I am currently in the process of reviving and retrieving all of my files from my former Red Garter Club website, which has been kinda in some funky limbo for the past couple of years while I was searching for a new domain host.

I do plan on reviving the site soon with new articles…but while retrieving some of the older articles, I came upon an old essay that sexologist Dr. Carol Queen had written for a sex work anthology that was quite an influence on my developing (at least, it was back then) sex radical philosophy.

In the midst of the Deborah Jeane Palfrey “suicide” and all the discussion about sex work in general, it certainly livens up the debate.

Some excerpts below, followed by a link to the full text:

As we will see, sex radical thought is both deeply feminist and also profoundly challenging to many attitudes and assumptions promoted by contemporary mainstream feminism.  While I continue to identify with feminism, I also regard it with some disappointment: though I feel that most of its core principles go without saying, I certainly do not feel their unmodified relevance to all areas of my life, particularly to sex.

[...]

Sex radicalism means to me that I am automatically on the side of the minority sexual viewpoint or behavior; because our culture carefully and narrowly circumscribes what is acceptable, much of the sexual world gets left on the wrong side of the fence.  Sex radicalism also means that when I hear the voices of those who have been left out of the discussion, I choose to believe what they tell me about their own lives, even if it contradicts some “expert’s” opinion; it also means that I maintain my own sexual integrity, if not cultural popularity, when I follow my own desires and trust where they lead.

Sex radicalism is also profoundly feminist, and with good reason.  While many men are oppressed (in reality or potentially) for their sexual desires and practices, women are encouraged to never explore or experience sexual feelings in the first place.  We are supposed to exist sexually within a (married, monogamous) relationship with a man, or else not at all. When we do step across the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality and “good girl” propriety, we are often treated viciously.  Women need each other’s support (although we do not always get it) to navigate the rough waters of living nontraditional sexual lives.  Mainstream feminists learned this lesson from lesbians, who would not withdraw their demand for support from feminist organizations and institutions; it has not, however, extrapolated what it has learned to women elsewhere on the sexual fringe.

[....]

Upon further exploring sex radical thought, I learned the concept of “sex-negativity”, which most of us in this erotically benighted culture drink in along with our mother’s milk.  I learned that there is indeed a community of people who are sex-positive, who don’t denigrate, medicalize, or demonize any form of sexual expression that is not nonconsensual.  In our general society – where sex is sniggered at, commodified, and guiltily, surreptitiously engaged in – being outspokenly sex-positive is sex radical indeed; for even those of us who love sex are usually encouraged to find someone else’s preferred sexual expression abhorrent.

I discovered sex-positive thought in various places: through my study of sexology; through my friendships with sexually adventurous others, especially gay men; in the leather community; and, perhaps most importantly, through meeting women who were both outspokenly sexual and feminist and who refused to let one quality cancel out the other.  These “sex-positive feminists,” as many of us have taken to call ourselves, embrace the feminist analysis of gender inequality, but challenge the silence or conservative positions of Dworkin- and MacKinnon-influenced feminism on sexual issues.  Many sex positive feminists are veterans of the feminist sex ward over pornography and S/M; and many are current or former sex workers.  Coming to a radical sexual world view, especially through my contacts with women who could relate to and who could mentor me through my confusion about sex and feminism, actually proved to be excellent preparation for becoming a whore.  When I did so, I discovered a world very different from the one for which the vague warnings of mainstream feminists had prepared me.  My comments are sourced in the whores’ world I have known; I do not intend to encompass the experience of those whores who do not work voluntarily, who are underage, and who act out the negative expectations imposed on them by a sexist and sex-negative culture.

[...]

As an activist in the sex-positive community, I have met well over a hundred prostitutes, a few dozen dominatrices, and a number of models and porn actresses – far more than have most anti-sex work activists and even most sex researchers.  Just one factor stands out to distinguish those who live well, with no loss of self-esteem, from those who may find sex work a difficult or even damaging career choice.  Most of the former have sufficient sex information and are sex-positive.  Most, too, are staunchly feminist, even though some of them refuse to embrace the term, associating it with women who do not understand their circumstances and who do not support their right to work and control their own bodies.  Most of the latter have internalized negative attitudes about sex, especially divergent sexual behavior, and certainly about sex work itself.

In this respect, the latter are no different from those who have devoted their lives to agitating against sex work.  None of these crusaders, whether they emerge from the Religious Right or the feminist Left, voices respect for sexuality.  (Rubin, in fact, calls mainstream feminism a “system of sexual judgment”(2) — an accusation its adherents have not yet managed to disprove.

If these activists truly wanted to improve the lot of sex workers (which, of course, they don’t; they merely want to do away with the sex industry), they would insist upon thorough and nonjudgmental sex information for clients as well as whores.  One basic piece of information would be that women – and whores – do not exist to be sexually used by men, but that any sexual interaction, including a paid one, benefits from negotiation.  This would facilitate the climate of respect that anti-sex work demagogues claim is absent in a paid act of sexual entertainment or gratification.  The paucity of sex-positive discussion about what is possible in a commodified context often negatively affects sex workers themselves.

In fact, when we whores see a client or when a peepshow worker or stripper interacts with a customer, the presence or absence of respect has much to do with how sex-positive the client or customer is – and something to do with our own sex-positivity. It also depends upon each person’s degree of self respect and presence or absence of sexual shame.  Men who have taken (and internalized) the most damaging blows around their right to sexual pleasure are among the most unpleasant clients to deal with.  Unfortunately, the well-publicized opinions of the anti-sex work crowd are highly judgmental about the motives of those who pay for sexual pleasure and entertainment.  I have encountered many men whose self-acceptance – and social skills – have been impaired by hearing too much media credence given to the opinions of people who are in no position to make even an educated guess about what friendly relations between whores and their clients would be like.  Sex-positive feminists are only now beginning to get enough media attention that their message can trickle down to these men and to other women.

Combined with our treatment by a sex-negative law enforcement and legal system and the notorious tendency of the police to think of aggressions against us as something other than crimes, many of us are routinely victimized – by police if not by our clients and customers.  Meanwhile, most of society looks the other way, including many feminists who are quick to point out how egregiously our clients are “abusing” us simply by giving us money for sex of erotic entertainment.  Feminists should be among the first to clamor for decriminalized prostitution, yet many remain silent and even vigilant in the fight to further criminalize prostitution.  Feminists should raise their voices in protest when police abuse whores or ignore our need for police protection.  Yet too often these voices are silent, even though these socially sanctioned abuses fall disproportionally on those most lacking feminist and other support: women of color, poor women, transgendered women.

[...]

Some of us want out of the business, but many of us want to see conditions improve, with everybody else out of the way.  All of us would be served by a dose of sex-positive thought, which might allow us – many for the first time – to think of what we do as a professional service, not demeaning, on-the-fringe behavior.  An ever-increasing number of us want our sexually schizophrenic culture to look at the realities, not the lurid myths, of what we do; and to see that when sexual pleasure is seen as positive and honorable goal, much of the negative fruit of the sex industry is deprived of soil in which to grow.

[....]

One often frequently hears that whores are sought by kinky clients whose desires are unacceptable  to other people.  This, I think, is the source of part of the contention that clients want to abuse us; in spite of the fact that all over the country women are slurping on their partners’ cocks for free, experimenting with bondage, and arranging or at least fantasizing about threesomes, a large percentage of the U.S. population still considers activities like these beyond the pale, degrading, and abusive, even when consensually performed.  In fact many clients bring socially unacceptable desires to sex workers – or at least desires that are unacceptable in their own bedrooms. And until the climates in their bedrooms change, sex professionals will be among  their only outlets.  The anti-whore sentiment that grows out of the conviction that there is only one kind of appropriate sex and that all others are sinful and/or abusive (depending on the sort of morality embraced by the critic) is precisely the cultural norm in opposition to which sex radical politics grew.

Sex radicals see as a problem – and a source of oppression – in any one’s conviction that their own sexual patterns are right while someone else’s are wrong. Getting between the lines of the anti-sex-work ideologues’ reasoning, we find various concerns embedded but not often articulated: a married man is wrong to take his sexual desires to anyone but his wife; a married man is wrong to have sexual desires if his wife isn’t comfortable with them; oral sex is depraved; giving men an outlet for blowjobs will just make the man want them at home, and blowjobs are demeaning to women; sex is demeaning unless a romantic bond (or a Christian bond) exist between a couple; giving a man an outlet for any kind of sex, including sexual looking [voyeurism], will make him want more sex/kinkier sex, if a prostitute isn’t immediately available, he will harass/rape other women; getting sex from a professional is the same as infidelity; men should not have access to sexual variety; prostitutes carry HIV (to “innocent victims”).  (This says nothing of the numerous married men who actually patronize male whores; but again, this common situation is scarcely ever recognized and commented on by sex-work abolitionists, especially feminist ones.)

[....]

Viewed from a sex radical lens, whore stigma derives from whores’ sexual availability and presumes copious sexual activity.  From a sex-positive feminist perspective, most whores are available and sexually active on their own terms. It’s no wonder that whore stigma attaches itself more viciously to women than to men, for in this society a sexually emancipated woman is threatening and despised; neither “slut” or “whore” is a name most women want to wear.  Sex workers cross this line, either proudly or not, for money, adventure, or rebellion.  Would our client’s wives – or even many mainstream feminists – be willing to brave that stigma for a chance at sexual agency?  What about for the promise of greater solidarity among all women?  Early feminism tried to erase the whore stigma for just that reason; today’s feminist orthodoxy would often rather do away with whores.  Any issues that divides women – and this is one of the most potent divisions of all – is crucial for feminists to consider and resolve.

Other whores won’t necessarily agree with me, but I’d be glad to see sex work wither away because everyone became so sex-positive that a market for our services no longer existed. Perhaps then we could become the sexual healers and sex educators that many of us believe we (potentially or already) are.  Of course, we’re nowhere close to that utopia; in the meantime sex workers can help facilitate gratification for those who wouldn’t ordinarily get it, and we can all – whores, sex radicals, sex-positive feminists, and critics alike – continue to ask questions whose answers point to an increasing level of comfort and safety for sex workers (as well as, incidentally, for our clients).

[....]

The stereotype about sex workers that says we are driven to this demeaning lifestyle by a damaged history must be exposed as the sex-negative and, yes, sexist crap that it so often is. (How eerily this parallels what used to be said about lesbians?)  This image is neither universally truthful nor even helpful for analyzing the situations of those whores whom it describes, unless the question is also asked: What separates those sex workers who experience their lives negatively from those who do not?  Abolitionists won’t ask this question, because it implies that there might be a strategy for creating a positive sex industry, but we whores and all our supporters, including sex-positive feminists, must ask it continually.  Abundant and accurate sex information, as I noted above, is a key determinant.

And while I maintain that it should be everyone’s right to do sex work, I hope people will consider their motives for it whether they are thinking about entering the sex industry or are already a veteran.  It is never too late for anyone to begin to root out his or her sex-negativity, and the whores who haven’t done so – those whose damaged lives and horror stories are so eagerly pointed to by the anti-sex-work activists, and even those who disrespect their clients’ desires – may lack the most important qualifications for the job. It is the responsibility of the culture to work on its negative attitudes about sex and us and our work; but it is whores’ responsibility to work on our negative attitudes about ourselves.

Women and men who do sex and sexual entertainment for a living are targeted by laws as well as social opprobrium, and so are our clients and customers – though the latter form a shadowy, hard-to-recognize army. We are regarded more as outlaws than they are, and this can be one of our strengths: seeing, often with the support of other sex workers, that we constitute a group with different sexual norms, oppressed because of these differences, is the first step toward embracing radical politics and understanding that we are only one group out of many that have been culturally labeled and mistreated. A feminist analysis, too, helps us see ourselves as a group with shared circumstances, one for whom gender is by no means irrelevant. Certainly, we should have pride in ourselves and hopefully in what we do, and sex radical politics, along with a sex-positive belief system and a sex-positive feminist analysis, can go a long way toward ensuring that we develop that pride.

[...]

There is no sexual majority, although the whole society conspires to behave as though there were. Our clients – mostly married heterosexual men who show an illusory exterior of “normalcy” (whatever that useless concept means) – are also cross-dressers, anally erotic, bisexual, fetishistic, wrapped up in wild fantasies no traditional heterosexual marriage could ever contain. And what the “poor abused whores” lobby will never tell you is that many sex workers, too, are fetishistic, sexually curious, nonmonogamous by nature, and exhibitionistic, delighting in the secret proof our profession provides us that restrictive sexual mores are rupturing everywhere.

No one should ever, by economic constraint or any kind of interpersonal force, have to do sex work who does not like sex, who is not cut out for a life of sexual generosity (however high the fee charged for it). Wanting to make a lot of money should not be the only qualification for becoming a whore. We in this profession swim against the tide of our culture’s inability to come to terms with human sexual variety and desire, its very fear of communicating about sex in an honest and nonjudgemental way. We need special qualities, or at the very least we need a way of thinking that lets us retain our self-esteem when everyone else, especially do-gooders, would like to undermine it.

Activist whores teach, among other things, a view of our culture’s sexual profile that differs from traditional normative sexuality. Every whore embodies this difference each time s/he works. It is time for all whores to embrace this difference, to become ambassadors for sex and gratification. The politics of being a whore do not differ markedly from the politics of any other sexually despised group. We must include radical sexual politics in our agenda, becoming defenders of sex itself. Our well being and our defense depend on it.

— Carol Queen: Sex Radical Thought. Sex-Positive Thought, and Whore Stigma (from Jill Nagle’s Whores and Other Feminists, via here)

Seems like some pretty sound advise to me.

Tags: Carol Queen, sex radicalism, Sex-Positive Feminism, The Sex Work Debate

Update: Susie Bright has just posted her tribute of sorts to Deborah Palfrey at her blog; also, see Audacia Ray’s snippet at her new Village Voice blog, The Naked Truth. Amber Rhea has just posted her reaction as well.

Original post:

In case you haven’t heard the news of late, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “DC Madam”, was found dead at her mother’s home in Florida today.

Right now, they are calling it a suicide; but with these things you never know.

Palfrey had just been convicted of prostitution and bank fraud charges in running an escort service out of Washington, DC….the same service that ultimately claimed now former New York governor Eliot Spitzer and (still) Louisiana US Senator David Vitter as its clients. She had been threatening to reveal the names of her clients, which apparently included some heavy-hitting political figures, but had been denied at every turn by the court system.

I would like to say that I’m surprised…but I’m not…because this is the ultimate (if to the extreme) means to which our sex-negative society deals with women who challenge the status quo when it comes to our hypocritical sexual mores. It’s much easier to drive the woman to suicide or simply murder her than it is to take a realistic look at how our laws and social mores against consensual adult sex (for free or for pay) do far more destruction and degradation than the actual sex acts and services that are bought and sold.

(That’s right, GenderBorgians, I said “acts” and “services”. not “bodies”; women who do sex work are not comparable to slaves, and they still own their own bodies, regardless of whether you like what they do with them.)

Like the Duke University rape accuser who gets slimed and virtually raped over and over again in the media because she dared to even make the claim that she was raped (and NO, MRA jackals and all other “White pity” fools, this is NOT permission to send me your half-baked comments on that case, either).

Like the rape crisis center owner who decided that a woman like Renegade Evolution should be denied the right to even counsel women who have suffered from abuse….merely because she might defile the center with her clients.

Like the cops in LA who mocked and laughed at and dehumanized an arrested street hooker into wetting her pants because they could only see her as an “object” to be used and manipulated for their benefit. (But I guess that since they were trying to get prostitution off the streets, that makes it OK for some so-called radicalfeminists, right???)

Like every Goddess-damn porn starlet, sex worker, adult model, and merely overtly sexual woman who has to face the full stigma of “slut-baiting” for simply not being as “pure” or “chaste” or “decent” for the public taste. Not even a young adolescent like Hannah Montana is immune from the anti-sex gaze; lest even sweet virginhood is defiled by her actress character flashing a bra for her boyfriend.

And all this done in the name of “protecting women and children”, no less.

But let us ban Playboy and Penthouse from military bases; let’s ban all “violent porn” and jail anyone with possession of such; let’s jail all the men “johns” and stick them in reeducation camps “john’s schools” so that they learn that thinking about women as sexual beings is a sin, that touching your genitals to the thought of women pleasuring themselves and other people is such an evil threat; that your very erection can only be a weapon that kills and maims and you should be shamed to have sexual feelings.

And we say that we are better than the fundamentalist Muslims because we don’t do clitorectomies or burqas???

Goddess Damn America, indeed. (At least, until we get some freakin’ common sense about consensual sex and the limits of government intervention in such matters.)

In the meantime….may you finally find peace, Ms. Palfrey. And may not another woman have to suffer your fate merely for being a sexual being…and respecting the sexual side of others.

[As usual, Bound, Not Gagged has much more as the story develops...and see also Ren Ev (who's been on freakin' FIRE of late).]

Tags: Serious Bullcrap, The War on Sex