Guest Post: Rewriting the Whorearchy with Stephanie Parent

I’m thrilled to present a guest post from my friend Stephanie Parent – a fantastic writer, poet, and author of the novel THE BRIARS (which I cannot recommend enough). Today, she’s discussing the “whorearchy,” its intersections with whorephobia and shame, and her personal experience working in a commercial dungeon in Los Angeles. Enjoy!

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“I think that new girl is, like, an escort.” My coworker Lynn spat out her last word, as if it left a bad taste in her mouth, before continuing: “I’m not comfortable working with her.”

Having just finished our shift, Lynn and I were walking down a palm-shaded street in Los Angeles, chatting about a topic too delicate to discuss within our workplace—a rarity considering we were both professional switches at a commercial dungeon. In rooms appointed with bondage beds and St. Andrew’s crosses, we spent our days tying up, spanking and flogging clients, or allowing them to do the same to us. Yet escort was, for many of us working at the dungeon, a dirty word.

Lynn and I had become friends because of our shared workspace, a place that naturally encouraged close bonds between those of us within the dungeon walls. Though our job was technically legal, as we did not provide explicit sexual services for our clients, we were still sex workers. What we did was considered taboo by most of society. We all had to hide our jobs from someone, be it friends, family, or employers in other workplaces. And even when we could discuss our profession, outsiders could never completely understand what it was like to spank a full-grown, naked man over your knee, or to be tied up and spanked yourself by strangers on a regular basis.

And so, for us submissives, switches and dominatrixes, connecting with coworkers became both a welcome relief, and a necessity—one that led to friendships lasting far beyond the workplace.

Sex work brought me and coworkers like Lynn together, and yet for many of us working in the mid to late 2010s, we created a clear distinction between the type of work we did at the dungeon, and full-service sex work. We joked about how disgusting it would be to perform sexual acts with clients; we gossiped about any coworkers rumored to offer “extras.” As for dungeon employees who were also full-service sex workers—that was, as Lynn’s scandalized whisper demonstrated, a topic too distressing to broach at our workplace itself.

Lynn was one of my best friends, and I couldn’t admit to her that if our new coworker truly was an escort, I was more fascinated than I was repulsed. As a teenager I’d watched movies about brothel workers and call girls, like the classic Belle de Jour, which had ignited my own dreams of becoming a sex worker. I’d lacked the courage to act on any of my fantasies before the dungeon, and now that I’d finally found a community where I fit in, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t want to risk being cast out by admitting that I didn’t condemn FSSW. So, I just answered Lynn, “Yeah, I don’t know about that new girl,” and ignored the guilty knots in my stomach and throat.

It wasn’t until I’d left the dungeon and started writing about my own sex work experiences that I encountered the words “whorephobia” and “whorearchy”—terms with variable definitions, but which always indicate a class system of sorts among sex workers. Workers who engage in in-person sexual activity with clients, such as escorts and streetwalkers, will generally rank lower in the whorearchy, and may become the object of whorephobia from workers who do not take part in sexual acts—i.e. strippers, online workers and dominatrixes.

Based on my own experience at the dungeon, I believe that whore-archical distinctions usually come from a sense of shame about one’s own work, and an attempt to differentiate oneself from those doing work considered more shameful and reprehensible by society. Considering the centuries of sexual repression and judgment that hang over our culture, I doubt there’s any sex worker out there who hasn’t experienced a moment of shame. It’s almost impossible to draw a clear line between personal discomfort, and internalization of the judgment cast upon us by society. In a world where “whore” is a dirty word, the creation of a sex work whorearchy seems almost inevitable—but that doesn’t mean we should just accept it, the way I did during my conversation with Lynn.

At the time, I never told Lynn I disagreed with her judgment, and I never reached out to our new coworker or tried to get to know her better. Since beginning to write about sex work and connecting with a larger SW community, I’ve come to regret my choices. As a marginalized group faced with prejudice and lack of legal and societal support, we sex workers do ourselves a disservice by dividing further. By cutting ourselves off from those with whom we could share experiences, mutual aid and understanding, we are only weakening our already vulnerable community. As workers who have been at the knife end of such sharp judgment, turning that same judgment on our peers seems, frankly, insane.

When I wrote my novel The Briars, set in a commercial dungeon much like the one I worked in during the 2010s, I made a very intentional decision to include escorting as part of the dungeon workers’ stories. Some of my characters share their full-service-sex-work pasts openly, neither judging themselves nor fearing judgment from others. Other characters keep secrets even from themselves, until they finally feel safe enough to release the burdens of their past, and find comfort in the only community who can truly understand them.

In writing these characters and this story, I strove to rewrite my own sex work experience—to find the support and inclusivity I’d always longed for, and to make up for the fact that I’d never challenged the whorearchy at the dungeon where I worked. I hope that reading about my three-dimensional sex worker characters, who feel both shame and pride, regret and joy about their work, will inspire sex workers and civilians to see this profession and those who pursue it in a new, more open-minded light.

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Stephanie Parent is an author of fiction and poetry. Her debut novel THE BRIARS was inspired by her experience working in a commercial dungeon in Los Angeles. Stephanie now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she was born and raised. You can find more about her and her work at her website, or discover her book, The Briars, here.

Header image via Unsplash.