<- - - inside whorenet - - -> A mailing list gives sex workers and their allies an online space to call home -- and a place to squabble. + ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ BY TRACY QUAN The other day, I found myself dishing about Whorenet, a mailing list I have come to think of as my home. I was talking to a friend who is one of the list's first "dropouts." How and when, I wondered, did Whorenet become my "dysfunctional online family"? During the first three months, when we were a tiny but growing cc: list? Perhaps, he agreed, all our problems could be traced back to our origins. Last year, I disappeared from the list for a few months and, when I resubscribed, one member posted a message that said, in part: "Welcome home, Tracy." At first, I cringed -- public displays of affection embarrass me. But I'm not alone in feeling very much at home on Whorenet. A private mailing list with about 74 subscribers, Whorenet was created in 1996 as a way for prostitutes, pro-sex feminists, activist johns, academics and others to talk about the rights and concerns of sex workers. (You can't join the list unless an existing member recommends you, and there's no commercial activity allowed.) Everybody on Whorenet agrees that sex work should be treated as a job or a business, rather than a crime. Beyond that, there are no guarantees of harmony. A news item about street arrests on Chicago's Northside can spark a disagreement about whether newspapers should publish the names and addresses of those arrested for selling sex. A wordy report on impending changes in South Africa's prostitution laws is followed by an even wordier post from Xaviera Hollander (known to many as the "Happy Hooker"): Her dog is dying. (Some empathize; others -- dogfree -- roll their eyes.) We reminisce, rate the hookers we see in Hollywood movies, criticize the latest academic "findings" on prostitution, plan conferences and squabble about what happened afterward. Americans -- we're in the majority -- are frequently criticized by subscribers from overseas. Sometimes, the most contentious threads are about who should be on our list. Factions have developed -- and I belong to more than one. But when I was invited by a friend to discuss prostitution on another list, I remembered why we had invented Whorenet in the first place. Venturing outside of my esoteric online community, I discovered anew that sex for money makes other people uncomfortable -- yes, even on the supposedly libertarian Internet. I am not the first Whorenet member to experience this. Last year, Catherine La Croix of COYOTE/Seattle, a sex-workers' organization, began subscribing to FEMISA, "a very granola feminist list," as she puts it. "When I and two or three other sex workers proudly introduced ourselves, we were immediately flamed," she reports. "The general consensus was that a whore had no right to be proud of anything, and that none of the COYOTE representatives were actually whores but rather shills for the sex industry. When we attempted to respond, the list managers prevented our responses from being distributed." Julian was hustling his way through a masters program at the University of British Columbia and posting "on one of the gay Usenet newsgroups, where someone referred to 'a hustler whose soul was being visibly drained.'" He took exception: "How could they possibly know what was going through his head? I pointed out that I myself had often gone to lengths to look sad and lonely, since a cocky attitude often turns johns off. When I tried to discuss prostitution in soc.feminism and alt.feminism, one list rejected every post I sent -- presumably because I'm a man, and can't possibly have a valid opinion about prostitution. On the other list, I got into long-winded debates with some woman in Ottawa who thought I didn't know what I was doing to myself. I don't recall seeing any other sex workers posting in either of the feminism newsgroups." At the other extreme, he found alt.sex.prostitution, where most participants were "typing with one hand" and there was "virtually no opportunity for meaningful dialogue." A recurring discussion -- one that professional sex workers simply find tiresome -- was hetero johns "trying to convince themselves that wearing a condom was unnecessary." Real discussions, on alt.sex.prostitution are often drowned out by a flood of phone-sex ads. On M-FEM, the Marxist-Feminist list I temporarily joined, one participant described her visit to a peep show: "I went with a group of 'Women Against Pornography,'" she explained, recalling "a glassed-in arena with several girls marching about masturbating at viewers in sunken pits ..." She was clearly appalled -- "If this is the best option those girls had, then their options are pretty poor," she opined -- and she assumed they were as traumatized by it all as she was. I was taken aback -- and had to remind myself that her attitude, not mine, was probably the norm among the general public. It's different on Whorenet. There, a discussion thread on peep shows would consist of civic-minded posts about the union-membership drive at San Francisco's Lusty Lady. Masturbation on the job is a topic we can warm to without fear of being judged. One professional submissive and peep-show girl posted, from her home in the Midwest, "You mean I'm getting *paid* for this?! :-)" An ex-hooker admitted that she had never masturbated on the job: "I'd have been far too self-conscious," she explained. And one member claimed that she "would not make any noise" if she came -- a customer might discover that some of her "um, orgasms" don't live up to the real ones. But don't assume that Whorenet is a community free of taboos: Ours aren't sexual, they're political. While anything goes in discussions of sex, there are times when we choose our words carefully. In April, when the Lusty Lady peep show went union, some right-wing Whorenetters -- independent prostitutes, for the most part -- raised their anti-collectivist eyebrows in private e-mail. But on the list itself, unionization at the Lusty Lady was treated as a victory, and those who could not say something comradely were tactful enough to say nothing at all. The sex workers' movement leans further to the left than you might expect. Many of its call girls are lingerie liberals of the "horizontal class" who have it easy, but they hope to make things better for those who don't. In this movement, "inclusiveness" -- a buzz-word on Whorenet -- takes on unexpected meanings. On Whorenet, an invisible caste system seems to have evolved -- with sex workers sitting at the top and johns at the very bottom. Advocates and foes of the Net have characterized the online world as a borderless free-for-all, but there is a strong urge to create and maintain order on Whorenet. The world we have invented has its own closely guarded borders -- and its own social laws. Outside of Whorenet, many of us conceal the fact that we are, or ever were, prostitutes -- from employers or co-workers (in a "straight job"); from parents, children, lovers and relatives; and, more significantly, from governmental powers-that-be. For some, this is pragmatism; for others, secrecy is a cause of isolation or frustration. But something that might be a mark of shame in other settings becomes a trump card on Whorenet (and in prostitutes' organizations generally). A prostitutes' rights activist can score points by hinting that an opponent "has never really been a hooker." A former ally can be discredited if you can persuade others that her checkered past is just a sleazy fabrication. Actually, Whorenet is (and always has been) two lists, though the distinctions between them remain somewhat fuzzy to many members: Whorenet-1, with fewer than 40 members, is more exclusive, and Whorenet-2 is where most discussions and news items appear. In March, when many Whorenetters attended the International Conference on Prostitution in Los Angeles, both lists attracted new members. Some requested a place at Whorenet-1's table, mistakenly believing it to be a "sex workers only" alternative to Whorenet-2, where professors, lawyers, writers, feminists and social workers were either posting or lurking. "Can somebody please tell me if there is any sex worker only space on Whorenet?" Jenni, an Australian, bluntly posted. "It seems that Whorenet-1 is touted as being for sex workers, but obviously this is not the case." New members from Australia and the U.K. wanted to know who the non-sex workers on Whorenet-1 were -- and what made this list special or different from the larger one? In fact, all the "Whorenet-1 exceptions" (as they came to be called) were women, and they were political allies of American activists with strong connections to various chapters of COYOTE. Post after post expressed the need for a "sex worker only space" -- which was hardly surprising to me. Prostitutes of New York, a group I belong to, has long had a policy of hosting meetings for current or retired sex workers only. Why couldn't the prostitutes' movement -- after 25 years of activism -- provide sex workers with an online, ongoing, international version of a PONY meeting? Was a mailing list, by nature, different from a meeting? Should feminists who support prostitutes' rights be removed from a list that they had been part of from the beginning? The whores on Whorenet began splitting into factions. Wendy McElroy, a feminist writer, responded to the controversy by posting a "goodbye" letter, explaining that Whorenet-2 had been established as a forum in which sex workers were the equals of non-sex workers. "But I now find it described as a place where I am a 'guest' of sex workers rather than an equal member," she wrote. "As a result, I have ceased posting." In another post, McElroy explained that she had been on Whorenet "when it was nothing more than a cc: list." A surprising -- and poignant -- aspect of Wendy's goodbye was her plea for tolerance. She protested that she was an "individual, not some card-carrying rep of a class category known as 'non-sex worker.'" A Bay Area prostitute posted a compassionate comment, blaming the conflict on the rise of "identity politics"; almost immediately, an Australian sent off private e-mail passionately defending "identity politics." I began receiving message from prostitutes openly opposed to a "sex-worker only" space and from the "troublesome" new members who were giving us all a run for our money. McElroy's protest, however, was based on the assumption that non-sex workers were under attack. "How different am I from you? Is it the money exchange?" she asked. What, she wanted to know, would it take to be seen as "one of you?" What she overlooked, because she wasn't "one of us," was that this was a conflict between sex workers, sparked by regional -- not sexual -- identity. Feminists like Wendy McElroy might think they were allied with the sex workers' movement, but many in the international movement had never heard of her or any of the other "Whorenet-1 exceptions." All politics really is local -- even online, apparently -- and if these names didn't mean anything to activists outside of the U.S., didn't this make Whorenet-1 an imperialistic online "club" for the American activists? In the U.S., where connections with feminists are still highly valued and sought after, Wendy had an alliance with COYOTE and, consequently, with Whorenet-1. This wasn't important to some Australians, who saw this as a symptom of our political backwardness. In Australia, a prostitute can parlay her activism into a government job without ever hiding or condemning her "scarlet past." Among English-speaking activists, Australians, not Americans, are in the vanguard -- they're not afraid of stepping on toes. Whorenet turns out to reflect the global power (and size) of Yankee culture, yet it's out of step with the global prostitutes' movement. To some extent, Whorenet is an online fantasy world dominated by American problems, concerns and ways of relating. While debate continues on Whorenet about how the two lists should be defined, I continue to think of our intentional community as one governed by, well, aTARTheid. And, if tarts are at the top of the Whorenet pecking order, this online skirmish taught us that pro-sex feminists like Wendy occupy the unstable middle, where nothing is ever secure. While they might be admitted to Whorenet-1 (where sex workers are always welcome), their presence can be challenged. Activist johns, however, can be sure of their current "status." In a provocative post, Vic St. Blaise, a prostitute and member of the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, pointed out that "there are no johns (that I know of) on Whorenet-1 while there are some non-workers." He went on to ask: "Is it because we all believe johns come from some inferior subset of humans ...?" Could it have anything to do with the fact that most Whorenet members are female -- and unable to identify with johns who are, almost always, male? All the males on Whorenet-1 have been members of the "sex worker caste" -- and johns are thought to "belong" on Whorenet-2. Whorenet is no longer a friendly little cc: list. But, if Whorenet reflects the best and worst aspects of the prostitutes' rights movement, what does that say about us? Are we a tribe of hopelessly balkanized bimbos, soon to become politically extinct, or part of a social movement that is finally coming of age? Factionalism and infighting might be a sign of extremely rude health. As one list member, Dolores French, is fond of telling me: "I can remember when there weren't enough of us to have an argument." Aug. 14, 1997 Tracy Quan is a contributor to the anthology "Whores and Other Feminists" (Routledge). Her last piece for 21st was about the Turing Test and conversations with bots. ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL ELROD