MIND & BODY
story by Lilly Montgomery | design by Lizeth Valdes
Sex.
Just seeing that word written here might make you uncomfortable. Often constrained to talks in hushed tones or clickbait articles on the internet advertising new ways to please your husband, sex and its many facets are frequently shunned from the limelight of conversation and awareness. This unique aspect of human living has a range of definitions and classifications far broader than could ever be listed between the covers of this magazine. From gender designations to procreation, sex can mean countless things for different people—including work—and should not be something that we are afraid to talk about.
Sex Work is Work Sex work is a trade that goes shockingly far back in recorded history, and continues to develop and expand today. There are a wide variety of professions and activities that fall under the umbrella of sex work and the adult sector, from stripping to the street trade, but it is important to delineate who exactly is engaging in this labor. A written statement to the United Kingdom’s Parliament by Gaye Dalton, who used to work selling sex and now champions the rights of sex workers, outlines four main categories of individuals that engage in this work. Elective sex workers are individuals that make the choice to enter the sex trade for their own benefit. Crisis sex work is that which it is used as a shorter-term solution to help financial or other issues. Survival sex workers are the third archetype outlined by Dalton, and are individuals that enter into sex work based on survival-motivated viability. Finally there are coerced sex workers, who are entered into the business under duress from another individual. Many assumptions about people in the sex trade are made and broadcasted from all corners, often tinged with a glaring lack of information on the subject. “We’re seeing a sort of a backlash, or a resurgence of a lack of accessibility for knowledge about sex broadly,” M. Eliatamby-O’Brien, director of CWU’s women, gender and sexuality studies department and associate professor of English, says. Eliatamby-O’Brien has worked with community groups in places like Vancouver, B.C., where they have seen the impact of sex work and related legislation.
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Eliatamby-O’Brien has also taught courses discussing issues of sexuality and gender, including modern views on the adult industry. One topic that Eliatamby-O’Brien highlights is a pote-ntial reason for the resistance that many people feel to the topic of sex work. “Stigmas that relate to trans bodies being sexual, fat bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies, those obviously add to the level of what people feel in terms of both discomfort when discussing sex work, but also a desire to minimize it, control it or see it as somehow unpalatable.”
The Prevalence of Pornography The American Psychological Association defines pornography as “writings or images… with blunt, often exploitative sexual content designed solely to arouse a sexual response and to satisfy the sexual urges of the beholder.” With the proliferation of sites like Patreon and OnlyFans allowing for small-scale content to be monetised more easily, pornography and sex work can look very different than they did at their advent. “Porn tells us something about ourselves in our social world, right?” asks Griff Tester, professor in CWU’s department of sociology and an affiliate faculty member in the women, gender and sexuality studies program. Tester has taught courses in queer studies and performed graduate research that discussed the comparisons of race and gender in lesbian pornography produced by men versus that produced by women for women. “What we click on and what we buy,” Tester says, “tells us something about that, but it also reflects those inequalities and those biases and those prejudices that reflect in our society.” Tester goes on to mention one interesting facet that some modern pornography has begun to explore more often: consent discussions. Not traditionally included (and often not even taking place behind the camera) in mainstream video pornography, these interactions often include discussions of likes, dislikes and sexual limits between partners before a sexual interaction. These talks are vital to ensuring that all participants are actively engaging in and consenting to the activities in the scene. Tester says that video pornography is becoming more open to including these discussions as “part of the storyline, and what you see in the build up to other aspects of the sexual scene.” Eliatamby-O’Brien adds that these inclusions of consent discussions and normal mishaps “disabuse people of the notion that everything always has to be one type of sexy.” Showing sex in media with this authentic of a context is something that is relatively new to produced pornogra-