"Honey," my wife called from downstairs. "The Bulls game is on."
"Just a minute...," I replied, from my office, "I'm arguing with prostitutes in Australia."
Strange world, this.
Watching the Bulls play on television with the family is a joy. In the mornings we ask each other, "Are the Bulls playing tonight?" Someone checks the schedule hanging in the kitchen, and, if there's a game, we all sigh in happy expectation. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a sports fan, and generally that's true —I went to the Cubs home opener Friday, reluctantly, invited by a reader, but could not name a single player on the team, before or after. It was nice to sit there and eat peanuts and trade baseball trivia. But the Cubs didn't do anything memorable. One of them hit a home run. That's it.
The Bulls are different: tremendous athletes, passionate competitors, each an individual, all trying to make the best of a tough situation: Derrick Rose being out for another season with another injury. It's still fun to watch them play. I never thought that passing the ball could be a thing of beauty, but when Joakim Noah does it, it is, sometimes. Often.
Yet I lingered upstairs Friday. Because there is a strange mix of intimacy and invasion to the Internet, particularly Twitter, which has replaced Facebook and email as the dynamic communications form of the moment (and don't write in informing me that no, it's now Spotify, or LeadPipe, or something even newer. I'm 53 years old. I'm by definition behind the times. I catch up when required).
What happened is this: Wednesday night I got a call from Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office, telling me that Amnesty International, which generally has a sterling reputation somewhere between Doctors Without Borders and Miss Bianca of "The Rescuers," would be debating, in Chicago, on Friday, whether to endorse the decriminalization of commercial sex: basically saying that prostitutes, madams, pimps, brothels, should all be legal. Their argument is that selling your body, or someone else's, is a civil right, like voting.
Madigan passionately believes that is wrong, that all commercial sex is coerced, either now or in the past, the result of child sex abuse. "The reality is, no young girl dreams of becoming a prostitute," she told me, Thursday morning, when I was writing the story. Her view made sense to me.
I felt confident the column laid out the situation in a balanced way. "The issue pivots on that notion of consent,"I wrote. "Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?"
Now I admit, I didn't line up testimony to back up that second premise, never thought: "I better find some hookers to talk about how wonderful their lives are." My belief, from 30 years of reporting, is that prostitutes are invariably damaged in some way, typically drug addicts feeding a habit, and fall or are lured into that way of life, trapped without recourse.
While no doubt some are working the bar at Gibson's and having a grand time, at the moment, that is rare enough to be insignificant, compared to the general awfulness of the trade experienced by most women. Heroin addiction doesn't become a good life choice merely because Keith Richards pulled it off. That said, I did not do a thorough and comprehensive review of world prostitution. And in posting my story here, I gave, as I try to do on the blog, a little extra background that didn't fit in the paper, a look at the bias I brought to the story: years ago, I went out with the Cook County Sheriff's Police as they swept streetwalkers off Cicero Avenue. It was a scene from hell; I was amazed that men would pay these women for sex, because I was uncomfortable standing on the same block, breathing the same air.
That wasn't offered as a sweeping indictment of all sex workers everywhere, but rather a description of what I felt, honestly and sincerely, standing there.
The column hit the world of Twitter Friday afternoon, re-tweeted more than 100 times. And a furious opposition sprang up that caught me completely off-guard.
"Pure hate..."
"Polemics and damaging stereotypes..."
"You are afraid of your own sexuality, so you condemn others for theirs. It's fairly textbook..."
The reaction was not from Chicagoans, but Australian sex workers -- as far as I could tell -- plus various sympathetic sorts: London party boys, Irish good time gals. Dozens of them.
"So horrendous. Not even slightly professional."
"Comparing SW to drug dealers rises to a whole new level of cluelessness."
"Neil Steinberg is a pustulent, rotting WANKCHARIOT."
The thing to do would be to ignore it all. I had my say, now they have theirs. A columnist should have a thick skin.
But to me, a thick skin leads to a thick head. What I do requires being sensitive to nuance. It's not a choice, really. Constitutionally, I'm not the shrug-things-off sort. I'm an explain-myself sort. That's how I'm able to do this job. So I waded in, trying to answer all these people, tweeting in batches of five and 10, trying to make them understand my perspective, to tamp down their outrage. But the more I tried, the angrier they seemed to get, and the more personal. My comment about hookers on Cicero Avenue, about not wanting to breathe the same air, really rattled them, and each tweet exaggerated it a bit more, until it was no longer about a certain group of prostitutes on Cicero Avenue, but about all sex workers, then about all women everywhere.
I tried arguing back. No, not all sex workers. Actually, I was thinking about one specific, real person -- Pam Bolton, I remember her name. I talked with her. The cops said she had AIDS. She was scary. Two weeks later she was murdered. I never forgot her.
The next thing I know, I'm arguing with a dominatrix in Seattle and Dan Savage, the sex columnist -- and my friend, someone I have had lunch with, talked to, read all his books, and deeply respect—is trying to moderate between us.
"I know you both," he writes. "If you got together, you guys would get on like a house on fire. 1st round - or 3 - on me?"
I almost wrote back, "You know I don't drink, Dan," but then too much of my personal life was already being dragged into it, dug up by Down Under doxies racing online, grabbing what sharp details they could find in 30 seconds and rushing back to scratch at me with them. Personal and mean, behaving very much like right wing religious zealots do when challenged, a rare point of commonality between the two groups.
Dan's becoming involved gave me clarity, because I thought of his recent book of essays, American Savage, and how it frustrated me when, in places, he detours into various pissing matches and inside-baseball parsing with angry people from various sexual subgroups, who do not see Dan as he really is, big picture — an important writer, a man of integrity and courage and humor who spotlights important issues that most people never even thought about, never mind sympathized with — but instead measure him on some partisan standard insisted upon by their particular clique, find him lacking in that one regard, then condemn him broadly for some lone sentence or passing thought plucked out of his decades of writing.
Which is what I was getting now, from people who didn't know me, but were waving a phrase they didn't like—"breathe the same air"— and trying to smear me across the floor, demanding automatic sympathy for themselves while extending none to me. I was the Bad Man they had uncovered. The classic slasher movie dynamic -- identify someone as evil, quickly establish his guilt and then punish him with all the cruelty that supposedly left you aghast in the first place. You're free to be as vile as you like if you have the right victim.
I wanted to say, "You know, I was attending secret transvestite dances in Chicago while you were learning the alphabet, honey, so cut me some slack..." I kept trying to disengage from it, yet kept being drawn back, to face this howl of disapproval. I finally leapt up, fled downstairs, and caught most of the first half of the Bulls game. The Bulls dominated, of course.
At halftime I was back at my computer. The more I looked at the fireworks on Twitter, the more I recognized the pattern. This is what you get from insular groups—motorcycle riders, gun fanatics, sex workers—who are so used to trading pieties among each other, they forget how to deal with outsiders. They see themselves as besieged. Everybody outside the wall is either a friend or an enemy, a zero or a one. Thus, if I make a statement that seems just a dry, factual rendition of reality—riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous; so is carrying a loaded pistol on your hip; prostitutes are mostly degraded victims—expressing that thought flips the switch in their heads, their targeting systems boot up and lock on you, and they automatically blast away. Piling on, flooding the zone, rushing with a snarl down the hillside, clubs raised over their heads, is their mob-mentality response to anything perceived as an insult.
Eventually I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and their corrosive bile. I started just blocking everybody who commented on Twitter—the examples I gave are actually the mild ones, the ones I didn't block, because the worst ones are gone. When that was too much had the presence of mind to ignore the thing and head downstairs for the fourth quarter—I missed the third trading quips with harlots—where my wife had prepared some peppermint tea.
That helped. Peppermint tea always helps.
The Bulls crushed the Bucks. I came back upstairs, refreshed and determined to extract myself. Consider the source. I looked at the bios of the people writing in. You need a glossary. "Sex-pos Feminist, Bi, Ply, Libsoc, Agorist..."etc. from Wellington, New Zealand. ("Libsoc" is libertarian social philosophy, Agorism is a kind of utopianism where society is based on voluntary exchanges). "Genderfluid Feminist Dominatrix EXTREME MISANDRIST" (hater of men. Well knock me over with a feather. I had a hunch, but still looked it up, to be sure).
You have to marvel at that. "EXTREME MISANDRIST." In all caps. Because a plain old lower case misandrist who merely hates men moderately doesn't do the trick. That took an edge off the criticisms. To be honest, there is something so heartbreaking, it's almost sweet, advertising your own bigotry in your bio and then caterwauling that people aren't treating you fairly. It's like the guy who complained that a supermarket bakery was discriminating against him because it wouldn't put his son's name, "Adolf Hitler," on his birthday cake. Well boo-hoo pal, maybe you should have thought of that before you got into the hating business.
It would seem too obvious an irony in fiction, which is why I so love journalism. You can't make this stuff up. A reminder that even marginalized groups can be haters—especially marginalized groups; sometimes, it's all they've got.
You can't be hurt by that, I kept telling myself. You can't. At least you shouldn't. Because this isn't about you, this fire hose of on-line antipathy. They may have your name, and a few dusty facts they grabbed off Google. But they don't know you, don't know what they're talking about. They're just taking the common dodge of using what they consider their victim status to be bullies. And yet — almost touchingly — they somehow expect respect for it in return. How's that workin' for you guys, as a life strategy? Make many friends that way?
Enough. There's no winning, just stopping. The tragic part is, they have a point somewhere. I see that through the haze. I'm not the Welcome Wagon for banning sex work. When not channeling the attorney general, I'm pretty open to any stab at fixing intractable social problems like prostitution. If the goal is to reduce the harm, as with drugs ("Foxxie! He's comparing us to drug dealers again!"), then the solution seems a kind of quasi-legalization that kills the secondary market. If Scandinavia can cut heroin use by giving the drug away for free, under controlled settings, maybe making prostitution legal, for the prostitutes, while keeping being a pimp or a madam illegal, would help. It seems to work in Sweden. Maybe instead of banning brothels, the government should run them.
Or maybe not. Given how terrorized and abused prostitutes often are, how they'll testify that the man who beats them and takes all their money is in fact merely their boyfriend, not their pimp, this is an area where glib solutions should be viewed skeptically.
Enough. Shutting up is an art form, one that requires practice. I'm bad at it, but I'm trying to be better. I don't understand people who live online, endlessly sparring with others who disagree. Not my idea of fun. Which is why I'm glad I call the shots, and can move on from their world, at a quickstep, while they're stuck there. Though to be candid, I'm glad for this episode, because it taught me, not only what agorism is, and how to crank up the filter on my Twitter Interactions feed, but also the heretofore unimagined notion that some women will claim that being a prostitute is the fulfillment of their childhood dreams (pride is the last possession of those with nothing, and the more abject a person's situation, the more they insist on elevating themselves. I try to remember that when some debased soul is glorying themselves over me). It also reminded me of the importance of walking away and waiting for the storm to pass.
None of the women who claimed that prostitution was their childhood ambition took me up on my request that they write in at length, explaining that journey. "Someday mum, I'm going to blow strange men in cars, just like you..." I kept asking my Twitter correspondents, if you have a point to make, why not write to me directly and make it fully instead of getting me in their crosshairs and squeezing off 140-character bursts? Only one, Dan Savage's dominatrix pal, who wrote a column for Seattle's The Stranger for many years, actually did. This post is already too long, and this letter makes it longer—you might want to take a break and have some peppermint tea; it's revivifying—then return. But I asked for it, so I'm presenting her letter uncut and without comment, and you can judge for yourself. I think she makes some good points:
You said in your tweets on this subject that you were open to more information, so I’m taking you at your word. This letter may look long, but the situation is complex, so I hope you take the time to acquaint yourself more fully with the issue of sex worker rights.
Strange world, this.
Watching the Bulls play on television with the family is a joy. In the mornings we ask each other, "Are the Bulls playing tonight?" Someone checks the schedule hanging in the kitchen, and, if there's a game, we all sigh in happy expectation. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a sports fan, and generally that's true —I went to the Cubs home opener Friday, reluctantly, invited by a reader, but could not name a single player on the team, before or after. It was nice to sit there and eat peanuts and trade baseball trivia. But the Cubs didn't do anything memorable. One of them hit a home run. That's it.
The Bulls are different: tremendous athletes, passionate competitors, each an individual, all trying to make the best of a tough situation: Derrick Rose being out for another season with another injury. It's still fun to watch them play. I never thought that passing the ball could be a thing of beauty, but when Joakim Noah does it, it is, sometimes. Often.
Yet I lingered upstairs Friday. Because there is a strange mix of intimacy and invasion to the Internet, particularly Twitter, which has replaced Facebook and email as the dynamic communications form of the moment (and don't write in informing me that no, it's now Spotify, or LeadPipe, or something even newer. I'm 53 years old. I'm by definition behind the times. I catch up when required).
What happened is this: Wednesday night I got a call from Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office, telling me that Amnesty International, which generally has a sterling reputation somewhere between Doctors Without Borders and Miss Bianca of "The Rescuers," would be debating, in Chicago, on Friday, whether to endorse the decriminalization of commercial sex: basically saying that prostitutes, madams, pimps, brothels, should all be legal. Their argument is that selling your body, or someone else's, is a civil right, like voting.
Madigan passionately believes that is wrong, that all commercial sex is coerced, either now or in the past, the result of child sex abuse. "The reality is, no young girl dreams of becoming a prostitute," she told me, Thursday morning, when I was writing the story. Her view made sense to me.
I felt confident the column laid out the situation in a balanced way. "The issue pivots on that notion of consent,"I wrote. "Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?"
Now I admit, I didn't line up testimony to back up that second premise, never thought: "I better find some hookers to talk about how wonderful their lives are." My belief, from 30 years of reporting, is that prostitutes are invariably damaged in some way, typically drug addicts feeding a habit, and fall or are lured into that way of life, trapped without recourse.
While no doubt some are working the bar at Gibson's and having a grand time, at the moment, that is rare enough to be insignificant, compared to the general awfulness of the trade experienced by most women. Heroin addiction doesn't become a good life choice merely because Keith Richards pulled it off. That said, I did not do a thorough and comprehensive review of world prostitution. And in posting my story here, I gave, as I try to do on the blog, a little extra background that didn't fit in the paper, a look at the bias I brought to the story: years ago, I went out with the Cook County Sheriff's Police as they swept streetwalkers off Cicero Avenue. It was a scene from hell; I was amazed that men would pay these women for sex, because I was uncomfortable standing on the same block, breathing the same air.
That wasn't offered as a sweeping indictment of all sex workers everywhere, but rather a description of what I felt, honestly and sincerely, standing there.
The column hit the world of Twitter Friday afternoon, re-tweeted more than 100 times. And a furious opposition sprang up that caught me completely off-guard.
"Pure hate..."
"Polemics and damaging stereotypes..."
"You are afraid of your own sexuality, so you condemn others for theirs. It's fairly textbook..."
The reaction was not from Chicagoans, but Australian sex workers -- as far as I could tell -- plus various sympathetic sorts: London party boys, Irish good time gals. Dozens of them.
"So horrendous. Not even slightly professional."
"Comparing SW to drug dealers rises to a whole new level of cluelessness."
"Neil Steinberg is a pustulent, rotting WANKCHARIOT."
The thing to do would be to ignore it all. I had my say, now they have theirs. A columnist should have a thick skin.
But to me, a thick skin leads to a thick head. What I do requires being sensitive to nuance. It's not a choice, really. Constitutionally, I'm not the shrug-things-off sort. I'm an explain-myself sort. That's how I'm able to do this job. So I waded in, trying to answer all these people, tweeting in batches of five and 10, trying to make them understand my perspective, to tamp down their outrage. But the more I tried, the angrier they seemed to get, and the more personal. My comment about hookers on Cicero Avenue, about not wanting to breathe the same air, really rattled them, and each tweet exaggerated it a bit more, until it was no longer about a certain group of prostitutes on Cicero Avenue, but about all sex workers, then about all women everywhere.
I tried arguing back. No, not all sex workers. Actually, I was thinking about one specific, real person -- Pam Bolton, I remember her name. I talked with her. The cops said she had AIDS. She was scary. Two weeks later she was murdered. I never forgot her.
The next thing I know, I'm arguing with a dominatrix in Seattle and Dan Savage, the sex columnist -- and my friend, someone I have had lunch with, talked to, read all his books, and deeply respect—is trying to moderate between us.
"I know you both," he writes. "If you got together, you guys would get on like a house on fire. 1st round - or 3 - on me?"
I almost wrote back, "You know I don't drink, Dan," but then too much of my personal life was already being dragged into it, dug up by Down Under doxies racing online, grabbing what sharp details they could find in 30 seconds and rushing back to scratch at me with them. Personal and mean, behaving very much like right wing religious zealots do when challenged, a rare point of commonality between the two groups.
Dan's becoming involved gave me clarity, because I thought of his recent book of essays, American Savage, and how it frustrated me when, in places, he detours into various pissing matches and inside-baseball parsing with angry people from various sexual subgroups, who do not see Dan as he really is, big picture — an important writer, a man of integrity and courage and humor who spotlights important issues that most people never even thought about, never mind sympathized with — but instead measure him on some partisan standard insisted upon by their particular clique, find him lacking in that one regard, then condemn him broadly for some lone sentence or passing thought plucked out of his decades of writing.
Which is what I was getting now, from people who didn't know me, but were waving a phrase they didn't like—"breathe the same air"— and trying to smear me across the floor, demanding automatic sympathy for themselves while extending none to me. I was the Bad Man they had uncovered. The classic slasher movie dynamic -- identify someone as evil, quickly establish his guilt and then punish him with all the cruelty that supposedly left you aghast in the first place. You're free to be as vile as you like if you have the right victim.
I wanted to say, "You know, I was attending secret transvestite dances in Chicago while you were learning the alphabet, honey, so cut me some slack..." I kept trying to disengage from it, yet kept being drawn back, to face this howl of disapproval. I finally leapt up, fled downstairs, and caught most of the first half of the Bulls game. The Bulls dominated, of course.
At halftime I was back at my computer. The more I looked at the fireworks on Twitter, the more I recognized the pattern. This is what you get from insular groups—motorcycle riders, gun fanatics, sex workers—who are so used to trading pieties among each other, they forget how to deal with outsiders. They see themselves as besieged. Everybody outside the wall is either a friend or an enemy, a zero or a one. Thus, if I make a statement that seems just a dry, factual rendition of reality—riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous; so is carrying a loaded pistol on your hip; prostitutes are mostly degraded victims—expressing that thought flips the switch in their heads, their targeting systems boot up and lock on you, and they automatically blast away. Piling on, flooding the zone, rushing with a snarl down the hillside, clubs raised over their heads, is their mob-mentality response to anything perceived as an insult.
Eventually I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and their corrosive bile. I started just blocking everybody who commented on Twitter—the examples I gave are actually the mild ones, the ones I didn't block, because the worst ones are gone. When that was too much had the presence of mind to ignore the thing and head downstairs for the fourth quarter—I missed the third trading quips with harlots—where my wife had prepared some peppermint tea.
That helped. Peppermint tea always helps.
The Bulls crushed the Bucks. I came back upstairs, refreshed and determined to extract myself. Consider the source. I looked at the bios of the people writing in. You need a glossary. "Sex-pos Feminist, Bi, Ply, Libsoc, Agorist..."etc. from Wellington, New Zealand. ("Libsoc" is libertarian social philosophy, Agorism is a kind of utopianism where society is based on voluntary exchanges). "Genderfluid Feminist Dominatrix EXTREME MISANDRIST" (hater of men. Well knock me over with a feather. I had a hunch, but still looked it up, to be sure).
You have to marvel at that. "EXTREME MISANDRIST." In all caps. Because a plain old lower case misandrist who merely hates men moderately doesn't do the trick. That took an edge off the criticisms. To be honest, there is something so heartbreaking, it's almost sweet, advertising your own bigotry in your bio and then caterwauling that people aren't treating you fairly. It's like the guy who complained that a supermarket bakery was discriminating against him because it wouldn't put his son's name, "Adolf Hitler," on his birthday cake. Well boo-hoo pal, maybe you should have thought of that before you got into the hating business.
It would seem too obvious an irony in fiction, which is why I so love journalism. You can't make this stuff up. A reminder that even marginalized groups can be haters—especially marginalized groups; sometimes, it's all they've got.
You can't be hurt by that, I kept telling myself. You can't. At least you shouldn't. Because this isn't about you, this fire hose of on-line antipathy. They may have your name, and a few dusty facts they grabbed off Google. But they don't know you, don't know what they're talking about. They're just taking the common dodge of using what they consider their victim status to be bullies. And yet — almost touchingly — they somehow expect respect for it in return. How's that workin' for you guys, as a life strategy? Make many friends that way?
Enough. There's no winning, just stopping. The tragic part is, they have a point somewhere. I see that through the haze. I'm not the Welcome Wagon for banning sex work. When not channeling the attorney general, I'm pretty open to any stab at fixing intractable social problems like prostitution. If the goal is to reduce the harm, as with drugs ("Foxxie! He's comparing us to drug dealers again!"), then the solution seems a kind of quasi-legalization that kills the secondary market. If Scandinavia can cut heroin use by giving the drug away for free, under controlled settings, maybe making prostitution legal, for the prostitutes, while keeping being a pimp or a madam illegal, would help. It seems to work in Sweden. Maybe instead of banning brothels, the government should run them.
Or maybe not. Given how terrorized and abused prostitutes often are, how they'll testify that the man who beats them and takes all their money is in fact merely their boyfriend, not their pimp, this is an area where glib solutions should be viewed skeptically.
Enough. Shutting up is an art form, one that requires practice. I'm bad at it, but I'm trying to be better. I don't understand people who live online, endlessly sparring with others who disagree. Not my idea of fun. Which is why I'm glad I call the shots, and can move on from their world, at a quickstep, while they're stuck there. Though to be candid, I'm glad for this episode, because it taught me, not only what agorism is, and how to crank up the filter on my Twitter Interactions feed, but also the heretofore unimagined notion that some women will claim that being a prostitute is the fulfillment of their childhood dreams (pride is the last possession of those with nothing, and the more abject a person's situation, the more they insist on elevating themselves. I try to remember that when some debased soul is glorying themselves over me). It also reminded me of the importance of walking away and waiting for the storm to pass.
None of the women who claimed that prostitution was their childhood ambition took me up on my request that they write in at length, explaining that journey. "Someday mum, I'm going to blow strange men in cars, just like you..." I kept asking my Twitter correspondents, if you have a point to make, why not write to me directly and make it fully instead of getting me in their crosshairs and squeezing off 140-character bursts? Only one, Dan Savage's dominatrix pal, who wrote a column for Seattle's The Stranger for many years, actually did. This post is already too long, and this letter makes it longer—you might want to take a break and have some peppermint tea; it's revivifying—then return. But I asked for it, so I'm presenting her letter uncut and without comment, and you can judge for yourself. I think she makes some good points:
Dear Mister Steinberg,
Mistress Matisse |
First, some basic terminology. People who exchange sex - or sexy activity, if not actual penetrative sex - are sex workers. That’s a catch-all term that includes everyone. Categories break down from there: an escort, a massage worker, a street worker, a dominatrix, et cetera. Some people write it as one word: sexworkers, and as the Chicago Manual of Style hasn’t yet made a rule for this, either way is acceptable.
Those are all neutral terms. The word “hooker” is a slur, and so is “whore”. Prostitution is a crime, and calling someone a prostitute is making a statement about their legal status, so unless one is talking about a legal situation, it’s better to avoid that word. Those are the terms I’ll be using in talking to you, and that’s how sex worker activists will speak of us in any further reading you may do.
Background: There is a worldwide sex worker rights movement underway. It’s been going since the ‘80’s really, but it’s been moving in higher gear for about the last decade. In the US, what we want is: any nonviolent and non-coercive exchange of sex/sexy activity for money to not be a criminal offense. Basically, if a sexual act would not be illegal if no money changed hands, then simply adding money to the situation should not transform it into a crime. We have a long way to go in achieving that goal here - America is the last Westernized nation that arrests a LOT of people for nothing more than offering to have sex for money. Not pimps, not traffickers, the actual sex workers themselves. Most of them are women, most of them are poor, and a lot of them are people of color. Some of them go to prison for it, and all of them are seriously harmed by the experience of being harassed by police and arrested. Laws against sex work are unjust and unfair, and we want that to change.
There is more to sex worker’s rights than simply not being arrested. But in the US, that’s the biggest hurdle to overcome. What American sex workers specifically want is: Decriminalization. That means that all laws making the offering/purchasing of sex for money a criminal offense are abolished. An example of decriminalized sex work would be the systems used in New Zealand and parts of Australia, where sex workers can work independently or in a brothel, under reasonable business regulations.
Decriminalization is different from Legalization. An example of legalized sex work would be the counties in the state of Nevada where there are a few licensed brothels. The state imposes very strict regulations, not comparable to any other industry, on the daily lives and personal behavior of women who work in the brothels. Women have little control over their surroundings, when they work, and how they meet with clients. They must pay a large part of their earnings, including tips, to the brothel, and they may not work anywhere except the brothel. They must live in the brothel full-time – they cannot work a shift and then go home. If they are not in the brothel, they are not permitted to be anywhere in the county, and are subject to arrest if they are. Sex worker activists do not favor legalization.
I have been a sex worker for over fifteen years. I am an activist for the rights of sex workers. As part of that, I would like to see a world where no one is forced to do sex work. That does happen sometimes, and it's bad. But forced sex work is not the huge and scary problem some people would like you think it is. It is not okay that it happens at all, but it simply does not happen NEARLY as often as anti-sex workers say it does. The pivotal fact: When lawmakers and anti-sex work activists say “sex trafficking” they mean ANY exchange of sex for money, even if it is between two adults and completely voluntary. Let me say that again, because I think it bears repeating. To an anti-trafficking activist, an adult person, fully in possession of her rational faculties and completely independent of anyone else’s influence, who chooses to exchange a sexual act for money equals: a sex trafficking victim.
I think this is deeply insulting to people who really are victimized. I think one should only use the work trafficked to mean a person who is truly being forced or coerced, or controlled by another person in a way that's harmful or exploitative. I also think it's unjust to invalidate the agency of an adult person. I own my body, and if I, as a consenting adult, choose to have sex with another consenting adult, the state should not have the right to say, "No, we don't approve of your reason for having sex, so we are declaring your act to be a crime and arresting you both." It does not matter if I decided to have sex because someone bought me dinner, or because they offered me a diamond ring, or if they offered me a hundred dollars. Further, no one should declare that I am a "victim" of anything without my consent. It is for the person who has had the experience to identify whether she/he was a victim of something or not. It’s wrong to impose a label on someone they did not choose for themselves.
Since about 2008, the state rhetoric about any act of sex for money has changed, and the state now defines all of it as "trafficking". That's happened for a variety of reasons, most of them to with the allocation of grant money and the erosion of civil liberties. There is a War On Sex Workers, much like there has been a War On Drugs. There is a system of restrictive ideas about what kind of behavior is socially acceptable, which have been woven into government policy and law, and there are a lot of people whose jobs and money and sense of power are all dependent on keeping that system in place. If there is no social panic about shadowy international crime rings and millions of women and children being abused in sensational ways, those people will lose power. That's why when you read scary headlines about “X Bazillion People Are Being Sex Trafficked", it does not necessarily mean the person is underage, or has been taken from one place to another, or is an undocumented immigrant, or is being forced or coerced into doing sex work against his/her wishes. (It also doesn't mean that anyone can actually see/find those supposed victims, since they are often pure invention.)
I think this is deeply insulting to people who really are victimized. I think one should only use the work trafficked to mean a person who is truly being forced or coerced, or controlled by another person in a way that's harmful or exploitative. I also think it's unjust to invalidate the agency of an adult person. I own my body, and if I, as a consenting adult, choose to have sex with another consenting adult, the state should not have the right to say, "No, we don't approve of your reason for having sex, so we are declaring your act to be a crime and arresting you both." It does not matter if I decided to have sex because someone bought me dinner, or because they offered me a diamond ring, or if they offered me a hundred dollars. Further, no one should declare that I am a "victim" of anything without my consent. It is for the person who has had the experience to identify whether she/he was a victim of something or not. It’s wrong to impose a label on someone they did not choose for themselves.
Since about 2008, the state rhetoric about any act of sex for money has changed, and the state now defines all of it as "trafficking". That's happened for a variety of reasons, most of them to with the allocation of grant money and the erosion of civil liberties. There is a War On Sex Workers, much like there has been a War On Drugs. There is a system of restrictive ideas about what kind of behavior is socially acceptable, which have been woven into government policy and law, and there are a lot of people whose jobs and money and sense of power are all dependent on keeping that system in place. If there is no social panic about shadowy international crime rings and millions of women and children being abused in sensational ways, those people will lose power. That's why when you read scary headlines about “X Bazillion People Are Being Sex Trafficked", it does not necessarily mean the person is underage, or has been taken from one place to another, or is an undocumented immigrant, or is being forced or coerced into doing sex work against his/her wishes. (It also doesn't mean that anyone can actually see/find those supposed victims, since they are often pure invention.)
People can be abused in systems of sex work - just as they can be abused in non-sex work forms of labor, and in all other social systems. But criminalization and stigmatization of all sex work is not the right answer. People are abused in the social institution of marriage, too. But we do not outlaw marriage and arrest anyone who says, "I do." People are raped, but we do not respond to that fact by outlawing all consensual sex. On a moral level, we do not want anyone to be harmed. But when it comes to allocating public resources to combat that, the current system does not work. Some of the systems that are ostensibly used to "help" people are not what those people themselves want, and may actually cause even more harm. It is not useful to treat a very wide spectrum of people around the world as if they were all the same one-dimensional “victim”, and neither is it wise to try to condense this multifaceted issue into a few bits of bumper-sticker wisdom.
To that end, this is the reading that I recommend to get a fuller understanding of the challenges of helping those who need help, without criminalizing, stigmatizing and generally imposing a very binary victim/criminal worldview onto a large and diverse set of people.
A good place to start: "The War On Sex Workers", by Melissa Gira Grant: http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/21/the-war-on-sex-workers
And this, also by Melissa Gira Grant: "What the New York Times (and France) Got Wrong About Prostitution" http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/12/sex_work_laws_the_new_york_times_praises_france_s_new_legislation_and_gets.html
An excellent piece by Maggie McNeil debunking false statistics on sex work and trafficking: "Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics" http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/
If you just read those three pieces, you’ll have some idea of where we are coming from and what we are fighting against. I can recommend LOTS of further reading if you want it, from big-picture pieces to really granular stuff. There is a lot of good work happening, and good things being said. Ask me for any sort of information about sex worker rights, and I’ll happily direct you to it.
But the best way I can sum it all up is: listen to the sex workers themselves. Not the state, not rescue organizations – the people who do sex work and who suffer under unjust laws. We have voices and we know what we want. We say “Nothing ABOUT us WITHOUT us”, and that’s what we are fighting for.
Sincerely,
Matisse