Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him. – Charles DeGaulle
As I said last month, it’s amazing how many of these stories seem to crop up around the holidays! So without further ado, here’s the first batch of the year.
Real People (February 6th, 2011)
It’s a classic Catch-22; because of criminalization prostitutes need to be discreet, but anonymity allows the prohibitionists to invent lies about us that further support for criminalization. So it’s always good to see articles that show sex workers are people like anyone else; this one is from the December 12th Daily Sundial, the student newspaper of California State University, Northridge:
“I started stripping when I was 19 because I had huge debt…” said Jane Doe, 32, a doctoral student at USC…“I loved it…Of all the shit jobs I had ever had, it was the only shit job that was not a shit job.” Doe’s story is not atypical; according to a recent study on…sex work by Widener University’s Sarah Elspeth Patterson…“10 percent of students know of students who engage in sex work in order to promote themselves financially, with 16.5 percent indicating that they might be willing to engage in sex work to pay for their education”…
For Jessie Nicole, 25, sex work was the only employment option that allowed her to make ends meet and remain a full-time student. “I was broke,” Nicole said. “I had a scholarship that paid my tuition and 70 percent of my books, but that doesn’t pay your rent, that doesn’t give you food, and you still have 30 percent of your books.” Nicole, now the director of SWOP’s Los Angeles chapter, began dating “sugar daddies” when she was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Florida State University, but turned to escorting when she moved to Chicago for graduate school. “One of the easiest things about escorting in grad school was that I could pay to live and work a couple of hours a week,” Nicole said. “That was so crucial to me. I had a thesis to write…[My] time [was] really precious.”
Though sex work helped pay for both Doe and Nicole’s schooling, the cost of education left each of them in an incredible amount of debt. According to the Widener University study, 2010 college graduates are carrying an average of $25,250 worth of debt…“I did sex work to live and be a student and then I graduated and couldn’t find a job because I have a master’s in humanities,” Nicole said. “…So I kept doing sex work. And I’m still using sex work to pay off my student loans”…According to Nicole…many who critique and condemn sex work see the industry as coercive and degrading. “(Sex work) is a job like any other job,” Nicole said…according to [her], there are more student sex workers than one might think. “I didn’t (out myself) when I was in school,” Nicole said. “When I did come out, I found at least three other friends that were doing sex work in Tallahassee at the same time that I was. I was like, ‘are you fucking kidding? Is this just my group of friends or is everyone carrying this around? Why didn’t we work together?’”…
The story also interviews a professional submissive and has a short section on neofeminist anti-whore rhetoric. Nicole’s last point is very true; in my experience university students are the second largest group among escorts, after young divorcees with kids.
Heroines (May 16th, 2011)
OK, so breast self-examination is a little off-topic, but I’ve mentioned superheroines before so I just had to tell you about this PSA from Mozambique in which Wonder Woman gives herself an exam. Other ads in the series feature She-Hulk, Catwoman and Storm of the X-Men. The only thing I want to say is that I find it easier to do my exams topless, but I guess then we wouldn’t know who they were (except for She-Hulk, who’s pretty recognizable in any state of dress).
A Procrustean Bed (May 19th, 2011)
Though this essay was about a Massachusetts law, the principle applies to any part of the US:
…trafficking mythology…requires that the state produce victims other than the amorphous “public decency” or the faceless “state”. A “human trafficker” requires a human to “traffick”, so the law amputates prostitutes’ legal “legs” (i.e. the presumption of adult self-determination), reducing us to victims unable to walk into or out of prostitution on our own. And if all whores are victims, all those who assist us in our work must therefore be victimizers…[such laws define] anyone who “manages” a prostitute (of course, “manage” is not specifically defined) as a “pimp” and all pimps as “human traffickers”, thus stretching escort service owners, drivers, boyfriends and husbands into international gangsters.
Here’s the Big Apple’s version, courtesy of the December 14th New York Times:
…As prostitution has shifted off the streets and into hotels and apartments, the drivers who transport prostitutes have emerged as some of the industry’s most powerful players. Sofia, who uses a pseudonym because she fears retribution from traffickers, said that when she was enslaved as a prostitute, her drivers organized her schedule, drove her to appointments and took half of her earnings before she turned over the remainder to her pimp…On Wednesday, Sofia will testify, from behind a screen, before a joint hearing of the City Council’s Transportation and Women’s Issues Committees, on two pieces of proposed legislation that would penalize drivers who knowingly transport prostitutes. The first proposal…would raise the fines on drivers who knowingly transport trafficking victims, and would direct the Taxi and Limousine Commission to add training for all its drivers on the subject of sex trafficking…Sofia estimates that she worked with 70 drivers, who brought her to 5,000 clients…Sofia said that the drivers rarely spoke to her, except when they tried to recruit her away from her pimp. “They promised us a better life,” Sofia said. “I know a lot of girls who said they left the pimp they were working with. In the end they just worked for the driver.”
Is there any truth at all to this story? Who knows? It’s hard to take seriously an article whose very first sentence is based in a fallacy (that the majority of prostitution used to take place on the street, which it never has), and which characterizes low-end employees as “the industry’s most powerful players”. It also uses the phrase “enslaved as a prostitute” but then at the end states that the so-called “slaves” can work for whoever they like (including, logically, themselves). The huge numbers (70 different drivers? 5000 clients?) sound suspiciously like “reframed experiences” to me, and a lot of dubious assertions are trotted out to justify giving pigs and prosecutors the power to railroad (mostly immigrant) cab drivers as “human traffickers” for the “crime” of giving rides to hookers.
The Enlightenment Police (October 1st, 2011)
French prosecutors with nothing productive to do now want to send Hind Ahmas (whom we met in this column) to prison, as explained in this December 13th article from the Daily Mail:
A 32-year-old mother from France is set to become the first woman ever to be sent to prison for wearing an Islamic veil. Hind Ahmas refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Paris court which has ordered her to spend 15 days learning her civic duties…Ahmas was not allowed into the hearing…because she refused to remove her face covering. But prosecutors made it clear to her lawyer, Gilles Devers, that Ahmas now faces two years in prison and a £27,000 fine. ‘There is no possibility of me removing the veil,’ Ahmas said. ‘I’m not taking it off. The judge needs citizenship lessons, not me.’ Ahmas, who has already refused to pay a fine of around £100 for wearing a veil on another occasion, intends to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights…If Ahmas does become the first woman in the world to go to prison for wearing a veil, then it will be seen as a huge propaganda coup for Islamic-rights campaigners.
Mr Sarkozy said the ban on head coverings was not aimed at persecuting Muslims, but merely to make France a more tolerant, inclusive society…But the sight of a young mother being led away to the cells merely because she refuses to take off her veil will cause outrage around the world. Mr Devers said the veil ban was ‘unconstitutional’, while senior police officers have told judges that it is unenforceable without persecuting women…
Only a politician could believe that it’s possible to create a “more tolerant, inclusive society” by being intolerant and exclusive.
One Year Ago Today
“The Cold, Grey Light of Dawn” provides several examples of “the first feeble rays of light…[creeping] into the brains of those who, while perhaps not actually prohibitionists themselves, have always gone along with government policy on the matter.”
Great updates Maggie, and the college debt thing is REAL. I saw kids coming into the Navy with $30K plus in college loan and credit card debt. My son’s best friend just graduated with $125K in debt because he had no parental support and didn’t have the requisite equipment for sex work!
Hopefully stories like these women tell will change some attitudes but I am not optimistic about it. I just got back from my Christmas / New Year’s “vacation”, which I spent with family and in-laws. My political views on this always get me into trouble. I thought my mother and sister and law were going to kill me when I told them that decriminalizing prostitution would empower women. I didn’t get any “blowback” from the males though (except when I stated I was thinking about voting for Obama) … but, it’s the WOMEN who hold the strongest anti-prostitution views based on my anecdotal experiences. Only one of the women in my wife’s family (a cousin who lived in Los Angeles) seemed to get the message when I was talking about “female sexual power” … I think she got turned on by it because she started hitting on me, which my wife thought was hilarious because she was drunk!
I don’t drink – I have to remain sober to properly spread the “gospel of krulac” to the sinners out there! 🙂
And there was no way to work out a threesome with my drunk wife and her drunk cousin because I had the kids with me too!
(sigh) It’s a heavy load.
Then on to my folk’s place – and they’re not much better (though I love them – they are narrow-minded). Two years ago my 17 year old niece got pregnant out of wedlock – which never happens in my family but it did. It was “the end” of the world and my brother called me on the phone to apologize for her “embarrassing” the family. That threw me into an outrage when he did that because I have had to tell mothers that their son’s died in combat and that is a tragedy. I’ve had to identify dead servicemen who were often impossibly disfigured – those are tragedies. A new life being born isn’t a tragedy – sure, it’s not optimum – but we can all chip in and take care of that kid and we have.
This year, my minister cousin cheated on his wife with a High School flame. It was discovered, and he was fired from the Church for “moral sin”. He told his wife about the affair – and his teenaged kids to. So then his mother felt the need to apologize for HIS embarrassment to the family. I told her … “Look – it was ONE TIME, and he feels like SHIT about it”. I told her hell yeah his wife should forgive him if she wants to keep the family together and still loves him. I’d forgive my wife if she cheated once on me. In fact, if she gave me details – it might turn me on a little!
I’m wired so differently in the way I think from virtually ALL of the rest of my family and sometimes that depressing.
Even more depressing is I didn’t get the phone number of my wife’s cousin! So these holidays were a bust for me. 🙁
Sounds like you got your Friday the 13th proselytizing started a few weeks early! 😉
You’ve been writing some good posts lately, and I saw nothing in my my memory to disagree with. My anecdotal experience is that a higher percentage of women are against prostitution too. They really think like stupid children on this issue believing that they will make the world safer or better without hindering liberty by being against decriminalized and legalized prostitution and a whole host of other things. How wrong they are! It’s such a relief and joy to read Maggie’s collumn even when we have misunderstood eachother or simply disagreed because she is unlike most women and really does know better how to make things safer, better and increase liberty when it comes to prostitution or other issues. Most men aren’t any good when it comes to thinking about how to increase safety, liberty and better things either, but in my experience as much as it pains me to say it, a higher percentage of men are better than women in these regards. Of course decriminalization and sensible legalization would on average make life much better for the whores and johns. Whether it’s prostitution or some other issue, there is no perfect sollution, but there are better and worse ones.
That NYT story enraged me. Obvious and outrageous fantasy and lies.
Expect infinitely more of the same now that a fanatic “feminist” is executive editor.
Hi Maggie,
I ran across this and wondered if you’d seen it and what your reaction was. Particularly about the desperation seeping out of the walls…
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/urban-exploration/news-7-eerie-abandoned-brothels-around-world
Of course, the authors of the article seem to forget that old churches, railway stations, public housing etc., also seem creepy when viewed in an advanced state of decrepitude. I wonder, though, if they would use the same verbiage about the desperation of petitioners and believers sinking into the walls.
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’ Mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.
The forms a person imagines out of that which is formless say a lot more about the observer than that which he observes.
Yay Rorschach!
5,000 clients; 70 drivers?
If she wouldn’t mind working in an office the person in the Times story could be a great sales manager.
The Daily Mail article.. the comments… so sad.. a women has to move country not to be thrown in jail for wearing the wrong clothing.. no not Saudi Arabia… France… and some British people.. so so sad.
The woman in France would be facing legal trouble here in the US too…a lot of municipalities and some states have what they call “mask laws” forbidding adults to go masked other than at Halloween or Mardi Gras. These laws were originally put on the books as a way to get at the twentieth-century version of the Ku Klux Klan; a lot of the Klan’s power came from its anonymity. They’ve generally been upheld in challenges AFAIK because the courts figure that an adult going masked is probably up to no good.
See my response to C Andrew above.
We ‘read’ faces in addition to listening to what the individual is saying – a veil makes this impossible.
That’s true, and it’s certainly the free choice of individuals not to interact with a veiled person who makes them nervous. But I would rather be made uncomfortable by styles of dress or grooming I find strange – whether they be full-face veils, facial piercings or “grills”, or even guys in drag – than have the State empowered to tell people what they can or can’t wear. I don’t know exactly how the French law is written, but it won’t survive a robust challenge; it’s only one step from that to prohibiting actor’s concealing makeup in films and full character costumes at Euro-Disney.
Since the enslaved, trafficked victim is anonymous, hidden, impossible to cross-examine, we have no way of knowing if she ever indeed was enslaved, trafficked, or victimized. She may or may not have ever engaged in any act of prostitution in her entire life. She could be a virgin who has never ridden in a cab, limousine, or other professionally driven vehicle. There’s simply no way to know.
Why isn’t Mozambique translating these PSAs from Marvel into Portuguese? Are they intended for ALL of their women or only the elite educated who can understand English?