Revolting Prostitutes

In 2018ish, I remember telling a self-described progressive Bernie voter friend of mine in casual conversation that my view of sex work is: “decriminalize, legalize, unionize.” He looked at me like I had grown a 2nd head. My stance hasn't changed much since then, but this is the first time I've read something that challenged it. I learned my terminology was oxymoronic, but the spirit of my original stance has been honed by this book.

This book is not salacious. It tells no sexy stories. It is as dry and analytical as any typical book talking about an overly exploited sub-sect of the working class.

It does thoroughly repeat the points over and over again to make them as strong as possible. If you're already on the author's side, it can come off as overly repetitive.

When people talk about “sex work,” they get so hung up on the first word that they often forget about the 2nd. The call for decriminalization isn't about wanting to further exploit women and marginalized minority groups. Quite the opposite. This is about empowering workers with labor protections instead of further criminalizing their work, thus further alienating the worker, and preventing them from moving beyond said work. Criminalization does not make sex workers safer any more than drug criminalization makes people with drug addiction safer.

Like the book I just previously read “quick fixes”, sex work, like drugs, isn't really about sex work, it's about control. It's about those with power thinking they're doing the right thing but are ultimately making things worse.

Sex trafficking is a serious problem across the world. This book repeatedly emphasizes that there is not enough funding to actually help the victims of sex trafficking and that many of the laws are fundamentally counter-productive. The biggest being the high cost to cross borders. I'm not doing justice to the authors' arguments but I assure you they're quite thorough and compelling. Here's 4 quotes about that:

“Immigration status is the most important single factor engendering migrant workers' vulnerability to exploitation in the UK sex industry.” (This quote is from a UK research study the book quotes)

“People are not, en masse, being snatched off the street. A report from the UK's anti-slavery commission notes that cases of kidnap are very unusual, essentially because it would make little sense to ‘give' someone the services of taking them across a border for free, when people are willing to pay up to thirty thousand pounds to be taken across that same border.”

“People smuggling tends to happen to less vulnerable migrants: those who have the cash to pay a smuggler upfront or have a family or community already settled in the destination country. People trafficking tends to happen to more vulnerable migrants: those who must take on a debt to the smuggler to travel and who have no community connections in their destination country. Both want to travel, however, and this is what anti-trafficking conversations largely obscure with their talk about kidnap and chains.”

“Our position is that no human being is ‘illegal'. People should have the right to travel and to cross borders, and to live and work where they wish. As we wrote in the introduction, border controls are a relatively new invention – they emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of racial domination and exclusion.”

There are 4 general camps regarding the legality of sex work:

1. Criminalization and Incarceration

“Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritises a ‘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 criminalisation as the key ways to deliver justice to women.”

Some carceral feminists think this is actually helping sex workers, which is absurd. The criminal justice system is designed to ruin the lives of people thrown into it. This is a feature of the system. Infinitely more lives are ruined by it than “saved.”

It's hypocritical for supposed “feminists” to think that empowering the police and border enforcement, inherently patriarchal institutions designed to uphold existing patriarchal structures, are somehow whitewashed when doing so against sex workers. If you actually listen to what sex workers say, you'll know that borders and police are as big of enemies as violent managers or clients.

In my humble opinion as a white guy, I don't think carceral feminism is real feminism and should be denigrated the same as TERF's.

“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), 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 the statistics: many will never dare to make a report to an abuser's colleague.”

The police are not your friend.

2. The “Nordic Model” AKA: “Don't criminalize the selling of sex, criminalize the buying of sex.”

This is seen as the “gold standard” of “progressive and forward thinking” Nordic countries.

This law is fundamentally counter-productive and does not make the lives of sex workers safer or better in any way. On the contrary. When it's criminalized for just the buyer, it's more likely that buyers will be violent and the worker would have to stay out later to make ends meet.

“(Pro–Nordic Model politician Rhoda Grant even described this dynamic while advocating for its introduction in Scotland, saying, ‘While those who currently break the law [i.e., violent abusers] will not see the criminalisation of the purchase of sex as a deterrent, many others will.') Thinking of sex work as always, intrinsically violent, of course, hides the difference between a respectful client and an abusive one.”

“A 2004 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security found that ‘the Swedish street prostitutes experience a tougher time. They are more frequently exposed to dangerous clients, while the [legitimate] clients are afraid of being arrested ... They have less time to assess the client as the deal takes place very hurriedly due to fear on the part of the client.'”

It doesn't solve the underlying problem and does not make anyone safer.

Not only that, sex workers may not get prosecuted for sex work, but they can (and do) get evicted, arrested, and even deported.

“[A] sex worker working under the Nordic Model still has a lot to fear. If she's a migrant – even one with a visa – she can be arrested and taken to a deportation centre today. If her name is on the tenancy of a flat she shares, she can be prosecuted. Would you call the police if doing so would make you homeless today, or open you up to prosecution?”

3. The Nevada Model, AKA: “Legalize and regulate”

This overly bureaucratic solution does not give power to the worker, but to the managers. Those who don't adhere to the managerial structure are still criminalize. It's not about protecting people, it's about control.

One thing I'm not quite sure I can agree with from the author was their belief that “mandatory testing is a violation of human rights. Everybody deserves medical privacy and medical autonomy, and mandatory testing violates those core human rights.” I'm sort of more on the idea that workers' rights also need to counterbalance with consumer rights. Maybe that's a bad take.

“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 the ability to work within the law is in practice beyond them. [...] “Penalties mean taking power from workers and giving it to the police, employers, or clients.”

4. The “New Zealand Model,” AKA: “Decriminalize & Unionize”, AKA: The best solution.

“Full Decriminalisation: A legal model that decriminalises the sex worker, the client, and third parties such as managers, drivers, and landlords and regulates the sex industry through labour law.”

Yeah. That. That's what I support. This is why my original stance of “Decriminalize, Legalize, Unionize”. Because Legalization actually means regulation...

“Under legalisation, some sex work, in some contexts, is legal. This legal sex work is heavily regulated by the state – generally not in a way that prioritises the welfare of workers. [...] Often, to legalise means to implement new laws related specifically to sex work, including new criminal penalties, rather than repealing the existing ones.”

Right. Don't want that.

New Zealand has gone the farthest, but that's seen as a starting point, and more progress should be made. A lot of additional progress is additional improvements to the material conditions of the working class to eliminate systematic desperation, depriving those who seek to exploit vulnerable and marginalized people of that vulnerability (and hopefully the marginalization as well).

“Decriminalisation cannot wash away class conflict between the interests of management and employees; instead, it aims to mitigate the intense workplace exploitation that is propped up and fuelled by criminalisation.”

Decriminalization means: Workers' Rights, Defunding Police of their ability to abuse and further exploit sex workers (as is often the case), & harm reduction.

“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.” People do it for money. The best way to eliminate sex work is not criminalization, it's improving the material conditions of the poor and working class. It's really that simple.

Great book. Very enlightening.

And as always, I'd like to end with some of my favorite quotes and my thoughts about them:

“The bravery and resilience of sex workers has played a part in many liberation struggles. In the 1950s, prostitutes were part of the Mau Mau uprising that led to Kenya's liberation from British colonial rule. In the 1960s and 1970s they were part of the riots at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the Stonewall Inn in New York that kickstarted the LGBTQ liberation movement in the United States. In times of rapid social change, working class sex workers are often at the heart of the action. As sex worker activist Margo St. James has put it, ‘it takes about two minutes to politicise a hooker'.”

I wonder if those in power deliberately try to quash and criminalize specific sects of the populous to prevent grassroots radical movements.

“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 criticised feminist reliance on the police, and note that the police appear as the most benevolent protectors in the minds of those who encounter them the least. For sex workers and other marginalised and criminalised groups, the police are not a symbol of protection but a real manifestation of punishment and control.”

ACAB includes CBP

“For feminists, this preoccupation with feminine ‘innocence' should be a red flag, not least because it speaks to a prurient interest in young women. Conversely, LGBTQ people, Black people, and deliberate prostitutes are often left out of the category of innocence, and as a result harm against people in these groups becomes less legible as harm. For example, a young Black man may face arrest rather than support; indeed, resources for runaway and homeless youth (whose realities are rather more complex than chains and ropes) were not included in the US Congress's 2015 reauthorisation of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act.17 Anti-trafficking statutes often exclude deliberate prostitutes from the category of people able to seek redress, as to be a ‘legitimate' trafficking victim requires innocence, and a deliberate prostitute, however harmed, cannot fulfil that requirement.”

Example of insufficient/counter-productive legislation.

More quotes regarding borders:

“The clash between people's need to migrate and intensifying border fortifications has predictable outcomes. Migration scholars Nassim Majidi and Saagarika Dadu-Brown write that intensifying border restrictions creates ‘new migrant-smuggler relationships', adding that ‘smugglers will take advantage of a border closure or restriction to increase prices'.”

“Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), an NGO that tackles the exploitation of migrant workers in Europe, notes that ‘fear of immigration authorities is a major barrier to reporting for undocumented workers ... The threat of reporting to police or immigration authorities is routinely used by unscrupulous employers to hold workers in abusive situations.”

“Both the US and UK typically tie domestic workers' visas to a specific employer. As a result, a staggering 80 per cent of migrant domestic workers entering the US find that they have been deceived about their contract, and 78% have had employers threaten them with deportation if they complain.”

“[F]or carceral feminists, the problem is commercial sex, which produces trafficking; for us, the problem is borders, which produces people who have few to no rights as they travel and work. The solutions we propose are equally divergent. Carceral feminists want to tackle commercial sex through criminal law, giving more power to the police. For sex workers, the solution includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarised border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers.”

Border are unjust and can cause more problems than they solve. They exist to serve the interest of the power elite and not the interests of the people.

Well-written, well-researched, concise, thoughtful and extremely readable.

Smith and Mac do not flinch and they pull no punches. Whether or not you agree with their thesis, their analysis of the current regimes is cogent and solidly backed up, and their analytical framing on labor rights and labor law's affect on sex workers is one that is both highly necessary and sorely neglected elsewhere.