As part of my community work, I sometimes participate in meetings and events that are affiliated with the York University Sex Work and Critical Trafficking Research Cluster. When I learned of Dr. Tuulia Law’s new research, I took it as a sign to catch up on her work since we last sat down to discuss performing gender and the economy of favours at the strip club.
Law teaches criminology at York University and is a coordinator for the Cluster. This time, Simarpreet Kaur, Law’s research assistant and recipient of the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence Prize joined us in conversation.
Law and Kaur presented their latest research part of York University’s Annual Critical Femininities Conference this summer. During the research, Law ran two different focus groups–one for sex workers and one for students- in which participants mapped their sexual experiences. Instead of focusing on consent, or sexual assault, Law had her research participants, all of whom identified as women, mapped their sexual experiences while trying to measure willingness (or the lack thereof) and reward (or it’s opposite, harm).
Law told me that she teaches a class on Critical Victimology, and that students and sex workers are often framed by the media, and by our justice system, as being vulnerable to sexual violence. However, during her years researching and talking to sex workers, she found that:
“What it [labelling] does for sex workers is it often overwrites their own understanding of their own experience. You know, sex workers who are content with their work are often labelled as victims erroneously.”
This conflation of sex work with human trafficking as opposed to to sex workers having capacity to make decisions about the work that they do, and the autonomy to carry them out, is something that I’ve written about extensively before.
ND: Do you think this research is kind of contributing to a new vocabulary of how we can, in a way, divorce our sexual experiences from the criminal legal system? Is this where this is going?
TL: I mean, I would hope so, but I guess I would hope it’s more than that. It’s not just divorcing it from, criminal justice or criminal legal framings of sex versus sexual assault, I think it’s also just divorcing it from the societal hang ups about sex. There’s a lot of baggage there that is persistent. That was particularly important for sex workers, I think because they were talking about how enthusiastic consent doesn’t quite apply to sex work, because the consent, or to use the language of this research project, the willingness is always conditional on the reward of the payment. Even the willingness is not a conventional willingness to have sex, right? We think of willingness to have sex. Normally, someone is turned on and or in love, those kinds of things, right? They (sex workers) are looking forward to paying off their car, right?
ND: So it’s a completely different motivation to take off your clothes and start doing it, right?
TL: And what’s wrong with that?
ND: Nothing!
TL: But a lot of people have a problem with that. And I think that it also goes into the conventional framings of sex workers as victims of exploitation. As soon as sex is commercialized, then people can’t understand. I wouldn’t do that. Therefore, it’s bad, right? And so I’m hoping that this just gives another way of highlighting how people get various things out of sex that they’re willing to participate in for various reasons. And then having the students, as another group that participated in this project kind of gave some more dimension to that. It’s not just sex workers who are having these ambivalent times, or like unenthusiastic consent sometimes or whatever, like neutral times…so it’s just a good way to have some context there, rather than a control group, maybe a conventional group, if you will.
Enthusiastic consent in relation to sex work is something that I have thought about before and talked about with my peers. Law’s findings ring true: the motivation is not love or horniness, but wanting to pay your bills. And any reader who deals with customers knows that most are ok, some are awesome, and some are annoying but we sigh and keep going, because that’s our job. The truly awful ones where we refuse to see the customer again due to poor or abusive behaviour are the exception. Sex work is no different.
Having said that, I haven’t spent much time on thinking about being kind of ambivalent, or medium willing in terms of a romantic relationship, and how sometimes, especially in a long term relationship, maintenance sex that’s neither good or bad but gets the job done can be an unsung hero of a relationship. Law explained that sometimes, even if everyone consents, there are mishaps where folks might feel pain or discomfort, and that her framework would help people talk through those moments.
I asked if there are any other applications of the willingness and reward measurement framework.
SK: So when we were talking about how the scatterplot could be used, a number of participants said that they think it could be used for restorative justice or for rehabilitation. And one of the main reasons they said that was because it avoids labels, so it doesn’t use labels like victim or perpetrator, which is really helpful when we’re talking about relationships, because no one wants to talk about their partner in that sense.
TL: Yeah, a couple of participants said that actually in the different groups. Not wanting to label something sexual assault with a partner, but yeah, it would. It would be nice, you know, to have a way to talk about that with a partner, that it’s like explaining to them how it was unrewarding, or so harmful, or, unwilling, or all of those things.
For most people, sex is neither a Hallmark movie or an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and equipping women who have been previously framed as victims with a new way of understanding their more nuanced experiences empowers both students and sex workers.
Dr. Law is hoping to publish her research in an academic journal at some point next year (academic publishing is a notoriously lengthy process), she is also working with her community research team- who are comprised of student and sex workers- on making non-academic informational materials and resources that will benefit the very communities she is researching.
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