Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Amanda Brooks of Bound, Not Gagged posts the story of a 40-year-old business owner and mother of three who was arrested while moonlighting as an escort. One needn’t favor legalization of sex work (as I do) to appreciate either her story or the following, really fucking critical point:

When I called the police after being beaten by my first husband, they refused to protect me. In fact, they blamed me for his drinking and womanizing. Even after the doctors told the cops that I was one blow from having my skull shattered, they blamed me. When I was brutally raped on a date rape, kicking and screaming, and went to the police, they did nothing. They blamed me because I’d been drinking. And, you know, for being female. Great. So now I’m happily making money, stimulating both the economy and the gentlemen of the area, and here they are banging down my door. Like the Gestapo. They told me they were “protecting” me. From what? As an escort, I could afford condoms, blood screens, regular medical checks. Gentlemen who are willing to pay for sex are, in my experience, much more respectful than the ones who expect it for free. The ones who raped and battered me were getting free sex. The ones who paid, were kind and respectful.

She said it here.

Point #1: the police (or, more correctly, society and its instructions to and constraints on police) aren’t particularly effective at protecting women from assault, abuse, rape, or battery. Consequently anyone who argues they’re trying to “protect” the sex workers they rescue is a liar.

Point #2: Considering the conservative bona fides of your average anti-prostitution activist, her words about the differences between men who pay for sex and the men who expect it for free ought to resonate with Über-conservative silverback Newt Gingrich’s repeated point that humans have an astonishing tendency to abuse and neglect that which they don’t pay for. I happen to believe Gingrich is mostly batshit insane, but that shouldn’t be a problem for conservatives. The point remains, though, that in the eyes of their abusers there really doesn’t appear to be much more consideration, nor less resentment, of sex workers who charge men for money, and “ordinary” sex-partners who don’t.

Point #3: How exactly is it the case that notifying a sex worker’s employer (who, fortunately in this case, was also her daylight-business partner) “protecting” her? The common reaction for employers (all too common!) is to find cause to fire the sex worker, with the result that her odds of leaving sex work go down. And her odds of having to return to sex work go up.

Point #4: None of this implies that all sex workers are hearty, happy self-determined entrepreneurs. Many are not. Many, in fact, not only don’t enjoy their work but are trapped either by circumstance, conscription, or outright coercion! It’s not exactly clear to me, however, how making their work or even their customers illegal improves anyone’s odds of getting out or moving on. Based on conversations with individuals who’ve made poor choices in the past, it’s not clear to me at all how an arrest record, let alone a conviction record, let alone a jail record, let alone public record of one’s activities, makes any form of employment other than either marginal/minimum-wage or criminal ones possible.

Point #5: If society and/or the police really were interested in protecting sex workers they’re fucking protect sex workers instead of, well, policing them. Instead of arresting them they’d let sex workers put their numbers in speed dial. Instead of arresting them they’d establish clear relationships with sex workers and sex-worker alliances to instead police of the very-large number of people who currently get away with raping, robbing, roughing up, and murdering sex workers (and, cough, non-sex workers.)

Point #6: As I said above, you don’t have to like prostitution to see the arguably-intractable problems with current policies regarding its legality.

Wow, the twittersphere was just all aflutter about some college student asking the President if he’d considered legalizing prostitution and/or drugs as a way to stimulate the economy. That was, what, three days ago and it’s still getting retweeted.

Anyway, I thought Matthew Yglesias put the reaction nicely in perspective (emphasis mine.)

I think it’s obvious you can’t end the recession by legalizing prostitution and drugs. But at the same time, it should also be obvious that there are real economic costs associated with the prohibition of these activities and politicians ought to actually justify asking people to bare those costs. This is particularly pressing because the laws in question are so selectively enforced. Elliot Spitzer had his political career derailed by prostitution, but he’s not in jail. Does Obama think the world would be a better place if Spitzer were serving hard time? What about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana? For that matter, does Obama think the world would be a better place if he’d been caught using drugs back in the day and sent to jail?

Presumably not. But to have laws on the books that the national elite fully intends never to apply to themselves or their families is ridiculous. I don’t want to see hookers and blow available for sale at the corner store, but there’s enormous scope for the reform of our policy in this area.

He said it here.

That’s a classic example of what I called (beginning in the days before Twitter) a twits vs substance problem. It’s not that drugs or prostitution is right or wrong (you can still be a twit about something that’s completely legal… see Britney Spears 24-hour marriage, for instance.) It’s that generally speaking the tut-tutting is done by people who don’t think the item in question is all that serious on the nominal behalf of… other people who also don’t take it terribly seriously in their own lives.

It’s like what Paul Graham says in Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age about swearing: grownups swear around each other but pretend not to in front of children; meanwhile children swear around each other but pretend not to in front of adults.

Speaking for myself I don’t think it would be a good thing if Barack Obama had gone to jail for smoking marijuana or whatever when he was a young man. I don’t even think it would be a good thing if Sen. Vitter was jailed for paying sex workers to make him wear diapers. (I don’t think he should be a United States Senator, at all, but that’s not why.)

Meanwhile, though, as Yglesias says, the race to publicly pretend to be maximally concerned makes it very difficult to be meaningfully concerned, which in turn makes it very difficult to enact and enforce meaningful policies.

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.

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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.