Art and sex occupy similar positions under capitalism. The commodification of each, while rampant, is also rife with anxiety and subject to questions of ethics, purity, and meaning. This is because we are told art and sex shouldn’t be commodified. Both are seemingly sacred forms of human expression, and we are taught to keep them close to ourselves, safe from capital’s voracious appetite. And yet, art and sex– and specifically the art and sex industries–are actually capital’s stress points: two industries saturated in hyper-capitalist relations while also existing on the outskirts of the formal economy.
page 5, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
Table of Contents
Sex Work and Dissociation
Every once in a while I read a book where the subject matter hits close to home in a way that makes it hard to review. I thought a lot about how I wanted to approach review, how much of my personal past I wanted to expose in what is ostensibly “just” a review of a non-fiction book.
My experience with sex work and sex workers goes back about a decade now, most of it as a client. Until very recently, I wasn’t involved in the sex work biz as a creator myself. I found myself thinking about all the experiences I had with sex workers over the past decade or so of my life.
I’ll not go into any kind of lurid detail about those experiences here, partially because I don’t remember that kind of detail and partially because they are not really relevant to the point I want to make.
It’s work that is intolerable; the oppressive fact of wage labor that drives us to dissociate, to exit our bodies or else inhabit them in the worst of ways, like a smoke-blind person attempting to crawl their way out of a fire, desperately trying to evade the source of the damning heat.
page 57-58, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
I want to talk about disassociation in the context of capitalism and sex work as Sophia does here. In my experiences over the past decade, I was often dissociated from the physical experience of the sexual acts in question, that is partly why I don’t remember most of them. The sex was merely a conduit for something else, a need to fill some kind of emotional void which wasn’t being filled or was constantly growing.
A lot of the last decade of my life was spent in various states of bad mental health and as such I resorted to various coping strategies to get through the day-to-day drudgery of life. Sex was one of those methods I relied on a lot, it was less a physical need and more a psychological one. As such I was often dissociated from my “real” self in a lot of these encounters I had.
A lot of my bad mental health at the time was caused by capitalism, I was working shitty jobs, burned out and constantly worried about money. As such dissociation through sex was a salve I applied a little too much. Capitalism creates dissociation in all of us, so-called capitalist alienation is a very real feeling that affects us all. I found it extremely interesting to bind that alienation with the nature of sex work in a capitalist society as Sophia does in this book.
The Book Itself
This book was recommended to me by my friend Chloe – artist, academic, and sex worker. As such the book deals with a world of art that I am not familiar with at all – museums, art galleries and the absurdly rich people that come with those things. So some parts of this book were things I was not familiar with; I had a call with Chloe after I finished this book to discuss those aspects.
The key concept that I took away from reading this book and that discussion was – access and distribution. Who has access to these fancy galleries? Whose art is taken seriously? How much misogyny is in the art world? (hint: its a lot.). What is art and what is pornography?
Art vs. Pornography
But for all the hemming and hawing of what makes something art versus pornography. the answer is simple: the sale price. Art is just more expensive.
page 118, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
I find myself in agreement with this. Obscenely rich individuals will pay obscene amounts of money for what they consider art. They will not pay anywhere close to those amounts for pornography. So again, the question becomes about art vs. pornography. If your pornography is in a fancy art gallery does it then become art?
That last one is a nonsense question based on an asinine premise. All pornography is art, even if in just a technical sense. A sex worker in a work of pornography is an artist as much as a stage actor is in a play. Pornography is performance and as such is performance art. So ultimately the answer to the nonsensical question is determined by social norms and values. What does society consider art? That is determined by the classification of what is considered an artist and that is something delineated across race, gender and class markers.
If you are a white conventionally attractive straight woman or man you can have your pornography on display at an elite art gallery and have rich people call it art. If you are a black trans woman, your pornography is considered just that, just pornography and not worthy of being on display in such a art gallery. The sex worker in that latter context is stripped of their artistic ability, or to make a rhetorical point – they are stripped of their humanity insofar as creativity is innate to all human beings.
And as Sophia astutely points out, if people consider your work pornography instead of art, they will pay you less for it. Ain’t capitalism great?
Okay But What About The Book?
The book is good. The biggest compliment I can give a book is that made me think a lot and made me think deeply about a subject I care about deeply, in this case – sex work. If you are someone like who has an interest in sex work and want a more holistic understanding of that world from the perspective of a sex worker and an artist, then you should read this book.
This is the first book I’ve read in 2024 and I couldn’t have asked for a better one to get the year started with. May the rest of the books I read this be as thought provoking as this one.
Thank you for reading this post.
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