Raunch and Its Discontents by Tracy Quan

Recently, on Radio 4, Cosmopolitan magazine was attacked by Carol Sarler for reducing women to the sum of our “rude bits.” Cosmo’s deputy editor Helen Daly was a model of civility, despite the fact that Sarler had called her magazine a “raddled old slapper.” The surprise here is that Sarler isn’t your typical anti-sex crusader. Over the years, she has written thoughtful stuff about women’s issues. She has opposed repressive porn laws which seek to “clean up” our minds and taken a stand against victim-oriented feminism, especially where drinking and sex are concerned. Her recent commentary on Anna Nicole Smith was provocative yet compassionate.

Despite this, Sarler joins the “anti-raunch” chorus. She’s especially ticked off by a question Cosmo posed to readers: is flashing your breasts on a night out empowering?

A transatlanic anti-raunch movement is growing, but today’s finger-wagging scolds are different from the militants who opposed porn in the 1980s. They don’t necessarily hate men or view women as blameless victims: Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, is troubled by the fact that young women are themselves fueling the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon. They’re more mainstream: The jacket of Pamela Paul’s Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families features an American-flag thong panty, and Pamela seems just blonde enough to carry off the look in private. (Dark-haired Ariel might be too earnest for stars-and-stripes underwear but she has her own appeal.) I doubt that either of these camera-ready authors could end up like Andrea Dworkin, who, at the height of her fame, looked as eccentric and tormented as her message. Today’s anti-porn headliners tend to be pretty and presentable. They may be wrong about a few things but they aren’t lunatics — or even wild-eyed visionaries like Dworkin. Nor are they radical thinkers, like Catharine MacKinnon whose outlandish legal theories broke new ground. They are packaged not as hardline feminists, but as voices of sanity in a hyped up, hypersexual wilderness.

But you can’t blame Ariel and company for trying to make sense of this new reality. When MacKinnon and Dworkin hatched their theories, the college students who flash, masturbate and French kiss each other in Girls Gone Wild videos weren’t even born yet. Strippercise wasn’t being hawked by the Washington Post or BBC as the latest way to tone your abs. Back then, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their followers were almost as marginal as the sex industry.

As a former sex worker, I have some questions about “raunch culture” in general and about cardio-striptease in particular. Jenna Jameson, who once worked as a stripper, made it clear in her memoir that exotic dancing is extremely hard on the body – it’s a job, and hardly the ideal path to fitness. In How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Chapter 9 is devoted to shin splints, degenerative muscle tissue and other occupational injuries. The dancers I know are doing Pilates, yoga, kick-boxing and weights to stay fit — not “strippercise.” Some take self-defense classes to protect themselves on the job. The same is true of hookers. Sex industry workers who can afford to do so invest considerable time and money in physical therapy, relaxation treatments and health care because our bodies are, quite literally, our business.

But not all sex workers can afford such antidotes, and sometimes I think women outside the sex trade are being sold a bill of goods about how “empowering” or fun sex work is. While it can be fun, there are dues to be paid, and sexual power extracts a price.

That’s why I never recommend prostitution as a career to anyone, even the most enthusiastic would-be call girls. And it’s why I question the wisdom of appearing in a commercial video, naked and masturbating, in exchange for… a tank top. If someone is making money off your body, you should too. If it would make you feel a bit sleazy to sell your own sex videos or to get paid for that masturbation routine, then perhaps you shouldn’t take your shirt off for the camera. Are you doing it just because you’re drunk? Like Ariel, I can believe that appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video leaves some participants feeling a bit, well, hungover the next day.

There’s nobody more prudish than a former prostitute. When I see the girls I once worked with, we trade quips about how white our cotton undies are. Few of us will watch porn with our boyfriends or husbands. Been there, done that — with our clients — and porn looks too much like work to us. We actually think it’s unromantic for a man to ogle other women — that’s something customers do.

And yet I’m not ready to cast my lot with anti-raunch campaigners. While I’ve arrived at my brand of prudishness honestly, I’m not convinced they have. And, as one who still identifies with the sex industry, I don’t trust them.

In America, for example, the anti-raunch consensus seems to be that society is going to hell in a handbasket — and college girls are getting rowdier — because sex workers aren’t cowering in their shame-filled closets. Recalling that Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown because Penthouse photos had resurfaced, Ariel appears to be nostalgic for the good old days when “being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from.” Now, to her dismay, being in porn is “itself the comeback.” Though she urges her readers to remember that sex workers are, indeed, working, you get the eerie sense that we’re like black people moving into a previously white neighborhood. Perhaps, since she’s deploring our cultural influence on hitherto “nice” girls, a better analogy would be white fans aping black musicians, a trend that’s been around since jazz was invented.

One supporter of Ariel’s alarmist thesis is Jennifer Egan, a New York novelist who looks askance at mainstream books about sex work and, like Ariel, assumes that commercial sex is in league with raunch culture. It’s more complicated than that, for the sex industry is no monolith. Many prostitutes view themselves as traditional beings clinging to a subtler, more feminine, aesthetic than we now see in porn, at lap-dancing clubs — or at hen parties.

Romantic Cinderella fantasies are still alluring to us, but these tend to bubble below the surface, in the private sphere of the prostitute’s mind. A deeply independent streak might render those fantasies moot in the cold light of day but still… prostitution can be a lot less raunchy and brutal than some of the mainstream dating rituals I’ve witnessed. As a former hooker, I’m shocked and puzzled by what young single males get away with — not with sex workers but with civilians. The old-world pre-feminist concept of the gentleman is alive and well in the world of post-feminist prostitution, where respectful admiration is still valued.

From a distance, the sex industry appears larger than life. Close up, you will see that it’s not just a parade of bigger ‘n’ better plastic breasts. Or cosmetically altered sex organs. In the most traditional areas of the sex trade, where people don’t just gawk and stare, there’s room for civilized interaction.

The problem Ariel describes is real: Women outside the industry don’t have much contact with the intimate side of commercial sex. So, they can be conned into embracing the most visible hype — the carnival of the lap dance club, the gymnastics of porn, the superficial sleaziness of “raunch culture.” Prostitution’s a different kind of zone where off-the-record intimacy is uniquely its own thing and quite varied: illicit, awkward, friendly, disturbing, joyful, tense, kind, or even angry and resentful. It’s a very mixed bag of emotions. Men who aren’t in the industry can easily sample these intimate, humanizing secrets. Most men who visit prostitutes are probably aware that internet porn, phone sex and lap-dancing contain a cartoon component. But they don’t tend to discuss their findings with the civilian women in their lives. It’s just not done.

And yet, women in large numbers find aspects of the sex trade rather alluring. The result is, you guessed it, recreational pole-dancing as a form of empowerment.

Or, perhaps, flashing your breasts on a Saturday night. Whether you find it empowering or appalling, this is a trend worth discussing. It tells us much about our cultural mood and reflects some new thinking about the sex industry in relation to society.

In other words, Cosmo has found a way to treat our body parts not as “rude bits” but as, well, talking points.

Tracy Quan
Tue, 20 Feb 2007, 6:36 AM