Kay Kassirer - A Whores Manifesto: An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers

Also by Kay Kassirer Confessions of a QueerUnbandage the Wounds A Whores Manifesto An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers Copyright 2019 by Kay Kassirer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. Thorntree Press, LLC P.O. Box 301231 Portland, OR 97294 Thorntree Presss editorial offices are located on the ancestral, traditional and unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Cover design by Siana Sonoquie Interior design by Jeff Werner Copy-editing by Heather van der Hoop Proofreading by Hazel Boydell Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kassirer, Kay, editor. Title: A whores manifesto : an anthology of writing and artwork by sex workers / edited by Kay Kassirer ; with a foreword by Clementine von Radics.

Description: Portland, OR : Thorntree Press, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019013314| ISBN 9781944934897 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781944934910 (kindle) | ISBN 9781944934927 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH : Prostitutes. | Prostitution. | Sex. Classification: LCC HQ118 .W46 2019 | DDC 306.74dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013314 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my father, who tries his best to understand, and loves me endlessly. To my sister, a continual reminder of the good that exists within both humanity and myself. Thank you to my poetry family. To Charlie Petch, for pushing me to start writing about sex work. To Rabbit Richards, soul sibling, teammate, and best friend. To apsaunaki iaqsti, also known as Mitcholos Touchie, a powerful presence who teaches me so much.

To Vanessa McGowan, for empowering me to share my story. To Jess Tollestrup, for helping me edit, and loving me for who I am. Thank you to Thorntree Press for believing in this book and in our stories. Thank you to all of the sex workers I have shared space with, learned from, pretended to fuck, and genuinely loved.

It turns out, there are nearly as many ways to sell your own sexualized body as there are to have one. Broadly speaking, sex workers include those who sell their bodies (and time) through sex, domination and submission play, and fantasy fulfillment for kinks that are eroticized in the minds of practitioners though not explicitly sexual in nature, such as spanking, feeding, etc. Sex work also includes those who sell an idea or image of their body and sexuality through strip clubs and other live performances, as well as porn, live webcam shows, and all the tiny corners of the internet where people are willing to pay to see something they have long craved and kept to themselves. It also encompasses a huge array of other experiences, because humans have a taste for sex that is vast and varied and delicious and strange, and sex workers cater to all of it. To me, being a former sex worker often feels like being in a sorority built on grit and a hard-earned taste for fast money. Difficult, but undeniably fast.

We, this sorority I imagine, are a heterogeneous riot of voices, less a community of women and more a network of cis women, trans women, and non-binary queers who perform a stylized version of womanhood for the gratification of clientsmostly cis, straight men of means. There are of course cis and trans men in the industry too, and non-binary people who performed a stylized boyhood. But throughout the world, 80% of prostitutes are women between the ages of 18 and 34, catering to men. So, many of us who have passed through this industry had girlhoods, and everyone who had a girlhood had that girlhood end. For most people I know, that end came with or around the realization that a womans body is constantly judged, sexualized, and commodified. Sex work takes this commodification to its most literal point.

Those who do it seek whatever empowerment can be found through it, however hard-won that empowerment is. Sex work is not a monolith. Our experiences vary, as do our triumphs, traumas, and the amount of choice we actually have in this choice. We have burdens we share and burdens we dont, but we recognize this: we are people who at some point looked our own exploitation straight down the barrel, and made some money off it. To be clear, we are discussing safe and uncoerced sex work, as uncoerced as any labor under capitalism can be. We are discussing the autonomous sale of intimacy, which is itself a complicated thought.

Intimacy can take many forms, and its surprising how many can be paid for in cash. Still, those who choose and continue to choose to stay in the adult industry know its violent edge. Most of this work is not legal. The field is overwhelmingly populated by gender and sexual minorities, and people of color often experience racialized aggression, bigotry, and financial injustice in addition to oppressions already at play. Sex work is also typically done by those who are economically disadvantaged, or by people who in some other way have their choices compromised by drug use or disability. Sex work can be dark.

It can lead us to dark places and prompt reckless choices. I have a few of these stories. I cannot trust that everyone will hear them the way I need them to be heard, so in my day-to-day life, I keep them to myself. I keep them, silent as a burning library set alight by someone elses hands. This is what most sex workers do. We shut our mouths and our legs and return to civilian life out of fear of being judged for what we have done.

We have all heard the stories of jobs lost and families aghast. And so, we dont discuss the ways we have been damaged, just as we dont discuss the ways we have been enriched and bettered. Because yes, there can be true rewards to this work, beyond just Instagramming yourself with piles of twenties. There can be a genuine tenderness in the performance of tenderness for the benefit of others. There is an exchange of unbalanced power, yes, but to me that exchange always felt less like a handshake and more like a complicated dance where the lead kept switching. There were clients who wanted words as much as touch.

There were clients I came to genuinely care for, men who I (quite literally) whipped into shape, who I know I helped have more impassioned, honest, healthy sexual relationships with themselves and their partners. Generosity from other clients provided true and life-changing opportunities that would otherwise not have been open to me. Sex work taught me about myself. I do, on occasion, celebrate its memory. We dont need to accept a life as a burning library. One way to stand in our power is to tell our stories.

To tell as many individualized stories as possible, to give space and context to lives that are normally faceless and swinging in the public imagination between exotic and victimized. That is why a book like this one is necessary: to begin a conversation that centers, finally, on our own stories. Clementine von Radics