Carol Leigh, who sought to alter the picture and remedy of intercourse staff — a time period she is usually credited with coining — by way of each mainstream advocacy work and her colourful performances and writings underneath the title Scarlot Harlot, died on Wednesday at her house in San Francisco. She was 71.
Kate Marquez, her executor, mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
Ms. Leigh (pronounced “lee”) started working as a prostitute after transferring to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1978. In a 1996 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she mentioned she was galvanized into activism in 1979 after two males raped her on the intercourse studio the place she labored and she or he realized that if she reported the crime, the institution could be shut down, leaving her and different ladies there unemployed.
“I turned very, very devoted to altering situations in order that different ladies wouldn’t must take care of what I handled,” she mentioned.
On the time, prostitution was hardly ever regarded as something however against the law, and women and men who bought intercourse had been considered as criminals and, typically, as individuals who had been pressured into the work by traffickers or circumstances.
Ms. Leigh was amongst a bunch of advocates who proposed a special view, one captured within the slogan that the motion adopted: “Intercourse work is work.” She argued that some individuals engaged in prostitution by selection, and that many sex-for-money transactions — the escort enterprise, for example — weren’t the street-corner offers most people pictured.
Her level, generally expressed humorously, was to encourage a rethinking of the attainable relationships between intercourse and commerce.
“There are such a lot of ladies who make a residing within the intercourse enterprise and who don’t admit it,” she advised The Arizona Each day Star in 1985. “Topless dancers are intercourse staff, for instance. And we’ve all heard the story in regards to the spouse who has intercourse together with her husband to get a brand new fridge.”
Ms. Leigh took credit score for introducing the time period “intercourse work” as a substitute option to describe the enterprise of prostitutes and others. In “Inventing Intercourse Work,” an essay she contributed to the gathering “Whores and Different Feminists” (1997, edited by Jill Nagle), Ms. Leigh recalled a convention organized by Girls Towards Violence in Pornography and Media that she attended in San Francisco within the late Seventies or early ’80s. The title of a workshop involving prostitution, she mentioned, used the time period “intercourse use business.”
“The phrases caught out and embarrassed me,” she wrote. “How might I sit amid different ladies as a political equal once I was being objectified like that, described solely as one thing used, obscuring my function as an actor and agent on this transaction?
“Initially of the workshop,” she continued, “I steered that the title of the workshop must be ‘Intercourse Work Business,’ as a result of that described what ladies did.”
Now the phrase is in widespread use, and it has been credited with serving to to reframe the persevering with debates on the topic.
“Carol Leigh was — and can at all times stay — a staple within the motion for intercourse staff’ rights,” Jenny Heineman, who teaches sociology and anthropology on the College of Nebraska Omaha and has written about intercourse work and feminism, mentioned by electronic mail. “By no means shying away from exhausting conversations, she coined the time period ‘intercourse work’ to encapsulate the intersecting challenges that stigmatized and criminalized laborers throughout the globe face.”
Ms. Leigh was born on Jan. 11, 1951, in Queens. She described her dad and mom as “disenchanted ex-socialists.”
“I used to be raised on discouraging tales of the failure of political struggles,” she wrote in “Inventing Intercourse Work.”
Within the early Seventies she found feminist authors like Betty Friedan and Kate Millet. In line with the 1996 profile in The Examiner, she earned a bachelor’s diploma at Empire State Faculty in 1974. She then studied artistic writing at Boston College and based a ladies’s writing group the place feminist concepts had been mentioned and debated.
“By 1978 I had had sufficient of Boston’s imply and repressive environment,” she wrote; she moved to San Francisco, the place she hoped to discover a life within the arts.
“My mates who had been artists had been working in eating places,” she advised The Examiner. “I checked out them and I believed, I don’t need to work in eating places. I’m an artist, I need to discover life. So for me, initially, prostitution was an investigation. I used to be additionally poor and feeling determined on the time.”
The additional she acquired into the lifetime of prostitution, the extra she felt a disconnect between her experiences and the feminist doctrines she had espoused earlier.
“Feminist evaluation of prostitution as the final word state of ladies’s oppression didn’t match the power and attitudes expressed by the varied ladies I met,” she wrote.
“Many lesbians had been ‘out’ as lesbians,” she added, “however the place was the prostitute on this new girl we had been inventing? She was degraded and objectified anew by the feminist rhetoric.”
Within the early Eighties Ms. Leigh developed a one-woman present, “The Adventures of Scarlot Harlot,” which she carried out in San Francisco and elsewhere. In it she advised tales from her working life, argued for a spot on the feminist desk and steered that intercourse for cash was maybe not that totally different from regardless of the viewers did for cash.
She additionally bought her personal model of fragrance, Whore Magic, and different novelties. When she spoke at occasions, she would generally hand out colourful stickers that learn “Whore Energy” or “Be Good to Prostitutes.”
However she was severe about decriminalization, well being care, needle exchanges, decreasing the jail inhabitants, how AIDS must be handled and different sex-work points, and she or he was taken critically. Within the mid-Nineteen Nineties she served on a fee on prostitution created by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and in 2008 she was among the many extra vocal advocates of Proposition Okay in San Francisco, a poll measure that might have had the impact of decriminalizing prostitution within the metropolis. It failed. Its opponents included town’s district legal professional on the time, Kamala Harris.
Ms. Leigh is survived by a brother, Phillip.
Ms. Leigh made movies, organized artwork exhibits by intercourse staff, and in 2003 revealed “Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot.” Within the 1996 interview, she provided a succinct tackle intercourse and decriminalization.
“This,” she mentioned, “is the one exercise that you are able to do free of charge however you possibly can’t receives a commission for.”
Supply: NY Times
