Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

When you hear someone named Chomphoonut Dongird was sentenced to four years for pimping trafficked young women you’d probably want to check whether the person in question was a man or woman before posting the story on your allegedly-reputable wire service. But not if you were the Associated Press, which a) wants to shake down or sue us disreputable bloggers for linking to their stories and b) just arbitrarily assumed last month that Dongrid is a man.

She’s not. A pimp, yes, and a classic extortionist, false-pretenses sex-trafficker to boot yes…

At least two of the women were forced to perform sex acts on customers to make extra money, which was garnisheed by Dongird to pay for their immigration, made possible by sham marriages to American men who were paid thousands to pose as their husbands.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ye-Ting Woo said the women were made to work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for virtually no pay. And Dongird scared them into staying hidden indoors lest they be discovered by immigration authorities.

Source: Seattle Times

But not a man.

(Via The Slog)

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And just to be clear, it doesn’t matter that the women she contacted in Thailand may have already been sex workers, as is often the case. What matters is that she coerced them to work for her. And, exploiting U.S. immigration law as well as anti-prostitution laws, she used fear of immigration authorities to intimidate her victims.

Late last week there was a list circulating in libertarian circles about illegal markets that would stimulate the economy if they were legalized. The items were… predictably libertarian: gambling, drugs, immigration, and the handful of sex-work tasks (gay prostitution in Nevada, prostitution everywhere else) that aren’t or aren’t yet legal. Matthew Yglesias says he might support some of the proposals but doesn’t think they’d have the effect economic-oriented advocates of legalization claim. (Emphasis his.)

With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. In fact my instinct would be that given the extraordinary margin between the real cost of drug production and black-market prices, legalization would strongly contract their component of real GDP. (Ear nose and throat doctors pay $7/gram for cocaine; even eye-popping cannabis bud costs only dollars a pound to grow.) That’s actually a good thing: the biggest drug dealers on the planet are convenience-store clerks dispensing tobacco and alcohol but, surprisingly, none of them can afford Glock bullets let alone Glocks, few of them can afford car fresheners let alone cars, and as far as I know no child, anywhere, past maybe age 4 sees 7-11 clerks as glamorous, romantic, let alone emulatable role models. Drug-dealing themes are a major component of popular media. Convenience-store clerks have two movies Clerks and Clerks II. (But… but… even then the drug dealers in the two Clerks movies, Jay and Silent Bob have four movies about them!) But I digress…

I can’t be sure how much legalizing the rest of adult sex work would change the economics, but like Yglesias I think it would mostly shift numbers from the off-the-books ledger to on-the-books. Otherwise? On the one hand I’d imagine pimping would evaporate — legal bodyworkers like massage therapists and chiropractors somehow manage to stay healthy, wealthy and wise without them. And without the “opportunity cost” of arrest and jail time, not to mention the threats of unreportable rape, robbery, assault, murder, and police shakedowns sex workers could change when and how often such work was performed and therefore possibly what they would charge and/or what customers would be willing to pay. Again, though, it seems pointless to speculate without sounding like a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome.

But really, in the case of both drugs and sex work, my interest isn’t really in the direct economics at all but the potential for risk and harm reduction: if a drug habit cost only dollars a day instead of tens or hundreds the vast amounts of collateral losses of life, property, and security would be mitigated, and if a drug habit cost only dollars a day gangs would have very little incentive to have turf wars period let alone turf wars over schools and parks. Similarly if sex work was legitimized there would be diminished opportunities for pimps, serial killers, corrupt cops, and whatever fraction of customers are dishonest or violent to abuse sex workers. Oh yeah, and to put the two together, to the extent that pimps and traffickers actually do use addictive drugs to enthrall involuntary sex workers, the availability of legal drugs at dollars a day would undercut that little avenue as well.

And to touch briefly on the other mainstream libertarian issue, as researcher and author Laura Agustín says over and over international and national migrants often accept sex work when they might ordinarily not because a) social and economic opportunities at home are so bleak the work seems worth it compared to the alternative of staying home b) because they migrate without documentation they have few opportunities for other employment, also c) once they become illegal migrants they’re often at the mercy of the same pimps, criminal customers, corrupt cops, and twilight conditions that make life so perilous for illegal domestic sex workers.

My points being, then, that a) regardless of economic arguments drugs, sex work, and immigration are socially entangled and b) our decisions to keep them illegal keep increase that entanglement and keep the activities closeted in ways that obstruct use of social as opposed to law-enforcement policies.

The Las Vegas Courtesan, who got arrested (for “trespassing”) the last month has some pointed remarks about pimps and people who work for them

Well I am up later than I thought I would be tonight because I just can’t get some things out of my head that were being said in jail between girls who have pimps and how they “manage” them. It made me nauseated and I felt a little bit dumber being surrounded by these girls and their horrible logic.

...

There were about 3 or 4 girls that would go back and forth with each other and how their pimp was “so great” in this way and “my man takes care of me” this other way that it was nauseating. These girls had been arrested for prostitution and trespassing so many times just in the last month my jaw hit the floor. One girl had gotten out only 2 days before and another had been arrested 20 times in the past YEAR. These girls don’t care what it takes to go in and get the money in every casino, barred or not, so long as they make their man happy. They refuse to do escort services since that is giving their money up to someone else (huh? Great logic there) and don’t care to be arrested because it’s all part of the “game”. They clog up the court systems so bad with their cases, but I am sure they are making a lawyer happy somewhere.

...

The final thing that made me so sad was how robbing a customer (I don’t mean saying you’re going to do one thing like a blow job but end up only giving them a hand job) was part of how much money they brought in. It was essential to steal or else their totals weren’t as high to impress their pimp. ... I wish there was some sort of jail group that could help these girls but lets face it, our court and prison system sucks. You can be a prostitute and do it the right way like I try, or you can do it the wrong way like these girls. I just wish I wouldn’t get punished in the court of law and treated like I was one of these ladies.

She said it here.

Levitt and Venkatesh reported (pdf) that in Chicago prostitutes who worked for pimps reported fewer arrests than those who worked without them. This doesn’t sound much like a universal truth.

They also said that Chicago (street) prostitutes who worked for pimps also reported higher earnings than independent prostitutes, but see LVC’s post…

These girls say they are making between $700 on a bad night and $3000 on a good night (which is probably true for most girls in Vegas) in one part of their conversation and then saying that their guy gets everything but their daily allowance is around $40 on average. One girl (who they considered a “spoiled bitch”) gets between $100-$200 a day and $500 whenever she wants to go shopping for herself. Their math was amazing. One common thing they all boasted was how the guy pays the bills, pays the rent, and for their car like it was so unbelievably sweet of him to do. Like it didn’t hit them that it was their money paying for the necessary things you need in life and they could easily do it for themselves without some threat of the guy beating them and being more normal.

So… working with a pimp you… bring home no more money but the money you do bring home goes to the pimp? Who then spends part of it to support you and the rest on… what? Lawyers? Bail? A question, then, for Levitt and Venkatesh would be whether the pimped prostitutes were talking about gross income or what they themselves wound up with at the end of the day.

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Quick thought though, based on the conversations LVC recounts: The other day on the radio I heard two men talking about… um, not sure what… but one of them said “...it’s kind of like marrying a rich girl. Sure it’s nice but after a while you feel like you have to do something to prove you can earn your own living.” And the other guy unselfconsciously and non-ironically laughed in agreement. And it left me wondering if something like the opposite isn’t going on there. Because since it sounds like it’s perfectly possible to do the same job minus the pimp as with one — with the same income plus certainly no greater risk of arrests. And whatever their objective relationship with their pimps their discourse implied they believed it was discretionary and even advantageous. So… what’s in it for them? I mean, assuming similar levels of unselfconsciousness and non-irony as the men on the radio is there some basic discomfort with seeing one’s self as the primary breadwinner in a relationship when you’ve grown up thinking men are “supposed” to do that?

Because, I mean, I can see what’s in it for the pimps — control, money, and maybe inter-peer-group status. (I can see also, based on the radio guy’s attitude towards dependency, that being objectively dependent on someone else’s income might lead to egregious “othering” leading to neglect and abuse of the person they’re dependent on.) But if, as they seem to think, and as LVC also implies, the women she shared a holding cell with could work without pimps then…

Ok, ok, I’m not being very coherent about this but… it just isn’t making sense to me. I’m just wondering what’s in it for them? Because if they don’t think they need help then no amount of wanting to help is going to work.

And of course if their prostitution-related arrests and convictions remain on their records it’ll be even harder to help them if they ever change their minds about needing it.

Cara of Feministe says

“In light of the policy of the Department of Justice with respect to prostitution offenses and the longstanding practice of this office, as well as Mr. Spitzer’s acceptance of responsibility for his conduct, we have concluded that the public interest would not be further advanced by filing criminal charges in this matter,” Garcia said.

Right, because that’s how we often treat the women who work as prostitutes, isn’t it? They accept “responsibility” and law enforcement decides to just let it go, because how does it serve the public interest to prosecute women and humiliate them openly in a society that condemns their work, especially when they’re very often only doing the job because they’re desperate for money, or have even been forced or coerced?

Oh no, wait, actually Eliot Spitzer himself was well-known for prosecuting those running prostitution services and working for them, but not the clients.

Read what else she said here.

I still think one of the biggest obstacles to legalization of prostitution is that customer anonymity — the occasional very rare arrest here and there notwithstanding — is better protected.

Which by the way has to be one of the weirdest elements of prostitution in its current social construction.

I mean consider: if prostitution is legal then there’s nothing wrong with hiring a prostitute*. And if there’s nothing wrong with it there’s nothing to be ashamed of. And if there’s nothing to be ashamed of then there are no additional consequences for having it learned you hire prostitutes**.

And yet customers far more than sex-workers seem reluctant, embarrassed, or even ashamed to have their activities known.

Now, right about now your mouse pointer is probably hovering over the “comment” link… or maybe the “close window” one. But chill for a minute, I promise there’s a non-“moralizing” point to this.

Whether or not one should feel reluctant, embarrassed, ashamed, or even (especially?) afraid to be known as a customer the vast, vast majority is! And rather than try and unwind why let’s just accept that it is that way… heck, let’s be generous and say people feel that way not for any reason but for every reason. They just do.

Oh, just one more stop and I’ll get to the point: Elliot Spitzer faces no meaningful legal penalties for hiring prostitutes. Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) faced no legal penalties***. Heck, for some reason even customer of pimps who pay to have sex with minor children evidently face no legal penalties! Heck, Spitzer and Vitter remain married and Vitter is still a Senator in good standing with both his party and, evidently, his constituency so there aren’t even meaningful social, domestic, or employment penalties.

So. If there’s a) stigma associated with being a customer but b) no meaningful legal consequences if you’re caught then what’s going to make you feel more comfortable that you’ll never be outed: legal prostitution where the workers one hires have nothing to worry about or illegal prostitution where the workers you hire risk legal consequences far, far higher than you do****?

Just my way of saying one shouldn’t assume that none of 123,508 voters who opposed Proposition K were customers, or that all who voted for it were.

[* Unless they’re involuntarily trafficked or pimped, in which case there’s something very wrong. But then one never hires a conscript for sex, one pays the conscripts pimp or trafficker who lets you rape them. —fl]

[** Obviously there might be ordinary consequences but those can arise any time, for instance, one partner in a personal or business relationship spends non-discretionary joint earnings on any activity without consulting the other partner. —fl]

[*** The operator of the escort service Vitter used, Debora Jean Palfry, should have been so lucky — she took her own life after being sentenced to 55 years in prison. I’m not saying there are no meaningful consequences, just there are none for customers. —fl]

[**** Hmmm… another reason so many customers seem so barkingly casual about paying pimps and traffickers for sex with involuntary conscripts? Funny what a powerful force shame can be, eh? —fl]