By Anabel Costa
The COVID-19 pandemic has levelled a financial hit to almost every industry, but there is one that often gets ignored: sex work.
Even in ordinary times sex workers face stigmas, unsafe working conditions and low pay, among other challenges. Now that the entire world is suffering from a pandemic, those threats to health and wellbeing have only intensified, say industry activists.
Last Thursday, UC Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center hosted an event co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center called “Sex Work in the Time of COVID.” The event featured three panelists — Sinnamon Love, Chiqui, and MF Akynos — all sex worker activists working and organizing in the United States and Europe. The conversation was led by Feminist Studies professor Mireille Miller-Young, and Black Studies professor Terrance Wooten.
From left to right, UCSB Black Studies professor Terrance Wooten, Sinnamon Love of the BIPOC Sex Workers Collective, MF Akynos of the Black Sex Workers Collective and Chiqui of the Berlin Strippers Collective in an event on sex work during the time of COVID, presented by the Multicultural Center and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Chiqui has been a dancer in the industry for 18 years and is a founding member of the Berlin Strippers Collective, which began in 2014. “One thing that got me to start this collective was how passionate my colleagues were. They were creative, they were intelligent,” she said.
Chiqui has been a dancer in the sex work industry for 18 years, and in 2014 she founded the Berlin Strippers Collective.
But Chiqui and her colleagues had long worked with the threat of being fired for minor, and sometimes even uncontrollable things, such as having the wrong nails or gaining weight. Fed up with the poor treatment, Chiqui and her friends decided to start a collective where they “undress to express,” and work towards destigmatizing stripping by informing others about the work and lives of sex workers.
In Chiqui’s experience, the biggest threat to her members since the start of the pandemic has been safety. “Safety in the workplace was already quite fragile,” she said.
At many strip clubs, women were already forced to pay a fee if they missed a shift due to illness. She says club owners have kept this policy in place even with a global pandemic in full swing. The virtual audience heard about one woman who felt sick but couldn’t afford to pay the fee. She went to work and ended up spreading COVID-19 to several of her colleagues.
In Berlin, there is a notion that sex workers are the biggest spreaders of the virus, but that assessment is untrue and unfair, Chiqui said. Outbreaks, she believes, are not the fault of the workers but rather the business practices of the clubs.
MF Akynos has been working in the sex work industry for 30 years and in 2018 she founded the Black Sex Worker Collective.
Akynos has been in the sex work industry for 30 years. She founded the Black Sex Workers Collective in New York City in 2018. The collective is a philanthropic arts project that seeks to amplify the voices of black sex workers by providing peer support, legal assistance and housing. Akynos is currently in graduate school and has ambitious plans.
“I am now doing my masters to try and completely upend the patriarchy and destroy all the anti-sex worker narratives that are out there,” she said.
In founding the Black Sex Workers Collective, Akynos has experienced push-back on her leadership from those she has worked with. “One of the issues that I faced as an organizer was people not really supporting black leadership like they claim they want to,” she said.
Recently, the collective has been able to make a big impact in supporting black sex workers financially by collecting donations and fundraising, and COVID has given that a push. “For some reason, there has to be a crisis for people to respond to sex workers,” Akynos said.
Sinnamon, of the BIPOC Sex Workers Collective, said last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests also gave a temporary boost to her group’s activities.
“While the entire country was on fire after George Floyd’s brutal murder, every company and every industry started issuing these Black Lives Matter statements, and the porn industry was no different,” Sinnamon said. “Companies whose foundation of their product line was racism started issuing these statements saying that they stand with their black employees.”
Sinnamon has been in the sex work industry for 26 years and considers herself “a lifer.”
Sinnamon Love has been working in the sex work industry for 26 years. In May of 2020 she founded the BIPOC Sex Workers Collective.
“There are three ways into sex work,” she said. “Choice, coercion, and circumstance.” Sinnamon found her way into sex work as a mode of “survival” when she was a teenager.
Though it had been in the works before the pandemic, she founded the BIPOC Sex Workers Collective in May of 2020, a few months after COVID began to surge. Its mission is to support a diverse community of adult performers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color, by providing education and support services.
Sinnamon was ready to tackle issues such as the wage disparity between white women and BIPOC women in the industry. But when the Black Lives Matter protests coincided with the pandemic, she sensed an opportunity to do even more.
“Understanding the disposable nature of sex workers to the people who own these companies, I saw this as an opportunity to impact real change,” said Sinnamon. And so, her group quickly became a resource for the most vulnerable workers in the community so they could maintain agency over their work, and their lives. Financial aid and free yoga classes are among the group’s services to its members.
“When people have to pay their bills, when people are in desperate situations, they’re willing to be co-conspirators in their own demise,” said Sinnamon. “But we do not want to be co-conspirators in our own demise. We want to be able to make conscious decisions. We can only do that if we’re being supported when we’re at our most vulnerable.”
Anabel Costa is a fourth year Theater major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.