E41:Revolting Prostitutes p3

 Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 14-24 of Revolting Prostitutes, a groundbreaking work that challenges societal views on sex work. Delve into the critical themes of agency, labor, and the intersections of identity and exploitation. In this intimate reading, Porcelain brings her unique perspective to the text, offering insights and reflections on the issues that shape the lives of sex workers worldwide. Tune in for a thought-provoking and unapologetic exploration of a world often misunderstood. 

Transcript

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Hi and welcome to Behind About Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. Today we are carrying on with Revolting Prostitutes The Fight for Sex Worker Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. This is the end of page 14. Cops borders carceral feminists There is a huge emphasis on policing, including border policing, as the quote solution to prostitution. This is the case even among these on the left. However, it is remarkable how little you will find out about the police and borders in such discussions. These omissions have led to the illusion that one can discuss the laws that govern sex work without any discussion about how such laws are implemented and by whom. But laws are not just messaging, they are what the police are permitted to do in the world. The institutions of policing and borders may seem natural or inevitable, but they are recent inventions. Their modern forms date back only to the nineteenth century, and a look at their history illuminates their present. In the southern United States, the first centralized and specialized policing organizations were slave patrols, whose major function was to capture and punish runaway slaves. Historians of the region argue that they quote should be considered a forerunner of modern American law enforcement. In the early nineteenth century, northern United States and in the United Kingdom, professionalized police forces were set up in response to a restive working class organizing against bad working and living conditions. As historian David Whitehouse explains, the state needed a way to control burgeoning crowds, protests and strikes without sending in the army, which risked creating working class martyrs and fervor radicalizing the populance. Thus the police were designed to inflict generally non-lethal violence to protect the interests of capitalism and the state. The situation is not so different today with police citing authorization from the president of McDonald's to justify arresting restaurant workers protesting for better wages. Today's immigration controls are also largely a product of the nineteenth century. They rely on ideas of radical inferiority propagated by white Europeans to justify slavery and communism. Jewish refugees arriving in Britain in eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties were met by a surge in anti-Semiticism and anti-Semitic tracts claimed at the time that the white slave traffic is carried out everywhere by Jews. This racist panic led to the enactment of the Aliens Act of nineteen oh five, which contained the first recognizably modern anti-immigration measures in Britain. In the US, the first federal immigration restrictions included the Page Act of eighteen seventy five, the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, and the Scott Act of eighteen eighty eight. These targeted Chinese migrants, particularly sex workers and devoted substantial resources to attempting to discern wives from prostitutes. Along with racists. Along with racism, anxieties about commercial sex are embedded in the histories of immigration controls. These are legislative spaces where race and gender co-produce racist categories of exclusion men of colour as traffickers, women of colour as helpless, seductive, infectious, both as threats to the body politic of the nation. These histories help us see that police and border violence are not anomalous or the work of bad apples. They are intrinsic to these institutions. The feminist movement should thus be sceptical of approaches to gender justice that rely on or further empower the police or immigration controls. Black feminists such as Angela Davis have long criticized feminist reliance on the police. And note that the police appear as the most benevolent protesters in the minds of those who encounter them the least. For sex workers and other marginalized and criminalized groups, the police are not a symbol of protection, but a real manifestation of punishment and control. Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The socialist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritizes a quote law and order agenda. A shift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals. Carceral feminism focuses on policing and criminalization as a key ways to deliver justice to women. Carceral feminism has gained popularity even though the police and the wider criminal justice system are key perpetrators of violence against women. In the United States, police officers are disproportionately likely to be violent or abusive to their partners or children. At work they commit vast numbers of assaults, rapes or harassment. Sexual assault is the second most commonly reported form of police violence in the United States after excessive use of force in brackets. And on duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population. Those are just the assaults that make it into statistics. Many will never dare to make a report to an abuser's colleague. Meanwhile, in the very nature of police work involves perpetrating violence in arrests or when they collaborate in incarceration, surveillance or deportation. In twenty seventeen, there was outrage in the United Kingdom when it emerged that the Metropolitan Police had arrested a woman on immigration charges after she came to them as a victim of rape. However, it is routine for police to threaten to arrest or deport migrant sex workers, even when the worker in question has to come to them as a victim of violence. Carceral feminism looms large in sex trade debates. Feminist commentators pronounce that quote, we must strengthen police apparatus. That criminalization is quote the only way to end the sex trade. And that some criminalization can be relatively benign. Anti-prostitution feminist Catherine McKinnon even writes with ambient approval of brief jail time for prostitutes on the basis that jail can be a respirate from the pimps a respirate from the pimps and the street end quote. She quotes like-minded feminists who argue that jail is the closest thing many women in prostitution have to a battered women's shelter, and that quote, considering the absence of any other refuge or shelter, jail provides a temporary safe haven. Sex workers do not share this rosy view of arrest and incarceration. One sex worker in Norway told researchers, quote, if a customer is bad, you need to manage it yourself to the end. You only call the police if you think you're going to die. If you call the police, you risk losing everything. She had been arrested for prostitution two months earlier and had recently been sexually assaulted by a man claiming to be a police officer. It remains unclear as to whether he was. Ideas seemed to lurch between contradictory stereotypes and perhaps unsurprisingly for a group more often spoken about than two. Much as immigrants are seen as lazy scroungers while somehow also stealing the jobs of quote decent people, sex workers are sultaneously victim and accomplice, sexually voracious yet helpless maidens. When our society attempts to reconcile these wildly contradictory expectations, sex workers are asked to produce a spokesperson who quote represents the community. This is impossible, just as there can be no one representative token woman who can stand every time women's issues are on the table. One sex worker may be nothing like the other in their identity, circumstance, health and habits. From the single mum with a weekday job in the Scottish massage parlour, to the young Cambodian bar hostess keen to travel to Europe, to the group of black trans sex workers forming political collectives in Cape Town, to the undocumented Nigerian migrant hustling on the streets of Stockholm, across the globe north and south, across an age spectrum that spans many decades. Sex workers are unimaginably diverse in race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. To achieve anything like real representation, this book would need thousands of authors. Many sex worker activists find their testimonies are dismissed in feminist spaces on the grounds that, by virtue of these activists, they are not representative, that they speak from an exceptional privileged and non mallous perspective. Questions over whether a sex worker is representative become recursive in their claimed eagerness to hear from the voiceless. Anti-prostitution campaigners position anyone they can hear from as by definition someone who no longer needs to be listened to. This is of course not a logic that anti-prostitution campaigners apply to their own voices. The authors of this book could certainly not be described as representative of all people selling sex. Both of us are cisgender and white, born and raised in the global north working in a country where the sex work we do is less criminalized, with middle class educations and the access to power and capital that brings. It is not by accident that opportunities to speak on television, publish articles, and be appointed to salaried activist positions come to us or people like us. Just as in any radical movement, a select few activists often receive unfair credit for doing the same work that more marginalized sex workers who cannot risk being public in their activism are doing amongst them. The existence of this book, which is written in English and which focuses on the UK, where we live and work, itself illustrates a way in which some modes of discussion are legitimized by society while others go unrecognized. The service, provision, and community building created by marginalized grassroots communities is something relatively unknown. The service, provision, and community building created by marginalized grassroots communities is sometimes relatively unknown. These ephemeral forms of resistance can be incredibly joyful or life-saving, and the memories of them invaluable to a movement. On the other hand, books, blogs, and policy documents are forms of advocacy that make easy passage into history. A book gives us a substantial amount of space to critically explore the sometimes painful aspects of sex work politics, space and nuance non afforded to people taking two-minute turns on a megaphone at a rally. This book is forged from our perspective, and our perspective is shaped by our privileges. However, we strive to include a range of sex worker voices in our writing, from triumphant to refluxive, to critical to mournful. All these forms of political speech are valid. Sex workers sometimes pay a high price for political speech. In 2004, Argentinian trade union activist Sandra Caberia was shot dead in her home in retribution for her work challenging police corruption and police violence directed at sex workers. Her murder remains officially unsolved. Kabita Roy, an activist with sex worker trade union in India, was murdered in the union's office, Kolkata in 2016. In january 2018, three prominent sex worker activists were murdered in Brazil. In 2011, criminal gangs murdered the president of a migrant sex worker trade union in Peru. Sex worker Angela Vian Bustamante, a colleague of the murder trade union list, said, It's not in the mafia's economic interests that sex workers organize, end quote. Nor is the high cost of political speech eventually disputed among sex workers, nor is the high cost of political speech evenly distributed among sex workers. Precarious immigration status, fear of eviction, and police violence. The potential loss of child custody mean that migrant and indigenous workers, the insecurely housed and parents, particularly mothers, all face higher stakes when organizing or speaking up than sex workers who have secure long term tendencies, hold a passport, or sit some streets. Or have no children. Cisgender sex workers are safer from these risks than transgender sex workers. White sex workers are safer than sex workers of colour. Nonetheless, even the sex workers with relative power demonstrating that we can speak for ourselves is often a grueling task. The prostitution debate is in many ways shaped far more by invisible actors, such as the media staffers who write article headlines and choose the photo that will accompany an article, or local government workers who progress planning applications than by who actually sells sex. Even the most privileged sex workers take a considerable risk by becoming publicly known, so online amenity is a vital tool of diverse speech. Yet this anonymity is often used to discredit us as nesperious sex industry lobbyists, websites where sex workers have anonymously connected with the public, with each other and with clients are rapidly being dismantled. As this book went to press, US President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that seeks to stop sex workers from communicating online, with disastrous implications not only for privacy and political advocacy but for sex workers' safety and survival too. The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act Foster and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act SISTER are respectfully the House of Representatives and State Bills enacted eleventh of April 2018 that criminalize sites that host content linked to sex trafficking or knowingly assist, support, or fertilitate sex trafficking. The text of the law is broad enough to refer not only to the sex industry, advertising, but also to community organizing or support spaces. At the time of writing, Backpage.com and several other major advertising platforms enabled sex workers to identify both viable and dangerous clients had been taken down. More information is available at survivorsagainstor. We wrote this book with thoughtfulness about where we stand, but also with the sense of satisfaction that you will hold in your hand a book about prostitution written by prostitutes. This is unfortunately all too rare. Sex workers not journalists, politicians or the police are the experts on sex work. We bring our experiences on criminalization, rape, assault, intimate partner abuse, abortion, mental illness, drug use, and epistemic violence with us in our organizing and our writing. We bring the knowledge we have developed through our deep immersion in sex worker organizing spaces, spaces of mutual aid, spaces that are working towards collective liberation. As two friends writing this book together, we strive to make the demands of our movement visible. The man responsible for the killing spree in Fika, Kenya, was apprehended in 2010. He confessed and claimed that he would have continued killing until he reached a hundred prostitutes. And there were eighty free to go. Ayisha, a sex worker in Fika, who with her friends protested in the streets during the frightening time before he was caught, says, We wanted people to know that we call ourselves sex workers because it is the wheat our families depend on. Even in the face of such overwhelming vocabulary, they openly identified themselves as sex workers in public for the first time. With bright red t-shirts and loud chanting, as one sex worker at the protest remarked, The community should know we exist and there's no going back. Sex We are anxious about sex. For us as women, sex can be as much a site of trauma or an easy compromise as a site of joy or intimacy. Feminist conversations about sex work are often seen as arguments between those who are quote sex positive and those who are sex negative. The reasons for this will be explored in this chapter. We have no interest in positioning ourselves within the terrain. Instead we assert the right for all women to be sex ambivalent. That said, the hatred of sex workers is rooted in very old and misogynistic ideas about sex. Understanding those visceral responses of disgust is a key starting point for understanding all kinds of things about prostitution, including criminal law. People are preoccupied with the sexual dimension of sex work. These anxieties manifest in ideas of bodily degradation and the threat of the sex workers pose as the vectors of such degradation. The prostitute is seen as a disease spreader associated with death. We are envisioned both as removing corruption from society. A ninth century French physician spoke of the seminal drain brackets and as a source of contamination, disease and death in our own right. Puta, the Spanish word for prostitute has links with the English putrid, another preoccupation that holds that to have sex or to have sex in the wrong ways too much with the wrong person or for the wrong reason brings about the same kind of loss, often contradictory ideas about sex and these visceral frets or losses interwind in cultural depictions of sex worker, forming a figure that Melissa Gria Grant names the prostitute imaginary. Sometimes the connection between these ideas is obvious. For the Victorians, the quote loss of virginity risks ruin and a grim death from syphilis. The ruined woman is reconfigured as an agent of destruction, spreading disease in her wake. Sometimes the loss is a spiritual decline. She precipitates in others. In eighteen seventy, for example, a journalist, William Acton, wrote that prostitutes are ministers of evil passions, who not only gratify desire but also arouse it and suggest evil thoughts and desires which might otherwise remain undeveloped. In The Whore's Last Shift, a 1779 painting by James Gilway, the tragic figure of a heavily made up nude woman with hair piled high stands by a broken chamber pot in a dirty room, washing her filthy and clumsily symbolic white dress by hand. Attitude towards the prostitute imaginary can be read in context with the more familiar paradox around a specific body part. Ugly, stretched, odorous, unclean, potentially infected. Desirable, mysterious, tantalizing, the patriarchy's ambivalence towards vaginas is well established and has a lot in common with attitudes around sex work. On the one hand, the law of the vagina is a threat. It's seen as a place where a penis might risk encountering the traces of another man or a full set of gnashing teeth. At the same time, it's viewed as an inherently submissive body part that must be broken in to bring about sexual maturity. The idea of the vagina as fundamentally come from missed or pitiful is helped along in part of a longstanding feminist perception of the penetrative sexual act as indicative of subjaron. The nineteenth century Contagious Diseases Act gave police the power to subject any suspected prostitute to a false pelvic exam of a speculum, a device still in use today, invented by a doctor who found gynecolligible contact repellent who purchased enslaved black women to experiment on. In London in eighteen eighty three, Caesar Lombroso studied the bodies of women from the dangerous from the dangerous classes, mostly prostitutes and other working class women, the women of colour, all of whom he described as primitive. He asserted that prostitutes experienced increased pubic hair growth, hypotrophy of the clitoris, and permanent distension of the labia and vagina, clearly believing that their unnatural deeds and their unnatural bodies were two sides of the same coin. To him the social and moral degradation they represented became legible in their physical bodies. An eighteen eighties novel describes a sex worker as quote a shovel full of putrid flesh, continuing it was as if the poison she had picked up in the gases from the carcasses left by the roadside that ferment with which she had poisoned a whole people had risen to her face and rotted it. The body of the prostitute is out of hurt. The body of the prostitute is out to her innocence. She is carrying contamination and foulness to every quarter where she creeps, no precautions used and poisons half the young. During World War I, the disease ridden prostitute was imaged as the enemy's secret biological weapon. Poster depicted her as an archetypal feminine fatal, with a cigarette between her red lips, a tight dress and a wicked smile. Above slogans warning that she and other pickups were dangerous traps, loaded guns, quote junk joint snipers, axes, agents, enemies of the Allied forces and friends of Hitler. These questions about the duplicity of the sexualized body also came up around queer and gendered non-conforming people. Trans women are often questioned about their biological status, a demand that invariably reveals an obsessive focus on their genitals. A trans woman is constantly targeted for public harassment. At the same time, if she is quote read as trans, she is seen to be as threatening as a man, accused of trespassing into bathrooms to commit sexual violence. Conversely, if she can pass as for cisgender, she is regarded as dangerous, liable to quote trap someone into having sex with her unawares. This is where we're gonna end for today. This has been Behind the Bader Podcast with Paulson Victoria reading Revolting Prostitutes. If you want to subscribe or follow, please do, and also leave a review, that really helps. If you want to suggest anything else we read next, you're more than welcome to, or any other topics for the podcast. Yeah, you'll be able to catch my socials and behind the battle socials on the links. This is it for today. Bye!