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From CBS News Early Show website, about alleged Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell. (Emphasis mine.)

[Early Show host Harry] Smith read a statement from a woman who escaped from Sowell’s house after, the woman says, Sowell started to try to choke her. The woman said Sowell remarked, “You’re just another crack (blank) from the street. No one will know if you’re missing.“

Read the quote in context here.

What pisses me off is he was right. Smith interviews the mother of a woman, Tanya Charmichael, who disappeared from Sowell’s neighborhood a year ago. When she tried to report her daughter missing she says police joked that “Oh, go home, she’ll show up by Christmas, after the drugs are all gone.” Oh, and refused to take the report.

I don’t know if there’s much we can do about substance dependency problems, which Charmichael evidently had. And I don’t know if we can do much about whatever it is that makes people become serial killers either. And I don’t know if maybe another 3,000 years of experimentation with law enforcement might finally make prostitution go away.

What I do know, though, is that there’s a class of people — street or subsistence prostitutes — that’s extraordinarily vulnerable to predation because a) nobody cares but also b) even though “nobody cares,” the work they do is still illegal and so c) they are obliged to avoid, lie to, and generally invite the contempt of the people who would most be likely to protect them.

I talk a lot about legalizing prostitution, not because I think it’s hunky-dory. I don’t. In particular, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I believe it reinforces the idea of male sexual scarcity and heterosexuality as inherently transactional, and those are enormously destructive not only to women but to heterosexual men.

Instead I talk about legalizing it because here in the Pacific Northwest, including locations just a mile or so from my house, serial killers are known to have gathered and murdered something like four hundred human beings since the 1980s. And nearly all of them were street/subsistance prostitutes who were chosen expressly because their killers knew of, and typically shared, society and law-enforcement’s distain for them.

So when I talk about legalizing prostitution, again, it’s not because I think it’s just hunky-dory. It’s because I think it’s the only way to start transforming society’s relationship with an extraordinarily vulnerable population… and to transform that population’s relationship with society.

(Via Google Alerts on the term “serial killer”)

In her clear, concise argument in favor of legalizing prostitution Holly of The Pervocracy also said

I think a lot of objections to prostitution are really objections to capitalism. I’ve never sold my ass, but I sell my body five days a week—I do physical things I don’t enjoy and say things I don’t mean because I need the money to live. I risk violent assault and exposure to diseases at my job. I have to touch and be nice to strangers off the street with no right to refuse unpleasant ones. The vast majority of the money I take in is kept by my employer.

But I provide a socially valuable and economically productive service, and I’m in the same boat with most anybody with a job. (How I differ from hookers, other than the obvious: I have the ability to call the cops, to file an L&I claim, and to sue my employer. And because my employer knows this they provide safety systems. Legalization would save lives, people.) Doing un-fun things to meet survival needs is a condition of life outside the Garden of Eden, and I’m not convinced that selling sex is a uniquely horrible way of doing that.

She said it here.

While I agree with her overall argument (if you don’t then sorry, you’ve got blood on your hands) I don’t agree with her claim the real objection is to capitalism and not to sex.

Not least because the narratives around prostitution are so highly gendered. To hear most people talk you’d think nearly all prostitutes are women. Instead the only prostitutes activists generally discuss are women prostitutes. For most, including far too many people who imagine themselves feminist, what happens to gay male and, especially, trans prostitutes is irrelevant and immaterial to their little universes. Except, of course, to the extent their opinions of (almost exclusively) male customers are confirmed.

Instead most objections occur in the context of the “no-sex” class paradigm where it’s assumed that women naturally aren’t, and therefore mustn’t be, sexual. And, with that contradictory “aren’t and therefore shouldn’t be” construction (see also Rule #1) people take the position that women in prostitution are a) fragile, forced, feminine flowers and b) skulking trash who deserve what’s coming to them. Oh, unless they’re gay or trans in which case c) who cares what happens to the dirty faggots and women-wannabes.

Anyway, that reason and, I think, only that is why Holly’s ambulance/EMT work is considered different despite all the overt similarities. And thus I think it’s why the main objection is about the sex and not labor.

—-

Doh! Actually I realize it’s not an issue of sex, it’s an issue of gender! People who buy the patriarchal frame that women are essentially non-sexual will, of course, see sex work as an abuse of the expected women-use-sex-for-leverage/men-use-leverage-for-sex paradigm. More contemporary feminists, of course, see that paradigm itself as a abhorrent.

That doesn’t mean that sex work is all hunky dory or that we can all just take our clothes of and run naked. The dominant paradigm is, well, dominant. Especially among men who, as a (sex) class seem to be roughly 40 years behind the curve and thus even more mired in the transactional model of sex. (As I’ve mentioned if not all sex-workers are female, virtually all customers are male.) Until that changes, one way or another, and until the idea that sex is inevitably transactional is turned around, certain elements of sex work will remain problematic.

Comic by Modern Hooker. Used with permission from the artist.

I love this comic. It just says what ought to be official policy. If, and only if, sex-work isn’t going to go away using all the methods available of course… oh wait! Making it illegal doesn’t seem to make it safe. In fact, instead, since sex-workers can’t call the police, or even solicit orders from the chief of police, or even collaborate on street safety without risking running afoul of RICO anti-racketeering statutes, or even having _all their property summarily confiscated if they show up on police radar at all.

Another image, though, from her “borrow” page

Image by Modern Hooker. Appears to be freely postable.

Her blog over at Wordpress is pretty sharp too.

Also via Research Blogging, Christie Lynn of Observations of a Nerd says neither doh! both the “but she looked 18” and “but I was too drunk to tell” defenses against statutory rape are bogus.

Many accused of statutory rape claim two things – 1) that the girl consented and 2) that they thought she was older. The first is unimportant – if the girl is underage, it’s still rape. But in the US, there is a special defense clause which allows defendents leiniency if there is reasonable evidence they “mistook” a younger girl for one of consenting age. Many times lawyers claim that a girl’s makeup or guy’s consumption of alcohol impaired the offender’s judgement of her age. As an excuse, it’s pretty common among men charged with all varieties of sex with a minor. Well, researchers wanted to see if those factors really had an effect on how men (and women) estimated a girl’s age. The results are clear: alcohol had no effect on a man’s estimate of a girl’s age, and makeup had little.

Read the quote in context here.

There are some half-hearted attempts to but… but… but… from her commenters but overall the conclusion is the more “real world” you make the tests (adding voice or conversation, for instance) the less likely it becomes to legitimately mistake a child for an adult.

And does this have bearing on anything? Why yes, I believe it does!

The study Lynn based her post on acknowledged a fairly consistent age overestimation of roughly two and a half years. Which might make the error plausible for older underage sex workers. But… given that a) ignorance of the law is no excuse and b) a generally accepted age of first-entry into sex work is closer to 13 than 15.5 I’m feel even more attached to my strong preference for prosecuting customers of prostituted children and/or child prostitutes for child sex crimes instead of the far more lenient laws intended to police hiring sex-working adults. (Obviously I think hiring, or being, a non-coerced adult sex worker shouldn’t be a crime at all. Hiring a child, however, especially in the face of the finding Lynn reports, ought to be prosecuted with chilling ruthlessness.)