Sex Workers' Memes Are Funnier Than Yours
A couple of months back I published a new article which looks at sex workers’ uses of humour in online spaces, and spoke about it at the NZPC’s Hui in Tāmaki Makaurau in June. The article is actually entirely open access, so if you’d like to read the full version instead of my summary, you can do that here!
I’d been interested in looking at this topic for a while, because I’ve spent a lot of time in various online sex work spaces and I noticed through being embedded in them that humour is really key to how they operate. While there’s a lot of prior work about humour in the workplace generally, there’s much less about humour within sex workplaces specifically. All the work which has been carried out on the topic previously has focused on humour in face to face settings. Increasingly though, online spaces are where sex workers both attract clients and do a lot of community building, sharing information and resources. So, it struck me that looking at how humour is used online could be a really useful contribution – both to document what kinds of culture are evident in online sex work communities, but also to further show what the community loses through deplatforming or shadowbanning by social media sites.
Humour in the workplace serves multiple functions – it promotes group cohesion, and in the case of black or gallows humour it can have a kind of buffering effect in the face of stressful situations. Quite a lot of the prior work about humour in face to face sex work has proposed that it is sometimes used as a way to respond to experiences of stigma. For stigmatized groups more generally, humour can be a way to make taboo topics more ‘speakable’. Another key point about humour, and one which I’m interested in as a cultural studies scholar, is how it might function politically.
For this project I looked at humour drawn from three key sites. During the initial Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020, there were a few news media reports which discussed how sex workers were responding to clients attempting to book – two of these were illustrated with images supplied by sex workers showing their responses to clients. One of them noted that many sex workers were sharing these on social media, and personally I saw quite a lot of this during the lockdown on my own feeds. The second and third sites were the social media profiles of two Australian peer-led organisations, Scarlet Alliance and Vixen Collective, who generously allowed me to draw on their memes for my research.
Now, one important characteristic of each of these sites is their anticipated audience – in all cases, other sex workers are part of the audience, and for the peer led organisations probably the primary audience. But they’re all public posts and that sets them apart from humour which we might see or be familiar with in more closed or private spaces. I think considering the audience is also important because this helps us to contextualise what the humour is doing, thinking about what knowledge the audience will be coming to it with.
A lot of meme humour works because people understand what a particular meme usually represents. Each portion of it has additional unstated meanings which you learn through repeated exposure to the meme, or through exposure to the original cultural property it is drawn from. In my analysis I’m interested in thinking about those intertextual elements. Too, I’m looking for how we see power functioning and interacting with the humour. What kind of power dynamics are typical in the broader social context, and are these reflected in the humour? What power dynamics are being played with or subverted?
I found the texts which I was examining fell into three broad categories: humour about or at the expense of clients; stigma and discrimination; and humour focused on activism and political change.
Humour at the expense of clients is something which has been found in prior research too. In a study based in an indoor workplace in the UK, the researcher notes this humour took place both out of earshot of clients, but also in front of them, sometimes in a coded way without the client realising. Something quite similar happens in sex worker humour online – it’s less coded, but I think the subtleties of it would probably be lost on a lot of clients.
Under this broad theme, there were some recurring motifs. Some of the texts I looked at dated from the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of Aotearoa was under a level 4 lockdown. This meant everyone needed to have contact only with their household bubble, and meant sex workers couldn’t meet with clients face to face. Despite this, some clients would text and hassle people into taking a booking, and there was a brief spate of people posting their funniest interactions with the clients on their Twitters. A common gag was asking clients if their penis was 2m long, since that was the required social distancing.
Something which I thought was really interesting about seeing these screencaps shared in media, is that it shows unfiltered interactions with clients, which isn’t something we see very much. A lot of the time interactions with clients are either dramatized, or if they’re filmed then the presence of a camera changes them. Alternatively, you see clients represented as either these wealthy, lonely, but respectful gentlemanly figures, or you see them as threats. In these interactions, and in most of the humour at the expense of clients, they’re neither of those things: they’re schmucks, basically. The other key veins of humour here came from clients pushing boundaries in various ways and being rebuffed: having a sook about showering, asking for a real name, asking for a discount because they believed they had a special connection with a worker. The humour in a lot of these cases comes from clients fundamentally misunderstanding the terms of the engagement – they’ve failed to realise it is a transaction, and so the humour is drawn from their misreading of social norms. Built into this, of course, is the idea that sex work is work, and that understanding is what makes the joke function.
The second theme is humour which deals with stigma and discrimination. Some of this was through identifying and naming the experiences of whorephobia, either in quite high level or more specific terms. So you might see humour which was built around for example having to lie about your occupation when around civvies, or sort of dark or gallows humour about banking discrimination. Quite a lot of this humour did what is often calling ‘reframing’ in literature about stigma or resilience. Essentially what occurs is the stigma getting folded back on whoever is perpetuating it. So in this post, for example, there’s the common idea that sex workers are unattractive or unviable romantic partners, and it is effectively being reframed such that it opens the speaker up to critique – no one asked for their opinion here, and they get turned into the butt of the joke – there’s an inversion here of socially normative ideas about who should be trying to win the approval of who.
The third main theme related to activism and political change. At the time I collected the data for analysis, Victoria was in the middle of enacting decriminalisation, and Scarlet Alliance, who are the national body, also had multiple member organisations – in Queensland for example – who were actively campaigning for decriminalisation. Something I was interested in exploring in the article is how memes are a really effective way of communicating messages about political change and activism. Image memes typically take a base image which conveys a specific social dynamic, or describes an event or situation which leads to a particular emotional state. Once you are familiar with a particular meme image then you know approximately what every panel or figure in it represents, and have an expectation of how the joke will play out. This can allow for more complex humour to be encoded within them, because you don’t have to do as much set up – this figure is X, this figure is Y – that’s knowledge your audience already have, so you can convey fairly sophisticated messages quite efficiently.
In this article, I argue that sex worker humour isn’t just an interesting diversion, but that it is productive and it does things. The humour about clients – making them the butt of the joke for asking for real names, for example – normalises sex workers creating and enforcing boundaries. This also functions as a kind of ‘backstage humour’ – it is presented to a broader audience, but it is arguably funniest to other sex workers. Through this, it contributes to creating closer community links, or sharing it might be how someone re-establishes themselves as part of the community. A secondary function here of this humour being most amusing to other sex workers, is that it’s very shareable, and through this it likely also improves the reach and effectiveness of other messaging from the peer-led organizations by essentially gaming the algorithm a little bit.
Finally, there is a tendency in some prior work on humour in sex work to understand jokes about clients as primarily being something which alleviates stresses, or makes the work tolerable – which is an approach that sort of assumes it will be necessarily gruelling or taxing. I think there is a different reading which can be taken of jokes at the expense of clients. Humour that hinges on clients being blundering and irritating is not necessarily intended exclusively as a buffer against the frustration of dealing with them, but instead it can be viewed as something which suggests alternative social arrangements and distributions of power.
Essentially, what occurs throughout this vein of humour is the creation of a new typology of the client, which is quite distinct from a lot of the archetypes which exist in popular public discourse. It is a typology which foregrounds the knowledge held by sex workers, and allows their perspectives to shape the schema of the dynamic and interaction. And I would argue that this is one of the things which makes sex workers’ humour so powerful and therefore worth studying and taking seriously. While it can be treated as an ephemeral kind of interaction which serves a limited and short-term purpose, I think it can also be approached as a repository of cultural knowledge. Essentially, this is a micro-context where we see the perspective of sex workers shaping the understanding of events and their meanings, and one where sex workers’ point of view is – even if only temporarily – the one which is centred.