Sell/Buy/Date - a Review "In-Progress for Public Workshopping"
“Welcome to me!” giggles Bella the sex-positive blond, a Feminist Sex Work Studies major “with a minor in Social Media and a concentration in YouTube memes.”
Such was the characterization of sex worker activists on the internet by Tony-award winning playwright, Sarah Jones. She has been publicly “workshopping” her newest one woman show, entitled “Sell/Buy/Date” at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from September 18th to October 18th, allegedly to seek feedback and social media publicity/hype from early viewers. I had the fortune of being one such viewer last night, on its closing night, and I have some feedback.
“This is really rough, everyone,” Jones said at the opening of the show. “Some of this stuff, I literally wrote in the last hour.”
It certainly felt like that.
The impressionistic sketches of the former Nuyorican slam poetry champion, Sarah Jones, has the level of accuracy of a Mean Girls’ collection of favorite insults. The play is really one insult after another, crafted for comical value.
From jabs at head-bobbing Indian women, to a rotund and slow-witted Native American sex worker, to using the N-word during an impression of an African-American male, it seems that Sarah Jones had something offensive for everybody.
“Skinny people…you can tie a few together and make a Dreamcatcher!” exclaims one 300-pound Native American sex worker, on stage at a Las Vegas venue called the Exploitation All-Inclusive.
Everybody was a “prostituted woman” except for a Russian male pimp who self-described as a sex worker. And the sex worker rights activists are caricatured as dimwitted and undereducated supporters of Sarah Palin. In line with other anti-prostitution movement mythologies, Sarah Jones seems to be under the impression that the sex worker movement is funded by big corporate interests, which has bought out human rights organizations like Amnesty International. (Of course, bribery is the only reason why any human rights organization would want to support sex worker rights.)
Set in a futuristic classroom, where a professor looks back on a history of the previous century with disbelief at its errors – the short-lived legalization of prostitution being the greatest error – Jones’ monologues paints a world where sexism is pathologized and automatically treated with therapy. In this progressive world, prostitution could not possibly exist.
The future is a techno-utopia of ever improving gender equality, and the main narrator is a college professor who is teaching to a classroom full of students through summoning characters from the past, using a buzzy form of neurotechnology. These “characters” which Jones imitates with her famed ability to act out funny impressions, are voices from our present day mid-2010’s, as well as imagined voices from the years 2020-2060. Their brains and memories encoded and preserved in some cloud of internet-based immortality, and reincarnated onto the stage by Sarah Jones’ multi-faced talents.
Assuming that history progresses teleologically towards social justice, and is not some kind of arbitrary power struggle between various actors under resource constraints, the future India will be a place where an emergency medical treatment will be necessary to cure male porn addicts of their epidemic – Sarah Jones is a modern day Cassandra for the Male Health Crisis of adolescent dopamine depletion due to pornography and video games. However, magically, there will be a “re-sensititization” of men by forcing them to watch Thelma and Louise, which will suddenly lead to a change of neurochemistry across all the members of the sex, and will make men much more supportive of educated women rather than porn stars. (Because the two types of women are mutually exclusive. And because men are, of course, the only consumers of porn.)
Fortunately, with the brave new world technology of Thelma and Louise, men will also “suddenly lose the capacity for domination.” (Because that’s what BDSM is really about.)
The Head of the Union of Sex Workers International speaks to a membership of seven, and claims in her ditzy and self-centered way, that this union is the “most vocal” union, with some members so educated as to even have an Associate’s degree! Clearly, Jones has never heard of the 650,000 strong DMSC, a sex worker collective in India, only one of several sex worker unions in that country. She has also never met the majority of fetish workers in New York City, 39% of whom have Ph.D.’s from institutions like Columbia University, which is a higher level of Ph.D. attainment than almost any other profession in the city. Jones certainly displays a lot of educational superiority for a college dropout from Bryn Mawr who decided to leave school to become a slam poet. (But I’m being Mean now…)
“I started out in the Lingerie Football League,” the sex worker union leader tells the audience, explaining how she was basically getting pounded in the head and other parts for a living, “what we need are better helmets and labor rights.” (The notion of a high-paid porn industry star becoming a sex worker activist is kind of awesome and fantastical, since the vast majority of sex worker activists are middle-to-lower-level tattooed radical/anarcho-socialist types like myself, but bear with her here…) Sarah Jones tries to point out how the very notion of labor rights in prostitution is silly, because…football.
Yes, professional athletes also do a physically harmful job, and take on great risks for pay, and are way too often broke and homeless years after their best performing years, much like veterans. This is, in fact, a labor rights problem, which needs to be addressed through better retirement and job re-training, savings and investment programs during high-earning years, lifelong healthcare and reparations – all things that sex workers have been talking about for decades, and would really benefit from if there was actually such a thing as sex worker labor rights.
Without addressing any of the push factors of prostitution from socioeconomic inequality to mass incarceration to the dire need for additional housing for runaway youth, or suggesting any better solutions for gaining reparations/rights/protections from violence for sex workers besides more criminalization of clients (as if that has been so effective in dissuading all those guys in these last few centuries…) – the bleak future that Sarah Jones paints is dystopic only insofar as revenge porn continues to exist through futuristic “mental dommes” who are clients that target sex workers by taking snapshots of the inside of their brains.
“Sure, hack me, as long as you pay me, whatever” chants the nonchalant and docile Asian Australian sex worker in the play, probably a sketch of Julie Kim of Scarlet Alliance, whom Sarah Jones claims to be impressed by, though she “agrees to disagree” with Kim’s politics.
An Irish sex worker is also caricatured – sounding an awful lot like Laura Lee or Gaye Dalton – and mis-portrayed as some pathetic woman who has been abused by one man after another, whose sad life is testament more to womankind’s weakness than an Irish sex worker’s strength.
There is also a “sex-negative” immigrant domestic-worker-become-sex-worker, supporting her children while playing towards racial stereotypes of Jamaican women, or Indian women pretending to be Jamaican women. She is included in order to demonstrate a diversity of views, and her words sound a bit like Lori Adorable’s, but she is portrayed in a very backhanded sort of way. Jones downplays this kind of economic instrumentalism as an egg head academic’s idea of “agency” but not empowerment, because empowerment is for the whole of womankind, against which the economic decisions of individual sex workers are opposed.
It seems like Sarah Jones has been paying pretty close attention to Sex Worker Twitter, so much that many of her characters seem to be caricatures of real sex worker activists. But with predictably mistaken statistics on the age of entry into sex work, because she either willfully ignores what she reads by sex workers and academics, or because she has decided that it will be more commercially viable, or artistically successful, to cater to the much more dominant prostitution abolition movement.
Actually, Sarah Jones’ work has been directly commissioned by the anti-prostitution organization Equality Now. Speaking of corporate sponsorship, it seems the human trafficking movement has never been short of it. But it really disappoints me that queer feminist people of color spaces like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where I hung out as a teenager through participating in Urban Word, a writing program for youth of color with a strong social justice focus – is increasingly supportive of this kind of paid rhetoric on prostitution.
Jones would do well to read a much better writer’s compilation of prostitution facts and fictions, such as Maggie McNeill’s blogpost here. But who has time for distinguishing between such distinctions? Fiction is clearly more fun and more rewarding, and can just as easily be masqueraded as fact.
I think the worst insult of all that Jones throws around is her musical portrayal of the Sad Survivor stereotype: an ignorant Latina girl with low self-esteem, who has been abused by men, and she deserves so much better, because all she really wants is love. (This whole bit is Jones’ singing finale – yes, she is one of those slam poets who sings in her poems to show off her singing voice, which is admittedly quite a lovely one.)
There is no strength in the melodic voice of the Survivor stereotype that Jones portrays. Crooning somberly to the metaphor of an airplane, the Survivor stereotype sings: “I was grounded…and I didn’t think I deserved anything better, but now I know that I deserve more…I deserve to fly. I just needed love.”
Could anything be more insulting?
Yes, it could. Sarah Jones not-so-subtly suggests in closing that she herself might just be a survivor of the sex trade, who was “prostituted” at age 17. But she backtracks: even if she were a survivor, Jones says through her narrator, that she would not want to let the public know this fact, because the Survivor is too stigmatized a figure in the public imagination. “The audience might put you on a pedestal as a survivor,” she said, “they might tell you it’s courageous, but really, they raise you up to take better aim at you with pity.” Of course, Jones would never want to court public pity.
Nor would she want to contribute to the stigma of being a survivor of prostitution, a “veteran” of being prostituted, or an example of how being a prostituted woman completely ruins your life and self-esteem – unless, of course, you write a Tony award-winning play, or get invited to speak at the White House with Michelle Obama. Of course, survivors never have experiences like that…
“I want to dictate the terms of my objectification,” says the sex worker activist-bimbo-dumbditz in Sarah Jones’ play, “I go to a bi-weekly feminist pole dancing party called Don’t Get All Pole-mical.”
“You are not a Toyota; you are a human being,” preaches Jones through one of her many personalities.
She pretends to be a retired vice cop in the AA for prostitution addiction, who pines for sentimental romance: “You can’t get enough of that feeling. You keep chasing. It hurts your ego deep down,” because what the l vice-cop-ex-client really wants is love:
“I got access to this special part of them, and all they got back is money…Prostitution steals the one true thing you could have in the world: love.”
Oh, Po-lice! “I’ve heard orgasms faked in 100 languages,” the vice cop goes on to pontificate, barfingly, “The sound of orgasms should be beautiful, like the forest, or the ocean…but instead, it’s like I am hearing an ambient noise machine.”
It just so turns out that ambient noise machines aren’t criminalized or subjected to systematic violence by the police! And here and again, I also can identify a hollow ring, from anyone who claims to have worked on the street: we know that police are not your friends.
I was pretty excited to see this show, and I really really wanted to like this piece. I would like to assume the best about Jones, and hope that through the workshopping process, she will produce a better-researched (and less Mean Girls crossed with NGO fundraising commercial) sort of final product. But somehow, I’m not too hopeful of that.
