The first session block on Sunday morning at this weekend’s Sex 2.0 Conference was The Whore Madonna Complex in Contemporary Society, presented by sex-worker activist Veronica Monet.

Since the subject was about the madonna/whore dichotomy the subject matter was mainly about women in heterosexual contexts. One issue that’s sort of inextricably linked to comprehensiveness of the dichotomy is just how little room there is in contemporary society for male sex workers.

For instance, Monet pointed out, in San Francisco back in the days before the internet female escorts who placed ads in the backs of the local alt-weekly newspapers had to be freakishly circumspect. For instance they had to avoid too much physical description. Nor could they mention what a customer might expect. You even had to say “no sex” in your ads. If I recall correctly from discussion back in the day it wasn’t just that the papers wouldn’t print your ad if you were anything but circumspect, it’s that the police would answer them! That would have been just for women escorts, mind you. She said at the same time gay male escorts, on the other hand, could get away with saying how long their cocks were, or, say, what they charged for blowjobs without worrying much about either censorship or law-enforcement scrutiny. In other words as far as local law enforcement was concerned male sex workers were invisible.

There were upsides and downsides to that, by the way. On the one hand (this is my recollection, not Monet’s) women prostitutes had higher visibility to law enforcement than men… but on the other hand when male sex workers were robbed, beaten, or murdered it was generally chalked up as “gay bashing” rather than sex-worker abuse.

So that’s one thing that came up about the invisibility of men in sex work.

Another point came up when Graydancer mentioned trying to convince a journalist that being hired to have heterosexual sex with other sex workers for johns made him a sex worker. The journalist remained unpersuaded. Even though I’m… pretty sure he’d have agreed that another woman being hired to perform sex while a customer watched would make her a sex worker. (Surprise! Guess what customers sometimes hire sex workers to do!?!?!)

Aaand finally, thinking about the discussion reminded me how really invisible men are in conversations about sex work and human trafficking on the one hand, and (see the San Francisco ads mentioned above) in conversations about how prostitution is by definition trafficking because no one ever “prostitutes” themselves willingly.

Think this peculiar blind spot for men who have sex for money has anything to do with a dominant paradigm that both believes and demands that women be reluctant to have sex and that men be unable to resist it, or that women must be interested in sex only for the things it can be exchanged for… and that men must be interested in things only for the sex they can be exchanged for? Why yes, I believe it does!

Aside: I’ll need to do at least one entire post to her observations and answers about not just men’s, not just “square” or “straight” people, but everybody’s participation and/or complicity in the madonna/whore complex. I hate to tease the subject like that but it’s probably not surprising what sort of insights someone who was an active feminist before she because a sex worker or sex-worker activist can bring to or bring out in a discussion like that. I’ll just say I’m extraordinarily glad I made it.

* Good to remember, as Veronica pointed out, not all women who have heterosexual sex are necessarily heterosexual themselves. Nor does the reminder apply only to women doing sex work.