Melissa Gira Grant - Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.

The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.

Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:

Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel
Strike for America by Micah Uetricht

First published by Verso 2014
Melissa Gira Grant 2014

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-323-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-324-8 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-638-6 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

Archange ou putain

Je veux bien

Tous les rles

me sont prts

Archangel or whore

I dont mind

All the roles

are lent to me

Colette Peignot (Laure)
Le Sacr, trans. Barbara Ann Brown

An attractive blonde walks into a Fargo hotel room, it begins, followed by a mustached man in a black leather jacket. He asks what brought her to town. The blonde in the low-slung jeans is about to sit down. You can just see her shoulder and the back of her head.

In another room, a man looks at a woman with long dark hair. Shes seated across from him, wrapped in a robe or a shirt. Its hard to see in the glare of the bedside lamp. He stands and slips off his boxers. He asks if she would let him see hers. She drops the robe or the shirt from her shoulders a few inches, then excuses herself to go freshen up.

Youll be satisfied, a third woman says. This is my job.

Theres always a television, and its playing a western, or the kind of old Hollywood picture with men dancing in topcoats and tails. In front of the flat screen, two women are cuffed. Hes ordered them to sit for questioning.

As he reaches for one of the womens wrists, the man in the cop uniform says, Were just going to lock these cuffs, so they dont get tight on you. She asks, Can I ask what I did wrong?

Im not gon[na] lie, writes a commenter under one of the videos, i jacked off to this.

Though they resemble amateur pornographys opening shots, you will not find these videos by searching YouPorn, PornHub, or RedTube. Theyre published at JohnTV.com, which boasts over sixty million views. JohnTV is the project of Video Vigilante Brian Bates, who since 1996 has been trailing women he suspects to be prostitutes and hookers and shoots videos of them with men he tells us are their johns.

JohnTV posts are sorted into sections: Busts, Stings, and Pimp Profiles. These start with a mug shotusually of a black manfollowed by his name and criminal allegations. Bates claims he often works with patrol officers and members of the Vice Unit on cases involving human trafficking. He also goes solo, trailing people on streets, in parked cars, wherever he finds people he considers suspicious, attempting to catch men in the act and the women with them. For Bates, the camera isnt just a tool for producing evidence: Its his cover for harassing women he believes are selling sex, pinning a record on them online even when the law will not.

Bates didnt shoot the six videos from Fargo. This is the first time JohnTV has come across videos of this sort, he gushes on his blog. Usually these sorts of videos only appear on television after being highly edited by television programs such as COPS. These six unedited videos are embeds from a North Dakota news outlet, where they ran with the headline, Watch Local Prostitution Stings Unfold. But they werent produced by reporters. The videos were created by the Fargo Police Department.

Theres so much to watch in the long minutes between negotiation and interrogation, and it repeatsthe nervous customer asking if hes going to get full service or if she upsells, the undercovers rehearsed excuses that they just need, like, a five-minute shower while they call for backup, then the sudden, crashing appearance of black vests and ball caps and guns drawn on undressed people, who are told to bend and kneel and spread their arms.

Prostitution stings are a law enforcement tactic used to target men who buy sex and women who sell itor men and women who the police have profiled in this way. These days, rather than limit their patrol to the street, vice cops search the Web for advertisements they believe offer sex for sale, contact the advertisers while posing as customers, arrange hotel meetings, and attempt to make an arrest from within the relative comfort of a room with free Wi-Fi and an ice machine down the hall.

Whether these videos are locked in an evidence room, broadcast on the eleven oclock news, or blogged by a vigilante, they are themselves a punishment. We could arrest you at any time, they say. Even if no one is there to witness your arrest, everyone will know. When we record your arrest, when youre viewed again and again, you will be getting arrested all the time.

In the United States, one of the last industrialized nations which continues to outlaw sex for sale, we must ask: Why do we insist that there is a public good in staging sex transactions to make arrests? Is the point to produce order, to protect, or to punish?

No evidence will be weighed before the arrest video is published. Even if she was not one before, in the eyes of the viewer and in the memory of search engines, this woman is now a prostitute. As so few people arrested for prostitution-related offenses fight their charges, there is no future event to displace the arrest video, to restate that those caught on tape didnt, as one of the women arrested in Fargo said, do anything wrong. The undercover police, perpetually arresting in these videos, enact a form of sustained violence on these womens bodies. Even with a camera, it is not immediately visible.

To produce a prostitute where before there had been only a woman is the purpose of such policing. It is a socially acceptable way to discipline women, fueled by a lust for law and order that is at the core of what I call the prostitute imaginarythe ways in which we conceptualize and make arguments about prostitution. The prostitute imaginary compels those who seek to control, abolish, or otherwise profit from prostitution, and is also the rhetorical product of their efforts. It is driven by both fantasies and fears about sex and the value of human life.

The sting itself, aside from the unjust laws it enforces, or the trial that may never result, is intended to incite fear. These stings form just one part of a matrix of widespread police misconduct toward sex workers and people profiled as sex workers. In New York City, for example, 70 percent of sex workers working outdoors surveyed by the Sex Workers Project reported near daily run-ins with police, and 30 percent reported being threatened with violence. According to The Revolving Door: An Analysis of Street-Based Prostitution in New York City, when street-based sex workers sought help from the police, they were often ignored.