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E73:Revolting Prostitutes p19

• Porcelain Victoria • Episode 73

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Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 182-192 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. 

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to Behind the Paddle Podcast with me Pulsing Victoria. We are continuing on with Revolting Prostitutes the fight for sex workers rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. So we're on page 182. In present day, nevada legal sex workers are generally issued a curfew for the duration of their contract and must live on the premises quote. Girls do leave all the time to go to town to get their nails done, says George Flynn, who works as a lobbyist for the brothel bosses in nevada. Quote. But I'm a huge fan of girls staying on premises. Without the controlled environment that the brothel provides, they may turn tricks outside without safety things, ie condoms. If gone for longer than 24 hours, workers must pay to be screened for stis, a useless precaution giving that infection from recreational sex wouldn't show up within two weeks anyway, but one designed to be a financial and social deterrent from straying too long from the quote. Safety of the institutional hearth.

Speaker 1:

On the streets of legalized Europe, sex workers may be confined to boxes or shelters and permitted to work legally only within a specific zone. As well as being hemmed in, sex workers may also be cast out or pushed to the edges out of sight. Zoning measures which place sex working venues far from the community, in locations such as industrial parks, isolate women and enable violent assailants to target them. In one town in rural Nevada, local ordinance dictates that when a woman stops working at a legalized brothel, she must quote leave town on the next available mode of transport. She must quote leave town on the next available mode of transport. Susan Lopez, director of the Las Vegas Sex Workers Outreach Project, says, quote Sometimes it feels like they just want to keep the quote dirty whores out of the city so that they don't infect the public. That they don't infect the public.

Speaker 1:

The quote infectious body of the prostitute is present in any conversation about regulating sex work, and the discourse around public health makes the harms of regulation more difficult to discern. Oppressive control of people's bodies seems somehow more reasonable when it implicates the health of the whole nation. Why shouldn't sex workers be obliged to submit to health checks? Who could possibly suffer under such laws? These often well-meaning observations fail to take into account that whatever is made obligatory automatically produces a co-existent violation of that rule. This is, ironically, profoundly ineffective at protecting public health.

Speaker 1:

Public health. Should a sex worker be found to have an infection and face punishment, they are given an incentive to evade similar tests in the future. Similarly, those poor enough to be persuaded, in a moment of need, to agree to condomless sex for extra money are likely to avoid health services. In order to avoid criminalization in senegal, police actively target registered sex workers for extortion or sexual coercion, which is one reason so few choose to register, and in so many nations, test results are made available to law enforcement, meaning that HIV positive workers risk being charged under HIV non-disclosure laws if they are found to be working Again. This gives sex workers who suspect they may be HIV positive a huge incentive to avoid healthcare services.

Speaker 1:

We unequivocally support free and easy to access healthcare. All over the world, from Cape Town to Glasgow, sex workers campaign for better health services and even set them up on shoestring budgets. But mandatory testing is a violation of human rights. Everybody deserves medical privacy and medical autonomy, and mandatory testing violates those core human rights. These policies show sex workers that quote public health doesn't include preserving their bodily autonomy and privacy and encourages them to deploy savvy invasion strategies in times of infection if they need to put bread on the table.

Speaker 1:

A male sex worker in Australia was convicted of working while HIV positive and was outed and shamed in the press. There was no evidence he ever worked unsafely or transmitted the infection. The media fear or meant that the average number of sex workers getting tested in the area per fortnight dropped from 30 to less than two. No one wanted to risk being told that the two were living with HIV and could become a target for the same furor. Interventions in the name of quote public health have the opposite effect if they drive sex workers away from healthcare. Even when it comes to sex workers with no infections, sexual health certification creates a false sense of security. Not all infections show up on the test straight away, so any clear result only refers to what you were doing a couple of weeks ago, to what you were doing a couple of weeks ago. Inappropriately. Punitive screening wastes public funds and occupies a huge amount of resources, resources that could be devoted to public health measures that actually work. One public health professional spoke with almost pride of this superstitious approach in 2006. Quote we test these people. Opposition to it, along with other feminists.

Speaker 1:

There can be no doubt that this legal framework is not designed to benefit the worker. It lines the pockets of non-prostitute men, most notably those who manage or or solicit prostitution, as the sex worker community blog Tits and Sass puts it. Quote legalization serves the man. Academics Hendrik Wagner and Siet Skalding point out that many city authorities in the Netherlands decided to quote cap the number of brothels at the number that existed when legalization came into effect. This paved the way for an oligopoly of powerful and ruthless brothel owners to control the market. Employees suffer in the workplace when wealthy capitalists feel comfortable depriving their employees of decent working conditions In this. The legalized sex industry is not unlike the quote disruptive startup uber, where increasingly precarious workers are heavily regulated by the company they work for, with no rights.

Speaker 1:

Much feminist analysis of regulationism amounts to flawed and radicalized panic about quote trafficking explosions, while complexity is lost in these conversations. The two-tier mechanism is simply another iteration of the exploitative mesh that traps so many migrants when they cross borders and must choose between poverty and illegal work. Criminalized working spaces are inherently vulnerable for the worker, and if migrants are barred by their immigration status from other forms of work, they are primed for exploitation at the hands of third parties in the illicit economy. Traffickers, pimps and clients alone do not produce all that is harmful in the sex industry. Any robust analysis of the failings of legalization would be incomplete without recognizing the role the state plays Under legalisation, police and the criminal justice system still draws the same paychecks from prostitution they do elsewhere in the world through fines and confiscating cash. Regulating prostitution allows the state to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, it can punish unacceptable sex workers and seize their money. On the other hand, it enjoys the financial perks of a legal sex industry business, taxes on licensed brothels, income from tourism, income from tourism and a reputation as a fantastic lad's holiday destination.

Speaker 1:

In the debate there is often an uncomfortable clash of quote sex workers' rights and quote consumer rights, with these discussions uncritically framing the sex buyer as someone with a need for brackets or even a right to sex. Regulationism says that the sex worker's body must be regulated for the good of the client, rather than entrusting that workers will oversee healthcare for themselves. Crediting the sex worker with the same trust bestowed on the client is incompatible with a perspective that sees quote selling one's body as a form of self-harm. In this worldview, sex workers represent aberrant bodies who must have medical intervention thrust upon them whether they want it or not. Fighting the power Quote all prostitution is evil.

Speaker 1:

German author and anti-prostitution feminist, alice Swartzer, said as she opened a conference panel debate in Berlin in 2013. Unfurling banners and opening red umbrellas, 50 sex workers disrupted the event, hoping to draw attention to their first-hand experience of the topic at hand. Their flyers read quote Appeal to strengthen the rights of sex workers and to improve their living and working conditions. Swartzer, undeterred, spoke over them into the mic. Quote Fold up your little umbrellas. You get your turn later. First, we will speak now. End.

Speaker 1:

Quote by sex worker led organizations before its implementation in 2016. Since then, they have made repeated calls for the law to be repealed on human rights grounds, as german sex worker group hydra ev puts it. Quote we reject it politically. It will drastically change the living and working conditions of people who do sex work. End quote.

Speaker 1:

Media coverage of germany's sex industry is often saturated with panic. The idea of quote flat rate brothels in quote the bordello of europe garners particular distaste, with little attention given to how this iteration of commercial sex might alter workers experiences. Some flat rate brothels, where a client pays a one-time entrance charge and can see multiple workers pay a guaranteed hourly wage rather than a client-based commission, meaning that, while conditions are inadvertently variable, these jobs can represent a stable income compared to most forms of sex work. Sex workers in the Netherlands face similar struggles. In 2015, the mayor of Amsterdam made efforts to stamp out prostitution. This included planning to close nearly a hundred workplaces and eroding privacy rights by collecting data on sex workers mental health. On labor day, after 18 red light windows were closed down, brackets with nearly 80 more set to follow. The workers who had been made redundant took the city council to court to draw attention to their case. They occupied one of the closed windows for a day and later in the year, more than 200 people marched through the streets to demand sex workers be given more power in policy decisions.

Speaker 1:

In the UK, the strip club industry is, in a sense, legalised. In similar ways, Strip club licensing is tightly regulated by local councils and extremely expensive. This came about in the 2010s, in large part because anti-sex work feminists objected to permissive licensing, particularly in terms of what the existence of strip clubs symbolized for non-stripper women. Clubs now have to pay 30 000000 annually for a license. The club started to use quote house fee systems and and on the spot employee fines as a way to recoup the money they were newly losing to the license fees, leading them to overstaff the clubs and forcing the dancers to share fewer customers for less money. In 2014, after a series of protests by a coalition of feminists and local residents, a strip club in London had its opening hours cut by the local council, who gloated about the quote 676 hours a year, less objectification of women. There was little interest in how 676 less hours of wages a year might feel for the club staff, none of whom were included in the campaigning.

Speaker 1:

Time and again, sex workers watch as mainstream feminists intervention and commentary neglects, workplace power relations and the need to earn a living. In these analysis, forced health examinations are nothing to worry about, and making sex workers carry an ID around that reveals their real name to potential predators is fine. Swartzer, despite identifying as an abolitionist, supports forced health checks and compulsory registration. Forced health checks and compulsory registration, while leading feminist julia bindle criticizes regulationism as a legal model but suggests that the promise of registering prostitutes is one of its few redeeming features.

Speaker 1:

Many anti-prostitution feminists envision state interference uncritically as harmless for women and even as a form of protection. Writer kat banyard approvingly quotes a woman who tells her if it hadn't been legal, I wouldn't have done it, as I wouldn't rob an old lady, or as I won't steal at the shop or something like that. I wouldn't have made this decision if it wouldn't have been so easy and legal. I really had wished that it wasn't legal and that the state in Germany, you know, we called the state the father and I really had the wish that the father had protected me from that with a good law. Setting aside the implication that a prostitute should be criminalized in the same way as someone who robs an old lady a stranger implication to find in an ostensibly feminist text for women to ask the quote father state for protection from what we might perceive to be our own quote bad decisions is about as explicit an appeal to patriarchy as you can get. The word patriarchy literally translates to quote rule by the fathers, or the father state, one might say.

Speaker 1:

Though these politics are incredibly frustrating and harmful. Though these politics are incredibly frustrating and harmful to sex workers, it isn't hard to see how they happen. Regulationism represents an understandable nightmare that we are headed for a hyper-capitalist sexual dystopia where men profiteering from women's prostitution is a legitimized, unstoppable industry and women's bodies are cogs in the machine. We don't disagree that legalization is bad. In fact, what we'd like very much to do is lead a more robust conversation with people like Bindel, banyard and Swartzer about why and how exactly it is bad and what the alternatives are.

Speaker 1:

To regulate and control sex workers with the threat of punishment if they don't comply is to abandon the poorest and most vulnerable to the shadows. To these workers, legalisation is criminalisation, since their ability to work within the law is, in practice, beyond them. It's tempting to imagine drunken, aggressive stag parties stumbling out of bars in hamburg's reaper barn or amsterdam's de wallen red light districts and think that only additional restrictions, penalties and punishments will help. But penalties, however they manifest, only make the sex industry more dangerous. For sex workers. Penalties mean taking power from workers and giving it to the police, employers or clients, employees, employers or clients. Next we will explore the ways in which lifting these laws, rather than adding more, can benefit workers. No Silver Bullet, new Zealand. Full Decriminalisation a legal model that decriminalises sex worker, the sex worker, the client and third parties such as managers, drivers and landlords, and regulates the sex industry through labor laws.

Speaker 1:

A few days after decriminalization had passed, I attended auckland district court with a fa-fa-fine street worker who was the last person picked up for soliciting on the eve of the third reading of the PAR Prostitution Reform Act. The judge looked at her charge sheet and declared quote Madam, you are no longer a criminal, your offences no longer exist. Today, prostitution is decriminalised. You are free to go. Anna Pickering, new Zealand Prostitutes Collective.

Speaker 1:

As should be abundantly clear by now, most of the world's prostitution law is not fit for purpose. Criminalising sex work isn't working At its core. Exchanging sex for money, like migrancy, drug use and abortion, is a legitimate and pragmatic human response to specific needs. Prohibiting it produces a racistness and risk-taking among sex workers, driving them into the margins and exposing them to even more harm. Many feminists present the Nordic model as the answer to quote the problem, often without a critical assessment of its flaws sweden's prostitution solution. Why hasn't anybody tried this before? But no single piece of legislative reform, no matter its approach, can be a silver bullet for the many problems sex workers face.

Speaker 1:

The sex workers right movement too often appears to clutch at magical solutions. The movement is at pains to express in the simplest of terms that what sex workers want and urgently need is decriminalization. Sex workers brandish the example of New Zealand, where the Prostitution Reform Act of 2003 decriminalise sex work, as a talisman against the Nordic model. Not that law, this one. The logic is sound enough. If the problem is criminalisation, then, it seems, the answer must be decriminalisation. Readers of this book, too, would be forgiven for hoping that this chapter might produce a watertight solution, a pancreas where the dangers of prostitution can be swept away. For that to happen, however, it would have to actually be one singular problem rather than a matrix of oppositions that act together. The example we have of decriminalization in practice is New Zealand.

Speaker 1:

This incomplete achievement of full decriminalization we'll come back to this caveat is the closest we have come to ideal sex work laws. New Zealand has discarded penalties for street work and brothel keeping, allowing collectives of sex workers to work together or in managed brothels. Employers are accountable to sex workers through labour laws. This framework has won praise from work from women's rights organizations, human rights organizations and international bodies like amnesty international, human rights watch, un aids and the world health organization. Ultimately, as we've indicated, ultimately, as we've indicated, ultimately, as we've indicated, new Zealand does not far enough.

Speaker 1:

While this is unquestionably landmark progress for sex workers' rights, some of the most marginalized sex workers in these jurisdictions are still left behind, unable to enjoy full access to the freedoms granted to other workers when the new legislation was passed. Although the stigma of being a prostitute has lessened, a legal change in place for under 20 years has yet to undo the damage of all the of the millennia that came before it. Some police power has been taken away, but sex workers still have little reason to trust the cops, whose job at a structural level continues to harass, surveil and incarcerate the vulnerable, the poor and the quote troublesome. Successive right-wing governments have imposed austerity measures, and Maori, trans, youth and homeless populations are still over policed and under protected. Border laws mean that undocumented migrants must keep working illegally, and the failed war on drugs rumbles on. This all shapes a context where, tragically, the murder of sex workers has not ended.

Speaker 1:

The Global Alliance Against Trafficking Women describes the New Zealand model as contradictory. On the one hand, the decriminalization of sex work is a protective factor against the exploitation of sex workers, since they have the right to challenge exploitation. However, the policy which prohibits migrant sex work means not all sex workers fully benefit from decriminalization. It is vital that the benefits are further strengthened by extending rights to migrant sex workers who are holders of temporary permits. Nonetheless, the sex workers' rights movement is clear in its demands for decriminalisation, with the New Zealand model as a starting point. While there is much to say about what could be improved upon in New Zealand, none of it detracts from the evidence that criminalisation of work workplaces clients harms sex workers and must be lifted. The problems of the New Zealand model lie in the fact that some elements of criminalisation, such as the criminalisation of drugs, migration and migrant sex work, remain, thus maintaining some of the harms present in any criminalized nation. This draws criticism from the anti-prostitution movement, but clearly the solution to the problem of the remaining vestiges of criminalization is not to retreat from decriminalization.

Speaker 1:

With the privilege of uninterrupted space afforded to us in this chapter, so rarely afforded to sex working feminists attempting to discuss legal reform, we can explore what is effective in reducing harms in these iterations of decriminalization. We can examine the usefulness of claiming these countries as a benchmark for nations where commercial sex culture, economy and population may look very different. We can speak to a future where the full decriminalization of sex work benefits sex workers around the world. Right, that is where we're going to end today. I do believe we have, oh yeah, one more chapter left. I believe maybe maybe two, not chapter pages 10. No, oh, my gosh, I I have not had enough sleep this week. I really haven't maybe 20 pages left, but this is where we're gonna end. I have I I keep enjoying this book so much and I really, really love the fact that they can see and they do tell that no bullshit, decriminalization is great and everything like that, but it doesn't benefit anybody, like everybody, that it doesn't benefit everybody. And I love the truthfulness in that, where we're not saying, oh, decriminalization is like fully where to go, like it it is, but it needs to be tweaked absolutely in the legislation of it. Yeah, but thank you so much for listening to this episode.

Speaker 1:

I re-listened to my previous episode. I don't know if I might redo it, I might not. I was clearly very sleepy when I made that episode because when I mentioned about how we're under led under the legislation in western australia in the 1970s and 1980s, sex working women were not allowed to have relatives within 500 kilometer radius, could not have their brothers to visit. I said brothels, I meant to say brothers were not permitted to have a stable, have stable relationships with local people and they were restricted to certain areas of the town, including access to the swimming pool, which was restricted, and the women must live in the brothels. I mean I just want to go back a few pages there where it's must live in the brothels. I mean I just want to go back a few pages there where it's like living in the brothels, no, like that causes so many problems, especially if you're a mum and you've got children to look after. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

And when it comes to Nevada, there's no reason that we can't explore and go to another brothel or go to another state where it is legalized. It's ridiculous, it is genuinely and hopefully you have realized and understood. And the education is there where the, the bigger guys, want the money that that money makes the world go round and we, we can't express this enough. So it comes to the point where I am now going to talk about what is happening in Scotland. I know you can fast forward. If you've heard it before. I hopefully talk about it every episode now. I mean hopefully not at some point when I end this series of just reading books, the series of just reading books where Scotland, right now we're trying to get well, ash Regan of the Albert Party is trying to get in the Nordic model.

Speaker 1:

We do not want that at all and I don't know if you saw, but I was um, just briefly, which is very annoying, um, on channel four recently, talking about how we don't want a nordic model, we want decriminalization. That is what benefits. It's a bit annoying because, like they, I like we spoke to them for like a good hour at least and they interviewed us, who asked us 20 questions but only used, uh, like, not even a minute and a half of, like our footage. But you know, we, we got out there, we talked about, you know, a little bit of we want decriminalization, and can I just say in that part on channel four there was somebody who came from trafficking. Trafficking is completely different to sex work, totally different. Such, no, it is completely different, completely different from sex work, trafficking two different things. Um, so that really shouldn't have been actually included in the little news report, um, but yeah, um, and if you do catch that, if you do look back on it, um, it is on all the um news pages on channel four um, then you will see ash regan's um little interview, which is hilarious because it makes no sense and she clearly hasn't asked any sex workers at all.

Speaker 1:

Um, so, yeah, we don't want that to happen at all, and what the UK government is trying to bring in right now is a bill, the policing and crime bill. Yeah, um april 2025, they want to try to stop us from advertising online, which you can clearly imagine how ridiculous that is, honestly, with how we make our money and advertise and get out there, considering we can't even give people business cards we can't use like stickers on lampposts or anything like that. There's no um, we can't put our ads in the newspaper, but there is no way of advertising apart from online or word of mouth. So, yeah, that's what they're trying to stop. They also want to prosecute landlords um family members, friends, people who know um of sex workers, and what they can do right now is they can actually prosecute partners. They can attempt to. They can scare you um into saying that they will prosecute your partners, including even giving a court order and things like that and actually charging somebody from profiting off of a sex worker, profiting off of prostitution wages, earnings. You know all that stuff that does happen.

Speaker 1:

That has happened um yeah, so we don't want that and if you could, please help go to the English Collective of Prostitutes and you will be able to find on their website where you can email your MP. You do not need your real name or real email or anything like that. As long as you send um a letter, the English Collective of Prostitutes does do like a default letter saying we do not want this bill going through because of da da, da, da, da, and you can just press send and there you go. Your MP is now informed that they're annoyed, that we're annoyed by them, um by the government, and we want change and difference and all that stuff. So, yeah, this has been Paulson and Victoria. Thank you very, very much for listening and I hope everyone has a wonderful week and bye.

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