Would You Kill a Woman?

A Response to Tara Knight on Lesbian Sex Wars

Would you kill a woman? Would you kill a woman for money—not much money? What about from a distance? You don’t have to see her face. You just have to know what you did. Between 46%–48% of drone pilots suffered from significant psychiatric symptoms, severe enough to affect their job performance or family life. Would you kill a man, the bayonet of your M4 carbine stabbing into his stomach? Could you give it a twist? If you twist it his guts will wrap around knife like pasta around a fork. When you pull it out, they will spill out. You know because you’ve seen it before. You saw it ten minutes ago. What if he begged you not to? What if his wife was there, his children? What if someone screamed “do it” in your ear? Over 20% of combat veterans have PTSD. You know the war is bullshit. You know these people did nothing wrong. You’re invading them. If your bunk mates were next to you, if they were yelling encouragements, telling you to pull trigger of the gun you hold to the cowering child’s head, would you? What would happen if you didn’t? How alone would your once-friends make you feel? Could you stand brave against the ostracization? If you were in the army how many deaths would be on your hands? How many injuries? How many lives where you’re uncertain, where you hope they survived? Your buddies went into the building the pregnant lady had been hiding in. There’d been muffled cries. There was a muffled bang. Just one. They came out grinning. You didn’t help, but you did not stop them. You try to tell yourself that you were not standing guard for them. You pressed the launch button. Then the building collapsed. Did everyone get out? Did the old lady bother? Was anyone standing next to it? How much collateral damage can you live with?

Tara Knight recently wrote a reply to my article The Liberalism in Auto Anon’s Illiberalism called The Second Lesbian Sex War. In it she took issue with my claim that sex work was more ethnically permissible than military service. She wrote that to claim “prostitution is ‘less taxing than military service’ is the kind of glib comparison that falls apart the second you ask which women, in which countries, are doing which work, and for whom”. I would rather be paid to have sex that I did not enjoy than be paid to kill someone. In most cases I would rather be raped than kill someone. I know this because I have been raped, and I have not killed them. I have known that they would do it again. Yet I did not kill them. I think that in the heat of the moment, if this person was completely unknown to me, if it was at night and I was alone, then yes, I would use whatever force necessary to escape, and yes that might kill my attacker. But I would and have let men and cis women enter my body without my permission, but without physically fighting back. I have let out a meek “no”. But rape isn’t the question here. At least I do not think that it is. Pornography and sex work are the questions. In what follows I will be defending two claims of mine that Tara has taken issue with:

· Pornography understood in its loosest terms is not inherently debasing, however, the contemporary pornography industry is by and large exploitative and violent towards women, and;

· Sadomasochism and kink are legitimate forms of sexual activity, which, when done among consenting lesbian adults allow for creativity, exploration, potential healing, and may even allow for a more polymorphous sexuality, thus working as a bulwark against heteropatriarchy.

I’m a bad sex worker. I’ve done it for a few years now. I’ve done it when I needed money. I need money a lot. During the first months of my PhD I talked with older PhD students and post-docs. I learned that all the ones with vaginas I was befriending had done sex work. So, when my funding started going down and when inflation started rising, I started doing sex work. Primarily I made pornography. Sometimes I interacted with clients more directly, face to face. I still do, and if you’d like to help me quit, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. I want to quit. Because as Tara and I both know, sex work takes an emotional toll on you. Still, I have managed to remain someone disconnected from sex work. It is not my full-time job. I do not have the level of community involvement and connection that many of my sex worker friends do. That’s what I mean when I say I’m bad at it. I haven’t put my full pussy into it. I am actively begging you to support my writing enough to get me out of it. Because of that, I generally have avoided writing about it. However, due to Tara’s article, it would appear that I am at least somewhat obligated to make my stances a little more clear. I want to make it is clear, I increasingly respect Tara as a writer. I am very glad that her voice is emerging and maturing. I also genuinely enjoyed her response piece. But it does mean that I am being forced to talk about things in my own life (my sex work) that I generally do not like to talk about, and theory (about sex work and pornography) that I generally think better left to more established sex workers. Because of that, I am going to paywall this article. If you want to read about juicy drama between Tara and I (which is how I’m sure some of you will interpret this), or my work sexcapades, you’re going to have to pay. If you don’t want to pay, go read Thalia Vacha ⚢ or Sex Worker Writes. If you want to know more about an experience closer to mine, you can read Mistress Snow. Okay, you’ve gotten the first thousand words free. But now I want to get paid (so I can quit sex work) and you want to read about my sex work and my takes about it. So sorry, suck it up and pay. Call yourself a pay pig if it makes you feel better about it. Immediately after the paywall is a story about the first time that I sold a pair of panties. Then there’s a lot of theory.