Tired of reading leftist theory that degrades sex workers, misunderstands the nature of our work, or ignores us altogether? Maybe you’d like to hear what sex workers’ experiences reveal about capitalism and gender and policing? Hooker Mentality covers all the ways that selling sex can give hookers an insight into the systems which control us all, revealing why so many of us become radically left-wing after we start selling sex.
This book is the culmination of what I have learned from being a hooker for almost a decade, as well as the knowledge I’ve gained from the countless sex workers around me and those who have come before. If you’d like to get a copy for yourself, you can pre-order the book here worldwide until the publication date of June 27th. Feel free to check out the preview below, in the form of the book’s introduction!
Introduction
Hookers are incredibly easy to radicalize as leftists. Through this book I do not intend to speak for all sex workers or to say that we all think the same way, but instead to discuss the political issues raised for those selling sex and how we can understand them through a leftist framework or expose certain commonly-accepted progressive stances as harmful and hypocritical. An experience of selling sex and an understanding of how sex workers are treated can lead someone to a radically leftist way of thinking purely by observation. Those observations can be written down and preserved for allies who are outside of this sphere.
Whilst sex workers may have a wide range of jobs selling sexual services, from making porn to stripping to being a phone sex operator, the focus in this book will be on people who sell sex itself unless otherwise specified. It is vitally important that we promote solidarity between all types of sex workers whilst remembering that the most marginalized have a unique perspective because of our experience of oppression. Other kinds of sex workers are maligned in part by comparison to the most loathsome target who is not considered to be a worker at all: the prostitute, the hooker, the whore. Being a member of this oppressed class leads us to developing a certain mentality to survive. Our work itself also brings things to light, whether we as individual sex workers have the time and resources and disposition to consider them or not.
I was compelled to commit what being a sex worker can reveal about society to paper upon the realisation that even the civilians closest to me do not understand the mentality I have developed through my years as a hooker at all. Almost every thought I have about the state and class and gender and immigration and racism and homophobia is filtered through this lens. This holds true for other sex workers I know even though we don’t all come to the same conclusions. If my closest friends who don’t sell sex are shocked that I would think sex work reveals so much about all these topics, despite hearing me speak about selling sex and seeing the effects it has had on me in real time, then I have to assume that people who don’t have the benefit of a close friendship with someone who is openly a sex worker are even less likely to develop this understanding.
The sex workers I speak to, from all over the world, tend to be radical by necessity. Police treat us in such a way that we often have no option but to distrust them, from which point it is much easier to convince us of the need to abolish them entirely. Misogyny levelled against women who sell sex, and those who do so whilst being perceived as women even if that’s not our true identity, is an order of magnitude greater than the bigotry levelled at those who are considered more respectable. Suffering through being treated as vectors of disease who are mentally ill for using our bodies in such a way forces us to think more deeply about pathologization as a tool of control.
When we turn to activism as a way to fight for our rights, we arm ourselves with the words and rhetoric that our allies and opponents will respond to best. What we say in this context is not always the most accurate representation of how we feel. A person does not need to know the currently accepted language or have read entire bookshelves worth of political theory to know when something isn’t right. Those who don’t want to spend every moment they aren’t working on activism have something worthwhile to say, too. Whether they call themselves working girls or a rent boys or hookers as opposed to sex workers doesn’t undermine the truth of their remarks, nor does the crassness of their language or the fact it doesn’t make for pretty sound bites.
The conversation about prostitution – the term used to legally define our work – is global. Although we are more connected now than ever, I cannot claim to have insight into the ways every kind of culture will impact hookers’ views of our work and the language we use about ourselves. My mentality as a hooker is undoubtedly shaped by my own whiteness and Britishness as much as it is shaped by being trans and disabled and working while in poverty. While I seek to cover the nuances in how hookers across the world may feel about different issues, this work has a strong focus on the UK. That being said, sex workers are united by our experiences of whorephobia across borders and identities because of how these attitudes have been exported by colonialism and the ways we learn from each other about how to push back. Differences in culture and demographics and location lead to nuance, not total separation.
As with any group, there are some who bury their heads in the sand and resist the radicalization that calls to other hookers so sweetly. A sex worker who is fortunate enough to love the work and never have a bad client might not consider the systems which persecute their peers. Rich escorts will sometimes pull up the ladder behind them, citing their work ethic and bootstrap mentality as the reason for their success and separating themselves from the rest of us hookers. Others trade sex and experience harm, only to lay the blame on the patriarchy alone and to presume that their feelings on prostitution can be universalized, unwilling or unable to consider that their trauma is valid regardless of whether all sex work leads to the same result.
It’s for that reason that I want to talk not about a sex worker mentality, but a hooker mentality. We’re all considered hookers the moment we sell sex by people who want to throw the term at us like an insult, but we don’t all claim the term for ourselves. Here I use the word as an endearment. I love hookers. They’re my people in a way that no-one else comes close to. Under the warm embrace of this slur turned honorific in the mouths of whores, I include those who sell sex without being too ashamed to name it or group themselves in with the most marginalized and reviled. When I speak about hookers, I mean the street sex workers and drug users and unruly activists and those who don’t feel the need to use terminology that elevates them above us with the claim that they’re a provider of sex who wouldn’t dare engage in such disgraceful acts. I am speaking of those of us who may be traumatized and enraged, who know exactly where to direct our anger and do not believe this trauma negates our status as workers.
Someone who has never sold sex can learn from those who have and consider what our industry and the way we’re treated demonstrates about society. That does not mean they suddenly embody the hooker mentality that we have built as a mechanism for coping with whorephobia. Understanding where sex workers are placed in the social hierarchy is different from being a hooker who feels it on a personal level. A hooker mentality cannot be turned on and off, added and removed like tinted glasses. It is constant for as long as we continue to sell sex. For most it continues to impact how we think for a long time after, if not until our deaths.
Every time we’re denied the right to travel or donate blood or to adopt because of our work, our hooker mentality is reinforced. If we are forced to lie for our safety, the crushing weight of keeping our work a secret only stokes our justified rage. The conclusions I come to throughout this text are rational, but it would be wrong to say that I found myself at this point through utilizing logic alone. It is fury and sorrow and irritation which are ceaseless in the face of whorephobia which do not allow me to look away.
I’m sick of looking to popular leftist and feminist thinkers when I want to make sense of how I’m treated, only to find that if they do not actively detest us then they’ve never considered sex workers at all. We’re relegated to footnotes overflowing with pity and derision from those who are supposed to be our comrades. Any sex workers who manage to gain a small amount of credibility and advocate for ourselves are condemned as too privileged to speak on our work, no matter how much abuse we have actually suffered whilst selling sex, so that people who’ve never sold sex at all can speak over us on the basis of what they believe they know about the realities of it.
I’ve heard too many people quote Marx to count, believing they’re signalling their solidarity. Scratch one of these Marxists and you find the layer underneath the veneer of camaraderie is one of superiority.
“Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer,”i they gleefully quote Marx, claiming his advanced understanding of sex work in an era when it was never considered such, only to leave out the rest of the sentence in his notes, “and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.”
Marx wrote very little about sex work, thankfully, but what he did write tells us that he found it immoral on the part of the worker as well as the consumer. It is irrelevant that he blamed exploiters and managers more, not least because plenty of sex workers do not have them and did not throughout history, because he reveals his contempt for us regardless. For those willing to delve deeper, his issue with sex workers becomes clear even from the first segment of his sentence. All work is not prostitution of the labourer, in the sense that it does not all involve sex. Marx instead uses prostitution as a synonym for exploitation in a manner that is separate from the way a part of the value a worker generates is taken by their employer, denoting the sale of one’s body. Instead of speaking about selling sex as equivalent to other forms of work, he uses metaphor to share his disgust for the dynamic between capitalists and labourers by comparison to sex work.
In the Communist Manifesto itself, the little writing that mentions prostitution is similarly lacklustre:
“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”
Marx’s fails to see the sale of sex as, first and foremost, a reaction to a need for money in a world where people must earn it to live. The demand is impacted by the way wealthy men feel stifled in their monogamous marriages, their relative power in comparison to women allowing them the time and freedom (and creating the entitlement) to pursue paid sex, however this is always secondary to the willingness to sell sex which is created by financial need. To suggest we must end prostitution and resolve the absence of family among the working class is a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect.
Through my lens as a hooker, I am able to see clearly that I would not have lived long enough to agitate bourgeois society and fight back in a meaningful way if not for selling sex. Hookers are paid mostly by men, many of whom uphold the exact systems we seek to dismantle as communists or anarchists, and their frequently ill-gotten gains are transferred to us. We’re not all angels who are ethically superior to our clients, though you’d be hard-pressed to argue that hookers are less ethical on average than our clients are. In a way, it’s a redistribution of wealth from the capitalists and their lapdogs to the proletariat.
We can infer the opinions of some other left-wing thinkers about full service sex workers through their commentary on pornography and by listening to the arguments they use against it, as with Noam Chomsky during one interviewii:
“The fact that people agree to it and are paid is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favour of sweatshops in China where women are locked into a factory and work 15 hours a day and then the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented but it doesn’t make me in favour of it.”
“Just like child abuse, you don’t want to make it better child abuse, you want to stop child abuse.”
It’s interesting that someone who supposedly opposes both child abuse and the sale of sexual services so strongly would have interactions with Jeffrey Epstein after he plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor. Then again, when it comes to sexual exploitation and sex work alike, leftists often behave hypocritically.
Chomsky falls into the trap that many leftists do, when discussing sex work; he assumes it is abusive as part of his premise and works from that point, never re-examining his foundational assertion. There are people who sell sexual services like porn who do so whilst enjoying it, for high pay and in good conditions, like fashion designers who adore their jobs and achieve success. There are also those who are coerced into making porn by partners and bosses who expose them to appalling conditions and ignore their discomfort, pressuring them to keep working because they need the money so desperately, like workers in sweatshops.
Hookers notice these differences in ways that Chomsky does not, because we see the difference between ourselves and our peers in better or worse circumstances. Working the street and being harassed by locals and assaulted by clients or police, knowing you have to earn enough not to be beaten by your partner when you return, is not the same experience as working independently indoors with an easy regular client who pays well with a friend in the other room. I know this viscerally because I’ve felt the jealousy that seeing another worker in better conditions inspires, and I’ve been so much happier during the brief periods when I’ve attained those circumstances for myself.
One would hope that well-known feminist writers might have a better perspective, considering the plight of sex workers at least because so many are women who suffer extreme misogynistic abuse and attitudes. Whilst the landscape is improving with more people agreeing that sex work is work and supporting the full decriminalisation of it, there are still many so-called radical feminists who advocate for damaging laws and attitudes.
Among them is Julie Bindel, a writer and radical feminist whose work focuses on male violence against women. In a piece for The Criticiii, Bindel wrote:
“Accusations of “whorephobia” are increasingly used to silence and deter any criticism of the sex trade. Black, brown and indigenous women and girls are first in line to be bought and sold into prostitution. None of this appears to disturb those apologists on the Left.
On any other issue so bound up with oppression and inequality — a huge, malign free market enterprise that operates for the satisfaction of the exploiter — they would be screaming from the roof tops. You could be forgiven for concluding that the leftist defence of prostitution is indicative of how women at the bottom of the pile matter less than their bourgeois counterparts.”
What’s most bizarre about Bindel’s assessment here is her belief that the left, at large, oppose criticism of sex work and defend it. The people reacting with anger to Bindel’s support of the Nordic model (a legal model which criminalizes sex workers’ clients and leads to higher rates of abuse against us) are sex workers, not leftists without experience selling sex.
Given her refusal to see any form of selling sex as consensual, exemplified in her book The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth where she insists it is not a form of work and makes a point to put even the phrases sex worker or sex work into quotation marks, it is not surprising to see Bindel mischaracterise support for decriminalisation and destigmatization as a lack of care for sex workers. What is strange is that she would pretend that there is broad support for decriminalisation, even on the left, when most of the world utilizes some level of criminalisation and that is accepted as the default. Any time I interact with leftists who are not sex workers themselves, I find their knowledge of sex work to be lacking and that they default either to the same client criminalisation that Bindel supports or to suggesting regulation.
Andrea Dworkin was another feminist writer, who Bindel looks up to. She actually did have experience selling sex and spoke about it. Her position on prostitution was that it is intrinsically abusive, and she treated dissenting opinions from sex workers as the product of self-hatred. Her insistence in one speechiv that “the premises of the prostituted woman are my premises” was surely intended as a show of solidarity with others who have sold sex, but her insistence on exclusively referring to the “prostituted” shows her lack of consideration for sex workers’ choices and autonomy, which she considered meaningless under patriarchy.
People quote Dworkin with the insistence that they want what is best for those who sell sex, to protect us by putting an end to the work that many of us select as our best option. As a hooker who isn’t fond of selling sex, who has been abused, I rail against this paternalistic mindset. Protecting those of us who do not enjoy selling sex means providing us with the things we’re selling it for so that we have no need to. Abolishing prostitution does not feed us, does not clothe us, and does not house us. It simply takes away one more option which many of us prefer to other forms of work that can provide for those same needs. Dworkin’s ideas about the intrinsically abusive nature of selling sex are an insult to the intelligence and capability of the women she talks about. When people quote from Dworkin, I think about these later parts of her speech on prostitution:
“The people who defend prostitution and pornography want you to feel a kinky little thrill every time you think of something being stuck in a woman. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused. I want you to feel what it feels like when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: because that is what prostitution is.”
Clients and customers might want to give people a kinky thrill when they discuss their interactions with sex workers. Hookers usually don’t. We’re using our bodies with intent, not misusing them, and agreeing to sex involving our delicate tissues doesn’t suddenly become damaging when we charge for the privilege.
“In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women’s bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It’s impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after.”
This is, in the simplest terms, a misogynistic lie that mimics the kind of commentary made in classrooms by conservative teachers spreading abstinence-only education. I almost expect her to break out their metaphors, comparing women who sell sex to chewed up pieces of gum or used tape that has lost its stickiness and is covered in debris. The hookers I know are some of the most empathetic people I’ve met, certainly whole human beings. I am sympathetic to the idea that Dworkin speaks from a place of feeling personally damaged but I find it hard to keep that attitude when she’s applying it outwardly. Anyone who talks about us this way, or who quotes someone who talks about us this way, does not truly view us as equals worthy of consideration. Dworkin doesn’t shy away from the topic, yet the things she says about sex workers do us harm just the same as ignoring us does.
There are a great number of people who are victimised whilst selling sex. Some of those people go on to brand themselves as sex trade survivors, rather than rape survivors who used to be sex workers, and label anyone selling sex who does not conform to their victim categorisation as a member of the pimp lobby. It is a difference not simply in what they have lived through, separating happy hookers from abuse survivors, but in viewpoint. What distinguishes sex-selling Nordic model advocates from hooker activists supporting full decriminalisation is our mentality. It’s whether we universalise our trauma and refuse to believe someone else might consent to sell sex, or look at the systems governing us and see harm which cannot be resolved by further policing and stigma.
Though I strongly believe that a look at the realities of the lives of sex workers can lead anyone to view our labour as legitimate and to a better understanding of gender relations and consent and racism and the harm done by closed borders, that does not mean it doesn’t take work to look at sex work in an unbiased way. Sometimes we need others to guide us and help us seek past the filter our own trauma or disgust might lay over our perception, in a world so full of whorephobia.
I’m proud to be a hooker and I developed that mindset in the arms of other hookers who wouldn’t let me slip into an abyss of denial and self-hatred. I found my hooker mentality by listening to people who feel differently about hooking than I do and analysing my feelings whilst fully accepting them. I believe sex workers who love the work, no matter how hard that was to believe at first, and I listen to those who hate it and were abused in ways far worse than I was who don’t allow others to tell them that suffering abuse renders their labour illegitimate.
Hookers are sick of being canaries in the coal mine, warning others about rising fascism to no avail. We are tired of being ignored because we are assumed to be too traumatized to know what is good for us. We are done with being denigrated as members of a pimp lobby at the same time we are having the value of our labour stolen by the people we’re compared to. Our insights are worthwhile and we are the future of the leftist movement we’ve helped to build.
i Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Private Property and Communism by Karl Marx
ii The Price of Pleasure – Noam Chomsky on Pornography
iii Women should not be for sale by Julie Bindel, June 2022 – https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2022/women-should-not-be-for-sale/
iv Andrea Dworkin, Prostitution and Male Supremacy, 1 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 1 (1993). https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjgl/vol1/iss1/1
Hooker mentality comes out on June 27th. Pre-order your copy now, worldwide!
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