Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers. – William Penn
All too often, the allies of sex workers make arguments that, though well-meant and partially correct, contain some glaring flaw that spreads disinformation, undermines the work of other advocates or, in the worst cases, actually cedes ground to the enemy; today we’ll look at an excellent example of this in a recent essay by Ruth Messinger of the American Jewish World Service. Messinger’s heart is obviously in the right place, and many of the points she makes are right on target; in fact, only about four sentences would have to be removed to make it nearly perfect, and most of the people “tweeting” or linking the post apparently didn’t even catch them. But as the majority of you have probably noticed, these pretty brown eyes don’t miss much.
A few years ago, I traveled to Thailand where I met a sex worker for the very first time…she very succinctly told me about her life: “These were my options: I could be apart from my children for 10 hours each day while working in a sweatshop sewing buttons on shirts, or I could spend the day with my kids and, at night, talk to an interesting Western man, lie down with him for 20 minutes in a familiar, safe place and make a lot of money. Which would you choose?” Like many Americans in my generation, I was taught that prostitution is immoral, “dirty” and coercive…[but] in recent years, I’ve heard countless stories from sex workers themselves [and discovered that they] are much like me: they work hard and they care about their kids. But our lives are radically different in one fundamental way. These women are denied the basic human rights I’ve always had: protection from violence, access to healthcare, and the opportunity to earn a living however I choose.
Nearly everywhere in the world, sex workers are detained, arrested, fined and driven out of their homes or places of work…discriminatory policies enable police to rape and beat sex workers and confiscate their belongings, including condoms, which increases their risk to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Religious groups, police officers and non-governmental organizations routinely carry out violent raids on adult brothels. This violence is often justified as a “rescue operation” and legitimated by anti-prostitution laws…
So far so good; if the whole thing was like that you wouldn’t be reading about it in this context. The problem arises when she bypasses an enemy position without attacking it, thus leaving her flank vulnerable:
…To be clear, not all people involved in sex work are involved by choice. One of the core challenges in fighting for sex workers’ rights is making the distinction between sex work, a chosen profession, and sex trafficking, the forced migration of human beings—often minors—for sexual exploitation and coercive labor. Trafficking is a pervasive global problem, and many governments around the world have rightly passed anti-trafficking legislation…
By pretending there is a bright, clear demarcation between choice and coercion, as though all sex workers were either “happy hookers” or miserable, passive, pathetic slaves, Messinger throws the door wide open to neofeminist inanities such as “false consciousness”, to government demands for licensing and registration, to detention of foreign sex workers, to denying the agency of those who choose to migrate even when they know or at least suspect their conditions will be harsh, to myths about “Stockholm syndrome” and women “afraid to testify against their traffickers”, to imposition of politically-determined definitions of “coercion” and to endless debates about what fraction of sex workers are “coerced”, how to determine whether they are and whether police must accept their word that they aren’t. Furthermore, to accept that “trafficking” (which as we have seen is an essentially-meaningless term used to mean nearly anything governments and fanatics want it to mean) is a “pervasive global problem” is to allow a Trojan horse inside one’s walls, and its cargo is always her very next phrase: “rightly-passed anti-trafficking legislation”. The mythic menace of “trafficking” convinces true believers that it’s somehow a new problem requiring new laws, when in fact the great majority of countries already had laws against abduction, extortion, involuntary servitude, assault, fraud and every other crime which supposedly goes along with “trafficking” long before this moral panic started; those countries which don’t need to enact those laws, not draconian and tyrannically-overbroad laws against an ill-defined menace described with unsupported and ever-inflating numbers.
Messinger herself states that sex workers don’t need “rescue”, but by claiming as she does that “the distinction between trafficking and sex work is crystal clear,” she automatically implies that perhaps “trafficked slaves” do. Even if we ignore the often-deadly mistakes which occur with alarming regularity when thugs with firearms are allowed to smash their way into buildings by surprise, it is clear that defining any group of people as intrinsically helpless, and therefore allowing the state to make decisions for them, inevitably leads to abuse and corruption. If all people were allowed the freedoms she lists in the latter part of her article (including freedom of migration, association, occupational choice and equal protection under the law), there would be far less opportunity for unprincipled predators (with or without official titles) to exploit them, and those who were truly victimized wouldn’t have to be afraid to ask for help.
>These women are denied the basic human rights I’ve always had: protection from violence, access to healthcare, and the opportunity to earn a living however I choose.
Well jolly good for her! Does she realize how rare this is, even in the USA? Many of us haven’t enjoyed those good things.
I’ll give Ms. Messinger points for at least being aware enough not to want to punish those who make other survival choices due to lack of those things.
I’ve often lacked access to health care, working most of my life as an independent contractor. The solution to that is obvious, and all the other rich western nations have done so: a national health care scheme.
As for earning a living however one chooses, this is a really rare thing, usually for those who really don’t have to earn a living.The rest of us have to use the skills/attributes we have, and choose among the opportunities we’re presented with.
Messinger is actually a politician; she ran for mayor of New York in the late ’90s (losing to Rudolph Giuliani). I applaud her for the positive parts of her message, but despite her claims to the contrary she still clearly views sex workers as “others” who need her help rather than just women who need her respect for their choices.
Well, she’s half-way there I guess. I suppose this is as good as it gets for some people.
It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people try to justify their life decisions as a choice between two “bad” options. In other words, this gal had a choice between two bad livelihoods – so she opted for the lesser of two evils. I don’t like seeing it framed that way. Yeah, I realize this may be reality for a lot of people, but a lot of people DO have other choices.
I mean, I could say … “Well, I was raised in a poor farm town and got a mediocre education. My parents really couldn’t afford to send me to a good college so I joined the military.”
That would all be true but it would leave out a lot of the facts. Had I worked harder in school – I would have had a fine education. I actually did go to a Junior College for about a year – but I considered the time as “spinning my wheels” because I wanted to get the hell out of the South as quickly as possible to see the world. I didn’t do shit in college while I was there except chase girls – well, one girl at the time (an awesome redhead named “Tina”). It was actually my experience in dating Tina that I came to realize I needed to do something with my life because she deserved someone who had his shit in one sock, and I just didn’t back then. No – I didn’t have a lot of choices but I’ve always been physically strong and willing to deal with hardship just to prove how tough I am. So the military seemed like a good way for me make something of myself, using the talents that God gave me.
I could frame that as … “Well, I had no other options and this was the best one” – and that would be true. But the real truth is … I was enthusiastic about making that choice.
Too bad Tina wasn’t – she dumped me before I went to boot camp. Oh well.
I’m actually surprised she (a politician) got her views that close to a morally defensible position. When I first started telling people I was going to try to do some research with sex workers, explaining that there was a dearth of high-end studies on the topic, some of my friends basically said, “well, of course. Who cares about that/them?”. These are highly educated people who, normally, would see a gap in the literature as suspicious or as an opportunity, or both. But because it’s sex work, the people involved somehow become mere abstractions.
It is a difficult moral issue, simply because there are, around the world and taken as a whole, a miniscule number of women who are coerced into the life by threat of violence. This number is then blown out of proportion by an overwrought and uptight press, and used as justification for repression by neofeminists, government, and most especially the religious wrong–I mean right; slip of the keyboard, don’t you know.
Krulac is correct (and no this is not a sign of the apocalypse that he and I agree on something), at least Madame Messenger is half-way there. It is that other half she needs help with.
Yeah, it’s really an ABOMINATION that someone would use the misery of a few women worldwide in order to blow up an agenda on “epidemic” traffiking hysteria.
I’m personally willing to go after the bad guys who are persecuting these women and forcing them into “forced sex” – but Mayor Bloomberg is screaming in my ear that those guys are …
Taxi Drivers.
Come on! How big is this cancer? Hint – it’s not that big. Doesn’t need radical surgery … more like laproscopic highly localized surgery – so let’s get to it and find out who these really bad guys are, where they’re hiding – and let’s take ’em out.
We’re Americans dammit … who’s with me?!! 😛
I agree. in the Western democracies the problem is so miniscule as to approach zero. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America no one knows for certain, simply because the governments, for the most part…don’t care.
But it does make a great bogeyman to frighten everyone into giving up even more of their rights, as well as a cry of protect our poor white children from the black/latino/asian pimps who are exploiting them, creating yet more racial divisiveness in this country.
Arrrgh!
“[T]he opportunity to earn a living however I choose.”
I think this is where a large fraction of the disconnect between many of the politicians and academics (and 1%ers too) and the rest of us comes from.
Most of us have to do things we don’t choose in order to earn a living.
They don’t.
They do something they enjoy, something they’d do anyway even if they didn’t need the money and they earn a generous living from doing it.
A great many of them cannot emotionally appreciate, even if they can rationally comprehend, that it’s impossible to have a society where everyone does something they love and makes a good living from doing so. There are too many jobs that need doing that not enough people want to do. It’s obvious when you put it like that – there are a lot more office cleaners or fast-food cooks than people that want to be one. But too many of the people that make decisions and have power don’t feel that in their guts.
@Maggie: “The mythic menace of ‘trafficking’ convinces true believers that it’s somehow a new problem requiring new laws, when in fact the great majority of countries already had laws against abduction, extortion, involuntary servitude, assault, fraud and every other crime which supposedly goes along with ‘trafficking’ long before this moral panic started; those countries which don’t need to enact those laws, not draconian and tyrannically-overbroad laws against an ill-defined menace described with unsupported and ever-inflating numbers.”
Absolutely. This is true of all such similar kinds of superfluous laws, such as “hate-crime,” “racketeering,” and “child-abuse” laws, that only put a name on nebulous and over-extending legislation when there are perfectly good laws already on the books to deal with the real crimes (and which often go unenforced even as it is). But passing these laws with convincingly worthy titles allows the do-gooders and moralists and demagogues to feel superior and trumpet how much they are doing to protect the downtrodden. And further extend the reach of government and the criminalization of society. But we’re not supposed to notice those parts.
Indeed, those pretty brown eyes don’t miss much.
I am currently visiting my family, so I don’t have enough time to respond to the above, but since I consider myself a sex worker ally, I would just like to state for the record that I appreciate feedback such as yours: an accurate critique without being unkind. Nice job, as always.
Reblogged this on Καιρός und kommentierte:
Fits perfectly to my last blog and update.
I don’t know if she sees sex workers as “others” so much as she would want to rescue slaves locked into any kind of work. And if she has bought the notion that there are hundreds of thousands of sex slaves in every large country, then of course she wants to “do something about it.”
The example of food service has been used here. Let’s suppose that, for whatever reason, the current moral panic was that thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of women have been kidnapped from their homes and forced to work as waitresses. And, suppose that I believed that. Every time I went to a restaurant I’d be looking for clues that the pretty young thing serving me a baked potato is there under duress. I’d be wanting the government to increase the budget to fight waitress-trafficking. And, of course, I would want the willing waitresses to be treated fairly, to have the rights other workers have, and to not be punished just because their chosen profession is shared by slaves. Not because I think waitresses are “other,” but because slavery is wrong, dammit.
Hopefully, I would eventually start to wonder why there was any need to enslave women by the thousands to do a job so many do by choice. Hopefully, the claim would soon be that in America alone three hundred thousand women are forced into waiting tables every year and I could then ask myself, “How is that there are any women in this country left who are anything but trafficked waitress-slaves?” Hopefully, in other words, I’d eventually see that it’s bovine scatology.
It isn’t a perfect analogy — waitressing doesn’t have the public stigma, the “no woman would do that if she didn’t have to” meme permeating society, and of course waitressing doesn’t have the illegality which makes everything murkier and makes it harder for waitresses to speak out.
As others have mentioned, Messinger’s on the right path, and I’ll take as many of her as we can get over the likes of Farley or Kristof. Thanks for letting us know about this light (flickering though it may be) in the darkness.
I agree that the forced/choice dichotomy is one that sex workers need to move out of the discourse. I feel some headway was made in this respect when 20 sex workers received scholarships to go the Assn Women in Development conference in Istanbul earlier this year, where APNSW chairperson Kthi Win’s plenary speech received a standing ovation. About 1600 feminists chanted after Kthi, ‘sex work is work’.
I understand that most Americans see Ruth Messenger as a politician, but I want to put in a word for her here and state that she is speaking for AJWS, an organisation whose primary focus is self-determination and autonomy. They are also the most accommodating donors in terms of sex worker programming. She is not shilling for government interventions here.
Oh, I definitely don’t think she’s shilling; if I did, this essay would have been quite hostile. I fully believe Messinger really and truly want to help, and that her organization is really doing good. But at the same time, I think it’s very important that our allies “get on the same page” as we are, as it were; I don’t mean that they need to conform to some “official” agenda, but they definitely shouldn’t be selling the enemies’ agendas for them, either, even inadvertently.
Well, good catch Maggie. I guess the challenge is, how do we get our allies to frame the debate in a more respectful way. I mean, her endorsement for human trafficking laws to replace the already-existing slavery laws gives the rescue industry some traction. I would prefer she hadn’t said that and remember frowning when I read it. Maybe the key is to be more strategic, as a movement, when engaging our allies. With short, clear messaging from advocates for sw rights.
If you walk the walk, you’ll talk the talk. Is she calling for legalization in the country in which she actually holds citizenship? She seems like a philanthropic dilettante, who might take a practical view in her efforts to help the brown people, but who doesn’t actually stand for anything solid
“Is she calling for legalization in the country in which she actually holds citizenship?”
No, she is evolving like everybody else. And if she’s among the best of our donor allies, it only serves to illustrate the length and breadth of the struggle for sex worker rights.
I agree, and this is one of my main gripes too. I also read similar statements from sex workers and other allies. ‘“the distinction between trafficking and sex work is crystal clear,” is a VERY VERY common construct and should be explained and understood more. I was sad to see this one activist/ally highlighted for this issue, because it’s so rampant.
I have seen sex worker activist statements that say ‘we are consensual, not trafficked victims.’ This upset me because it discounts the continuum of ‘exploitation’ or labor abuses, AND it supports the anti-trafficking framework by ignoring the fact that there are so many definitions of trafficking. This is the same problem as above. I think there needs to be more education and discussion within the sex worker movement about these issues. I have a feeling we are still in ‘response mode’ and have not gotten our ground in terms of developing and teaching sophisticated (as opposed to knee jerk) analyses. In other words, allies like Ruth would ideally have more to draw from. At this point, if she draws from what’s out there in the sex worker community, it’s very likely that she would express herself as she does. I recall (I don’t remember when this year) recently a major speech by a sex worker activist that contained that construct that no one publicly critiqued, so this issue has not been properly tackled by our movement. In general, we need a great deal more clarity within trafficking discourse.
I think Cheryl Overs wrote one of the best essays on the subject: it was entitled “Willing Brides and Consenting Homosexuals“. Overs’ analogies are so apt and her explanations so clear, that the article should be read by every activist and ally.
I m used to get silenced and therefore I m not so much in commenting worthful thoughts here and there. I m not really much submissive but careful and still learning about this highly complex trafficking issue. Regarding scarlotharlot’s quote “I have seen sex worker activist statements that say ‘we are consensual, not trafficked victims’” I m still worrying.
It is not long ago that I was fallen into the trafficking discourse trap because of a huge lack of knowledge, but I learned so much by reading Laura Augustin’s ‘Sex in the Margins’ and spoke with so many people inside the movement. Also in Germany we suffer the same debate since a number of years. But since last year we face it increasingly as an accelerant to strenghten the position of repressive tactics and politics. In this view the pending legislation reform of the liberal prostitution law (into force since 2002) is necessary to help trafficked victims. When I try to differenciate trafficking I m accused to relativize or to negate the fact of trafficking. Do you know this interview with Laura when she told her experiences after joining the BBC debate at the “End Human Trafficking” Event in Egypt last year? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/trafficking-the-bbc-the-n_b_803593.html She is an expert in this field, also Emi Koyama, who speak publicly. The experts and their knowledge exist. I m constantly thinking about the distribution of it and how to find strategically new ways to get it into the debate. Yes I found out what powerful interests, media exist to silence our voices. I think we should think about two ways to distribute. Because we still live in “The society of spectacle” we need to scandalise the silencing of voices and we need to create media events to start discussions and jump out of the response mode. We also need to enhance that knowledge within our communities. The trafficking issue is very complex and and we need to work it out properly and understandable for everyone and spread it around. Probably we can find only very few people who are able and willing to join the debate due to the fact that most of us need to work anonymously and have almost no time to care for activism. I m a non-paid activist and I ve a lots of problems since I went public. I can not recommend it with a good conscience. But I ve a plan. To improve the discussion within the community and to integrate so that its more than a local or virtual peer group in Germany. I think I should also take legal action against some popular abolitionists. This would help to broaden the debate and to get listened. Especially to clear the situation and to influence the legislation reform in a more reasonable way. I know it sounds a bit strange but I m still optimistic – as ever.
AND: Its the stigma I think and the wish not being connected to crime, criminalisation and/or victimisation. It is also important to make clear that survivors are truly enabled to move forward and give respect to this enormous strengths and livelong achievement. Once a victim means not to be always a victim.
Maggie:
Good to see you’re still churning out good stuff, spent last night catching up on your site. This article is of certain interest to me as I’m still interested in getting involved, but want to actually help instead of being paternalistic or undermining the work actual sex workers have done. It’s good to see that the politician here has some idea, but still has some ways to go as far as her advocacy.
[…] Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers. – William Penn (found this quote from Maggie MC Neills Blog) […]