E55:Revolting Prostitutes p10

Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 87-97 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 to Behind the Paddle Podcast with me, Porcelain Victoria. We are still on Revolting Prostitutes. This is part 10 now, I believe. And we're starting with chapter 4. We've actually made like a good dent in this. I'm like so happy. I'm sure at some point soon I'm gonna need recommendations and more of a book to read next. Um, I'm really enjoying the book in frustration, honestly, with how ridiculous and sad a lot of it is in the ways of how the government is and how other feminists are, and it it's sad, it really is. So let's let's hop in. I would also like to mention hello to any new listeners. Um I'm sure you can just read this, listen to this straight off the bat. Um, but we do have a part one if you want to go listen to that. It is a few pages down. There is a new podcast episode every Monday, and there is a new podcast book reading every Thursday. And every Thursday we do about 10 pages. And yeah. So welcome to Behind the Paddle Podcast and Boss and Victoria. And this is Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. Chapter 4: A Victorian Hungover, Great Britain. Partial criminalization. A legal model where some aspects of the sex industry, often the most visible, such as street-based sex work, are criminalized. Within England, Scotland and Wales, the acts of buying and selling sex are legal, but almost everything else is criminalised. For example, soliciting and curb crawling, working indoors with friends or facilitating sex work. In the weeks leading up to Christmas 2006, sex workers in the small British town of Ipswich feared for their lives. The bodies of two sex working women had been found in the previous week and the killer was still at large. Out in the quiet streets, a local news film crew approached a young woman named Paula Clenell, one of the few who remained waiting for clients in the usual spot. When asked why was she risking her life out on the streets when a murderer was on the loose, she explained. Paula, a mother of three in her twenties, had been selling sex for some time. After her children were taken away from her, she became depressed, and by the winter of 2006, her dependency on heroin and cocaine had reached a stage where she needed an income of around £100 a day to support herself. For Paula, as for so many people in similar situations, selling sex was the only viable way to obtain this kind of money. A friend encouraged her to try indoor escorting in the hope it would be safer, as well as legal under British law, but in her situation that level of organization and financial overhead was unrealistic. Street work was low criminalized, meant she could sell sex wherever she wanted and return home with instant cash. She had no partner and no manager to split her money with. A few days after her appearance on the news, Paula vanished. By Christmas her body had been found. Along with those of four other women. Steve Wright, a local man, was later found guilty of all five murders. Nine years later. Daria Pianko's smiling face jumped out of news reports. Daria was just twenty one and had moved from Poland to Britain ten months before. Daria's mother, Lydia, described her as a kind hearted and joyful girl who was always eager to help others. A few days before Christmas 2015, a young man named Louis Pierre kicked Daria to death in Holbeck, Leeds in order to steal 80 pounds from her. Daria's body was discovered by her housemate and friend, Carolina, who was also a street-based worker. Daria had been working in the Holbeck managed area. This is a place where street-based sex workers and clients can meet without fear of arrest. An arrangement that only one of its kind in Britain. In most of Britain, sex workers who wait for clients in public places may be charged with quote soliciting or quote loitering with intent to commit prostitution. Their clients may also be charged with quote curb crawling. Daria left the managed area with Pierre, as was compulsory. Although sex workers can meet clients without fear of arrest in the Holbeck zone, sex there was not permitted. They were forced to leave the managed area and find a dark alley or patch of woodland where they conduct business in secrecy. In doing so, sex workers risk arrest. They also, of course, are at risk of attack in these hidden spaces. When Louis Pierre reappeared in the lens of the same CCTV camera that caught him walking away from the managed area with Daria, he had blood on his steel capped shoes. In response to such horrific stories, it is easy to make them purely about male brutality and the disposability of prostitutes. These themes have resonance for us too, as they surely do for any sex worker who has stepped into a car or a hotel with a stranger. The emphasis on male violence as the conceptual framework through which to understand these murders allows non-prostitute women who may themselves be survivors of male violence to empathically and discursively enter into the experience of the prostitute. While this empathy is welcome, there is a danger that this sands away the specifics of Paula and Daria's lives, and the lives and experiences of prostitutes as a whole, which then become draped around the figure of the every woman. As Beth Ritchie argues, the quote every woman victim slash survivor concept was created in the 1970s as a strategic rhetorical move on the part of the nascent feminist movement to demand attention for the epidemic of male violence, but this has transmuted over time into something closer to a focus on the quote default woman, and the quote default woman is certainly not a drug user or a sex worker, nor is she a survivor of state violence. Daria and Paula's lives were shaped by specific realities, including the ever-present threat of criminalization. These young women were acting rationally in a system designed to harm them at every turn. Instead of asking questions about how the state makes women like Daria and Paula unsafe, media coverage tends to channel the world view of their aggrieved neighbours. The fact that selling sex is technically not a crime in Britain does seem little to render sex workers relatable or grievable in the eyes of police, residents or journalists. Sympathetic perceptions of sex workers are readily tossed aside for something more callous. Mike Vall, chief of the Wiltshire Police, indicated that when a prostitute reports a crime, he takes her less seriously than other victims. You would expect me to believe her. If you have a drunken prostitute making allegations regarding a bad debt, you have to make more of a judgment. Judgments of this type are not in short supply. A few years after the Ipswich killings, one journalist wrote, quote, the girls killed in Ipswich were not working in the stupidity PC term sex industry. They were junkies. Can we afford rehab for the girls in Ipswich and everywhere else? Speaking as a taxpayer, I'd say, um well um good question. Indeed it seems the Ich switch killings and the questions they raise drew a particularly vicious strain of rhetorical cruelty into the public arena, suggesting that hatred of sex workers and collective guilt about social neglect are closely bound together. Another journalist called the five Ipswich women quote disgusting drug addicted street whores and brindled at what he considered excessive mourning writing we do not share the responsibility for either their grubby little existences or their murders. Society isn't to blame. Death by strangulation is an occupational hazard. Who, then, or what is to blame? Why didn't Paula and her friends have access to a flat they could have taken turns using with clients instead of being driven away alone in a car? Why was she paying five hundred pounds a day for opiates that the National Health Service could have provided in a safe version for a fraction of the cost? Why was she stuck trying to manage her trauma through street heroine instead of through more sustainable support services? Instead of being supported to be the loving parent she desperately wanted to be. Paula was left depressed and in profound poverty. For Daria too, these questions bubble up painfully. An evaluation of the Holbeck managed area had already noted months before Daria's murder that the most notable time of risk for sex workers is away from the managed area. Women like Daria and Paula need so little, some basic safety and resources. That it is so easy to imagine society meeting those needs. Yet at the same time, they needed so much. In that to imagine a society takes their safety seriously is to imagine a society profoundly transformed. Low class, high class. As with much else in Britain, including immigration and drug use, class plays a huge role in the way sex work manifests and stratifies and stratifies. Prostitution law is produced by archaic class structures and in turn produces a microcosm of that class system within the bounds of the sex industry, where values of decorum, property, decency, and discretion are reshaped to fit the world of commercial sex. The law attempts to establish what is and is not respectable on the long spectrum of the sex trade, from bareback blowjobs against a parked car to sugar babying in exchange for tuition fees, and appears to grant a degree of exception to that which is discreet or invisible. Technically, the only way to sell sex in Britain without getting into legal trouble is to work alone and indoors, and for migrants with the relevant documentation. Labels like elite or high class often attached to those who more or less meet this requirement. And those terms signify the sex worker's position within the class strata of sex work, even though such phrases are primarily advertising keywords and frequently have only a tenuous link to a worker's actual socioeconomic class. It is in more exposed spaces like the streets or conspicuous red light establishments that sex workers are most often perceived as being low class and rural or simply a nuisance. This is also where they are seen to be the most victimized and exploited, which provides a convenient justification for even harsher policing. Soliciting on the street, curve crawling, managing sex workers, and working in groups, even pairs, are all criminalized, along with procuring or inciting people into sex work. Sex workers seen to be breaking these laws are framed as an embarrassing stain on the fabric of British society, a terrible hypervisual burden on all who regard them. To take one revealing example, a neighbourhood group seeking to end the managed area of Holbeck, Leeds is named Save Our Eyes and is far more concerned about the scrooge of scantily clad women in public spaces than the prospect of actual violence against those women. Where irate residents can't provoke police crackdowns on sex workers to quote clean up the community, they sometimes resort to vigilante violence. When residents of Balsal Heath, Birmingham mobilized against street-based sex workers in the mid-1990s, sex workers were harassed and physically threatened, including with baseball bats and dogs. Their windows were smashed, and the sex worker who objected was forcefully removed from a community meeting. Vigilantes lit fireworks and pushed them through a sex worker's letterbox and fired an air gun into her house. While street while street workers bear the brunt of public discontent, most sex work in Britain happens indoors, in the worker's flat or the client's flat, or in rented temporary apartments and hotels. But staying within the law is almost impossible when the law is broad enough to encompass basically everything prostitution entails beyond this actual sex. To quote incite someone does not entail force. It can mean simply supporting or advertising them before they begin sex work. When police attempted to close working flats in Soho London in 2013, they defined quote incitement to mean calling a job application back to talk to them about potentially working in the flat. Arranging a second sex worker's involvement in a freesome might also be causing or inciting a brothel can be any property in which more than one prostitute works even if they work at different times and never cross paths. Persistent fears of such rules and their consequences, in particular eviction. And loss of child custody have a preemptive disciplinary effect on all people selling sex across the breadth of the sex industry. They must take the risk and toe the line, or, if they cannot comply with the law, are compelled to be absolutely undetectable in their activities. With laws as complex and outmoded as these, confusion is common among sex workers. Opaque policing mechanisms lead many to simply assume, in the absence of concrete knowledge, that what they're doing must in some way be illegal. This suspicion that they will be treated as criminals significantly impacts their perception of their own human and labour rights. This makes it nearly impossible to exercise those rights in the workplace and diminishes their power of resistant abuses from clients, employers, the police, and violent assailants. Activist Nikki Adams commenting on a series of violent gang burglaries of London brothels spoke of incidents where women have been attacked, and their attackers have told them brazenly that they know the women won't dare go to the police. As well as risks to safety and security, the situation also, a culture full of silences. Very few sex workers are prepared to step forward and speak in political spaces because of the consequences visibly can be disastrous. The few that remain, including the authors of this book, are often dismissed as privileged, unrepresentative or high class outliers, but rarely these structures within sex work properly interrogated at the marital level. It's accurate to say broadly that the demographic within sex work politics, most often given a substantial mainstream platform to speak publicly, dovetails with the group that lives in metropolitan cities, commands higher rates with the group, has access to more resources, and suffers the least criticism. Criminalization. But it is an egregious oversight to leave the analysis there. Why these people are only voices you are hearing? What structures are silencing the others? The mechanisms that produce the silence, precarity, and vulnerability of most sex workers are not natural or fundamental to society. Just as the class system itself is not natural, sex working feminists watch feminist discussions of the quote policing, of speech, rye, amusement. For sex workers policing is not merely a metaphor. The war on sex workers who use drugs. All five of the women Steve Wright killed in Ipswich in 2005, Paula, Annelli, Gemma, Tanya, and Anetta were dependent drug users. This detail pulled out many times in the media over the following decade is worth mentioning. Though not because it allows us to allocate blame to quote junkies, or see their deaths as an inevitable and unfixable result of perceived fecklessness or self-destruction self-destruction. Drugs and the way of the law shapes the lives of people who use them are of direct relevance when examining why these women were working on the street and why they were vulnerable to rights attack. Ending the war on drugs is a sex workers' rights issue. In Britain, a significant majority of criminalized sex workers, particularly those working outdoors, have experiences with drug dependency. The most significant link between these two circumstances is money. Drugs can be expensive. For many people, selling sex is the only way to afford the drugs they need, and the level of their dependency dictates the amount they will need to work. Sex workers who use drugs are subject to the criminalization of both drugs and prostitution. And these policies and consequences manifest similarly. Criminalizing drugs not only creates even more risk of police attention and a criminal record, it also makes them illicit and therefore dangerous. As with soliciting laws, laws that mandate the arrest or dispersal of people engaged in drug use in public spaces lead to more clandestine behaviors, which can mean more dangerous drug usage, particularly rushed and risky methods of injecting. Arresting local dealers who often use drugs as well, pushes people to buy drugs from unfamiliar sources and prevents them from making better informed decisions about the transaction. Taking a risk on a dodgy seeming client because you need the money is a gamble, so is using a prohibited substance which may be mislabeled, quote cut with other things, or of unknown potency. In both situations, lack whether of money or of safer drugs pushes people into risk and the risk of your willing to take grows the more you lack. The desire to avoid withdrawal or poverty changes people's behavior in powerful ways. People who use drugs also have their safety measures destroyed by the police brackets much like sex workers. Groups of people keeping watch over each other while they're high are vulnerable to arrest, as are those carrying their own clean, sterilized equipment. Both sex workers and drug users face discrimination in the media, in courtrooms, in healthcare, in dealing with social services, and informal employment. Doubly, so for those who fall into both categories, sex workers who use drugs are intensely vulnerable to violence because they fear arrest on two counts, as the tragic case of Bonnie Barrett, who was murdered in London in 2007 shows. Bonnie's colleagues, like her, were both selling sex and using drugs. Before her death, they had noticed a particular client becoming rougher and more violent. Despite this, they all felt unable to report him or ask for help. This was with good reason. Bonnie herself was arrested more than thirty times prior to her murder. Both groups are forgotten by politicians, even the more progressive of whom are rarely prepared to die on the hill of reforming drug and sex work laws in favour of those who use drugs or sell sex. When commenters engage with the topics of drugs and sex work, it's easier to summon the contemptible figures of the pimp and the dealer brackets or better yet, blame the evils of sex and heroin themselves. Then to examine the structural context of prostitution and drug use. Examining these contexts would mean answering for the way that governments, not individual villains, are failing two of the most vulnerable groups of people in society. As already noted, many people who use drugs sell sex to get money to pay for drugs. Sex workers who take drugs often do so to cope with the trauma of work that is often exacerbated by criminalization. Examining this two-way connection between sex work and drug use renders people who use drugs and sell sex as ultimately rational. Logical actors who are responding to their environment. This is the perspective that many people find challenging. Even language pushes up against it. Rational people are often described with words that mean quote not using drugs, sober, clear-headed. But thinking of sex workers who use drugs as people who are trying their best to survive in a bad situation is necessary. It pushes the public to think of them not as flawed or failing, but as dealing with the big and small ways that society is stacked against them helps to identify the big and small challenges that would make them safer, like safe injection facilities, clean needles, safe red light areas, affordable housing, and an end destitution. Most starkly, prescription opiates would free people from long hours on the street to afford drugs, and instead connect them with healthcare and other services, giving them the knowledge and resources to manage their use safely. To some people, these forms of harm reduction, giving people heroin needles and places to use these things, would seem shocking, but are they really more shocking than needless deaths? Sex workers and drug users in Britain are dying every single week in the failed war on drugs. Twelve people died in the small Scottish city of Dundee in just one month in early 2018 because of the drugs they were using were unsafe. Current British drug policy amounts to a form of quote social cleansing. The drugs debate is steeped in the same injustice as sex work debate. When all drug use is constructed as terrible and differences between harms and more substantial, sustainable behaviours are flattened out, made invisible, or even reversed. British law is stricter on people smoking cannabis in a park than on people who sniff clue. Despite the latter being far riskier, both groups would be better served by being able to buy legal cannabis. Spice is a synthetic, cannabinoid, more addictive than natural cannabis and much more dangerous. Unlike cannabis, spice can cause serious bodily injuries and even deaths. It is the criminalization of cannabis that caused spice to be developed and widely used. The creators of spice were taken advantage of a temporary legal loophole, as the law cannot keep up with the rate that people can invent new compounds. The whack-a-mole game of criminalization pushes people, both those who use and those who sell, to experiment with riskier and riskier substances in an attempt to keep just ahead of the law. Precarious sex workers who use drugs as maligned and pushed while the middle and upper classes enjoy cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis, ketamine, and LSD on a regular basis. The lack of solidarity from middle class drug users towards those who are more marginalized is particularly frustrating, given that all drug users, regardless of social class, are affected to a degree by drug prohibition. Maybe you were ripped off for a bag of quote weed that was mostly herbs or felt a pang of fear in a nightclub watching a friend pop a mystery pill that you both hoped was ecstasy. Maybe your partner suffered the ill effects of a night on cocaine that had been cut with something cheaper. Across the board, criminalization prevents people who use drugs from being certain what they are taking. There's an argument that weed, pills, and coke are quote not as bad as heroin, crack, cocaine, or crystal meth, but it is the people using the drugs, not the drugs themselves, who are branded quote good and quote bad. The history of drug prohibition has shown us that quote problematic people favoring a specific substance is what renders the substance quote problematic, not the other way around. It is easy to demonize a drug when demonized people are most strongly associated with it. And although black British people use drugs at a far lower rate than white people, they are searched by police at a much higher rate as well as prosecuted more intensely if found in possession of drugs. The difference between the quote normative citizen and the prostitute who uses drugs is a question first and foremost of circumstance and need, quote, hard drugs are a far more powerful way to cope with a difficult life than party drugs, and often easier to obtain than prescription drugs. Second, it is a difference of policing and social control. Who is targeted? Who can be criminalized? Who is deemed unworthy of a good life? Who is allowed to flourish and prosper? Now we're gonna end on page 898. And wow. Again, every 10 pages is absolutely shocking to me. Absolutely. And every ten pages it just makes me sad. And I absolutely love this book because it brings awareness, like sex work, it has ties to everything. Everything. Because it it just makes me sad because they're showing that they're at another like level of dependency on living and such, and like it it just makes me sad. There's a lot more to it, but I feel like the book really does explain it really well. And yeah, this is where we're gonna leave it because I do have to shoot off. Um I've had a busy morning, I have had a two-hour session and done two custom videos and then done this podcast. But thank you for listening. I am Paulson Victoria, and this has been Behind the Paddle Podcast. You can find the spicier version on Dark Fans and Many Vids, and of course, I have my own personal stuff. Um, if you want any topics or anything like that, then give us an email. I would absolutely love it if you could give us a review on Spotify, Apple, whatever you're listening on. Absolutely love that. Um, and I think that's roundabouts it. Yeah. Enjoy your day and thanks for listening. Bye.