Audacia Ray calls out a genuinely egregious form of discrimination against a former prostitute based on a Louisiana state law from... the year 1806!

The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status as a sex offender stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.” Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution

Source: Waking Vixen

This is a form of reflex prosecutorial piling on that's just inexcusable. In what conceivable universe is a prostitute who performs fellatio a registerable sex offender in a way that a prostitute who "merely" performs intercourse isn't?  Or that a prostitute's customer isn't.  My personal and 100% correct opinion is of course that a prostitute is never a registerable sex offender and, for that matter, shouldn't be considered a criminal at all.   And while there's a bit more division in the ranks over this, with one interesting exception it's also my opinion that simply being a prostitute's customer should never be considered either a sex offender or a criminal either.

The exception, of course, is when the customer engages in behavior that would normally get them charged as a criminal or sex offender.  But, in today's... morally conflicted environment is considered boys-will-be-boys, hearty-fellow-well-done when a customer does it.

In other words, when customer has paid for sexual activity with someone who through age or coercion couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily be considered a freely consenting adult.  So paying for sex with a trafficked person?  If you weren't paying it would be rape, and thus a registrable sexual offense -- therefore if you get caught paying for it you should go on a sex-offender registry as well.  Same with sex with minors.

I happen to think it's appalling that prosecutors or judges in Louisiana, or any other state, would use such a heavy tool to penalize a voluntary adult prostituted or his or her customer.  But I also think it's appalling that they leave the same tool on the table when it comes to customers who have sex with children or slaves.

I’m traveling with family and have next to no time for blogging but I did want to make what I think is a critical point raised in the middle book of the Stig Larssen “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series of detective novels.

A major thread in the 2nd book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, involves sex-trafficking in Sweden.

Sex trafficking is the current bugaboo of sex-work abolitionists, both in America and abroad.

In America you hear, um, bullshit about how hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked into the country, against both their wills and their inclinations, for use as prostitutes. It’s bullshit because a) while there’s certainly international and intranational sex trafficking in America there’s no conspiracy large enough to conceal an extra million new enslaved people coming into the country every five years and b) there’s no evidence of such numbers either.

The problem seems to be that activists believe that unless the numbers are really, really, really big then nobody will care and nobody will do anything about it. And so they inflate their numbers.

In Larssen’s books, which are set in Sweden, everyone’s scandalized that as many as 400 (that’s four hundred total) humans might be trafficked into Sweden.

You know why I think that’s so cool?

Because 400 people trafficked against their will into any country, for any kind of work, really is a scandal.

Even one would be!

That American anti-trafficking activists feel they have to gin up the numbers is itself scandalous. That they might be right that no one would care if they used real numbers is also scandalous.

Of course I happen to think that, contrary to abolitionist activist hyperbole, ordinary voluntary sex work ought to be legal. I also happen to think that if it was legal then it would be a lot easier to identify and protect the much, much, much smaller number of people who really are illegally trafficked into the country, against their will, to perform sex work. Or any other kind of work.

Via Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex, a report out of New Zealand discusses one of the non-surprising benefits of their recent legalization of prostitution: increased leverage for prostitutes in relation to their customers.

After interviewing 772 sex workers, Otago University’s Gillian Abel found workers are more empowered to insist on safe sex and assert employment rights with both brothel operators and clients. Relationships with police have also improved.

‘When it was criminalised, the negotiations were much more covert to try and enforce condom use, whereas now they’ve got the law behind them. One sex worker in Christchurch has taken a client to court for removing a condom. ‘

Read the quote in context here.

One needn’t be enthusiastic about prostitution as a cultural institution to see this as a very, very positive outcome.

The power imbalance between typical workers on the one hand, and their customers, employers/agents, and law enforcement on the other is a huge, huge problem that’s further exacerbated by criminalization. In particular, independent of any social or philosophical problems one might have with sex work*, or legalization of it, and independent of any questions of whether sex work “empowers” those who do it, the blunt fact of legalization provides a tremendous lever that has traditionally been unavailable in negotiations with customers, employers such as pimps or escort agencies, and law-enforcement or other civil entities.

If you’re pro-sex-work it’s a positive development because it brings prostitution a lot closer to the level of enforceable civil and workplace law all other employed or self-employed worker have the right to receive — for instance the right to take legal action against a customer, employer, police officer, or passer by who attempts to rob, rape, rough them up… or even just refuse to leave on a condom. And if you’re anti-sex-trafficking it’s a positive development because it makes it far, far easier for coerced sex workers to come forward and, perhaps even more importantly, it gives sex workers themselves legal avenues for reporting when they become aware of other workers who are being coerced.**

In fact the only two kinds of people I think would be bothered by the direction of this change in the sex-worker status-quo would be people like pimps, cops, and johns who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to exploit them and… sex-work abolitionists who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to “rescue” them. (Hmm… gee, see a pattern there?)

* And I do have problems with it. The biggest, by far, being the way sex work appears in terms of the no-sex class paradigm’s construction of heterosexual sex as perpetually scarce, inevitably transactional, and desire as necessarily disjoint (men want sex, women want something else) rather than matched. Consequently sex work for me is a symptom rather than a root cause, and therefore there’s zero benefit to society, and quite a bit of harm for workers and even customers, in opposing it in isolation.

** I’m actually curious whether law-enforcement and social-service groups where prostitution isn’t illegal ever recruit legal sex workers to help identify sex workers who really are coerced. To the extent sex workers are altruistic they’re likely to be as concerned about coercion as any other law-abiding citizen. And to the extent they’re no more altruistic than any other law-abiding citizen there’s still the fact that illegal or coerced workers undercut both safety and prices.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus again, this time on an extremely prickly subject I’ve discussed previously: the blurred boundary between subsistence and dependency at the real margins of society. In this case the difference between assistance and exploitation or… well… she puts it rather pithily (emphasis mine.)

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

She said it here.

You wouldn’t think this kind of denial could happen. It could.

What’s really harsh, by the way, is that since in circumstances like this the pimp “boyfriend” may be trading his partner for favors or status or cargo rather than cash he may not, strictly speaking, recognize that he’s being a pimp either. Although mostly I’m guessing he’s pretty clear about he’s doing he still might not think of it as pimping.

That would be another problem with stereotypes, especially for those living really marginal lives.

As I said in my own post a couple of years ago

speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.

I said it here: Between Transience and Trafficking, a Personal Perspective

This isn’t by the way even remotely anything like an excuse. It’s a complication in any scheme to legalize prostitution, which I would still like to see. Or to keep it illegal, which many more people would evidently like to see. Which means, at least to me, that no matter how the pro/anti activism turns out this particular issue will probably need to be addressed by separate policy initiatives.

I don’t have much else to say about it. Except maybe that I think it could be distinguished pretty unambiguously in a page, or even a sidebar, in a comprehensive sex-education curriculum. And so if anyone’s listening I’d really like to lobby for its inclusion. Of course it would also be nice if we could count on students receiving comprehensive sex education in the first place…

I’ll just reiterate that I think Jacobs writes powerful stuff.

Incidentally she closes her post this way…

it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

Again, she said it here.

Powerful stuff.