Playing the Part, Telling the Tale: Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

In her memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence (2005), the Cambodian anti-sex-trafficking activist Somaly Mam documents, with courage and clarity, her descent into and rise out of the shadowy world of prostitution and trafficking. Published nearly ten years after the creation of her grassroots NGO, AFESIP (Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire: Acting for Women in Precarious Situations), and two years before the establishment of the Somaly Mam Foundation – an international NGO launched as a funding source for AFESIP and other victim services groups – the book was designed to promote the fledgling organisation and raise awareness about the scourge of prostitution in Mam’s native country.

Mam implies early in the narrative that behind this broad goal is also a desire to tell her story and recover her past. The book quickly became an international bestseller. Mam has been feted as a spirited survivor of the sex-trafficking industry and a valiant saviour of its hapless victims. Her organisations have attracted the enthusiastic support of politicians and celebrities from around the world, and her cause has been championed for years by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who live-tweeted his participation in a 2011 brothel raid and singled out Mam as a world leader in the fight against twenty-first century slavery. It is perhaps no surprise then that the subtitle of the memoir’s English translation, for which Kristof wrote the foreword, is ‘The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine’.

The problem, according to a recent article published by Simon Marks in Newsweek, is that this true story is full of falsehoods and fabrication. In the book, which was translated from French, Mam’s third language, she describes in straightforward unadorned prose the precariousness of her circumstances and the subjugation that led to her prostitution at the age of seventeen. Orphaned as a baby, Mam lived in a small village in eastern Cambodia until the age of ten, when she was ‘adopted’ (she speculates that she was in fact sold) by a travelling merchant whom she called ‘grandfather’. Rather than raise the young girl, however, the man who became her guardian forced her to work as his domestic servant before selling her virginity, her hand in marriage and, eventually, her body to a brothel in Phnom Penh. In the brothel, she was subjected to the same violence experienced by the young girls now in her care: rape, bondage, regular beatings.

Marks, who has been investigating Mam’s possible fraudulence for the Cambodian Daily for the last few years, counters this version of events with the details he and his colleague Phorn Bopha have gathered from villagers and former acquaintances. According to these sources, which appear to have been confirmed by an independent review recently launched by the Somaly Mam Foundation, Mam in fact grew up with her parents, graduated from high school, and sat the teachers exam in 1987, around the time she claimed to have been married to a volatile soldier and to have worked as a nurse in a regional hospital.

The Newsweek article follows from several pieces published in 2012 and 2013 that raised questions about the details surrounding a well-publicised raid in 2004 (which is also discussed in the memoir), about the alleged kidnapping of Mam’s daughter by traffickers in 2006, and about the testimonies of at least two of her rescued girls. Perhaps more powerful than her own narrative, these victim stories have been regularly told at fund-raising galas and publicity events, in documentaries and on Oprah. They have also played a significant role in the triumphant success of Mam’s organisations.

One of these stories is that of Meas Ratha, who in 1998 featured in a French television documentary titled Envoyé Spécial. In this program, which brought AFESIP onto the world stage and led to Somaly Mam being awarded a Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation later that year, Ratha tells of being deceived and sold into prostitution because of her desperate poverty, and then of being beaten and raped at the hands of her captors. It is an almost universal tale of duplicity and violence, but as Ratha admitted many years later, it was not hers to tell. According to an article published by Marks and Bopha in the Cambodian Daily in October 2013, Ratha was selected from a group of young women, fed the story, and coached on its delivery.

In early April 2014, just a few weeks before her resignation from the Somaly Mam Foundation, Mam published a response to the allegations of fraud on the foundation’s website:

I wrote my book to shed light on the lives of so many thousands of other women who have shared my fate. They have no voice, so I let my voice stand for theirs.

We might concede that Mam’s personal narrative was merely a rhetorical device to voice a shared trauma and thus speak for a collective identity. This charitable interpretation would place her book alongside that of the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Ménchu, whose book I, Rigoberta Ménchu (1982) presented the collective oppression of Guatemalan indigenous groups in the form of an individual life narrative, and also became the centre of a controversy about falsehoods and fabrication.

From a literary perspective, both books square awkwardly with the rules of the genres of autobiography and memoir, as they are traditionally conceived. Mam, like Ménchu before her, has broken what Philippe Lejeune calls ‘the autobiographical contract’ on which such narratives depend: that is, the assumption that the author and the narrator can be conflated, that they present a unified self. In telling her story, and in encouraging other young women to tell theirs, Mam countered the lack of reliable statistics and the general absence of any empirical tool with which we might gauge the extent of the global sex industry. In order to generate revenue for her anti-sex-trafficking endeavours, she had to first construct evidence of its existence. She had to name it. But by breaking the autobiographical contract, Mam has fractured the image of the sex-trafficking victim. Worse, she has effectively silenced the women for whom she claims to speak.

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Within the context of what Melissa Gira Grant calls ‘the sex-slave rescue fantasy’, however, the effects of Mam’s distortions far exceed any concerns for the unreliability of her voice. For Grant, who published an opinion piece about the controversy in the New York Times on 29 May, Mam’s willingness to stage victim narratives to feed and even generate ‘Western feel-good demands for intervention’ is a commonplace, if troubling, aspect of the global rescue industry. Indeed, as Johan Lindquist has argued, the questionable tactics with which NGOs establish human rights violations as fundable markets is not a new source of concern.

As Grant outlines briefly in her New York Times article and in greater detail in her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, Mam’s (and Kristof’s) sensationalist narratives and ‘heroic’ actions have served to further alienate the women they claim are objectified by the sex trade, dehumanising these women to the extent that they deem rescue the only means of restoring their humanity. The dominant narrative of sex work, which sees it as a form of victimisation, excludes the conflicting narratives told by sex workers who claim to have suffered neither coercion nor violence. It denies the sex worker who has chosen to sell sex her own voice. It reduces her, as it did Meas Ratha and ultimately Mam herself, to a

stock character in a story they are otherwise not part of, in the pity porn which the ‘expert’ journalists, filmmakers, and NGO staff will produce, profit from, and build their power on.

This woman must play the part of the whore as she is conceived in the imaginary of those who would save her. Otherwise, she risks being dismissed.

Even more troubling in Grant’s view are the connections between the rescue fantasy, with its moralising discourse and regular presence in the media, and developments in Cambodian anti-prostitution legislation. In 2008, Cambodia responded to pressures from the American government to eliminate sex work with police crackdowns on commercial sex. The resulting brothel raids, images of which were captured by Cambodian human rights groups and the sex workers themselves, subjected the women to further violence and captivity. Women reported being beaten, removed from their places of work against their will, detained illegally in rehabilitation centres, and sexually assaulted by their supposed saviours.

These raids, Grant argues, can inflict more physical and psychological harm on sex workers than the work itself. And in eliding the question of sex work as work, they demonstrate a refusal on the part of world governments and rescue industry proponents to address the underlying social and economic problems that shape labour conditions and lead people to choose sex work over other forms of wage labour.

In Somaly Mam’s organisation, for example, the women rescued and rehabilitated learn, among other skills, to operate sewing machines with an eye to future work in the garment industry, despite the well-documented and at times violent struggles of factory workers to secure liveable wages in return for their work. Some of these women – for the vast majority of garment workers in Cambodia are women – have in fact left the factories that produce clothing for retail outlets like Gap and H&M for the relative financial security of the brothels of Phnom Penh. Denying them this agency is another form of systemic and culturally accepted violence that alienates women from their own labour and undermines their basic civil rights.

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Violence and labour are two of the overarching themes in Playing the Whore, which at just over 130 pages offers a quick but detailed study of the various modes and sites of the global sex industry. Grant is a journalist, organiser, and former sex worker. She targets the myths and fantasies surrounding commercial sex and the demand for its extermination. Her table of contents reads like a list of categories or social types – The Police, The Prostitute, The Debate, The Stigma, The Movement – the definitions of which are bound up with control and what Grant calls ‘the prostitute imaginary’. This involves

the ways in which we conceptualize and make arguments about prostitution. The prostitute imaginary compels those who seek to control, abolish, or otherwise profit from prostitution, and is also the rhetorical product of their efforts. It is driven by both fantasies and fears about sex and the value of human life.

Grant argues that sex workers are identified as such, not in an effort to police sex, but rather to control expressions of deviant gender and sexuality. Whether they are deemed criminals or victims, angels or whores, the men and women who sell sex have seen their behaviour construed as identity and their demands for legitimacy and self-representation relegated to the margins. Grant, in addressing sex work as neither behaviour nor identity, but as a valid form of work, places these demands at centre stage.

The book opens with the question of policing and its attendant forms of physical and symbolic violence. While Grant’s discussion of the visible and invisible brutality with which sex workers are treated echoes other feminist arguments about sex work, the similarities go no further. In contrast with anti-sex work feminists – Sheila Jeffreys, for example, for whom the perpetrators are pimps, clients, and misguided feminists who would use the euphemism ‘work’ to describe prostitution – Grant focuses on the violence of law enforcement, politicians, vigilante units, rescuers, and moralising feminists such as Jeffreys.

For Grant, the abolitionist image of the violent pimp or the insatiable male client pales in comparison to the pervasive and generally accepted police aggression toward those who have been identified as sex workers. She cites police stings in which sex workers are patrolled online as well as on the street, lured into a transaction, then arrested and hauled off to jail in varying stages of undress. These stings are increasingly filmed and made available online, adding the punishment of public humiliation to the punishment of arrest. She also discusses police violations of human and labour rights around the world – in the United States, Greece, and China, for example, where law enforcement agents deny sex workers protection from aggressors on the street, force them to participate in public shaming rituals, and threaten them with hostility and sexual assault. Grant asks: How much of this violence toward sex workers, which has come to be understood as justice, is acceptable?

According to the abolitionist feminists Grant targets, sex workers are abused and objectified by the industry in which they work. Grant counters that they are also degraded by the lurid imagery prevalent in anti-prostitution campaigns, by the policies and attitudes that thwart their ability to organise and self-regulate, and by the demand that they justify their labour as ‘an empowered choice’. The question of consent, she argues, is in fact a detrimental one within the field of sex work. It diminishes the workers’ agency and further delegitimises their labour. No one asks the waitress, the garment worker or the shoeshine girl to justify herself in this manner. The assumption is that the sex worker has not chosen this form of labour – could not have chosen it – whereas the waitress, the garment worker, and the shoeshine girl have.

This is the same assumption behind the rescue industry – that is, that the women in the brothels are there against their will and that they must be saved. Further, it assumes an inherent or negotiated empowerment within these other forms of labour. The bloody, and for some fatal, crackdowns that took place earlier this year when Cambodian garment workers went on strike for better wages would suggest otherwise.

Finally, as is consistent with the abolitionist stance, the endgame of the demand for justification is not the empowerment of the sex worker, since empowerment would necessarily eliminate the need for such justification. Rather, the goal is the eradication of sex work, and thus of a certain population’s livelihood. The enfranchisement of the sex worker is not dependent upon how he or she feels about his or her work conditions. As with any other form of labour, acquiring power within the labour exchange involves a sustained, united negotiation with management:

It’s as true of sex workers as it is for nurses or teachers (or journalists or academics): Dwelling on the individual capacity for empowerment does little to help uncover the systemic forces constraining workers’ power, on the job and off.

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In the end, Playing the Whore is a book is about language, and in particular the way we use it to construct sex work as a field of knowledge and limit the control sex workers have over their own lives. It is about identifying sex work, not as something driven by male desire, but by the sex worker’s needs for housing, nourishment, access to healthcare, and even holiday time. It is about demolishing the myths surrounding sex work and emptying or re-appropriating the stigmatised terms and images that sustain these myths.

The term ‘sex work’, Grant tells us, was invented in 1978 by an activist named Carol Leigh, who was intent on reasserting individual agency, not only in the exchange of sex for money, but also in the exchange of ideas concerning the nature of sex work. Using the term today is a political decision, particularly given that most sex workers do not label themselves as such in their daily work (they are more likely to be context specific in their designations: escorts, porn actors and actresses, rent-a-dreads, cam-girls, and so on). Using the term ‘sex worker’ is to insist on a self-definition based on work and not on sex. To use the term is to shift consciously away from the persistent images of prostitute-as-criminal and prostitute-as-victim; it is a refusal to play the role assigned, the bit part, and a demand for greater control of the script.

Writing the larger narrative is not to be confused with telling one’s story, however, which Grant argues has little impact on the sex worker’s well being. In fact, for Grant, the demand for the sex worker’s story is but another form of the erotic exchange:

the storytelling process is a form of striptease indistinguishable from sex work itself, a demand to create a satisfyingly revealing story, for audiences whose interest is disguised as compassion or curiosity.

It is yet another performance, one that often involves the sex worker accepting a role that is too narrow to encompass the reality of his or her experiences. Or, as we have seen in the case of Somaly Mam and her ‘victim’ Meas Ratha, it can involve playing the whore in order to satisfy the expectations of a real or imagined audience and garner support for a real or imagined problem.

This last point remains especially problematic: is the problem real or imagined? Our statistics are unreliable, but does this mean there are no women trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation? Do we put ‘victim’ in scare quotes because in fact none exists?

The burgeoning labour recruitment industry in countries like Cambodia organises the trafficking of men, women, and children for domestic service, the fishing and mining industries, and the entertainment and sex industries. While it may not seem useful to frame our discussions of the recruitment practice in terms of victims and perpetrators, these agencies have been identified by the ILO (International Labour Organisation) and LICADHO (The Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights) as practising debt bondage and illegal detention, and as perpetuating substandard working conditions and abuse. Whether the worker is a young man held on a Thai fishing boat or a young woman confined in a brothel in Phnom Penh, Manila, or New York, the same structure is at work: exploitation. And this is an exploitation that is in no way mitigated by the narrative one uses to frame it. In other words, the victims of this exploitation are victims in a structural sense, regardless of whether they – or anyone else – grants them that role in a narrative.

Grant no doubt recognises the reality of structural inequality. Her refusal of the language of victimisation is an effort to reclaim visibility for those effaced by the effects of such language in the rescue industry. Throughout Playing the Whore, she is wrestling with the relationship between discourse and political action, and she is keenly aware of both the subtleties of narrative and the limits of its construction. Grant refuses to tell her own story because, as she remarks at the end of the third chapter, ‘This is not a peep show’. She declines to participate in this particular erotic exchange, refusing to lay bare the circumstances that led to her own involvement in the sex industry and the experiences she had as a sex worker. This is a temporary measure, she notes, until the appropriate conditions will allow the telling of her story to have a constructive impact on herself and her colleagues.

It is a matter of authenticity and of the politics of representation. The stance is consistent with her criticisms of academics, journalists and NGO activists who speak on behalf of sex workers. But it also gives the reader pause, particularly in the context of the denunciations of Mam in recent weeks, including Grant’s own. Whether or not she tells her story, Grant does not entirely avoid the trap of discursive constructions that silence individual agents. Her own construction is centred on this very problem, but it nevertheless creates a discourse in which some – particularly those who would recognise their victimhood not as a subjective identity but as an objective injustice – are dismissed as the fantasies of a hysterical industry.

Moreover, given her take on the pornographic impulse behind demands for victim narratives, we might have expected Grant to argue in the New York Times that Somaly Mam’s real mistake was to tell a story in the first place, regardless of its accuracy. She might have pushed further her criticism of the exchange, and by extension of the insatiable audiences whose financial contributions seem increasingly to depend upon sordid details, like those shared in Mam’s narratives. This would have been a gesture not of support for Mam’s actions or for her cause, but of solidarity in the face of a seemingly intractable political problem. Either one’s political position with regard to sex work has to be authenticated by her life story, or it does not. And if we are going to find a meaningful way not only to debate sex work, but to recognise the rights and needs of sex workers in our global society, then this gesture of solidarity could have further helped to shift the terrain from moral denunciation to political disagreement. This was one of her book’s goals in the first place.

Part exposition and part manifesto, Playing the Whore reminds us that the way we talk about sex work is failing us. More importantly, it is failing the sex workers whose lives are directly touched by our discourses on the subject. Grant’s analyses are illuminating and would be a valuable addition to the library at the Somaly Mam Foundation, which after ‘re-branding, renaming, and re-launching’, will carry on its ‘anti-trafficking and survivor empowerment’ mission. The book does not ultimately offer a way out of the morass, though Grant notes at the end that decriminalisation is an essential first step. What it does is help us to identify the problems underlying the ‘problem’ of sex work, the problems that do not attract millions of celebrity dollars, the problems politicians fail to condemn in their speeches, the problems we are all at times complicit in perpetuating.

References

Melissa Gira Grant, ‘The Price of a Sex-Slave Rescue Fantasy,’  New York Times (29 May 2014).
Johan Lindquist, ‘Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond,’ Public Culture, 22: 2 (2010).