Personal Essay
What Your Friendly Neighborhood Queer Sex Worker Wants You to Know
Our work is valuable. We are teachers of pleasure.
CW: Discussion of efforts to combat violence against women without details of violence.
Somewhere in the Bible Belt, this proud trans man just signed the legal paperwork to become an entry level grunt in the Sex Industry!
Yes, as this is a career like any other, there are entry level jobs. There are important skills to be learned before I can advance beyond being a supporting actor behind the scenes.
Why would I become a scarlet collar worker? Am I desperate? Am I a victim? Nope! I’m starting this new career for 6 reasons that I can think of off the top of my head.
1. It seemed like good research for my polyamorous romance series featuring a scarlet collar worker as one of the main characters.
I’m nothing if not thorough when I get passionate about a writing project. I want to show people I have loved and cared for that they can be seen as the beautiful center of a romance that treats them with respect. I want to show a character who broke stereotypes about scarlet collar work.
I also want to offer an honest portrayal of the society we live in, a society that funnels many trans people into the Sex Industry before punishing us for taking what is sometimes the only option available. I want to show that, even within such a society, empowered scarlet collar workers who choose to treat their work as a serious career exist.
2. I was inspired by my frustration with a police officer who blamed the porn industry for exacerbating violence against women.
He apparently forgot about all of the horrific violence against women (and everyone else) that has occurred throughout history before the invention of the moving picture, despite belonging to an institution that was founded on racist violence and white supremacist principles.
I was further inspired by a discussion leading to a classic SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) argument that aligns with this police officer’s position.
“I watched the video twice,” she said, “and I saw nothing offensive. I’m just trying to understand why it upset you.”
I found this video incredibly offensive as someone who has known and loved people who happened to be scarlet collar workers.
I’m not going to link to the publicly available video she was referencing because I do not want to benefit the speaker by driving traffic to their website. However, I have access to the video and can provide a link on request via a private message on twitter. My twitter handle is @logan_silkwood. It featured a law enforcement officer’s analysis of the effects of porn on violence against women. More about this police officer can be found in section 2 of this writing, in case my opinion of him remains unclear.
In the video, the police officer says, “with somewhat of a sarcastic smile on my face, I noted that the founder of Porn Hub just had his mansion burned to the ground, and is complaining that he was somehow attacked because of his beliefs and values…We have been doing research this past year tracking sites in the porn world.”
Scarlet collar workers of all levels deserve safety and support, not demonization.
“Ohh, I see what you mean,” she said, “but I think you misunderstood. The video wasn’t demonizing the people who didn’t choose to get into this industry, it was focused on the harm caused by the Sex Industry itself. A lot of porn promotes violence against women.”
Supporting scarlet collar workers isn’t just about supporting survivors of sex trafficking and those who were forced into this work, though they absolutely need and deserve compassion and assistance. Truly supporting scarlet collar workers also means treating those who chose and trained for a valuable career with respect and offering all of the labor protections they need to perform their work as safely as possible.
Scarlet collar workers do not cause violence against women or anyone else.
Perpetrators of violence cause violence against people. Those perpetrators live at the intersection of sexual repression and socially encouraged entitlement. Patronizing them by suggesting that they are not in control of their own behavior enables this entitlement.
I’ve watched my fair share of violent movies, but somehow managed to control myself by not going out and shooting an innocent person. I think it’s reasonable to expect people who are watching porn or engaging with scarlet collar workers in any way to take responsibility for their own behavior. The attitude that scarlet collar workers are responsible for the behavior of customers is victim blaming that puts marginalized people in serious danger. I don’t just consider this attitude offensive; I consider it to be a personal threat.
The monitoring of sex workers by the police is stalking. Let’s name this criminal behavior correctly.
It is not okay. This behavior by law enforcement needs to be treated as a crime. We must hold law enforcement accountable when they exhibit criminal behavior and demand that they stop immediately.
If you don’t like the message that porn is sending, support sex workers who send the message you prefer customers of the sex industry to receive! Intersectional feminist porn is a rising force that people with concerns could choose to support instead as an alternative Sex Industry standard, rather than demonizing those who feed the market as it currently stands.
3. Sex work is valuable. This work is valuable. This work is art.
It is a service that helps people to connect to who they really are; it can help people to learn about themselves and gain confidence. We all deserve to learn about pleasure. Why not let experts in pleasure teach us to connect to our bodies?
4. In supporting sex workers, we can make this industry safer for both the workers and the clients.
We can make this an industry where only people who desire to be sex workers would be involved in this field. We can increase access to education to improve safety and quality of work. We can dismantle the shame directed at this work.
5. Disrespect for scarlet collar workers is not “inclusivity”! Let’s check our attitudes.
According to one study, 20% of trans people acknowledge having worked in the “underground economy” (Forge cited U.S. Trans Survey, NCTE, 2015 for this statistic in the linked video). We are a population that has disproportionately relied on scarlet collar work throughout a long history of legally sanctioned discrimination. Refusal to respect the Sex Industry whitewashes that history. Trans people shouldn’t tolerate attitudes that throw up to 1 in 5 of us under the bus.
We can eliminate the flow of desperate people into the Sex Industry by supporting anti-poverty and anti-discrimination measures, but we cannot change a history in which so many trans people have been fired from jobs just for being ourselves. Disrespect for the Sex Industry is disrespect for those who have been and likely will continue to be victims of this injustice.
Law enforcement has a long, ugly history of assuming that trans people are automatically sex workers deserving arrest for existing. They have disproportionately targeted trans women of color for inappropriate arrests. Failure to support scarlet collar workers will leave collateral damage throughout the rest of our community, thanks to assumptions commonly made about our people. We need to demand that law enforcement earn the trust that they have long since obliterated in the LGBTQ+ community — by not continuing to stalk and arrest anyone they suspect of being sex workers. How can people who assist crime victims be more inclusive of trans people and build trust? As a transgender person who currently works in the anti-violence advocacy field, I have some alternative ideas. None of them involve stalking, harassing, and arresting scarlet collar workers or trans people just for existing.
6. Supporting sex work is a crucial part of supporting safer sex.
In an age where many, like myself, learned in school that abstinence is the only way to experience safety surrounding sex, porn and the Sex Industry has replaced a criminally negligent, queerphobic education system as the new source of sex education for those who reach age 18 without having ever learned about their bodies or safer sex from their teachers and parents. Scarlet collar workers play a critical role in shaping the message that all generations will receive about sex in the absence of any other source of this valuable, life-affirming information. We need to support them as they decide what message we will receive. That message will be more of a reflection of us than it will be of them, as we are the market that they serve.
As the friendly queer sex worker who could easily be that neighbor who baked you a welcome lasagna in a show of traditional Southern Hospitality, I want you to know that people like me deserve respect.
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