Tag Archives: sex work

An Open Letter to Meghan Murphy, fwiw, from an Other Side of Feminism.

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Editorial Note: This was originally posted by Nix on her tumblr on July 1, 2015.
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Hi Meghan,

I hope you’ll permit me to address you by your first name.  I do so not out of any disrespect or desire to minimize you or your work, but because I want to speak with you directly, a bit intimately, as one woman to another, as one Feminist to another, as one human being to another.

I’d like to tell you a bit about my life and the experiences that led me to choose sex work at the comparatively late age of 33.  I sort of want to confide…

I’m 34 years old, white, and from a Leftist, activist, middle class background (in Southern California).   My family has been torn apart by all manner of deceit, greed, abuse (including sexual), and hypocrisy, but I can assure you that there has never been a conscious moment in my own life when I wasn’t a Feminist.   I wasn’t permitted Barbie dolls unless I worked for the money to buy them for myself. I was given unlimited puzzles and books. I was told I could be anything that I wanted to be.  And I was encouraged to invest in my intelligence and physical capacities, as opposed to being “pleasing” to men.

I was not raised to see myself as an object.  I was raised to see myself as a subject, and a talented one at that.

Anyway, in 2008, I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of reporting two of my colleagues for sexual harassment at Northwestern University.  I was two years into a PhD program there.  One colleague had grabbed my ass at a bar (he was married and I thought we were meant to be discussing Deleuze) and another had told me that he had raped me and I didn’t remember it because I had been so drunk the last time he saw me (and technically, that was possible).

I did not want to ruin anyone’s career. But I did want to report for record, in case this sort of thing happened to someone else. I also requested sexual harassment training for my entire department in an effort to make sure that it would not.

Unfortunately, the Chair of my department was a woman who would not permit any training session to occur unless she knew which students were involved.  Conflict of interest much?

I had planned on letting it all slide.  I wasn’t about to out myself like that, as my department was so tiny and gossipy, and there would undoubtedly be negative repercussions.   Further, I was TAing for the Chair with that married colleague who had grabbed my ass.  I figured that I just needed to make it through the quarter… Until she asked me to compare grades with him at a coffee shop.

So I confessed to her, for lack of a better word, because I wasn’t about to meet with him off-campus.

She told me: “People get grabbed.”  She told me: Rape was “unthinkable” and “why would anyone say such a thing?”  She told me: “The Sexual Harassment Office is just an excuse for a sad, incompetent woman to hold a job and drink from her Northwestern coffee mug.”  She told me: “Americans are too uptight about being touched… Why, even her yoga teacher had to ask before touching students!”  She told me: “Reporting sexual harassment is a weak act.”  She told me: I needed “to take better care of myself and not worry so much about other people.”  She told me, in short, that: The only problem was me!  I was just too sensitive, weak, and fragile.

I’ll be honest with you, of all the words used to describe me over the course of my life, that is the only time I’ve ever heard “weak.”   She maintained this line and I eventually reported her to the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention for gender discrimination and a toxic work environment.

She was investigated over the course of a 24 hour period, which is an amazing turnaround, don’t you think? And then, nothing happened!  So I eventually attempted to report the entirety of Northwestern University to the Office of Civil Rights for violation of Title IX, arguing that NU has absolutely no protocol to speak of and pointing to their own lack of staff, myriad conflicts of interest, and lack of training, generally.

I still maintain this. And they’ve had three public scandals since I attempted to file a complaint against them with the OCR in 2010: one concerning a fucksaw, one concerning Ludlow and an undergrad, and the latest over this piece of pablum.

Of course, the OCR didn’t take my case.  I wasn’t raped, or at least, I don’t think I was.  And nothing that happened to me was a big enough offense to move a federal agency like the OCR, even if I was pointing to NU’s bureaucratic structure and lack of training as the root cause of my problems which would necessarily produce more problems for others.

So, by 2012, after fighting within the system with everything I had, I dropped out A.B.D.  I couldn’t justify writing a dissertation for a university that didn’t care about my own bodily sovereignty and safety, particularly as a “Feminist.”  And how was I supposed to be an authority on any topic whatsoever if I wasn’t the authority of my own personal space?  The entire experience was immensely disempowering.

I moved back to Southern California and I set out to get a job.  Any job!  Because I was starting my life all over!   Clearly, the academic route had been a terrible, terrible mistake for me.

As you might imagine, though, no one – and I mean no one – is inclined to hire someone who left their last post because they found out their institution had no functioning sexual harassment policy.  It’s too likely that you’re… fragile, weak, and sensitive.  And you’re a whistleblower.  Who the hell wants to hire someone that you know will blow the whistle on you if she deems it necessary, according to her own lights?

This left me in the position where I would have to fabricate a biographical lie for job interviews, which frankly I see as censorship and a disavowal of what happened to me.  This seems resolutely anti-Feminist to me and I was unwilling to make prospective employers comfortable with me, my past, or Northwestern.  I was unwilling to deny what I saw to be a fundamental injustice that must necessarily perpetuate itself by way of an almost willful negligence on the part of NU admin.  Not having a functioning sexual harassment and assault policy at a major university seems to me like a fucking crisis if ever there was one.  People should know.  And why should I be ashamed?  I left. I didn’t stay like some obedient slave. That would have been truly shameful, in my opinion.

Thus, I was unemployed for a good 6 months before I started my first business – which failed – after which I finally got into phone sex and camming as an independent domme in August of last year.  I’m a newbie, but the decision to do sex work was a long time coming and there are two important moments/thoughts that brought me there, and which I’d like to share with you.  (I thank you if you’ve made it this far.)

The first was when I was still at Northwestern.  I told a few of the professors, in 2010, that in light of the Chair’s clear policy on ass-grabbing, they really weren’t paying me enough and, indeed, I didn’t think they could afford me, and even if they could, it certainly wouldn’t go down like this.  I am not some unoccupied lot of land waiting for some intrepid male moron to come squat on me!  My existence is not an invitation to anyone for any reason!  I am not your Lady Everest!

The second thought occurred to me in April of last year.  I was very much unemployed and sort of psyching myself out for homelessness when I realized – If I was an exotic dancer at a reputable club, my ass would not be grabbed against my will because there would be bouncers.  Any ass-grabbing would only ever happen on my terms, with my consent, for money.

How in the hell is it that I’d be better protected from sexual assault taking my clothes off as sensually as possible in a designated area for money than as a PhD student at Northwestern University interacting with colleagues?  That’s a very sincere question.  How is that possible?  What insane fucking world is this?  But there you have it.

So, about four months later I spent an entire week researching my sex work options and deciding what I might commence with, what I was willing to do, what I was not willing to do.  I bought stock photos of sexy ladies – no shortage of those! – and framed body parts as if I was creating examples for a Mulvey lecture.  That wasn’t hard, as I’m sure you can imagine.  (I use my own image now, but I didn’t start that way.)

And you know what I thought? If this works, I’m finally going to profit off of the very thing that has been harming me my entire life.  It felt like grifting a system that had only ever grifted me.  And that felt really good.

The clients were not at all what I expected.  There are creeps, to be sure, but most of my clients are not even remotely abusive or rapey, because the most entitled men don’t pay for sex at all.  They just take it.  There are no boundaries with them, only overarching entitlement.  Ratio-wise, though, I encounter far more of these rapey men in my day-to-day than at work.  And I think there may be a plethora of them in academia, but who knows?  Still, there does seem to be a suspicious trend.

This all leads me to making the online acquaintance of Noah Berlatsky, a man you clearly hate, I understand… but I do think you have the wrong end of the stick here.  Please bear with me and grant me the possibility of a free (and stubborn!) will. I do appreciate your consideration and time.

Noah wrote an article that I became a little obsessed with on the UVa Rolling Stone scandal and Eden.  I was reading it because I was a sex worker and his work had been referred to often enough. I liked his articles.  But what struck me the most with this one was how it related to what I had experienced at Northwestern.  What happened to me was quotidian, not a big deal, something I was supposed to suffer under to prove that I was “tough.”  In it, he quotes Jessica Luther as telling him that:

 “We are saturated by a culture that sexualizes women but also demonizes them, that celebrates fuzzy consent and certainly doesn’t punish it, that blames victims for the sexual violence done to them, that is sometimes willing to ask people to intervene but is never willing to directly say to men that they should not rape. This kind of saturation makes it so people don’t really want to hear another story about a woman being sexually assaulted—and even if someone is willing to listen to story after story, what has to change to make it so these kinds of violent acts don’t happen with such regularity feels insurmountable. So there is this idea then that to get people to care, the story of that violence that you share (either as a journalist or a survivor) has to shock people so that they say, “Damn, even in THIS culture that doesn’t care much for women, THAT is bad.”

This quote seemed to exactly sum up my problem at NU and with the OCR.  And Noah seemed to be tracking two problems of which I was, and am, particularly aware – Sex worker stigma and sexual assault.  Or to put it another way – If I use my sexuality to extract cash from men, I’m a victim.  But if male sexuality is aggressively thrust upon me, that’s somehow my fault.  It honestly feels to me like my limited agency within this jackass culture is completely inverted, and whatever I say about myself will be turned upside down by those who “know better” than me, about me.

So I tweeted at Noah and told him how much I appreciated his articles.  And that was that.

I’ve had a ton of online exchanges with him and one chat by phone.  He has not once commented on how I look, referred to me by any diminutive, called me food items or pastry titles, solicited my services, pried into my personal life, condescended, or even ignored me, the latter of which wouldn’t be gendered violence so much as modern busyness and I-can’t-even.  That is pretty rare.

And that’s why women, and perhaps sex workers in particular, are willing, and even enthusiastic, to speak with him.  He isn’t objectifying us.  If he was objectifying us we would most certainly be charging him, or he’d end up listed as a loser by STUPIG or some other service like it.  It’s that cold, jim.  It’s that cold.  But there is nothing of the kind.

This leads me to the travesty that you think sex work is.  It wasn’t because I wanted to be an object that I got in to sex work.  It’s because I found myself sexually objectified even in places wherein I was meant to be valued for my intelligence.  It’s because I’m supposed to interpret an invitation to discuss philosophy as a sexual overture by virtue of me being cast as “girl” and my colleague being cast as “boy.”  And this ridiculously heterosexist garbage passes as “common sense” and even “professionalization” amongst people certified in the Humanities.  Ha!  Great. Why would I ever want to finish my degree?

So you tell me: What made me a whore?  It wasn’t sex work. I got into sex work because I wanted bouncers, distance, control, agency, choice, money, and all that freedom that I’m well aware you don’t like.  I got into sex work to capitalize off of what was always and already, my objectification. And before you call me a capitalist, please know that I am not.  But this is a capitalist society.  And I do seem to be reduced to my sex no matter how smart or competent I might try to be.

No.  I got into sex work because I don’t care what men think.  I don’t want their love.  I don’t want their approval.  I don’t want their advice.  I just want their cash, after which point I want appropriate behavior, and then I’d like them to go away.

As for Playboy… I get it.  It’s probably the premiere magazine in which the Beauty Industry and the Sex Industry overlap most overtly.  And that is a problem.  But it does have an impressive readership as well as a history of fabulous interviews with intellectuals.  Further, the sexism is not denied and the women do get paid.  It’s not free as you indicated in The New Statesman.  Sex workers are hustlers, if nothing else.  We want money, not to be told by the 50 billionth schmuck that we’re “fuckable.”  We know we’re “fuckable.”  As dumb as you might think sex workers are, we’re crystal clear on this.  That’s the business.

But this business doesn’t function with quite the stringent “boy”/”girl” beauty standard bullshit you might expect.  Really, this industry is built on fantasy, fetish, and to be perfectly frank, I think shame.  There is a performative quality to sex work that has the potential to be very subversive and very political.  But mainstream crap is generally just that, and it’s always been regressive and propagandist, not just in the sex industry.  My point is – It’s not the only type of sex work out there, even if it is the “norm,” which is, of course, a fiction.

With that said, I can’t say that I have a problem with a fantasy sex world existing, pending it is circumscribed and designated between consenting adults.  But I do have a problem when those fantasies start being projected on real people trying to live their lives in peace.

Personally, I am much more disturbed by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is a supposedly non-sexist, sober-minded American standard that has continuously and seemingly willfully made errors of fact concerning specific allegations of rape and sexual assault on my former campus against one professor in particular.  These two cases don’t concern me personally in the slightest, but the negligence with which The Chronicle has addressed them here, here, and here – and the way in which every other news source has parroted Kipnis’ thesis again and again, from Jezebel to NPR to Reason just yesterday – is distressing to me,  to say the least.  I don’t know what to call it, save a snow job.

I think Kipnis, who repeatedly calls herself a Leftist and a Feminist and then gives not one whit of proof by way of any of her arguments is more damaging to Feminism than Playboy, because she’s more sinister and covert.  And if I were to be mad at Noah Berlatsky for being published in Playboy I’d likewise have to be miffed that he’s published by Reason.  I mean, Kipnis actually says in her latest interview that she feels sorry for men making 98 cents on their past dollar when women currently make some 70-something cents.  Ha!  Wow.  I honestly can’t wrap my head around this. And she also re-uses the same example of an “anonymous prof and student dating” which she was specifically taken to task for here because it’s from the professor’s testimony only and concerns a rape case that is still being considered.

Anyway, while I do understand that you’re angered by the existence of Playboy, I’d be really happy if you might consider those day-to-day factors which might lead a woman to choose sex work and attack those much bigger issues, as opposed to attacking sex work, itself.

Because, ultimately, I think the main reason that you and Noah butt heads is because you’re trying to deconstruct Femininity and those with less power, when you really might want to start with Masculinity and those with more power.  Masculinity is a far more damaging and destructive force than Femininity at the moment, as the two genders are currently culturally coded. And Femininity is put down all the time. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see Whorephobia as anything other than internalized hatred that originates from male violence.  Because let’s be honest: We’re called “whore” no matter what we do.  Or to quote Emma Goldman:

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.”

Anyway, I’m rather sorry this is so long and I sincerely thank you if you made it to the end.  I don’t want to start a feud with you and I don’t want to convert you.  Indeed, I don’t really expect anything from you.  But I did want to share my perspective with you because I am angry, I am Feminist, I am activist (albeit despite myself), but my traumas and targets seem to be a bit different than yours.  It sort of seems a shame that we should be on different sides.  But then, I suppose it takes all kinds.

Take care, and thanks for your time, Meghan. – Nix

Acting as Sex Work, Sex Work as Acting

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(Editor’s Note: I (that’s me, Noah) interviewed Nix 66 about performance and sex work for this piece at Pacific Standard. Nix said a lot more in response to my questions than I was able to use in the piece, so I asked her if she’d reprint the whole thing here.)
 
Noah: What sort of sex work do you do? (I know you said phone…is that something with visuals? That’s different from camming, right?)

Nix 66: I’ve been a fetish sex worker for a year now, starting with my own phone line, doing occasional private camming sessions (not on open platforms), and just now having made my first two clips. And my first two clips look like my first two clips. (Egads, that lighting!)

Writing, directing, acting, lighting, costuming, etc. — Independent Adult Content Providers are responsible for all of these things, not to mention promotion and letting people know that you exist. Coming off with a polished-looking alt-porn or fetish clip is no easy feat. I am certain of this because I’m currently grappling with it, and have yet to achieve it. Maybe some day.

But mainly I do phones.

Most of my clients (all sexed male at birth w/ one exception – a couple – in the past year) fall into one of three classes: 1) Those struggling with issues of gender and sexuality (in light of our current culture, a huge market); 2) Those who want ongoing companionship (literally, an alternative to dating with no marriage at the end); 3) Those who want detailed sexual descriptions of a genuinely Sadean nature (shock talking; the dirtier and more detailed the better).

If you want freedom of speech, you call me. The worst thing that could ever happen is that I hang up on you and block you because you haven’t abided by my limits. But those limits are generally much more broad than one could expect to find with a psychologist, a partner, a priest or equivalent, a best friend, a family member, etc. Mainly because culturally normative notions of masculinity are narrow, limiting, silencing, and damaging (to everyone). I think sex workers are, in large part, confidantes and secret keepers. That’s one of the main social functions. And it’s a damn important one. Society dispenses with it at its own peril.

I listed my main classes of clients because I have cultivated them. Any SW-er who is doing well has a persona, a list of unique skills that s/he brings to the business. They have cultivated that persona and those skills no differently than any actor, particularly the Hollywood variety.

When I first began, I didn’t want to use my image at all for fear of stigma and violence. I bought stock photos that didn’t deviate *too much* from my own body type and said I was brunette because I don’t like men who prefer blondes.

That’s visual. It also has to do with character. I am not a Princess, a MILF, a co-ed, or even a Dominatrix in the most stereotypical sense. I am terrible at getting men to take me to the mall because the mall is the last place on Earth I’d want to be. Persona and experience. You gotta play to your strengths and you gotta create a mythology around those strengths.

Do you see a similarity between what you do and acting, or performing? How is your work creative (or how is sex work in general creative?)

I think of the different branches of sex work as the Greek Muses, personally. Meaning if you were to combine the many different forms and mediations of sex work into a whole, you’d end up with something that looks very much like the “Humanities” or “Arts,” writ large.

I feel like a performance artist, actually. But what I do, specifically, I see more in line with raunchy comedy and improvisation, as well as psychotherapy. I’m a great conversationalist, an ex-literature major, with life-long interests in power, violence, class, and sex. That’s my shoo-in. But other sex workers bring different skills to bear.

Full service providers and pro-dommes deal in touch, presentation, smell, and conversation. I have also been made to understand that they spend a great deal of time doing laundry.

Porn performers must master scripts, characters, and camera angles – and that’s just if they’re in front of the camera.

Cam models improvise on the spot much like I do, but they generally rely more on visual presentation than narrative description. They also might do cos-play and scripted shows.

And exotic dancers… dance! (Is now the right time to mention that I once worked as a professional Egyptian bellydancer in my early 20s, until I was informed that it didn’t matter how well I danced because people just wanted to see me naked? And I quit. On the spot. Cuz we all know there’s no art to nudity and/or sexual desire… right? Right? Amirite?)

Roleplaying is inescapable in sex work, because ultimately – much like actors — we’re hired fantasies. The only difference really is who is doing the hiring.

Do you see a similarity between actors like Lena Dunham and Anne Hathaway and sex workers? Is sexuality part of their performance, in your view?

Ha! What a question. Lena Dunham has built her entire identity on sex and her body type. Pretty overtly. Can you imagine “Girls” stripped of casual, random, unpaid sex premised upon profound self-loathing on the part of 99% of its characters? There goes Ms. Dunham’s “edge.” Here are the top three links I found googling “lena dunham girls sex,” some with great visuals that come directly out of porn:

One.

Two.

Three.
 

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Why should the cast of “Girls” be paid for raunchy sex scenes? Shouldn’t they be doing this for free if their heart was really in it? If they loved it? If it was a true passion and calling?
All the more so since Lena Dunham has never believed in paying (poor) people for their labor anyways.

Anne Hathaway, well… Her entire career has hinged upon the Princess because she’s playing to her strengths just like the rest of the savvy purveyors of high class (and overwhelmingly white) “pretty.” That seems to be her range, her persona. She’s a Disney Princess. Check out some cam platforms and alt-porn and you’ll see some folks being far more creative with that role than her privileged little mind could ever conceive. But then, I only ever enjoy seeing Princesses set against the backdrop of the Terror. ;)

And Kate Winslet, why should she have any more right to all that hideous kinky? I know her body almost as well as I know my own.
Ultimately, celebrities *are* sex workers. It’s just that they sell to studios and call it “art,” which makes the masses feel much more comfortable with the fact that they’re consuming sex day-in, day-out, by the millisecond.

Do you have other comments on the actors who signed the petition for criminalizing sex work, or on that situation in general?

Yes, concerning the situation in general:

  1. Some people may try to discount what I have to say because I engage in sex work that is currently legal in my region and have not met a client in person (though it’s not completely inconceivable). Firstly, sex work is so thoroughly stigmatized, despite the fact that it’s a booming industry, that sex workers who currently operate legally have difficulty getting paid for online services. See here. That’s just one slice of the day-to-day, structural discrimination we have to deal with. De-crimininalization and de-stigmatization of sex work, in whatever forms, benefit me directly.

    2.  

  2. Anyone who has been in sex work (regardless of medium) for any length of time has undoubtedly been propositioned for other services, in other media. I recommend clients to other sexual service providers when they are seeking services that I do not provide personally. That means that I know and respect sex workers in a variety of media. It also means I skirt the line of procuring, most probably. Even being legal, you can’t be a sex worker without stigma and criminalization touching your life, so that friendship might implicate you as a “pimp.” And I’m not even addressing the laws that affect property and the like.

    3.  

  3. Tara Burns recently wrote this article wherein she talked about how, at the age of 15, having been trafficked by her father, the DA said that her testimony against him would be unreliable because she had been a “child prostitute.” Firstly, there ain’t no such thing. But survival being what it is in a callous, child-hating, capitalist, sex-obsessed/deprived culture such as ours, it will take way more nuance and care than a brute law to address survival sex work, sex trafficking, and the sale of sexual services by minors.

    Still, that’s rape culture. That’s the same treatment Kipnis has dished out to the survivors of Ludlow. That’s why it took multiple decades and 35+ women (many ridiculously high profile) to finally accept that Bill Cosby is a rapist. And some people still don’t.

    Similarly, Meg Munoz gave a great interview to Tits and Sass on being blackmailed as a sex worker, which lead to her being trafficked as a direct consequence of criminalization of sex work.

    4.  

  4. Lena Dunham tweeted that “I recognize that I’m not a sex worker or a trafficking survivor. But I’m blessed to have a platform that many close to this issue do not.” Sex workers and sex trafficking survivors are all over the internet. You can’t miss us. She is co-opting our stories for her own fame, just as Hollywood co-opts our tales for passive, easy, guiltless titillation by way of disapproval.

    5.  

  5. I joke about being a “moneysexual,” but I mean it. I LIKE being paid for sexual services, even if that like is more about power and grifting a system (actually, it’s plural: systems) I hate. Still, I like it! Really. And I love the creativity and engagement that I have with clients. That I don’t do full service has to do with personality and preferences, not morals. Anything consenting adults agree to — whatever conditions an adult wishes to place on their attention, time, and companionship — is no one’s business save the people involved. And that anyone else should judge it or condemn it is fundamentally inhumane, hypocritical, prurient, and cruel.

 

Law & Order: SVU – Pornstar’s Requiem (Season 16, Episode 5)

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This was first published on CiCo3.
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The following post examines gendered violence and sex work in the context of a recent Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode. I make use of narratives by two adult film performers, Belle Knox and Kayden Kross, who recently published articles that overlap with the SVU episode, one directly engaging the episode. For broader context I cite Incite!: Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence and the Sex Workers Project and, while not quoted directly, analysis developed by Emi Koyama. Knox and Kross’s lived experiences provide fuller context and analysis than I cite below and Incite! and Emi Koyama’s work are central to the struggle against gendered violence against marginalized and criminalized populations and systemic violence more broadly. I strongly recommend reading their narratives and supporting their work and prioritizing it over what follows should you have to choose between them. Thanks to Megan Spencer for insightful feedback and to you for reading.

Like many Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes, the theme of the 22 October episode “Pornstar’s Requiem” is rape culture and the entitlement men assume over women’s bodies. This assumption is especially acute against women of color, colonized women, trans women and other communities marginalized by racism, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressive organizations of power. Though SVU often centers middle class and wealthy white women, “Pornstar’s Reqiuem” centers one such marginalized community, sex workers. While all sex workers are marginalized or dehumanized in one way or another, an individual or group’s status as indigenous, working class, black, transgender or any other Other (including intersections of any or all of the above and more) means not all sex workers have the same experience. That should be read throughout what follows. (For this review I ignore the production value and storytelling quality, saving that for a later engagement. In brief, this episode suffers from the caricatured posturing and hero-villain hyper-polarization prevalent in the last few seasons of SVU though it is not as bad as some.)

“Pornstar’s Requiem” is one of the series’ ‘ripped from the headlines’ productions. It takes an element from popular media discourse and fictionalizes it to fit the half-police procedural/half-courtroom drama that is Law & Order ’s trademark. The episode takes inspiration from the case of Belle Knox, a porn star and Duke University student whose real name was exposed without her consent by a male fellow student leading to extensive harassment on and off campus.

In the SVU version, Hannah Marks plays Evie Barnes, a white, working class student at Hudson University (a frequent Law & Order stand in for NYU) and adult film performer under the name Roxxxane Demay. Two fellow Hudson University students watching porn on-line recognize Barnes and arrange to get her alone in a bathroom at a college party where they, invoking the rough sex of the porn clip they previously saw, proceed to rape her.

As is usually the case, SVU gets some stuff right while embedding the broader story in problematic politics. At its best numerous characters, especially Barnes herself along with Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hartigay) and Det. Amanda Collins (Kelli Giddish), over and again strongly reject repeated interjections from men trying to justify or rationalize the rape of Barnes due to her work in adult film. In one instance Barnes, her parents just having turned their backs on her because of her work, says, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.” Barnes repeatedly invokes the principle of consent with no qualifications as to the job or social position of the person granting or withholding consent and how any violations of that are sexual assault.

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Evie Barnes defends her right to withhold consent and perform in porn saying, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.

 
In her write-up of the episode, Belle Knox identifies closely with Barnes.

I know well the chilling rape culture entitlement that comes along with men discovering that I’m a porn star. This is the scenario that plays out on the episode. One of the frat boys accused in “Pornstar’s Requiem” even goes so far as to say to the police the following jaw-dropping line: “I didn’t think you could rape a girl like that.”

Have I heard this before?

Not in those exact words, but in actions and in snide remarks, in the assumptions people make with my body and my livelihood because they have watched me in porn or heard that this is my profession. One time a hotel provided a key card to a friend of another man I knew, and at 2 in the morning, this large and loud, older and incredibly drunk stranger wandered into my hotel room — with his own key. I was terrified. Did he think that because I was a porn star he could just come in? Did he think he could do something with me?

She continues, “There is this sense of ownership of porn stars from strangers, which is, quite frankly, chilling.” In a recent article for Salon, fellow porn star Kayden Kross describes her own nonconsensual outing as a college student and how, due to sex workers’ societal position, people outside the industry can’t even imagine how it is that she hasn’t been raped.

I have not been molested by an uncle. Not by a single one of them, if you can believe it. Yet strangers every day tag me with this scarlet letter because they can imagine no other circumstance under which I might choose the life I have chosen. Not only is this an insult to me, but it is an insult to all women who have made unconventional personal choices, because the go-to assumption is that a woman who doesn’t fit the mold has very likely been sexually damaged by a man. It is a comfortable way to explain away a disobedient woman.

There are few keener descriptions of rape culture then how Kross describes the public as demanding her past rape in order to comprehend her. Rape is necessary for their engagement of Kross’s narrative, part of the “sense of ownership of porn stars” that Knox writes about. Kross describes the expected consequences in case of actual assault.

I sometimes wonder how deeply the assumption that the adult performer is somehow a lesser person really runs. Will our aggressor be given a lighter sentence in the event of a murder trial? Will the case be taken less seriously in the event that one of us disappears?

This is the result portrayed in “Pornstar’s Requiem”. After achieving the uncommon in real life result of a guilty verdict – according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, only nine out of every one-hundred sexual assaults are ever prosecuted in the first place – the judge sets aside the verdict and admonishes Barnes in the most condescending manner saying, “I hope going forward you find a way to respect your body and yourself.” Knox writes that the judge’s phrasing is “something I have heard so many times from my friends, family and peers it practically feels like my first name.”

The Patriarchal State and Accountability

SVU, like all cop shows, even more critical ones like The Wire, defines accountability as state intervention followed by incarceration. In the case of sex workers, people of color, colonized (including intersections thereof) and other Othered populations, interventions by institutions of state violence (the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military, F.B.I., etc.) frequently exacerbate rather than mitigate violence, including sexual violence.

The Sex Workers Project (SWP) at the New York City-based Urban Justice Center conducted a small survey of folks in the trade. Among their findings:

Thirty percent of sex workers interviewed told researchers that they had been threatened with violence by police officers, while 27% actually experienced violence at the hands of police. Reported incidents included officers physically grabbing and kicking prostitutes, as well as beating them; one incident of rape; one woman was stalked by a police officer; and throwing food at one subject. Sexual harassment included fondling of body parts; giving women cigarettes in exchange for sex; and police offering not to arrest a prostitute in exchange for sexual services.

Perhaps most obviously, that most sex work is criminalized means that agents of state violence generally seek to incarcerate sex workers, not offer any kind of protection or support. As Incite! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence notes, “Existing laws that criminalize sex work often prevent workers from reporting violence, enable law enforcement agents to not take violence against sex workers seriously when it is reported, and facilitate police violence against sex workers.”

The vigorous defense offered by the (initially reluctant) District Attorney and police in “Pornstar’s Requiem” is anomalous in the real world though the lack of rapist accountability of any kind in the end, the paternalistic dismissal of Barnes by the judge, the exploitation of class differences between the rapists to turn the working class rapist snitch and the perpetual saving mission of the police all ring true.

Condemned to Porn

The end of “Pornstar’s Requiem” is filmed as tragedy. Kross writes about experiences outside of the porn industry bubble where porn stars are dehumanized and made punchlines. In a comedy class she is taking the instructor says, “Don’t worry, if you fail at this, there’s always porn.” It’s a common punchline. In their opening monologue for the 2013 Golden Globes, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler make a similar joke.

Tina Fey: I don’t think she has plans to do porn Amy.

Amy Poehler: None of us have plans do to porn.

Examples abound. Porn is not a career one chooses in such comments but a life one is condemned or resorts to.

The porn industry has no doubt been tragic for some of its workers. But so has the restaurant industry. So has accounting. So has professional American football. The “porn as last resort” narrative is another way of dehumanizing sex workers. Since, in patriarchy’s narrative, no one would choose it, those engaged in it must not be anybody nor any body. This is how “Pornstar’s Requiem” ends.
 

Evie Barnes broadcasts her social death. (Screen capture from "Pornstar's Requiem")

Evie Barnes broadcasts her social death.


 
After the judge sets aside the verdict and frees Barnes’s rapist, Barnes commits what the show portrays as a kind of suicide, complete with suicide note, where she leaves university for porn. “Pornstar’s Requiem” narrates this as the failure of the agents of state violence to complete a saving mission. Barnes no longer exists, they lost her. Only Roxxxane Demay remains. Demay partially affirms her position telling Collins, “At least here when I say stop, they stop.” But she does so on the verge of tears over a funereal soundtrack making that affirmation instead part of the “resort to porn” narrative. No matter that earlier in the episode Barnes expresses a certain fulfillment with her work in porn, “I signed contracts. I got paid. It felt good. I mean these guys [Barnes looks to each side at the men on campus] look right through me. They have no idea what I’m doing on set with hot porn actors.”
 

Evie Barnes self-medicates before her funeral. (Screen capture from "Pornstar's Requiem")

Evie Barnes self-medicates before her funeral.

 
Evie Barnes’s social death is finalized on a porn set. Collins tells her, “You don’t have to be here,” and tries to offer her other options. Demay tell Collins, “Once you’re Roxxxane Demay, you can’t be Evie Barnes again,” takes some kind of pill, disrobes and walks to her burial, a gangbang scene with fifteen men as stand-ins for pallbearers.1 This, as with all saving missions, ends with the ‘saved’ being dehumanized by the saviors. The dehumanization that Barnes fights against earlier in the episode is finalized with the heavy, tragic soundtrack, Barnes/Demay’s tears and Collin’s desperate, sorrowful pleading. She is literally dehumanized in this narrative. The human Evie Barnes is dead and Roxxxane Demay, a fictional character invented by Barnes for stage purposes, now exists in a non-life as the title “Pornstar’s Requiem” suggests. Here Collins and Barnes’s rapists are no longer opposing parties, they find shared ground with Barnes’s dehumanization.
 

Roxxxane Demay approaches her funeral. (Screen capture from "Pornstar's Requiem")

Roxxxane Demay approaches her funeral.

 
The episode’s end message affirms both agents of patriarchal state violence as sole recourse of accountability (though failed in this instance) to victims of gendered violence and the dehumanization of sex workers. NBC broadcast this message to over two million initial viewers. As with all popular culture, the episode did not invent this message. Instead it (re)produces it in conversation with broader media and popular discourse. “Pornstar’s Requiem” is another exchange in the conversation and in spite of its attempt at critical engagement, it ends up projecting and producing the real-life alienation described by Kross and Knox.
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1.The episode strongly suggests a social death and portrays Roxxxane Demay’s evolution as solely horror. There is another interpretation though the show does not point to it in any way at all, what Emi Koyama calls “Negative Survivorship“. Interpreting the scene this way is far better and appropriately positions the agents of state violence with the rapists while supporting Demay/Barnes. Based upon all previous episodes of SVU, this is not the intention of the writers.