In our society, there are a lot of misconceived narratives about sex work which are accepted as fact. If you choose to believe these, you’ll believe that every full service sex worker is in it against their will, too drugged up to fully live, and, perhaps worst of all, ashamed of their profession. While some of these things may absolutely be true of some sex workers, they are stereotypes of a particularly vulnerable class of people, which most people have never bothered to question. I had held many of these as facts until I took the same position of Constance in Bellocq’s Ophelia, which is to say, the main emotional support of a sex worker who does not fall into these tropes.
At the beginning of the work, I was afraid Natasha Trethewey would fall into those same tired notions of what sex work is, particularly at the description in the opening poem, “this other/ Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville,” (pg. 3) my concern being with the word “inmate.” You can then imagine my shock at the January 1911 letter to Constance, particularly when Ophelia writes,
My dear,
please do not think
I am the wayward girl
you describe. I alone
have made this choice.
Save what I pay for board,
what I earn is mine. (pg. 15)
This single poem was able to change the narrative we’re typically given into one more in line with a lot of people’s truth. Though there are obvious differences in their situations, I sent this poem to my friend Vivian to get the thoughts of someone who had been in Ophelia’s position. She responded “Rachel yes!!!!” and offered to write something for the class. She wrote:
Every job I’ve had is about selling my body. Certainly, there’s a material difference between getting [redacted for vulgarity] and cleaning bathrooms, but I was making $8.50 cleaning the bathrooms and felt way more tired than after a “shift” of being a hooker.
Trethewey’s presentation of sex work was a refreshing bit of realism in a sea of misinformed ideas of what it is these people do.