In her short story “How to be an Other Woman,” Lorrie Moore writes, “When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.” Here the title of “mistress” is a put-on in more ways than one—it is wordplay, identity play, sex play. It confirms the reader’s assumptions about what it means to be “an other women” are true, but also that they are constructs. Like shoes you need to break them in before you can begin to navigate what being an other woman—what Melissa Gira Grant in her new book calls “whore stigma”—means to you. But perhaps more important is what the word “mistress” hides beneath its many-skirted charade: a discomfort with the order of desire as it stands, even an awkward wish to stumble over it.
The cover of Grant’s new book Playing The Whore: The Work of Sex Work—published by Verso in March as one of three books in its Jacobin series—features three flesh-colored gears from which spring three sets of spindly female legs dressed in high-heeled shoes. Here the visual pun turns on the gear, which replaces hips, torso, and genitals with a signifier of work, specifically of mechanical reproduction and technologies of assembly. Grant—a former sex worker, a seasoned activist, and now a journalist whose articles have appeared in The Nation, $pread, and Reason—knows very well how narratives of economy bleed into and often generate other stories of intimacy, sexuality, and pleasure. She is powerfully conversant in the ways such tangled scripts are disproportionately cruel toward sex workers, especially women of color and LGBTQ women. “If a woman is other,” writes Grant, “whore is the other’s other.”
One of the most important aspects of Grant’s imaginative and immaculate little book is the attention she pays to issues of state surveillance and the policing of sex work, which often endanger the women they claim to protect by pushing prostitutes deeper underground, forcing them to perform the old wives’ tale of a “double life.” Prostitution, Grant points out, is often a crime of talking and walking, which has as much to do with the gaze of the state as with transactions of money and sex. In the U.S., prostitution is a misdemeanor, but the dissemination of information about how to do it constitutes a more serious crime. As far as the state is concerned, a prostitute is always working, even when she is “off-duty,” and even though her work is not seen as legitimate. Grant details the migration of advertising of sexual services from the pages of alt-weeklies like the Village Voice and Craigslist (once called “the Walmart of sex trafficking”), to every corner of the internet, hidden in plain sight. Here sex workers are theoretically unseen (or at least don’t have to be seen) by the general populace, while police can easily browse them at will, and comfortably plot arrests.
Grant does the real legwork of the book with sharp journalistic tools, laying bare the hypocrisies of law enforcement’s crackdowns on the sex industry. In Chicago, for example, the Illinois Safe Children Act, passed in 2010, was sold as a ban against prosecuting child prostitutes; it also legalized felony charges for johns who were first-time offenders. Grant cites a Chicago Reporter investigation from 2012 that found sex workers, not johns, “made up 97 percent of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in Cook County” between 2008 and 2011. Over the same period, convictions of sex workers increased 68 percent. In the end, it was women yet again who paid the price for this supposedly progressive law.
Even given these bleak numbers, and others equally despicable, Grant smartly resists the liberal model of compassionately witnessing the victimized “other,” or perpetuating what Laura Agustín has termed “the rescue industry.” She has harsh words for those feminists whose messiah complex regarding sex workers masks a deeper desire to pass judgment, gain social status through expertise, and withhold material gains. Her chief concern is not working with the state, but advocating for sex workers, their labor rights, their legal legitimacy, their ability to craft their own stories. This is probably why Grant, I think rightly so, is less interested in eliciting from her reader a position on sex work than a position on police violence against sex workers. After all, a prostitute may sometimes fail to please, but the state is a cruel mistress.
