Book Review: Working It

Image: the cover of the book is an illustration/digital painting of a 1983 court photo scene where a dancer charged with obscenity bent over in front of a judge to prove that her clothing was not a violation. The background is light yellow with streaks of oranges and pinks darting out from the center where the woman, drawn in a pinkish hue is standing with her abum pointed away from the viewer. She has a long sleeve shirt on and a pair of very short shorts and high heels. She is bent over at the waist with her curly hair obscuring her face. Across the top in red letters is "working it" and below that in black letters "sex workers on the work of sex." On the bottom left in small black letters is "edited by matilda bickers with peech breshears and janis luna." On the right side is "foreword by Molly Smith."

Content warning for all kinds of trauma and harm you might expect regarding this topic.

I would describe my personal relationship with sex work as... Complicated. I've been sober for almost 19 years (Jesus, really? Seems like yesterday.) In both my years in the grips of a variety of chemicals and those in recovery, the line between sex work and trafficking was not very clear at times for me and for many women I've met. Some were straight up trafficked, but many were in a state of desperation where the drug withdrawal or the desperate need to forget were the ones doing the coercing. I've met women with rapist pimps who would sob in meetings with other women and others whose shame and trauma destroyed all of their relationships. I've had my own less extreme experiences with dealers taking advantage of dope sickness, being a minor around gross adults, or men misleading me into "acting/modeling" for their project that they would turn into porn once I was intoxicated with the substance they paid me in. Men (and sometimes others) lie to and exploit vulnerable women and girls (and marginalized genders and sometimes others) which is not news to most people. As a patron, I had been to a strip club a couple of times while I was using but not often and I don't remember anything extreme in one direction or another. I never encountered a positive or neutral story from a sex worker for many years. So, in my feminist evolution, when I discovered many of the second-wave feminist iterations of sex workers as victims, that made sense to me.

In time, both my understanding of addiction, drug use, and treatment as well as my understanding of sex work evolved quite a lot. (The addiction side will take another far too long post.) I met sober women who decided to continue sex work, often of a different kind, despite other job prospects. I met many trans people across the spectrum who found sex work to be the only, or just the best, employment prospect. I read about many people choosing a variety of kinds of sex work without victimization or coercion aside from the financial coercion of survival that we all have. But, I couldn't get behind much of the sex work activism messaging I'd see from mostly white, non-full service, sex workers which this book refers to aptly as "empowerment narratives" and "girl-bossification." I would think about my life and that of many people I've known and would think, "you all have no idea... Like I'm happy for you, stereotypically attractive fetish model/camgirl, that's great you feel so empowered but that's not most people." Then I'd feel bad, why couldn't I stop having these oppressive, dismissive responses to sex worker voices? I would encounter this again and again in a way that reminds me oddly of how people who I talk to about veganism sometimes understand it- this rich white people health craze, not a diverse collective liberation movement where wealthy and/or white people are actually the minority worldwide. Someone would eventually just say "sex work is work like any other job" without explaining what that even is supposed to mean. It seemed pretty different than other jobs to me.

When I saw this book come out, I figured I'd give it a shot but went in with low expectations. I didn't know the creators or the zine history. I'm really glad I went for it because this was the exact book I have been looking for.

Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex includes a wide variety of (I think mostly or all women) sex workers from many backgrounds, races, histories, types of work, and so on. Most but not all are from North America. Many of the entries are interview formats with the same questions for each person. They are well crafted and in depth prompts for discussion. Others were essays or other formats. Each entry is paired with an image of the worker's choosing which ranged from photos to drawings and more.

Right from the start, I knew this book was speaking my language. The discussion of white girl-bossification of sex work messaging and the wide range of reasons why people do it was at the forefront. Almost everyone discussed the louder voices of a few white sex workers with a hierarchy of sex work types they found respectable or not being a consistent problem. Black and indigenous women discussed the complicated forays through different types of sex work and non sex work jobs and the cultural complexity involved in their lives and choices. The entry on indigenous women drug users who were doing full service work or being trafficked was what I related to most despite being white and they didn't shy away from the reality that most of them wanted out. Trans women discussed dealing with the danger of fragile straight men's fear of being gay. One entry by a woman describing her desk job vs her sex work jobs really helped me understand "sex work is work" on another level. Her artful description of how she experienced the daily grind of each made a ton of sense. Another entry where a worker compared doing full service sex work to doing care work was really great as was the article critiquing enthusiastic consent narratives in regards to sex work. That last one has always bothered me, if you don't want to perform a sexual service but have to to keep your job, is that consensual? The entry was a really frank and helpful discussion regarding the complexity of consent in different situations.

There were also frank discussions of rape, abuse, entitlement of customers, exploitation by clubs and other businesses, and all of the ways sex work is very unsexy. There were discussions of intercommunity trauma and struggle. There were stories of workers making strides by coming together to support one another, stories of the solidarity of groups of people who only really have each other, and the varied ways and tactics that may or may not work to protect sex workers in various industries. Everyone who discussed safety or liberation called for decriminalization. There was a lot more than this, too, that I'm sure will pop into my head after I submit this review.

My only gripe about this book is that there are a few instances of gnarly fat and body shaming. Descriptions of a few men who were god-awful narcissistic customers didn't require me knowing their body size or atypicality to understand that they were really gross, shitty human beings. The idea that fatness was relevant, in a book with frank discussions about whose bodies are most valued in dominant culture, was disappointing. I get what they were trying to say- the entitlement that men have and how they view sex workers as another species practically leads them to treat sex workers in ways they'd never treat other people. There were just details that weren't necessary or even relevant.

Overall, this book really opened my eyes to what sex work is like for people who choose it and why they continue to. It taught me a lot about what "sex work is work" really means at a deeper level and allowed me to hear the voices of women I never get to hear from. I'm going to continue reading and learning more, but at my current level of understanding, this is the best writing I've read about sex work. So, I definitely recommend it to a variety of audiences who want to know more or to relate to the contributors.

This was also posted to my goodreads.