“Good morning, Pooh Bear,” said Eeyore gloomily. “If it is a good morning,” he said. “Which I doubt.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
I sometimes feel as though I’m becoming the Eeyore of the sex worker rights movement, the resident wet blanket who reacts to every bit of seemingly good news cheered by other advocates by letting them know exactly why it’s not as good as they think it is. Now, that’s not really true because my overall outlook is that sex worker rights are inevitable; however, there are bound to be a huge number of individual developments between now and then, both good and bad, and I think it’s important to recognize which are which. Take this one, for example:
…In a letter…to Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said his office would not use possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution or loitering for the purpose of prostitution. “Accordingly…the collection and vouchering of condoms as evidence by members of your department…should immediately cease.” Advocates for sex workers have argued that officers’ use of condoms to support their arrests discouraged prostitutes from using condoms, presenting a public health risk. A 2012 report by…Human Rights Watch found that such arrests sowed a fear of carrying condoms among sex workers…the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the department agreed that “it is not necessary to seize condoms as evidence of the intent of an individual to engage in prostitution.” But…[he] added: “We do not rule out their evidentiary value when going after pimps and sex traffickers. If there is a bowlful of condoms in a massage parlor, we want our officers to be able to seize them as evidence against the trafficker.” While prosecutors are generally wary of excluding whole categories of evidence, there is a growing consensus that condoms should not be part of prostitution cases that do not involve sex trafficking…Nassau County…prosecutors already reject condoms as evidence, even in more serious cases. “It was very important to me to also extend the ban to traffickers,” said Kathleen M. Rice, the…district attorney. Without it, she said, “traffickers will refuse to hand out condoms to their workers and in fact prohibit their use”…
While advocates were cheering this two weeks ago, my immediate reaction was “In other words, they’re just going to label more cases as ‘trafficking’ now.” That’s already happening all over the country, not just New York; what was once recognized at simple prostitution is now being shoehorned into the “trafficking” narrative so cops can brag about heroically “rescuing” women, prosecutors can score the bigger points inherent in felony convictions and both can steal money and goods from those so accused. Nor does a lack of evidence have any effect; even when sex workers testify that they were not coerced, prosecutors simply discount their testimony as “false consciousness”. Most hookers are not idiots; we can read what is plainly written on the wall. When prosecutors say they will continue to use condoms as evidence of “trafficking” and then demonstrate that they intend to call most if not all sex work “trafficking”, the net effect is no change whatsoever.
And that’s not even the worst of it. This action is a classic political dodge, exactly the same as the one used in San Francisco two months ago; making this a policy rather than a law allows it to be suspended at any time, which will be as soon as the heat is off. Once the media forgets about the issue, the policies will quietly be rescinded as needed. Of course, they don’t even need to do that; both San Francisco and New York still pretend that cops arresting whores is for our “protection” from those evil “traffickers” we’re too weak and childlike to “escape”. Even the Nassau County DA quoted in the story, who might seem sympathetic, refuses to get it; she has aggressively pursued an “end demand” strategy which casts sex workers as the “victims” of evil clients rather than rational actors in a business transaction, and pretends big, bad “traffickers” are forcing workers to do bareback, when it’s actually their personal decision. I predict a lot more district attorneys will make similar announcements this year; it’s an easy way for them to feign concern for us while conducting business as usual and getting the feds to pay for it.
There’s one small glimmer in this gloom: apparently, the American media pay enough attention to Human Rights Watch for its reports to become big news, and that news exerts sufficient PR pressure for governments to at least make a show of changing their policies; besides the condom report, a recent one on the dreadful harm the sex offender registry inflicts upon young people has likewise attracted considerable media attention and may soon result in a few of the braver politicians making displays of concern. But while HRW is officially pro-decriminalization and last month openly called for it in China, the only thing it has so far asked of American “authorities” is a restriction of the sort of evidence they use to harass us; that will be changing soon, and I am told a full report on the injustices inflicted on sex workers in this country is forthcoming (complete with an explicit demand for decriminalization in the US). Media coverage of that might engender a political pretense of looking at decriminalization which would be, as Eeyore put it, “Amusing in a quiet way…but not really helpful”; however, the resulting public discourse would help to shine light on matters the prohibitionists would prefer to remain obscure…and that would be a cause for optimism.
I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Politics is a depressing thing to be involved in. I’ve tried having hope at changing media laws only to see them stay the same or worsen. It takes a huge movement to get them to shift and I don’t see that for sex workers right now.
I agree, politics is a grind. However, remember that civil rights can improve with startling speed at times. Was it Julian Bond who said, “We thought we were losing the civil rights battle. We didn’t know we were winning until we had won.”
If you read Milne carefully, you quickly come to the realization that Eeyore isn’t gloomy or depressed. Eeyore is sarcastic, but since the other residents of the Hundred Acre Wood principally have fluff between their ears they don’t ‘get’ it. Being the Eeyore of a movement isn’t all that bad a thing…..
Give that man a (chocolate) cigar! I was rather hoping someone would pick up on that. 🙂
I always identified most with Eeyore as a young person, because I always felt he had the most realistic view of things. I never read much of them, though…predominantly got the screen versions. And as I got older, I still identified with him. Oddly (or not), I also developed a wickedly-sarcastic sense of humour, but I don’t recall ever thinking of him as being sarcastic. I may have to go back and actually read them…
A lot of people forget that democracies are designed to place low value individual input; the system isn’t supposed to change just because they really want it to. Just because something is a good and moral policy does not mean it will flourish in a functioning democracy or republic.
Side note: I learned to read by Winnie-the-Pooh; today’s epigram brought a smile to my face.
Eeyore used to be my nickname at work. Unfortunately, all the people who called me that ended up getting laid off.
Libertarian Websites I’ve visited like to mention “The Law of the Ratchet,” which basically means that government easily becomes more oppressive, but it is very difficult to make it go in the other direction of more liberty. Politics is quite depressing when you are swimming against the current. Also, let’s face it, all we gain from this is getting violent police officers and other State sponsored gangsters out of another area of our lives, while the other side gains power, money and improvements in prestige. I mean, if the thugs are working for you, you don’t mind them quite so much.
“she has aggressively pursued an ‘end demand’ strategy which casts sex workers as the ‘victims’ of evil clients rather than rational actors in a business transaction”
I was watching a TV show the other day, a Western about the transcontinental railroad called Hell on Wheels. Now, on this show the bawdy house is a main location, it is not illegal and it drives a lot of the plot.
This got me thinking about the fact that brothels are pretty important locations in a few Westerns I’ve watched, including the TV show Deadwood, the Clint Eastwood Western Unforgiven and the old Lee Van Cleef Western Day of Anger. So then I thought, “how did we get from the old West, when prostitution was tolerated to now, when the State often attempts to crush it?”
Unfortunately, my history here is a little sketchy, but I believe our brutal sexual thugocracy came about from a “rescue movement” involving the concept of “White Slavery.” In other words, the reason cops are now encouraged to brutalize, rob and even rape prostitutes in the United States came from a movement to rescue prostitutes. I think knowing how this particular road paved with good intention lead to Hell would be important to refuting the modern day version of “White Slavery.”
Part of it had to do with women getting too much power. A lot of the early brothels were run by women who became rich from the men who frequented the brothels. This upset the order of things and people got upset. I know I read something like this regarding a very famous madame in Chicago. The sad thing is that the female-run brothel system tended to be a LOT safer for women than the Pimp system. When they’re illegal, they can’t go to the cops when they’re being abused.
Additionally, I think it had to do with a feeling that allowing brothels allows men to be tempted away from their wives.
Do u think that this was a situation of a good intention that went wrong or a bad intention that used a mask to cover its real nature?
Because if its the first option, this kind of policies against prostitution have a sollution. But if its the second, the problem is way too different.
To be simpler: do u (is a question for everyone) that police, authorities and abolitionist feminists have a REAL INTENTION to “help” prostitutes or, in a enormous excercise of hipocresy, they are using a politically correct speech to hide their war on whores?
It can be both. There’s a term used in international spy-craft, mostly by East Bloc nations during the Cold War, “Useful Idiot.” The Useful Idiot is the sincere believer who advances your policy goals because he naively believes he (or she) is doing good works.
Interesting, I’ll need to read up on that. It would make sense.
keep up the good work, Eeyore! No one vivisects and determinates texts more logically and clearly than you do, nor more amusingly and helpfully
Eeyore was my favorite since I found Pooh a bit creepy.
“‘”Oh, bother!’ Pooh muttered as he centered the crosshairs on Piglet…”
I have been reading you carefully. You are blaming governamental authorities to build up FALSE traffik cases, which is a very serious accusation.
But… why would they do something like this? They are using many resources in both money and personal to fight against a non-existent problem? Which could be the reason of such waste? Moreover, to criminalize prostitution means this activity cannot be legally taxed, so its less income to the public administrations. It has apparently no sense.
Or, maybe you have got any reasonable explanation for the seemingly weird prosecution of the false trafficked victims. I hear you, Maggie.
Everything isn’t always about money. In the US eradicating sexual immorality is seen as worth the outlay of expenditures, the loss of tax revenue, and the loss of freedom. Our country is nothing like European companies in this regard, we still legislate against and punish sin here.
Because moral panics are political capital for politicians and lawyers. They did the same thing for “satanic panics” of the 1980s.
One thing you need to remember- government is not like a business, although their are some parallels. Government’s goal is not to “make money” its there to make power.
They gruesome details are very well covered in Maggie’s articles, but the cliff notes version is the government has been persecuting whores for a long time, which means the infrastructure is there to persecute whores. When it becomes politically unfavorable to persecute whores for having sex, there must be something to fill this “infrastructure void”. That’s “sex trafficking”. So, a case that would have been a prostitution case before is now a trafficking case, you see? The government does not lose any power by renaming the group it was beginning to lose power over.
That’s pretty much the definition of government.
They really don’t like to address REAL problems. Real problems might be hard to solve and the people in government are dillards anyway who probably couldn’t solve a legitimate problem.
But … aha! Invented problems are awesome. The government gets to “declare” a problematic situation – then they siphon off taxpayer money to pay themselves while they “solve” it – and of course, the more “complicated” the imagined problem is – the more money they’ll need to fight it.
And when people start getting hip to the scam – they can simply declare the emergency “over” – successfully handled by government!
Government sucks.
Eeyore; or perhaps Cassandra redux; or “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed whore is Queen”. 😉
I never watched Pooh and certainly never read him! I thought the whole thing was made for girls. There was one human character I saw once – and boy, he was a “dandy” … Pooh totally creeped me out. Oh, and I remember the tiger – and I remember thinking – “this might be a good show if this tiger just suddenly went ape-shit and attacked all these creepy characters!”
You might enjoy Happy Tree Friends… Flippy was always my favorite character. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLt2E0mOtiE
The Disney Pooh is about as close to the original as the Disney Jungle Book is to Kipling’s creation; not very. Milne wrote for Punch; and much of Pooh is actually pretty snarky. The original illustrations are better too. One of my favorites accompanies the following;
“Owl looked at him, and wondered whether to push him off
the tree; but, feeling that he could always do it afterwards,
he tried once more to find out what they were talking about.”
(Picture of Owl looking at Rabbit and thoughtfully flexing a talon)
“Politics should be discussed on all fours.” Grrr! Arf!
[…] will ensnare some of the latter. When prostitution is criminalized to any degree, women who carry condoms, answer personal ads, wear sexy lingerie, go without lingerie, fail forced “virginity tests”, […]
And as has been mentioned before: laws against whores hurt non-whores as well. How about the woman who would never ever do anything as nasty as prostitution, but has the good since to bring a condom when she’s visiting her boyfriend? That little bit of good sense can get her arrested, and accused in court of that nasty thing that she would never ever do.
So all you out there who don’t even like hookers: this is about your ass too.
[…] will ensnare some of the latter. When prostitution is criminalized to any degree, women who carry condoms, answer personal ads, wear sexy lingerie, go without lingerie, fail forced “virginity […]