E47:Revolting Prostitutes p6

Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 46-56 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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Hello and welcome back to Behind the Paddle Podcast with me, Porcelain Victoria. We are going to carry on with Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. We are currently on page 46 and we do about 10 pages every episode. So yeah, let's get on with this. Is work bad? In the Parliament building, the small group of sex workers who had traipsed through the rain to meet with a Scottish government minister were asked to speak briefly about why we had entered prostitution. We went around the table, one single mother with several children explained that she got into sex work to support her family. Another explained that as an undocumented migrant, sex work was one of the few jobs available to her. A third explained that when she came out as trans and started her transition, she lost her mainstream job. A man talked about the homophobia he had experienced in other workplaces. The minister was not impressed. She observed that we all seemed to have started selling sex in order to get money, in a tone suggesting not only that she was slightly incredulous, but that selling sex in order to earn an income seemed terribly mercenary to her. She contrasted our stories with those of sex workers who used drugs. They weren't in prostitution for economic reasons, were they? Of course sex workers who use drugs certainly are in sex work for economic reasons, even to get money with which to buy what they need, like housing or drugs, or as part of a direct trade for those same things. In the cacophony that followed the minister's question, as everybody tried to speak at once, this central point was lost. People sell sex to get money. The simple fact is often missed, forgotten, or overlooked. This can be because sex workers are stigmatized to the extent that their motives are pathologist. It becomes inconceivable that people could do something considered so strange and terrible for the same mundane, relatable reasons that govern everybody else's everyday lives. Brackets doubtedly so if they are sex workers who use drugs. Sometimes the centrality of money is more deliberately hidden because to do so serves a political purpose. He can sidestep awkward questions about the connections between prostitution, poverty, and government policy, and align anti-prostitution measures with populist tough on crime approaches. For example, Texas has some of the most extensive laws in the United States when it comes to criminalizing pimps, traffickers, and criminal gangs. But the state legislature has repeatedly failed to fund services for sex trafficking victims, let alone fund programs that would meaningfully address poverty and failures in the child welfare system. Pathologizing sex workers are as unable to make good decisions, rather than seeing them as people largely motivated by familiar mundane needs can lead to disastrous consequences. In 2013, a Swedish family court ruled that a young mother named Jasmine did not know what was best for herself. The court saw her sex work not as a flexible job that gave her a livable income whilst caring full time for her children, but as a form of quote self-harm. The judge ruled that as she was engaged in self-harm, that she was unable to care, unable to care for her children, and disregarded her warnings that her ex-partner was violent. Her ex was awarded child custody. When she visited him in order to see the children, he stabbed her to death. Dismissing Jasmine's prozac material reasons for doing sex work was key to the state's fatally inadequate response for her needs. The belief that sex workers aren't making and can't make good decisions leads us not to a feminist utopia, but to coercive, punitive modes of reform. Downplaying the practical and economic dimensions of prostitution also does some ideological heavy lifting for anti-prostitution feminists. For example, Catherine McKinnon writes, quote, if there were no buyers, there would be no sellers, namely traffickers. McKinnon's misidentification of people who sell sex as traffickers erases the fact that people who sell sex might be driven by economic need, a need which will not be solved by attempting to eradicate prostitution through criminal law. After all, if we thought for a second that people go to the streets because they need money, we needn't grapple with what will replace the income they loss. I want to go with lose on that one. Or what the implications will be for their safety when they desperately try to recoup that income. Remove money from the conversation and sex workers seem bizarre or broken. As one academic writes, quote, the notion that prostitutes have distinctive personal biographies has a long and unhappy history. Male myths about the psychopathologically of the prostitute persist, and in the twenty first century these myths have a feminist veneer. The sex worker it is stated or implied is not capable of understanding her own best interests and is instead acting out her childhood trauma. Anti-prostitution campaigner Kat Banyard, for example, argues that assuming a history of childhood sexual violence among sex workers makes sense, because common consequences of childhood sexual abuse include difficulty asserting boundaries. Sex working survivors have pushed back on this attempt to pathologicalize their lives. As Lori Adorable writes, it's not because of some kind of permanent damage or trauma, reenactment, compulsion, it's because childhood sexual abuse survivors often lack family support. In other words, people who have fled an abusive family home have a compelling need to avoid returning to it, and may sell sex as a strategy to avoid such a return. This is a material need, not a pathology. Economic necessity is the main imperative for women becoming involved in prostitution, end quote, according to UK Home Office researchers. Academic Julia Leite writes, Several late 19th century studies found that up to half of the women selling sex in Britain had been domestic servants, and that many had hated it so much they had willingly left service. Leight quotes a 1920s sex worker asking an arresting police officer What will you give me if I do give this up? A job in a laundry at two pounds a week when I can make twenty easily. Writing in the 1980s sex worker Nikki Roberts echoes these perspectives. Working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most degrading and exploitative work I ever did in my life. I think there should be another word for the kind of work working class people do to differentiate it from the work middle class people do. The ones who have careers. All I can think of is its druggery. It's rotten and hopeless, not even half a life. It's immoral. Yet as I say, it's expected of working class women that they deny themselves everything. Why should I have to put up with a middle class feminist asking me why I didn't do anything? Scrub toilets, even then become a stripper. What's so liberating about cleaning up other people's shit? Through the lens of economic need, people's reasons for engaging in sex work reappear not as aberrant or abject, but as a rational survival strategy in an often shitty world. As another set of researchers note, women are more likely than men to be unemployed, to be underemployed, and to be low paid. In the face of these obstacles, quote, prostitution can be the more attractive option. A sex worker in South Africa says, I had already been in Cape Town cleaning people's fucking bloody houses. I'd done lots of washing for people in different houses. I'd wake up early in the morning and open the windows, clean, cook, make porridge for their children, take their children to school, and do their ironing just for a place to sleep, for a plate of food, not even a cigarette on top of that. So I was done with that. A migrant woman in the UK who sells sex in a flat says, quote, this job is better, the money is good and quick, the cleaner job was really hard work, and no good money. I still say I'm a cleaner, I have to lie. But I don't want to be one. Race and disability are key factors in sex work demographics. Pluma Sumac writes that for many people of colour, quote, prostitution is not what you do when you hit rock bottom. Prostitution is what you do to stay afloat, to swim rather than sink, to defy rather than disappear. An anonymous Maori mother writes, My body isn't capable of working a 40-hour week, nor allowing me to become qualified as something that pays well. I'm disabled from working, and I'm part of a society that doesn't take care of people like me. People like my daughter, who is also disabled. Being a sex worker means I can work when I am able and have days off when I'm not. I can spend lots of time caring for my daughter. Like other marginalized groups, LGBTQ people are overrepresented in sex work. Quote, the criminalization, rejection and abuse, both at home and in wider communities, increase their preclarity and vulnerability in a homophobic and transphobic society, leaving prostitution as one of the remaining viable routes out of destitution. Trans women in particular often find that formal employment is out of reach, increased school dropout rates, lack of family support, and lack of access to adequate health care, including the means to finance gender-affirming treatment, leave them exposed to poverty, illness, and homelessness. One quarter of homeless youth in London are LGBTQ, and of that group, nearly 70% were forced out by their families. It is very difficult to prevent anyone from selling sex through criminal law. Criminalization can make it more dangerous, but there is little the state can do to physically curtail a person's capacity to sell or trade sex. Thus prostitution is an abiding strategy for survival for those who have nothing, no training, qualifications or equipment. There are almost no prerequisitions for heading out to the streets and waiting for a client. Survival sex work may be dangerous, cold, and frightening, but for people whose other options are worse hunger, homelessness, drug withdrawal, it's there as a last resort, the safety net, onto which almost any destitute person can fall. This explains the indomitable resilience of sex work. For some anti prostitution campaigners, concerns about the sex work industry stand in place of wider critique of capitalism. Why is the left in favour of the free market only when it is women's bodies being bought and sold? asks Julia Bindell. This question either misunderstands or misrepresents the argument. What the left actually favours is labour rights, to redress the balance of power between employers and workers. In a capitalist society when you criminalize something, capitalism still happens in that market. When we are asked in a capitalist society to choose between criminalizing commercial sex and decriminalizing it, we are not offered an option for the free market to not govern the proceedings. Look at the United States where the use, sale and distribution of drugs is, for the most part, criminalized. If in Julia Bindel's analysis it can't be a capitalist market because it is criminalized, are those activities therefore happening on a communist or socialist basis? Maybe the US drugs market operates as a gift economy. In fact, as the US drugs market devastatingly illustrates, capitalism is in many ways at its most intense in criminalized markets. This is because in criminalized markets there can be no regulations, no workers' rights with commercial sex criminalized. Whereas with commercial sex decriminalized, people who sell sex can access labour law. The left supports the decriminalization of sex work because the left supports workers having rights. The high prevalence of marginalized people in prostitution is seen as evidence for its predatory strangeness, but in reality it reflects the normalized, sympathetic failures of mainstream society. This reflection is so sharp it makes people uncomfortable, but rather than seeing that the source of their discomfort is the economic equalities that produce this situation, they over the problem by locating its source in prostitution. A similar dynamic can be seen in punitive responses to homelessness, such as finding people for begging or rough sleeping and installing anti-homeless spikes to prevent them from using doorways for temporary shelter. An Oxford City Councillor gave too explicit an account of the underlying reasoning when he said, quote, I would like to go to some of these rough sleepers and say you are a disgrace. I don't think it would do any good, but it ought to have some more respect. Nist in how so many policy advocates emphasize decreasing the visibility of street-based sex work rather than say increasing sex worker safety or decreasing poverty as a key metric of success. The visibility of homelessness and street-based sex work makes people angry with those who are sleeping rough or selling sex outdoors. To say that prostitution is work is not to say it is good work, or that we should be uncritical of it. To be better than poverty or a lower paid job is an abysmally low bar, especially for anybody. Who claims to be part of any movement towards liberation? People who sell or trade sex are among the world's least powerful people, the people often forced to do the worst jobs. But that is precisely why anti-prostitution campaigners should take seriously the fact that sex work is a way people get the resources they need. Instead, this is errily dismissed. Losing a bad job, we're told, is no big deal. Losing jobs is how we achieve social change, we're told. Anti-prostitution feminist Megan Murphy writes I suppose we wouldn't try to stop the oil industry because people will lose jobs. It isn't super progressive to defend harmful practices lest people lose jobs. Those who make these arguments imagine changing society through taking something away. Of course, many of these jobs are not directly analogous to sex work. Oil workers, bankers, and nuclear scientists are not already at the bottom of the social pile, but people with re relatively little are right. But people with relatively little are right to be fearful when their means of survival is taken away. British miners in the 1980s didn't strike on the basis that mining was the most wonderful job. They were simply correct in that their belief that once mining was taken from them, Thatcher's government would abandon their communities to desperate poverty. Likewise, few sex workers would object if you sought to abolish the sex industry by ensuring that they got the resources they need without having to sell sex. Instead, however, one Labour politician cites what she considered not considered to be sex workers, quote, low income, to argue that reducing it even further could not be a real concern. It is when people's incomes are low that reducing them is a terrifying prospect. It is when jobs are bad that workers most need workers' rights. Outsiders often think that selling sex must be a pretty horrible job, and many sex workers would agree. However, these sex workers may locate the problem not in sex but in work. Striking workers rely on their ability to refuse wages. The temptation to break the strike increases as your money runs out. In any negotiation, the most power is held by the side which is most able to walk away. We see this as mentry of need within sex work. As anti-prostitution feminists often like to point out, no man needs to buy sex. It is ultimately a recreational activity. Sex workers, however, do have a need. As Dudu de la Mini says, what it's all about is money. What am I gonna eat with my kids? My kids are hungry now. I need quick cash. I felt I will go, I will survive, and I will come back with money. I will take care of my kids. In an important sense, clients are not the demand, but the supply for sex workers. Clients represent the supply of resources into our lives. We have witnessed clients using internet forums to organize a boycott against escorts in their area, forcing them all to drop their rates. The clients are, of course, easily able to forego the luxury of commercial sex, and as a result, their ringleader knows that the escorts are likely to yield as he and his buddies can outlast the workers indefinitely. The person selling sex needs the transaction far more than the buyer does. This need makes the sex worker vulnerable. In the same way, a street-based worker suffering a lack of business after a police crackdown becomes desperate. A desperation makes them less able to refuse unfair demands. Compromise means capitalizing to the client's fears about avoiding the police. If he wants to do business in an unlit park at midnight to stay hidden, then he can make that demand or simply leave without paying. People are attracted to the concept of a Nordic style law that criminalizes only the sex buyer and not the prostitute. But any campaign or policy that aims to reduce business for sex workers will force them to absorb the defecate, whether in their wallets or in their working conditions, as a sex worker in the industrial workers of the world observes. I find that how easy, safe and enjoyable I can make my work is directly related to whether I can survive on what I'm currently making. I might be safer if I refuse any clients who make their disrespect for me clear immediately, but I know exactly where I can afford to set the bar on what I need to tolerate. If I haven't been paid in weeks, I need to accept clients who sound more dangerous than I'd usually be willing to risk. When sex workers speak to this, we often seemingly misheard as defending some kind of right for men to pay for sex. In fact, as wages for housework articulated in nineteen seventies, naming something as work is a crucial first step in refusing to do it on your own terms. Marxist feminist theorist Sylvia Federisti wrote in nineteen seventy five that to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it. Because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it. Naming work as work has been a key feminist strategy beyond wages for housework, from socialist Ariel Hotchild's term emotional labour, to journalist Susan Marchart's term wife work, to Sophie Lewis's theorizing around surrogacy and gestational labour, naming otherwise invisible or natural structures of gendered labour is central to beginning to think about how collectively to resist or reorder such work. Just because a job is bad does not mean it's not a real job. When sex workers assert that sex work is work, we are saying that we need rights. We are not saying that work is good or fun or even harmless, nor that it is fundament nor that it has fundamental value. Likewise, situating what we do within a workers' rights framework does not constitute an unconditional endorsement of work itself. It is not an endorsement of capitalism or of a bigger, more profitable sex industry. In fact, we want the opposite. Our ideal world is one free of the economic desperation that forces women into this business. It is not the task of sex workers to apologize for what prostitution is. Sex workers should not have to defend the sex industry to argue that we deserve the ability to earn a living without punishment. People should not have to demonstrate that their work has intrinsic value to society to deserve safety at work. Moving towards a better society, one in which more people's work does have wider value, one in which resources are shared on the basis of need cannot come about through criminalization, nor can it come about through treating marginalized people's material needs and survival strategies as trivial. Sex workers ask to be credited with the capacity to struggle with work, even to hate it, and still be considered workers. You don't have to like your job to want to keep it. Now, on the next episode of Behind the Padder Podcast, we will be starting chapter 3. So thank you for listening to these pages of Revolting Prostitutes with me. And if you want to leave any feedback, if you want to leave any reviews, or if you want to go see the spicy version on our dark fans or many vids, you can go do so. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok now. Um and yeah, if you have any ideas on topics or anything like that, then please say. But thank you very, very much for listening and goodbye.