How do you deal with the legal prohibition of sex work? I don’t mean practically, but rather psychologically; don’t you fear that someday you might be caught and sent to prison?
I’ve never much been one to “borrow trouble”, as we say where I’m from; in other words, I try not to worry about what might conceivably happen, instead of what is likely to happen. What this means from a practical standpoint in this context is, I have always taken sensible precautions against being entrapped by the police, but I never lay awake at night worrying about it because the truth is, if a powerful government really and truly wants to harm any individual, it will do so regardless of precautions. However, such governments tend to employ such extraordinary means against much “bigger fish” than ordinary sex workers making very ordinary amounts of money and filing taxes every year as the State demands. This is not to say that the police don’t target ordinary sex workers, because they obviously do; however, they’re generally looking for big numbers of people whom they can easily trick with lies and then inflict criminal records upon. They don’t really want people who can fight back, so they tend to tailor their schemes to entrapping the poor and marginalized rather than people who might have lawyers. I was once caught in such a trap, in October 2005, and though it was an extremely unpleasant experience it was over pretty quickly and in the end I felt more angry than anything else. Still, the experience gave me even more empathy for people who did not have access to the resources I had, and it’s one of the life-experiences that fuels my activism: I am trying, in my own small way, to work for a world in which nobody has to endure that, especially not the people for whom a prostitution arrest means very serious and life-changing consequences rather than a temporary scare and inconvenience.
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