A prison might be defined as any place you’ve been put into against your will and can’t get out of, and where you are entirely at the mercy of the authorities, whoever they may be. – Margaret Atwood
You’ll notice that sex workers are immune to most of these factors:
People often like to groan about how their job is “killing” them. Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true. A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups…
A Tale That Grew in the Telling
There are about 40,000 girls aged 13-17 in San Diego; this “study” claims that 30% of them become “victims of sex trafficking” every year:
A new study released by the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University revealed that the dark and secret world of sex trafficking in San Diego is the second largest underground economy locally after drugs…sex trafficking is an estimated $810 million-a-year industry and it is run mostly by gangs. The study revealed that as many as 11,773 become victims to human trafficking in San Diego alone on a yearly basis…Victims are primarily underage…The study was funded by the Department of Justice, and found that more than 100 gangs are involved in the local sex trafficking operations…next to schools, other recruitment hot spots include: trolley and bus stops, house parties, social media, tattoo parlors, churches, malls…about 1,776 victims/survivors come in contact with law enforcement…
That last is larger than the total number of “sex trafficking victims” that have ever been identified as such in the entire US.
Margaret Atwood on the asininity of giving away freedom for “security”:
…Governments know our desire for safety all too well, and like to play on our fears. How often have we been told that this or that new rule or law or snooping activity on the part of officialdom is to keep us “safe”? We aren’t safe, anyway: many of us die in weather events – tornados, floods, blizzards – but governments, in those cases, limit their roles to finger-pointing, blame-dodging, expressions of sympathy or a dribble of emergency aid. Many more of us die in car accidents or from slipping in the bathtub than are likely to be done in by enemy agents, but those kinds of deaths are not easy to leverage into panic…
Sometimes sexually-exploitative cops stop short of rape:
In August Patrick Quinn, a 27-year-old…Texas [cop]…pulled over a driver and [claimed he] spotted marijuana paraphernalia in her car. He told her he would not arrest her if she would let him lick her feet or give him her underwear. He…was [fired and] sentenced to a year in jail…
Peter Barbey is wasting no time as the new owner of the Village Voice. Per an interview with [the] Wall Street Journal…he’s nixed the thought of changing the print edition size, pitched to staff the concept of special themed inserts and decided it’s time for a major ad dollar shift: “Barbey plans to get rid of escort ads, a racy fixture of many an alt-weekly. ‘Adult women can be escorts, that’s fine with me’, Mr. Barbey said, ‘but it’s not the kind of advertising that fits where we want go’.”
…Beyoncé Karungi, a 35-year-old campaigner…is in hospital following [a] horrific attack. The activist had recently penned an article on surviving in Uganda as a trans sex worker, an occupation that can be dangerous and occasionally deadly. After recieving several hate threats, she went into hiding. When she emerged, she was attacked by a group of five unknown men. She sustained several serious facial and bodily injuries…This is not the first time Beyoncé has been attacked…one time police undressed her, took her bag, money and phone and then cut her hair to make her “masculine”…
The title is “Feminism’s Sex Work Problem“, but this thorough article contains a large section debunking the usual lies prohibitionists employ:
I’m not going to make the pro-decriminalization case here. Others have made it far more eloquently than I could…However, there are some elephants in the room that simply have to be addressed before a real conversation can occur. These are mistruths that seem to have become cemented as fact through sheer force of mindless repetition, and unfortunately they severely derail any objective discussion of sex work…
Las Vegas police will pay more than $80,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman who said officers detained her for two hours in The Cosmopolitan after falsely accusing her of being a prostitute. A federal judge wrote that the case showed…prostitution sweeps in casinos were overly broad and threatened people’s constitutional rights. Chentile Goodman was released without charge after the 2011 incident and filed a lawsuit later that year…
Meet CISA, formerly known as CISPA, AKA SOPA, alias PIPA, née COICA:
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) passed the Senate today by a vote of 74 to 21. A different version passed the House earlier in the year, so they’re going to have to conference to hammer out differences. Retail business interests supported the legislation. Major Internet and tech firms like Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Twitter…opposed it…”CISA…allows companies to monitor users and share their information with the government without a warrant, while offering a backdoor that circumvents any laws that might protect users’ privacy“…Attempts to add amendments to narrow the bill’s focus all failed…The Sunlight Foundation…notes that CISA creates a new exemption from the Freedom of Information Act…”That means if they overstep and share the wrong information — as this bill seems to intend — the public won’t know, and even if it did, it would have no legal recourse…CISA guarantees the public will have no ability to see what information is going from companies to the government“…
What Were You All Waiting For?
…There are good Catholic countries like Chile that have legalised prostitution. And I know its very controversial. Most people would put their arms up in horror. But by legalising it, they got rid of the pimps. The girls are monitored properly to make sure that they are healthy, to make sure they can come forward if they’ve got a problem. And they believe a lot of the illegal trafficking of young girls has gone away…
Things aren’t looking good for rentboy.com…The company’s bank accounts containing millions of dollars were frozen and its website was seized by Homeland Security…Now, the company is selling its office supplies and furniture on Craigslist in an effort to raise money to pay for its mounting legal fees…Some of these “goodies” include glass desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and video monitors. Other items for sale include cables, software, books, magazines, artwork, lamps, a copy machine, and “a lot of special, one of a kind rentboy.com ephemera”…
The Cato institute supports sex workers’ right to advertise:
Prior restraints—legal prohibitions on disseminating information before publication—are an odious burden on the freedom of expression and come with a “heavy presumption” against their constitutionality. Indeed, they are so disfavored in the law as to be virtually impossible to obtain outside of wartime. Informal prior restraints—government pressure without formal sanction—are even more unconstitutional than formal ones, as the Supreme Court noted in Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963)…But that strong precedent didn’t stop…Thomas Dart and his crusade against Backpage…As Cato, Reason Foundation, and DKT Liberty Project point out in our amicus brief before that court, Dart’s claimed “epidemic” of sex trafficking has evaded any sort of empirical verification for over two decades. Indeed, State Department data indicate that the opposite may be true. Nevertheless, Sheriff Dart, along with a new-age Baptist-and-bootleggers coalition matching the religious right and radical feminists, have raised the human-trafficking bugaboo to rally against prostitution—mimicking the drug war and all of its worst legal mechanisms…
Here’s the first part of an in-depth look at how the New York Times callously maligned an entire industry – one that, like sex work, provides income for undocumented migrants with little money to squander on bureaucratically-imposed startup costs:
Sarah Maslin…Nir’s coverage broadly [mischaracterized] the nail salon industry, [and] several of the men and women she spoke with say she misquoted or misrepresented them. In some cases, she interviewed sources without translators despite their poor English skills. When her sources’ testimonies ran counter to her narrative, she omitted them altogether. The second article lent the Times’ imprimatur to unproven theories, while committing science journalism’s cardinal sin of highlighting alarmist anecdotes that aren’t representative of systematic research. If it hadn’t had real-world consequences, the series—and subsequent attempt by Nir and her editors to parry criticism—wouldn’t be worth such intense scrutiny. But the day after the first article appeared in the print edition of the Times, Gov. Andrew Cuomo…announced a new multi-agency task force to inspect nail salons…The rush to legislate based solely on the Times’ shoddy reporting has hurt the industry. New nail salons, “which used to open every week in New York,” have stopped appearing…Salons once provided a steady source of jobs for undocumented immigrants; now many owners say they’ll hire only legal workers who’ve completed an occupational licensing program because they’re afraid of getting in trouble…
A good example of the philosophical incoherence and moral bankruptcy of corporate libertarianism.
Epstein seems to be arguing that having businesses and immigration authorities working together to provide a particularly vulnerable and exploitable workforce that allows said businesses to gain an unfair market advantage is A Good Thing. He’s offering an apologia for both corporatism and human trafficking.
Or does he expect us to believe that despite being able to gouge employees due to their immigration status and lack of occupational licensing, entrepreneurs will provide proper pay and working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts and give up the edge they hold over those who employ legal, licensed workers?
And has NYC really seen such a strong growth in demand for nail salon services? Or was the fact new ones opened every week due to their fly-by-night nature? Were the new ones merely rebadged old ones that had gone bankrupt or closed down and left employees and creditors in the lurch?
You don’t empower the vulnerable by turning a blind eye to their exploiters. You do it by making them less vulnerable – such as by liberalising immigration laws. If that were to happen you’d see the same stabilisation of the nail salon market and shift towards hiring only legal workers that so distresses Epstein.
You’re denying the workers agency. The way you don’t empower the vulnerable is by destroying the jobs they choose to do to better themselves.
ALL human interaction is “exploitation.” In both directions. That word is always an undeserved pejorative, and its use always shows economic illiteracy.
Recognising not all people have equal power in a given situation is ‘deny agency’ is it jd? A pretty mindless corporate libertarian version of SJW-speak don’t you think?
If you were economically literate you would know that if the jobs are valid they would be there because of supply and demand and that by exploiting the non-market-driven needs of people disempowered by immigration laws the salon owners are destroying jobs in other parts of the economy.
They are there because of supply and demand. Just because YOU wouldn’t do them or use them doesn’t mean they’re not valid.
The only non-market-driven jobs are the ones taxpayers are forced to pay for.
They might be in the country because of demand (though it’s just as likely to be push factors from the countries they left) but the fact they’re designated ‘illegals’ when they get there means they are more desperate and vulnerable than the bulk of potential employees and less able to seek assistance when subjected to illegal work conditions. That acts not only to distort the labor market in the salon industry – thereby putting both properly trained and accredited workers and those who train them out of a job – it also puts strain on other public infrastructure. For example, many of these workers will not have access to industry award health insurance and so will either put more strain on the public system or fail to treat their illnesses (or take necessary sick leave) and place those they come into contact with at risk. Salon owners who provide good customer service and conditions for their workers will be disadvantaged in competition with those who illegally exploit undocumented migrants, pushing the more competent and responsible entrepreneurs out of business in favour of ruthless ones more prepared to externalise their costs.
Maybe you need to change your gravatar label jd. Your namesake says “no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force”, yet you’re a supporter of those who exploit the threat of forced expulsion of undocumented migrants for their own profit.
BTW, note how Epstein rubbishes the notion that salons advertised for employees at $10/day only to confirm later in the article that’s exactly what they did. He offers excuses such as claiming such employees didn’t touch customers and could come and go as they please, then he expects us to believe that the salons were paying these people for the privilege of being trained up as unlicensed salon workers – despite the fact they were allegedly free to just pick up their cash and training and walk out when they wanted to.
Epstein later admits that some of these trainees actually received nothing but excuses that by saying “[salons] got away with it because enforcement was lax”, apparently forgetting that the whole thrust of his article is how tragic it was that the Times article led to increased enforcement of labor laws in the industry.
The fact is that Cuomo’s crackdown found over 40% of the salons they examined paid below minimum wages and/or kept no wage records at all. Yet Epstein prefers the uncorroborated word of a salon owner who “declined to allow me to examine his wage statements” and that of one of his hand-chosen alleged former employees.
Whether or not Nir got every detail right there was clearly something slimy hiding under the rock she lifted.
“Sex work is simply work. For me it was honest work. I was a sex worker when I was young. It was hard but well paid. There’s no shame in it.” – Margaret Cho.
With each new person that comes out, the lies of the prohibitionists become gradually weaker.
re Bad Jobs: the job factor seems quite small. But look at the differences in mortality across the US; a difference of 30 years. This finding represents inequality in ‘health’. The US certainly has some of the best ‘health care’ in the world, yet the rating for average ‘health care’ isn’t near the top. Likewise, the rating for ‘health’ as an average isn’t great. Somewhat labouring the point; the presence of world-class ‘health care’ doesn’t mean the population gets first class ‘health’.
You also have to distinguish between the top quality available (for pay) and what the average person can afford. Where I live (Switzerland), these are almost identical because everybody has health insurance (even if they have no money) and it covers everything medically necessary. In the US there is a huge, huge gap between the two. Of course, MDs do not tend to get very rich here, but the quality of their work and the available equipment is top notch.
This, incidentally, makes me think that saying that “US certainly has some of the best ‘health care’ in the world” is grossly misleading, as that quality is not available to many (most?) of its citizens.
I’ve both worked in healthcare in CH, and been treated and operated upon there. While healthcare is uniformly good, it is in GDP terms very expensive, though not quite as expensive as the US. In CH, healthcare is very bureaucratic today, even more so than in my time; then, some providers did get rich, not so much today.
By saying that the “US has some of the best health care in the world” I was being accurate; it does. But perhaps a third of the citizens can’t access it, so that overall, healthcare provision and ‘health’ is only moderate. Cuba has better overall healthcare and better health.
The inequalities in health and healthcare are a reflection of income/wealth inequality; the US is a very unequal society. As is CH, though not so markedly; something I always find surprising.
Hi Maggie.
I’ve read that “sex surrogacy” used to be a thing for a short while in the States but it was quickly outlawed. Professional sex therapists were providing sexual experience as therapy to their patients who were deemed to need that for healing. Do you think if this were brought back as a legal profession that it could vastly improve the sex work industry?
It’s not illegal in most of the US, though it is frowned upon in many quarters.
Sex surrogate are kind of like medicinal whiskey during the prohibition…
I feel many prohibitionists are not against alcohol or sex-for-money itself. I think they are simply against people doing whatever they want. They are fine as long as the scary dangerous things are controlled by health professionals or priests.
I agree on that. And, of course, the health professionals and/or priests are there to make sure these things are not fun. These people are extremist misanthropes and control-freaks that do not want anybody to have any fun or any real freedom.