Sex work is work.
It’s an idea that needs reinforcing in the wake of Sarah Jones’ recent performance of her one-woman show Sell/Buy/Date. Directed by Carolyn Cantor, the play was performed at USC’s Bing Theater on October 26.
Best known for her Tony award-winning show Bridge & Tunnel, the famed playwright’s newest show is a 90-minute exploration of sex work extrapolated into the 21st century. The show theorizes the fate of sex workers in a world restructured around the commercialization and commodification of “sex on demand.”
Playing more than a dozen characters, Jones sets the play in the far future, framing the show as a lecture on social history from the perspective of British professor Dr. Serene Campbell. Looking back on the past (our present and future), Campbell teaches her students about the evolution of the sex industry through the 21st century using “BERT” (Bio-Empathetic Resonant Technology) a future gadget that allows them to feel the stories of the interview subjects first hand.
The show is engaging, laugh-out-loud funny and has a distinctly feminist point of view. But it’s the politics of Jones’ various characters that become a point of contention.
There has always been debate within the feminist movement about if, where and how sex work fits within the contemporary politic. The so-called “sex wars” of the late 1970s and 1980s entrenched “pro-sex” and “anti-sex” factions that live on to this day. One side felt that there could be no pleasure in colluding in our own objectification, and the other felt the pursuit of feminine pleasure was a high ideal that should be nurtured and cultivated.
But all agreed that women live in a patriarchal society that oppresses them, commodifies them and serves them up for male consumption. It’s in this shared space that Sell/Buy/Date attempts to position itself. But Jones makes the critical mistake of conflating sex work with sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of minors — incendiary topics that flatten the discussion by elevating the extreme to sensationalize the mundane.
As her many characters occupy different relationships to the sex industry, their perspectives necessarily differ. But it’s the presentation of these perspectives and characters that belie Jones’ fundamentally conservative approach to sex, the body and the patriarchal bargain.
The contrast between two characters in particular, lays this bare: one is a “sex work studies” major who dithers over selfies before settling down to the interview. The other is a Dominican-Puerto Rican activist who is aflame with righteous anger.
The first, Bella, articulates her politics clearly. She believes in empowering sex workers to maintain agency over their lives by constructing the necessary social and political safeguards to ensure they are protected from the biases that make their work dangerous. To her, sex workers are laborers like any other, and they deserve the same workplace protections enjoyed by everyone else.
The second, Nereida, insists that sex workers can never be empowered. To her the work they do isn’t sex, presumably because of some romantic ideal of lthe sanctity of love and intimacy. She goes on to say that agency is for the individual and empowerment is for the collective, and that one woman’s choices don’t move the needle for women everywhere. On that single point I agree. But through Jones, she reinforces the idea that sex work and sex trafficking are one in the same. She declares that she won’t call sex workers victims if they don’t like it, but she will call them “veterans in the war against women” because they are fighting to be seen as people under the patriarchy. It is presumptive and condescending.
From the audience, Bella got peals of laughter. Nereida, applause.
What frustrated me about the distinction Jones drew between these characters is that she negated the substance of their critiques through the presentation of their ideas. Bella is presented as an unserious dilettante whose ideas should be dismissed because she believes pole dancing can give women confidence. Nereida is positioned as an authority on the dangers of sex work because she is passionate and claims to have women’s best interests at heart. But which of them is truly working in the best interest of women: the student who listens to sex workers and tries to accommodate their stated needs? Or the activist who defiantly dictates to them how they should live their lives?
Nereida claims that legalization won’t automatically shift the power dynamic in favor of sex workers. She laments that a legal mandate won’t make clients any more inclined to heed their requests or boundaries. She is right. But what she (and Jones) conveniently neglects to mention is that legalization (or decriminalization; consensus is out on which best serves sex workers) would allow them access to legal resources to hear their grievances. Sure, they can’t make a client attend to their hygiene, or be gentler with their bodies, but they should be able to. And legal protections would mean they can refuse to see uncooperative clients, secure in the knowledge that finding others won’t be as risky, or that if violence should follow their request, they might find justice.
She also forgets that we live in times of incredible technology. Sex workers are able to harness the internet to make their work safer. They can engage with clients in ways that allow them to maintain control over how and when they open themselves up to risk. Sex work exists on a continuum from stripping to camming to full service girlfriend experiences. To collapse a rich economy down to archaic ideas of wanton women baring their ankles in the street is to intentionally ignore the world we live in in order to build the one you want.
Sex workers may not currently hold much social power, but that is largely because of the stigma that surrounds them. Sex work is still seen as something participants need to be saved from, and even then they remain tainted by the necessary facts of their past. But what Nereida and Jones in turn forget is that sex workers begin that work precisely because they cannot find it elsewhere. For marginalized women, in particular those who are black, brown, trans or low-income, their bodies are the only commodity they can continue to control. Regardless of what harm may befall them, they will always have their body to sell, even as they are refused the opportunity to sell labor of other kinds.
By asserting that all sex work is oppression and that it must be eradicated, Jones is forgetting the millions of people for whom survival sex work means… well, survival. When people are not invited to participate in mainstream economies, they create them in the margins of society out of necessity. One can freely argue that these are not choices that are being made with enthusiasm, but they are being made with a clear understanding of how their social position and economic realities intersect to produce limited options. Denigrating and condescending to people who are simply trying to get by simply reinforces the negative repercussions of existing social stratifications . Especially when the conditions that would allow them to work in other areas would require a complete cultural and sociopolitical overhaul. That is too much for one woman to bear. Especially before primary needs like food and shelter can be met.
The only character in the show who meaningfully distinguishes between sex work and sexual exploitation is a frat boy type being interviewed in the parking lot of a strip club at his bachelor party. He correctly notes that they’re not the same, but goes on to reify the Madonna/Whore complex of yore, negating the premise of his earlier assertion. Jones does this again and again, making her political positions clearer and more disappointing as the show continues.
In other sequences in which Dr. Campbell fills in the blanks about the future we might see, she talks about how the ready availability of commercial sex obliterates men’s sexual function in the “Dirty Thirties,” leading to the “Male Health Crisis” of the 2040s. One male character, a retired police officer, talks about how he stopped purchasing sex after his ex-wife allowed their 14-year-old to have a stripper themed party. It’s a ludicrous creative choice meant only for shock value. It does not follow that the rise of commercial sex would lead either to a lowering of the age of consent or to a relitigation of social ideas about the appropriateness of children’s proximity to sexual content. But the upsetting prospect of a teen stripper, even in jest (an idea that merely plays on decidedly contemporary ideas of preserving the virtue of young women) makes the idea of disagreement untenable. Of course we have to outlaw sex work! Do you want your teenager to become as stripper? Never mind the skill and strength involved in doing that work well; those abilities do not port over into the realm of respectability.
Jones is an artist with an agenda and a specific point of view, and it makes her work engaging because her passion is clear. But Sell/Buy/Date is a perfect example of the ways in which feminist praxis can be weaponized against women who do not have the luxury of making more palatable choices. Jones attempts to explore the ways in which women of this era are served up for male consumption and how we navigate our own set of severely limited choices as we search for true cultural, spiritual and bodily autonomy, but she never manages to find a way to truly bring all women along.
This performance was part of USC’s “Visions and Voices” series, an “arts and humanities initiative” aimed at providing a “transformative and provocative experience for USC students” that “challenges them to expand their perspectives and become engaged citizens.