Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

[Quick hi to everyone from the 5th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy, hosted by Amber Rhea. —fl]

So. Back in the late 1970s in my home town a woman I knew vaguely as a customer at one of the bars I worked at wound up having what by all accounts including hers began as consensual sex with a bunch of firefighters at the nearby university-area fire station. After she’d had sex with fourteen, though, she wanted to stop. Instead the two or three remaining firefighters forced her to continue till they’d had “their turns.”

A lot of area locals were surprised, and even angry, when she had the gall to charge those last firefighters with rape and the others with helping them hold her down. After all she was Teh Bhig Slut for having sex with any of them so what difference did a few more make? Just because she didn’t want to anymore? People were even more surprised when prosecutors brought charges in the case.

That was the first time I heard the phrase “no means no” used in a feminist context and even in 1978 or 1979 I only had to hear it that once go get it. There was an even bigger lesson though, and it was one people had a harder time learning: rights, rules, and respect don’t evaporate when someone has Teh Sex, even if you don’t approve of the way she or he chooses to do it.

I mention this because Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors highlights a problem with the criminalization of sex work with the following quote from a New York Times

Jodi Michelle Link, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in sex and vice crimes, said prosecuting Mr. Elms for his connection to The Erotic Review could be difficult for free speech reasons. She also said that the prostitutes who said they had been asked by Mr. Elms for sexual favors would have trouble making a criminal case against him because they could simply choose not to participate on his site.

...

Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said.

Read the quote, and Bartow’s commentary in context here.

Sound familiar? Mr. Elm seems to have been getting away with straight up sexual harassment of both the hostile-workplace and quid pro quo varieties. But because everyone including the D.A. seem maximally titillated by the prostitution angle the reality of what happened to that sex worker goes by the wayside. Because, after all, how can a prostitute ever be sexually harassed? It’s her job to be harassed, her whole job is quid pro quo. So big whup, right?

But that’s the same mentality that led people to imagine that a woman who’s said yes to 14 men gives up any right to say no to the 15th, 16th, or 17th. It’s the same mentality that lets an asshole judge (Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni, to be exact) say gang-raping a prostitute is just “theft of services” and dismiss all other charges.

In the real world, however, sex workers (trafficked and non-trafficked) get put over the barrel like that all the time. And not to put too fine a point on it but it’s the “being over the barrel” part, not the “being a sex worker” that makes prostitutes unreliable witnesses. If your job is already illegal how much can you afford to disclose before (at least in the witness’s internal deliberations) you put yourself in legal jeopardy?

If the businesses or service providors Elms’s site reviewed were legal, don’t you think victims of harassment and extortion (let along what sounds like kidnapping and use firearm-aggravated criminal sexual assault) would have been taken more seriously? Of course!

I wouldn’t expect a vice-squad prosecutor to understand the nuances, nor to be able to untangle the chain of employment, nor to press the definition of “workplace” for the civil offense of sexual harassment.** but I bet a halfway competent employment-rights attorney could make hay out of this guy Elms.

The problem is that, once again, people get distracted and/or titillated by the “sex” part of “sex work” and therefore miss a lot of opportunities to really land hard on abusers.

[** That’s not a knock on District Attorney Link, by the way. I wouldn’t expect a prosecutor assigned to homicide cases to untangle securities fraud either. —fl]