What Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea said

And you wonder why I’m so passionate about decriminalization of prostitution and destigmatization of all sex work? You wonder why I get such a stick up my ass about self-identified feminists who don’t support decrim? (Yes, there are plenty who don’t support it, and that fact absolutely boggles my mind.)

A sex worker who had advertised on Craigslist was murdered in Boston two days ago.

She said it here here.

The first reports to come out said the woman was a massage therapist doing outcalls to a local hotel. Which isn’t that uncommon for hotels, at least in resort towns and areas where licensed massage practitioners have an active presence. Often hotels have arrangements with massage therapists where they offer the service, the hotel books them, arranges the fees, often even automatically adding the fees to the guest’s bill. The hotel usually takes a cut… or, more accurately depending on the hotel, charges the customer extra. The hotel may also suggest an appropriate amount that the customer should tip their body worker.

And so it would be very unusual for a massage therapist to be attacked, let alone murdered, by a customer in a hotel. Not unheard of — it is a risk for LMTs who do either in- or out-call work. But in part because the work tends to be aboveboard the risks are pretty low.

Now it’s sounding more like the victim was a sex worker. Who may or may not have listed herself as a massage therapist. But sex work is illegal. And because hotels don’t book sex workers the way they book body workers, it sounds like the victim made her arrangements with her assailant independently. And because sex work is illegal her case is complicated because it would have been illegal for her, and her customer though less so, to record any details of her appointments. A fact her assailant must have known he (it’s almost certainly a he) could take advantage of. And did.

And in that respect he was just like every other predator who targets sex workers.

One bitter irony here, of course, is that because prostitution is illegal, sex workers who work with pimps are marginally safer than those who, as the victim appears to have been, work independently. The irony being that if sex work was like massage therapy, i.e. legal, there would be no need for secrecy or pimps to insure her safety.

Say what one will about sex work (and I’ll say I’m not crazy about the way it’s so often constructed as “paying her to leave” after sex), keeping it illegal exacts far more toll on those who do it than would legalizing it.