E39:Revolting Prostitutes pt2

Behind the Paddle: Reading Revolting Prostitutes

In this episode of Behind the Paddle, we dive into pages 7-14 of Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This section sets the stage for the book’s radical perspective on sex work, challenging mainstream narratives and exposing the real-world consequences of criminalization. We break down the authors’ key arguments, explore the intersections of labor, migration, and feminism, and discuss how these ideas connect to the broader discourse on power and agency. 

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Behind the Battle Podcast with P Victoria. So we are continuing on from Revolting Prostitutes, the Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. In 1974, sex workers in Ethiopia joined the newly formed Confederation of Utopian Labour Unions and engaged in strike action that helped to bring down the government. In Europe, the modern movement is generally considered to have begun in 1975 when sex workers in France occupied churches to protest criminalization, poverty, and police violence. This sparked similar sex worker organizing in London, where the collective of prostitutes occupied churches in King's Cross, London in 1980. More recently, sex workers were deeply involved in anti-gentrification protests around Gesi Park in Istanbul, Turkey. In the UK, the 1970s and 1980s sex workers' rights movement was deeply entwined with the wages for housework campaign. Marxist feminists named the value of women's unpaid, productive and domestic labour and demanded a radical reorganization of society to value women's work. Around that time, the feminist group, wages due lesbians linked domestic work, sex work, and the work of heterosexuality in a solidarity statement against a 1977 vice crackdown. It is a strength to all of us and proof that women's services cannot be taken for granted. Throughout the 1980s, the sex workers' rights movement became increasingly international. The first and second wars congresses took place in Amsterdam and Brussels and new sex worker-led groups began emerging from Australia, Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, and Uruguay, among other places. In 1997, 4,000 sex workers made history with the first national conference of sex workers in India, organized by the Dubar Ma'la Salmonwear Committee DMSC for short. At a follow-up event in 2001, their number rose to 25,000 who came to Kalata to make their demands known, with signs proclaiming, quote, we want bread, we also want roses, end quote. In Bolivia in the mid-2000s, 35 sex workers from across the country participated in a huge series of collective actions against police violence and the closure of workplaces. She went on strike by refusing to go for a mandatory sexually transmitted disease testing. Others blockaded traffic or went on hunger strikes. We are Bolivia's unloved, said Urley Perez from the Sex Workers Union, national organization from the emancipated of women in a state of prostitution. We are hated by a society that uses us regularly and ignored by institutions obligated to protect us. We will fight tooth and nail for the rights we deserve. Despite their precocious feminism, prostitutes' relationship with the wider feminist movement has always been fought. In the middle nineteenth century, as middle class women emerged into the public sphere of the professionals, a new kind of role was invented, which married the ideal values and attributes of middle class femininity to paid employment. In part, this could be thought as a feminist project, as the alleged moral superiority of these women justified their taking as more public role in society, including working outside the home, the legal right to own property, the vote, and so on. But the creation of professionalized caring roles, such as philanthropic and social work, was about employment that reproduced rather than upset gender roles. These women were reasserting their position in a class hierarchy over working class people, particularly working class women and children, who were targeted as receipts for materialistic and coercive forms of care. This led to the development of what anthropologist Laura Gusten terms the rescue industry, meaning the various various systems of social rewards associated with reforming prostitutes, as well as protecting children and rescuing animals. Brackets this new kind of philanthropic role. Implicity bracketed children, animals and prostitutes together, which gives a sense of how women who sold sex were viewed at the time. The rescue industry enabled middle class women to claim a space as citizens and political agents in the public sphere, at the expense of their working class sisters, whose lives were increasingly policed. In 1877 the National Security for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children became embroiled in controversy when it prosecuted an upper class family for child cruelty for the first time. It had already prosecuted 38 cases of cruelty among poor and uneducated people, even when their interests temporarily aligned, as in their shared struggles against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1860s. Suffragists and other feminists fail to see sex workers their equals. Likening sex workers to animals persists in some feminists, with prostitutes sometimes compared to service dogs, pets and Pokemon. Feminists' discomfort with proximity to sex workers reached a fever pitch during the so-called sex wars of the 1980s and the 1990s. In this era, radical feminists locked horns with pro-sex feminists over the issues of pornography and prostitution. The radical feminist perspective on sex work holds that it reproduces and is itself a product of patriarchal violence against women. This analysis could extend to all heterosexual behaviors as well as public sex and kink, commonly known as BDSM for bondage, domination, submission slash sadism and masochism. The focus in this era was on censoring porn and raising awareness rather than addressing prostitution through criminal law directly. But a nonetheless vehement anti-prostitution stance became commonplace in the feminist movement. Writer Janice Raymond stated that prostitution is rape that's paid for, while Kathleen Barry said buying and selling sex was destructive of human life. The defense of porn and prosecution that followed in response was based on ideas of sexual libertation through nonconformist sexual expression, such as BDSM and the queering of lesbian and gay identities. Many pro-sex or sex radical feminists posted that not only could watching porn gratifyingly an educational, it could append patriarchal control over women's sexual expression. Moreover, that the sex industry was sticking two fingers up at the institution of marriage, highlighting the hypocrisy of conservative, monogamous heteronormativity, while some people who fought for sex liberation were sex workers, such as LGBTQ and AIDS activist Amber Holyball. Many sex radicals advanced their arguments from a non-sex worker perspective. Defending porn often meant defending watching it rather than performing it. Radical feminists famously described sex radicals as Uncle Tom's, pandering to the primacy of male sexuality while they in turn were derived as prudes, invested in preserving sexual pyramidism. Rather than focusing on the work of sex work, both pro sex feminists and anti-prostitution feminists condemned themselves with sex as symbol. Both groups questioned what the existence of the sex work industry implied for their own positions as women. Both groups prioritized those questions over what material improvements could be made in the lives of the sex workers in their communities, stuck in the domain of sex and whether it is good or bad for women, and a damn that it could only be one or the other. It was all too easy for feminists to think of the prostitute only in terms of what she represented to them. They claimed ownership of sex worker experiences in order to make sense of their own. Anti-prostitution activist Dorshan Leitholt spoke to this feminist impulse. This deindividualized, dehumanized being has the function of representing genetic women. She stands for all of us, and she takes the abuse that we are beginning to resist. It was in this context that former prostitute Andrea De Workin's work became highly influential in the moment, in the movement, and set a new tone for criticism of sex work. The prostitute, she said, lives the literal reality of being the dirty woman. There is no metaphor. She is the woman covered in dirt, which is to say that every man who has ever been on top of her has left a piece of himself behind. She is perceived as treated as and I want you to remember this. This is the real vaginal slime. Her confrontational writing style and her experiences in sex trade helped to legitimise and normalize similar usage of graphic and misogynistic language in feminist discussions of sex workers and their bodies. Barry, a contemporary of Duorkin, likened prostitutes to blow up dolls, complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation, while Lighthoit wrote that stranger after stranger uses her body as a seminal spittoon. What of a job is so deeply gendered that one's breasts, vagina and rectum constitute the working equipment? Academics Academics Cecile Hoygard and Liv Finstad wrote of women who sell sex that at the core they experience themselves as only cheap whores. Sex working feminists have long found themselves harshly excluded, and not only by dehumanizing language in academia, but by explicit lack of invitation into spaces. Kate Millet recalls a feminist conference on prostitution held in 1971. Disgruntled working women arrived to demand a seat at the table. An indivertent masterpiece of tactless precipitance. The title of the day's program was inscribed on leaflets for our behalf towards the elimination of prostitution. The panel of experts including everyone but prostitutes. All hell broke loose between the prostitute and the movement because against all likelihood, prostitutes did in fact attend the conference. They had a great deal to say about the presumption of straight women who fancied they could debate, decide, or even discuss what their situation, and not ours. Unlike the hostile environment of radical feminism, sex radicals were welcoming and supportive to sex workers. This influence helped shape the movement's growth. In 1974, Coyote hosted the first National Hookers Convention. The bright orange flyer nodded to the way prostitutes had been shunned from the women's movement, basled with a hand-touching evolver. It proclaimed, Our convention is different. We want everyone to come. In the following decades, advocates from Amber, Holly Bore and Annie Sprinkle to Kathleen Hannah and Amber Rose have linked sexuality to sex worker issues. Many sex workers have worked in the HIV slash AIDS and LGBTQ movements and been involved with Riot Girl, Slutwalk, Consent Awareness, Sex Education, and Non Monogamy. However, as we explore in depth in chapter 2, sex positivity can be counterproductive point from which to start a conversation above the actual conditions of the sex work industry. Working class sex workers and sex workers of colour have long criticized the race and class privilege of these politics, labour rights, and safety are not the same as pleasure. And those who do experience sexual gratification at work are likely to be those who already have the most control over their working conditions. As conversations about prostitute have rapidly widened and grown more complex in the age of the internet, sex workers have noted the way that a focus on sex positivity has become a defense response to stigmatizing media representations of prostitutes. Recent years have been a significant shift in the sex worker movement away from prostitution, quote happy hooker myths, towards a Marxist feminist labour-centered analysis. Sex workers who are survivors have become more vocal in the movement, citing their experiences of violence and criminalization as a driver for their activism. Anti-prosecution activists too are often drawn to feminism through their own histories of surviving violence. They often identify heavily with procriminalization survivors of prostitution, also called exited women. Through their howring testimonies of violence and firm stance on the punishment of men who bisex, excited women come to be regarded as the ultimate symbol of female woundedness, with the criminalization of clients as feminist justice. This sense of ownership that many feminists have over prostitution sparks debates about who is entitled to speak as a sex worker or on our behalf. It is common for anti-prostitution feminist commentators to claim that sex worker activists are paid shills. Illegitimate fronts for exploitative bosses preactively nicknamed the pimp lobby. When sex workers held a protest in the French Senate in 2009, one politician deemed them pimps dressed as prostitutes. In 2016, the Irish anti-prostitution organization Ruhama accidentally forwarded internal emails to a student journalist. In them, Ruhamas Ruhamas, chief executive muses that should the young journalist produce a critical article, Ruhama can discuss it as pimp thinking. Ruhama, caught out in writing, had to apologize. When Ambesty International announced their intention to support sex workers in their policy, anti-prostitution feminist campaigners flooded social media with the hashtag NoAMBSY for pimps. They photoshopped the iconic Ambesty logo, replacing the candle with an ejaculating penis above the slogans Protect the Male Orgasm and Protect Male Entitlement as a Prostituted Class. The way that sex workers' rights is merged with the interests of men in the feminist imagination makes it easy for non-prostitute women to turn away from us. As anti-prostitution campaigner Finn McKay wrote, It is time to choose which side we were on, because the multi-billion dollar sex industry is doing fine, and well, it does not need our support, it certainly does not need our protection. Today the anti-prosecution agenda focuses on eradicating sex work through harsher penalties for clients. Despite the fact that their movement is almost exclusively comprised of those who previously sold sex and those who have never sold sex, modern day anti-prosecution campaigning works to eliminate the means for others for other people to currently sell sex. Few in their number will themselves be materially affected by prostitution policy. The relationship between survivor-led sex positive by radical liberal, libertarian, Marxist and carcerial responses to prostitution is as fractious as ever. Both anti-prostitution feminists and sex workers at times double down on their views as a kind of shield against traumatizing encounters with their opponents. Each believing that the other is the enemy. Hostile debates hinge on force and choice, the spectre of sex trafficking, and the intersections of poverty and patriarchy. The few sex workers who speak out face pressures to conform to limiting narratives of their experiences. And regardless of how we share our stories, our movement continues to be attacked by those who reach for the quote happy hooker, strawman, as a way to undermine our politics and derail more complex conversations. After all, as any woman knows, it is a struggle to be heard if your detractors can easily dismiss you as slots. So this is where we're gonna end today. I really hope you enjoyed this lovely episode of Revolting Prostitutes. And yeah, I will see you next time. This is Behind the Bad Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. You can catch me on many vids, DocFans, Spotify, Apple, wherever. If you are gracious enough to send a tip, that would really help. Otherwise, please subscribe, follow, and listen on. If you would like to suggest any episodes in the future, please do. I'm sure there is a way to send us a message. But yeah, bye.