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The topic of abortion divides the American mind. For while the electorate has consistently rejected an unending series of fetal personhood ballot init

The topic of abortion divides the American mind. For while the electorate has consistently rejected an unending series of fetal personhood ballot initiatives, polls still show a significant portion of citizens imagine abortion to be immoral. This division, not between American minds, but within the American mind, is the topic and the target of Katha Pollitt’s Pro.

In the United States more than a million abortions a year are performed. One in three american women will have had an abortion before they reach menopause, and a majority of those women will already be mothers. Of the non-mothers who have an abortion, a majority of those will go on to have a child—presumably when their life circumstances can better accommodate the task of child-rearing. These facts are important because they correct the simplifying slander perpetrated by anti-choicers about women who've chosen to have abortions. They are not helpless uninformed girls or women seeking a consequence-free life--they're everybody

And that means that everybody knows several somebodies who have made the choice to have an abortion, although they may not know that they know them. Abortions are “this common secret” (to cite the title of gynecologist Dr. Susan Wicklund’s insightful memoir). This secrecy is produced in large part by a big rhetorical shame machine run by zealots. Those pictures of snipped up babies (which are almost invariably images of nonviable fetuses) take a toll on the psyche and divide the mind. All too often one makes the all too easy conclusion that abortions are immoral—without thinking all the way through the consequences of that designation.

Pollitt zeros in on how much of the success of abortion access opponents has its source in the way they can exploit the equivocation around the term “immoral.” Is terminating a pregnancy, she asks, “immoral as in, I want to berate you for getting into this mess and then I’ll drive you to the clinic? Or immoral as in, Now that you’re in this mess, you have to have that baby?” Legislators are able to govern as if it were the latter, when the vast majority of Americans (even Catholics, polls show) really believe something more like the former.

Even for hardcore abortion opponents the opposition all too often comes from an idealized vision of sexual morality that one would like to extend to others, but that disappears when it comes into conflict with the difficulties of lived experience within one’s immediate circle. Like Rob Portman, the family values Senator who had “a change of heart” about marriage equality when his son revealed he was gay, when a conception indicator turns positive the “it’s immoral” position tends to melt into the “it’s complicated” position.

Abortion's opponents prey upon that gap between the rigidity of American ideals and the compassion and practical sense with which Americans tend to lead their lives. And that is why, despite the failure of personhood amendments, state legislatures have been able to end run the will of the people and close down a ton of clinics by enacting a series of senseless bureaucratic jumping hoops making it prohibitively expensive to run a clinic and more and more and more vexing to be a patient.

While zealots attack abortion access directly, it’s Pollitt’s analysis that liberal politicians who don’t want to run afoul of the “it’s immoral” equivocation concede too much. For example in their stump speeches Bill and Hillary Clinton have for decades used the line “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” In this way they stand for the autonomy of women while conceding significant ground to the idealizing sensibility of abortion’s absolutist opponents.

What is to be done? Pollitt would like to see the concessions cease, and the good sense of the choice to have an abortion when in tangled circumstances recognized and affirmed. “I want us to start thinking of abortion as a positive social good and saying this out loud.”

Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed. Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it’s good for everyone if women have only the children they want and can raise well.

One of the virtues of this book that I haven’t touched on in this review is the way in which the parallel issues of birth control, gender roles, and sexual decision-making are taken up as part of her larger argument. I also think she does a good job of characterizing and not caricaturing her opponents’ views, and providing historical knowledge that contextualizes the current debate.

There is a perception that since Roe v. Wade the abortion question has been settled in the U.S., and therefore abortion politics is for hotheads. But it continues as a vital debate of enormous consequence. It would only take a couple of untimely deaths of Supreme Court justices during the wrong administration and an existing constitutional right held as precious by tens of millions could disappear at the stroke of a pen. A tiny fraction of Americans want this desperately, while the majority of Americans, protected by Roe, have never had to do the work to own what polls and behaviours and unguarded conversations indicate they really do think. Anyone with any ambition to participate in national life as it relates to the humane quest for intimacy and pleasure, as well as autonomy and bodily sovereignty, will benefit from an encounter with Katha Pollitt’s arguments and meditations.

Review written in 2015, minor revisions done on 5/3/22

I found Playing the Whore to be a fresh, innovative, and strongly voiced reflection on sex worker politics. So I was a little thrown off when I turned

I found Playing the Whore to be a fresh, innovative, and strongly voiced reflection on sex worker politics. So I was a little thrown off when I turned to the reviews—as well as the comments on various blogs, Goodreads, and Amazon—to find how many readers found the book to be tired, wandering, and ranting. Perhaps my bias in favor of desacralizing sex made me completely forgiving of some issues of tone that I didn’t not notice, and completely sympathetic to the book’s central notion that sex work is work and should be afforded the protections of work.

In this review I want to voice my reaction to Playing the Whore and its disappointed readers in two ways. In the first part I’ll suggest the kind of book this book is not. Perhaps this may be helpful to the many readers who found it a frustrating read, but who also mentioned that they had caught glimpses of its intelligence and power. Perhaps an explicit consideration of how this argument does not proceed will help such readers recognize and bracket expectations they may have imposed upon it. Maybe, then, it can be given another shot on its own terms. In the second part I’ll restate Grant’s central arguments and add commentary about why I find them to be so persuasive. My audience for this effort is, again, those of her intrigued readers who had a decisively mixed reaction to her arguments as arguments.

One of the ways a reader and a book can miss each other is when the reader is looking for the book to do stuff the book itself has no interest in doing. So here are some observations about what the book is not attempting.

This is not an outreach book.

Playing the Whore does not seek to persuade those who think that sex work isn’t work by confronting the reasons that they might think that in a staged pro-con debate. Such a book would be an interesting act of citizenship and I wish someone would write it, but that’s not what’s happening here. Instead this author seeks to be persuasive by citing ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists who’ve studied the views of sex workers by talking to them to establish the proposition that for the vast majority of those who do it, sex work feels like the other kinds of work that they have also done. She will then go on to argue that to grant sex workers the dignity of their own understanding of their own motivations would radically change the conversation around sex work.

This is not a book on Sex Worker Feminism 101, nor a manifesto.

A representative Goodreads comment complains, “The illustrations and polemics (one might say rants) collected here demonstrate that the prevailing logic about sex work is inadequate, but the book fails to cohere into a helpful alternative way to think about sex work.” I would agree with this reader that there is more critique here than affirmative program, but I would also say that demonstrating the inadequacy of the prevailing logic of a very deeply held set of cultural beliefs is kind of a lot. I appreciate the hunger to be taught more of the background of the arguments used so that their coherence and implication might have the look and feel of a more executive view, but would also point out that the book’s humility strikes me as one of its virtues. Grant knows what she knows deftly, even tenaciously, but it was my impression that she wanted to admit an element of uncertainty about how to go forward. Her plea isn’t for this or that unified policy, but the more democratic call that sex workers be included in policy discussions so as to become less its object and more its subject.

The What-Is-To-Be-Done question remains for each sympathetic reader within the confines of his or her activist circumstances, but the preference for decriminalizing or legalizing sex work perhaps along the lines of the New Zeeland model, revoking the policy of making U.S. foreign aid contingent on the distressed government signing an anti-prostitution pledge, asking law enforcement to work with a much more informed and nuanced distinction between prostitution and trafficking, as well as support for the positions with respect to prostitution articulated by The World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International as well as SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Program) seem pretty programmatically clear-cut.

This is not a memoir.

Although Grant lets it be known that she has done sex work and so considers herself to be speaking as one of the “them” against whom so much public scorn and police resources have been directed, her arguments do not draw upon her particular experience in this labor market. She explains why: “So often in telling sex work stories, 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.” In a word, she has learned it’s not safe for a sex worker to tell her story. It seems that given the surrounding culture they can only be read, and so can only be written, as a story of degradation or empowerment. If this seems like an extreme generalization, try to find an existing narrative about doing sex work that can’t be reduced to the proposition that the work is dehumanizing or (less often but at least as suspect) liberating.

But while this is not a memoir, I think it is fair to call it a work of intellectual biography—a reckoning and coming to terms with the sources that have produced her mind. Grant has long been reflecting on the way in which the figure of the prostitute has appeared in media and been used by those whose sense of their own respectability dictates a condemnatory stance. She’s invested a good part of her life reading and thinking and writing about labor, sex, activism, and politics, and sussing out the forces that resist seeing the commonality between sex work and other kinds of intimate service. She’s also interviewed and worked with and been an activist alongside of those seeking to have the needs and concerns of sex workers included in policy debates about prostitution and trafficking. She’s also apparently spent a good amount of time in the COYOTE and the Center for Sex and Culture archives steeping herself in the history of sex worker advocacy and its complicated and ever-changing relation to other feminisms.

So her influences are myriad and her absorption of them strike me as mighty and not impersonal, and yet I suspect it’s this virtue that causes spot problems with the book’s tone. Here and there you’re not sure who she’s talking to, or you realize that she’s talking to fellow sex workers now when just a paragraph ago she was talking to a general leftish wonkish reader or those who hew to a particular line of academic analysis which is not itself fully cited. I say this in an effort to acknowledge the perceptions of readers who did not feel the book was for them, but I also say it to insist the book is or can be for any reader ambitious to come under the influence of a deeply sourced work that breaks new ground.

Having discussed what the book is not, I’ll now sketch and comment on what I see as its three most innovative and well-made arguments.

Argument One: If the arc of history is to bend toward justice the set of automatic, default assumptions about women who sell sex must change.

Playing the Whore takes a long and large view by taking note of how the figure of the woman who sells sex has evolved. In Grant’s words, “Commercial sex—as a practice and an industry—as well as the class of people within it are continuously being reinvented.” She goes on to describe how the pre-modern figure of the whore was used to designate any woman who, for whatever reason, had sex outside marriage.

Argument Two: Sex work is work.

This is the book’s main argument, and I wish she had been just a little less subtle and a bit more direct in dealing with her main non-argumentative opponent: the yuck factor. Because people who don’t think sex work is work don’t think that because when they imagine themselves doing it what comes to them, to use a crucial phrase quoted earlier, is “a fantasy of absolute degradation.” If you opine that the laws against soliciting and prostitution are absurd such people will taunt you with, “Would you want your daughter doing sex work?” as if the only thing standing between doing sex work and not are harsh laws against it. If my worst nightmare is entering relations with a stranger for any reason whatsoever except experimental or marital intimacy, to say that an exchange of money can make a sex act into an act of labor is going to make as much sense to me as to call acting in a snuff film acting.

What Grant might say if she were to speak directly to those fighting to be rational against their own yuck factor is: “It’s not about you.” Or even, “It’s only about you if you make it about you—and before you do that you might want to talk to the folks having sex for money to see if maybe different folks have different yuck thresholds, perhaps related to being in different economic circumstances.” She then goes on to explain that the work of sex work doesn’t take place at the moment of penetrative horror as it’s imagined by a non-sex worker. It is, rather, the more prosaic pretending of a certain kind of mutuality.

Acting as if we share our customers’ desires is the work of sex work. But that’s not the same as allowing our customers to define our sexuality….Sex work is not simply sex; it is a performance, it is playing a role, demonstrating a skill, developing empathy within a set of professional boundaries. All this could be more easily recognized and respected as labor were it the labor of a nurse, a therapist, or a nanny. To insist that sex work is work is also to affirm there is a difference between a sexualized form of labor and sexuality itself.

Let’s be clear: Nobody is trying to wish the yuck factor away. What is being called for, instead, is the common sense recognition that all labor is more or less alienating. A therapist doesn’t listen to you because he cares what you think, not the way a friend might care. A nanny doesn’t change a kid’s diapers because she shares a natural bond with him. A nurse doesn’t debride an old man’s bedsores because she’s only all about healing. Money creates these relationships. And moreover, people are often grossed out at work. In fact, learning not to be grossed out is a big part of the early learning curve of many professions. The more one thinks about the all too arbitrary and personal and distributed nature of the yuck factor, the less sense it makes to make policy in its name.

Argument Three: Sex work is work, but it’s not yet “a job like any other.”

A law against theft endangers me only at the moment that I steal, but the criminalization of sex work leads to the police going on the Internet to pose as customers so as to entrap sex workers (and in some jurisdictions their prospective clients). It would be as if they set valuable apparently unsecured items in front of me hoping I would take them so that they could swoop down on me and read me my rights. And what sex workers are arrested for is very rarely having sex, but for agreeing to have sex. “Prostitution is,” Grant observes, “much of the time, a talking crime.” It’s also a crime that rarely goes to trial because the point of these arrests is harassment—cuffing, humiliation, publication, making the work more dangerous and unpleasant. In the age of the Internet when the street scene has largely disappeared, the point of stings is in no non-tortured sense the protection of the law-abiding from the law-breaking. This climate of illegality leads to a big package deal of distorted thinking.

"Crimininalization” isn’t just a law on the books but a state of being and moving in the world, of forming relationships—of having them predetermined for you. This is why we demonize the customer’s perspective on the sex worker as one of absolute control, why we situate the real violence sex workers can face as the individual [violent] man’s responsibility, and why we imagine that all sex workers must be powerless to say no.

From the viewpoint of most sex workers, Grant again cites the appropriate studies, what makes sex work unsafe isn’t as much customers as it is the police. This happens in two ways. First, they create the vulnerability of sex workers to criminally inclined clients by necessitating all-too-private encounters. Second, when a work-related crime is committed against a sex worker she becomes vulnerable to marking herself as a criminal by reporting it.

The walls of marijuana prohibition are being torn down, and big city American mayors and Latin American presidents are talking about “harm reduction” and “despenilizado” as preferred strategies to a war on harder drugs. Other once taboo behaviors are also being reconsidered. New Jersey is trying to get the federal ban on sports betting lifted, and the state of Delaware is selling its citizens parlay cards. The Supreme Court has determined that States can not outlaw acts of sodomy, and pretty near everybody probably knows some sodomites and thinks that they’re nice people. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that the U.S. incarcerates a far greater percentage of its citizens than any other country is starting to be felt as shameful even by those law-and-order types who take specific pride in the fact that their daughters are not whores.

These things are happening because libertarian talking points are being explored, expounded, and modified by liberal politicians and left-leaning intellectuals. Melisa Gira Grant is a journalistic leader in this movement, and I think her eloquent voicing of this newly synthesized point of view as it pertains to sex work is important because I think politics are important. This is a book that at times preaches to the choir, but in a new idiom of representivity and solidarity. Does one dare to hope that a rare moment is upon us when the message might find it's way to the world at large? In the near future might a new liberal sensibility on these matters make common cause with the non-theocratic sectors of the small government parties so that they might go forth together to change the law?

After the session ended, I turned off the tape recorder. I had a brief fantasy of erasing the tape, because I didn’t sound like any of the neutral-toned psychoanalytic therapists in the case studies my supervisor had been giving me to read. My fantasies of erasing the tape, or even just misplacing it, were quickly supplanted by a sinking feeling of dread over sharing it with my supervisor.

I argued with my supervisor about this for weeks. She was interested in my idea about symbolized enactments, but still felt that my client was setting herself up to traumatize herself or someone else. Eventually she told me that I had to confront my client, to caution her against enacting her fantasies and urge her to explore them only verbally.

Even after you have learned all of the skills set forth in this book, at some point in time it will probably occur to you that your trading is simply a feedback mechanism to tell you how much you like yourself in any given moment. After you have learned to trust yourself to always act in your best interests the only thing that will hold you back is your degree of self-valuation. That is, you will give yourself an amount of money that directly correspond with what you believe you deserve based on some value system you acquired at some point in your life. The more positive you feel about yourself, the more abundance that will naturally flow your way as a by-product of these positive feelings. So, in essence, to give yourself more money as a trader you need to identify, change or decharge anything in your mental environment that doesn't contribute to the highest degree of self-valuation that is possible.

In society [i.e. "a structured environment"] we can get by and even be successful with a facade of confidence because people will generally support each other's illusions about themselves. The market, however, has no vested interest in supporting anyone's illusions about himself. If a trader is feeling fearful he can try to cover it up all he wants but his trading results will readily reflect his true feelings.

Commitment to hard work and self-improvement may seem to be an obvious point; however, in reality I believe it's the essential point.

I am a firm believer in the power of positive thinking.

What works? Hark work works! That's it! Work. Work. Work. You know, in anything, to get it without working is not satisfying for the most part, and if you don't work hard, more than likely it won't work.