluid limbo that can nudge them into the land of materialistic respectability or delicately tip them over into the eternal lake of whore fire.  It is one of those activities that can make people good about engaging in practices that they may think are bad.

But I have some news. It does not serve any of us (sex workers) to call rank. A call girl who makes $5,000 an hour is no more or less  a sex worker than a trans woman who gives blow jobs for $20 in Brooklyn. A conscious decision to enter a mutually exclusive relationship isn’t very different than advertising yourself, negotiating your rates, and seeing a new client.

Sex worker hierarchies do nothing to help us survive in an industry that is under constant condemnation in the public sphere. When police are using condoms as way to label and arrest suspected sex workers, the fact that your “daddy” or “mommy” bought you an iPad instead of putting money in your hand doesn’t really protect you.

As a community of folk with the sole purpose is to satisfy people’s desire to connect with another person (or people), it’s important that we are able to recognize the contributions that all of us are making to that cause – in addition to our pockets.

Sincerely,

The Resident Hooker.