Abstract
Criminalized in most geo-cultural regions, people in sex work industries have often been represented in mainstream storytelling as anything but workers with rights. As anti-sex work mobilization and policy lobbying continue to expand in the present anti-trafficking movement in the United States, sex workers have encountered increased hardships and challenges in navigating workplace safety, sexual assault at work, and labor rights. While the 2017 MeToo movement afforded a global platform for voices advocating against sexual assault and for survivor justice, sex workers’ experiences were often excluded and relegated to the margins of the movement. As Selena The Stripper shared in the book’s Forward: [Y]ou may not have heard much from sex workers. […] [S]ome of us spoke openly about surviving sexual assault, but many of us were also reluctant to come forward. Those of us on the front lines of the fight for decriminalization often hesitate to admit to the abuses we have faced, for fear that our opponents will use our trauma against us to further crack down on our industry. (p. ix)
We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival is a powerful anthology comprising personal narratives written by and for people in sex working communities. The essays are organized into six chapters, themed as Stigma, The State, The Workplace, Family, Survival, and Healing. While each essay has its own unique style, structure, and dynamics, taken together, they jointly embody the highly diverse nature of sex work and the nuanced and distinctive work and life experiences across community members with different intersecting social identities. The narratives and insights generously offered throughout the book speak powerfully about how individuals from varying spaces of sex work navigate, resist, and challenge stigma, workers’ rights violations, racism, classism, and different forms of interpersonal and state-sponsored violence (e.g., police violence and criminalization laws). Beyond workplace encounters, many narratives also show how the authors’ experiences and identities in sex work intersect other social and life aspects (e.g., family, intimate relationships, and community building) and their different social identities (e.g., as parents, siblings, friends, partners, writers, and activists), contributing to not only challenges and dilemmas but also healing, solidarity-building, and activism. To fully engage with these stories, readers would do well to set aside prior assumptions and avoid diagnosing the lived experiences shared throughout the book. In the introduction, Natalie West reminds readers “to resist the urge to use our stories as symbols through which to criminalize work, or to turn us into victims in need of rescue” (p. 11).
Radical and abolitionist feminists see sex work as “inherently violent” and believe consent and choice are irrelevant concepts in sex work. Many personal experiences shared in the book, however, jointly demystify what choice means and how consent and professional boundaries can be exercised delicately and on an ongoing basis across varying sex work sectors. For instance, in A Family Affair (Chapter “Family”), Dia Dynasty shared stories from her Bondage, Discipline, Submission, and Dominance (BDSM) practice and said, “[s]ex work had helped me define and enforce so many new boundaries I have set up for myself: physical, sexual, emotional, and mental.” Lorelei Lee articulated what choice means in When She Says Women, She Does Not Mean Me (Chapter “Survival”): “[t]o say that I needed the money is not the same as saying I could not choose, and to say that I chose is not the same as saying it was always good” (p. 232). The nuances and complexities of consent and boundaries in sex work, however, cannot even be discussed adequately without a shift in culture and framework toward recognizing sex work as work. As Ignacio G. Hutía Zeiti Rivera shared in The Invisibles (Chapter “Survival”), “[t]he exclusion of sex work from the realm of work itself precludes any discussion around workplace protections for sex workers” and without a labor framework, “there is no room for nuance or discussion that doesn’t end with the abolishment of sex work itself” (p. 238).
While there is no intensive academic conceptualizing and theorizing to make arguments for sex work decriminalization in the book, the personal stories have indeed collectively make a powerful and compelling counter-narrative to the mainstream discourses and systems that do not recognize sex work as work and that treat sex work and sexual violence as either mutually exclusive or inherently the same. Several authors shared personal experiences of enduring or witnessing sexual assault at work, describing their struggles as workers whose rights are not recognized by the state and society and their ongoing activism for labor rights and workplace protections. In Hustling Survival, Brit Schulte Hustling Survival (Chapter “State”) shared stories of incarcerated sex workers fighting for justice as sexual violence survivors in the face of a criminal justice system and society in which “consent in survival work is often mischaracterized as nonexistent” (p. 73) and “victimhood” is only offered to sex workers when “society deems us in need of rescue” (p. 78). As Reese Piper articulated in “Are you safe?” (Chapter “Family”), “solutions and neglect on the job are not offered to sex workers” when sex work is “viewed through the lens of sexuality, not work” (p. 200).
Overall, We Too is a timely and vitally important collection of works for both sex worker communities and non-sex-working audiences. For readers in sex work, these personal narratives create a powerful healing space that allows community and solidarity to be built and to thrive. For people who do not have lived experience in sex work, We Too offers a critical insider’s lens and extensive insight that allow space for many to unlearn the stereotyped, essentialized, and polarized views of sex work and to understand sex work and people in sex work industries through the lens of work, intersecting complexities, humanity, and genuineness.
