Dear Esperanza,
Thank you for sharing your difficult experiences and your powerful ideas. What you have endured while trading sex is heartbreaking and unacceptable.
I first want to simply and unconditionally affirm your experience. What you have gone through is extremely painful, and no one should have to go through what you have experienced.
No one should ever have to engage in any sexual act against their will, or be put in the position where they have no other choice but to trade sex to survive. At Red Canary Song, we fight for every sex worker’s right to exit, in the time and manner that they choose. We are, of course, opposed to forced sex, forced labor, or trafficking of any kind.
Growing up in the NYCHA housing projects of Spanish Harlem, I also started doing sex work as a teenager, accompanying my best friend who was a single mother at age 17, and whose parents kicked her out of their apartment for drug abuse issues. I grew up in a household with so much physical abuse and pressure that I was constantly miserable, crying myself to sleep every night as a teenager. The summer after turning 15, I tried to help my friend with costs, dreaming of getting an apartment together, and we started doing call-girl work off of Village Voice ads. I had to use a fake ID from another Asian girl in the neighborhood who was only two years older than me, and had already been working for four years — she was jaded nd tired, and charged a fee for borrowing her ID.
My second month working for one pop-up call girl agency off of Back Pages, I was robbed by a new driver, who was angry at me because it was a slow night and he was promised more money than I could make from the call volume. He had been sexually harassing me all night, calling me “little China doll” and begging me to suck his cock. By morning, I was exhausted, and I had only gotten two calls, one of whom had cancelled on me after seeing me at the door because I looked too young (I was!) In the early morning, before meeting up with the boss to hand over his cut of the money, the driver took me to a side street in New Jersey, raped me, demanded I give him all of my share of the money I made that night, and then left me on the side of a road with no money and no way home. I had to beg a stranger to help me get home, and was then sexually assaulted by this stranger too, the same morning. This incident broke me as a teenager — I stopped doing call girl work, and remember writing an essay in high school at CreateNow, at the Asian American Writers Workshop, when I was a youth participant, about why prostitution should be abolished.
A few years later, I was in college, and one of my best friends was a beautiful girl at Columbia that I sort of idolized. An accomplished ballerina, side-hustle stripper, and pre-Med student — I secretly had a huge crush on her, and felt really honored that she wanted to be my friend. I learned that her parents were Cambodian refugees; her mother died while she was very young and her brother was killed by gun violence; she grew up with incredible trauma, and yet was fiercely strong, self-sufficient, and determined to succeed. I admired her strength so much, and wanted to be more like her. I joined her at the Hot Lap Dance Club parties she was working at, with Manhattan financiers and corporate lawyer, and I also began working at a BDSM house dungeon in Manhattan. I read an essay she wrote about how stripping and sex work helped her reclaim her sexuality from trauma. I wanted to embody the sexual power that I saw in her, the ideal dominatrix, and I also had a visceral need to get back a sense of strength from the many silent ways I had felt I had been hurt, that I had no way to express, no outlet. I found a creative outlet in Domme work that was cathartic for me — from the superhero costuming to the word play, I enjoyed donning the costume of female supremacy in a world that has repeatedly shown me the opposite.
When another worker in the dungeon went “independent” and began working for herself for higher fees, I joined her, and felt very financially empowered, making more money in one session than my immigrant parents would make in a week growing up. Having always grown up poor, picking up garbage furniture on the streets with my mother, who would work in other people’s homes as a domestic worker, taking care of other people’s children, always feeling like a second-class citizen in other people’s homes — I found it exciting to have money of my own. I also found it intriguing to live a double life as a college student by day, kicking investment banker asses by night.
A year into trying to run my own business as an indy dominatrix, I was beat up, locked in a hotel bathroom, and left in a pool of my own blood and vomit in the shower in Dallas, Texas, by a BDSM client who forcibly “switched” on me in the middle of a scene after doing a bunch of drugs, and started assaulting me. He was referred to me by another independent domme, so I thought I could trust him.
That day, at the hotel room where we sessioned, he started taking a ridiculous amount of drugs, and I was very uncomfortable but didn’t know what to do. He went from being an obedient puppy dog, to suddenly hurling at me, grabbing me by the neck, and beating me over the head and back with a chair in the hotel room. Much of the time after that is a blur to me. I can’t fully recover these memories, and it is so painful to try. I remember waking up in the shower of the hotel covered in my own vomit and blood, and screaming for what felt like forever, banging on the bathroom door, begging for someone to come let me out. He took all the cash he had put down, as well as my laptop, my phone, and all my possessions, and disappeared.
After the police came to the scene, I was taken to the hospital and then a woman’s shelter. All a blur. I was in a white cloud of pain and shame. I had a rape kit done at the hospital, but the DNA had been scrubbed off my body from me in the shower while I was knocked out. At the woman’s shelter, I remember joining a group in prayer. They asked me how I was doing, but I couldn’t say anything to them.
The next day, I met with a Dallas detective who asked me with a smirk on his face, “So isn’t that what you do in your line of work? You beat each other up?” He told me that given the “nature of my work,” my rape case may not be “sympathetic” to a judge — and that, in fact, he could charge me for prostitution. When I insisted that I was not a prostitute, and was raped by a BDSM client that also physically assaulted me — that these are not services I offer as a pro-domme — the detective laughed at me, and told me I should stay in school and find a real job. I stayed at the woman’s shelter for four days in Dallas, while another client bought me an airplane ticket to go home, and a friend went through my things and sent me documentation of my identity, acceptable for the airline company to go home. When I returned to New York City, I was numb and couldn’t eat or talk to anyone for a month. I lost over 20 pounds in a few weeks, and wanted to die. I was sent a bill of over $11,000 to pay for my own hospital rape kit, and my stay at the women’s shelter. I was told that since I was not from Texas, my expenses would also not be covered under Victims of Crime. When I went to my school Dean for a meeting, she was more concerned about hurting the reputation of the school, and told me that it would be wise for me to get some counseling, take a semester off, and keep quiet.
I got involved in sex worker rights activism after having almost lost my life to this client, and finding out that even in the case of such clear brutality, the Dallas Police Department would rather threaten me with a prostitution charge than investigate my case.
I could not find support from anyone — not law enforcement, not my school. I was not out to any of my friends in my civilian life, except for the ones who were also sex workers. One sex working friend, who was in medical school at the time, recommended that I call SWOP-NYC, and said it was some kind of support group. I found their website and called, and was screened by a sweet woman who told me that they are a group of sex workers who provide mutual aid to one another, and who meet in undisclosed locations every month. I was feeling completely broken at this point, angry at this client, angry at the police and at my school — desperate to find someone who would listen to me, and advise me on what to do, who would not be judgmental of my work.
At SWOP-NYC, I met another organizer who worked a day job as a social worker at the Anti-Violence Project — she told me she had also had her leg broken by a client while working as a sex worker in college in Canada. She also told me “I went to social work school because going from sex work to social work feels natural — it’s a transferable skill.” She was organizing an event for December 17th, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, and asked if I would volunteer to help put together the list of names of sex workers who had been killed that year.
It was during this time away from school, putting together the names of sex workers who had been murdered that year, most of whom were women of color and trans women, reading newspaper article after newspaper article, crying and crying for months — this was the time when I built my political consciousness in sex worker rights.
I also read Emma Goldman and Selma James’ writings on prostitution as undervalued women’s care work, and the writings of Andrea Ritchie and INCITE about the particular harms of criminalization on Black women and people of color. I read about sex worker organizing in Thailand and India. I met other politicized sex workers at Left Forum, where I interned during my time away from school, and helped to organize the Anarchist Bookfair at Judson Memorial Church, where I put together a workshop about feminism and sex work, and invited speakers to talk about trafficking and sex work. I was still very new to this topic, and at the time, I thought I mainly wanted to be an activist against human trafficking. It took me a long time to realize how problematic all of the data and statistics in the anti-trafficking field is, and how the way they advocate for more policing, surveillance, and immigration control, contribute to the greater oppression of all people in sex trades, but especially the most marginalized workers of color, immigrants, and youth.
I volunteered for $pread Magazine to help with graphic design, and read stories by other sex workers, and learned about just how diverse people’s experiences are in the sex trade. I immersed myself for a while in sex worker stories, and in making art, because I was dying inside, so angry about the silence I felt I was trapped in, the unbearable shame, on top of insurmountable medical debt and additional psychiatric expenses that I did not know how to pay off now, if not with sex work.
My school mandated, if I wanted to return, that I attend a PTSD intensive treatment program at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. But the program actually only re-enforced my trauma by having me relive it over and over again in a period of several months, and then framing my sex work as a form of psychological illness. Moreover, it was time-consuming and painfully expensive, and the only possible thing I could do at that time to make enough money to pay for this program, while having enough flexibility to attend the two-day-a-week group and individual sessions, was sex work! I tried doing legal assistant jobs at $12 per hour minus taxes, but it simply did not pay enough to cover my rent in NYC and so many bills. Due to flashbacks from the EMDR treatment, I also could not hold down the job because I was having panic attacks at work, breaking down and crying in the bathroom, and unable to finish the day on bad days.
I felt forced back into full service sex work by the cost of healthcare, and lack of other realistic job options. I tried to navigate sex work — my only source of income — as carefully as I could, with safety advice from other sex workers I met who were also full time community organizers and activists. While I benefited greatly from their tips for dealing with some annoying, boundary-pushing, obsessive and aggressive clients, I also had a few affirming, mutually supportive, and long-standing relationships with sex work clients, some of whom were also navigating disability like me, as well as widowerhood, closeted trans identity, illness, loneliness, fear of growing old and dying.
Throughout my twenties, I volunteered and took on part-time community organizing positions at labor rights organizations. At the Street Vendor Project, I learned about the intersection of racist policing, criminalization due to inadequate licensing, and informal sector labor organizing. At the National Domestic Workers Alliance, I learned how to talk about care work, exploited migrant women’s work, advocate for policy campaigns on a state and national level, and how to put together protests bringing together hundreds of thousands of people in DC, with details down to the hotel room registrations and each bagel on the bus. Like many sex worker activists, I supported my unpaid organizing and volunteering at many other organizations, with the money I earned from sex work. I understood, as I was conducting one-on-one conversations with Chinese street vendors in Times Square, and Filipinx nannies in parks in Queens, that what I was looking for was a language to articulate exactly how and why sex work is work, and take away skills from other informal labor organizations that I could one day bring to building professionalized labor rights campaigns with and for sex workers.
After returning to school for policy, I interned at Streetwise and Safe with Andrea Ritchie, who created a political home for homeless LGBTQ youth of color in street trades, coming out of the punitive carceral system. I also worked as an organizer at the Red Umbrella Project with Audacia Ray, to help facilitate creative writing and media training workshops with sex workers. In Toronto, I learned from Elene Lam, a brilliant Hong Kong organizer, about basebuilding with Chinese migrant massage workers at Butterfly. Through the incredible Chanelle Gallant, I learned about building anti-racist and intersectional spaces with drug-using sex workers, sex workers with HIV/AIDS, homeless Indigenous women trading sex for transportation to escape reservations but raped by police, young people navigating foster care and trapped by criminalization for just trying to survive, online cam girls navigating physical disabilities and mental illness.
I witnessed how Canadian sex workers fought through the Supreme Court to fully decriminalize sex work in Canada; and also saw how anti-prostitution nonprofits of wealthy and religious women under the Conservative government of Steven Harper, took that victory back, away from the sex workers who sacrificed decades of their lives, achingly, to mobilize for their liberation. I laughed and I cried with sex workers in Canada, and I see now how, through all the heartache and wins and losses, we always continue to fight back.
Little by little, my political stance on sex work transformed through many years of close engagement with people in sex trades, from an ideological stance against prostitution when I was a teenager, due to my own violent experiences as a call girl, to a feeling of shared community with so many other people in the sex industry of all different economic circumstances, races, ages, and genders— stories of triumph and resilience, as well as stories of violence and shame— I could not make any assumptions about anyone. It was nice to feel I could belong somewhere. I’ve spent the last 14 years of my life, just trying to listen and understand.
What I ask from you, Esperanza, is that you also please take a moment to consider that there are so many human beings that you are speaking of when you talk about the “privileged” sex workers who don’t “deserve” to have a voice. It’s a false dichotomy. These are human beings with a multiplicity of experiences in the sex industry. Most people in the industry do not fall neatly into the category of “privileged” or “forced”, but rather somewhere in between. The majority of sex workers organizing for change are not coming from wealthy backgrounds, as you mistakenly dismiss us, and we are certainly not a “pimp lobby” as AF3IRM and CATW often slander us — rather, we are all very different people: Latinx trans women in NYC, dalit women in India, single mothers, runaway teenagers, people with disabilities, people with ambitions.
In fact, many of us are survivors of violence in the sex trade; we are survivors of intimate partner violence; we are survivors of incarceration and police violence. In the sex worker movement, many of us are also survivors of trafficking, as I have been, having routinely been driven across state lines as an underage call girl to do prostitution that largely benefited my employers.
We come to this political battlefield that hurts us so much, giving freely of our hearts and our time, allowing ourselves to be pitted against one another by NGO’s that wish we simply did not exist — not because we like it, but because we want dignity for all people in sex trades.
How is it fair that I have to bleed before you — for you to consider me human? Why is it necessary for me to expose my pain before all the strangers in an organization you belong to, who despise me and call me names? And open the most sensitive parts of myself to their cruel and salacious gaze? Why are we being pitted against each other by people who only listen to us if we agree with their point of view? If we can be used to further their political agenda?
The tactic used by many anti-prostitution nonprofits — of exploiting the personal stories of survivors — in order to make an emotional argument that all sex work needs to be abolished…As if one survivor could speak for everyone in the sex trade…As if all survivors want prostitution to be abolished. I want you to know that this is a deeply harmful tactic.
But I am offering my story to you, anyways, because I am tired. I am so tired.
Over the years, I keep asking myself, why am I doing this activism? It hurts me. It re-traumatizes me to no end. The insolence and isolation that we have to endure from people who disrespect us, and aggressively attack us or belittle us, the endless thankless and difficult work of trying to create and repair relationships, trying to build community and support for one another, even when so many of us are full of trauma ourselves, and our movement spaces are full of conflict through the unhealed violence of our traumas — why do we do this?
Not because we’re too privileged to have known violence in the industry, but precisely BECAUSE of the violence we’ve lived through, including systemic violence from the police and medical institutions. Because of the violence that too many of our comrades have not survived. This is what pushes us every day to fight for the decriminalization and equal right to be at the discussion table about policies that impact our lives — which we have come to know, through long-term research, study, and deeply examined relationships with other sex workers around the world — is the only way to decrease our shared vulnerability.
I understand that you are hurting. Please know that I am hurting too. I am asking of you to please take a moment to listen, read, and see us, self-identified “sex workers” as equal human beings, deserving of the same compassion and patience that we are ready, unconditionally, to offer you.
=====
Sections Below:
- 1. The “Vast Majority” of sex worker organizers are not “privileged”
- 2. Sex work is Not Rape
- 3. Choosing between different jobs under Capitalism, is a choice — And taking away that choice is most violent to the people who need it most
- 4. Labor Rights are Not contingent on “Enjoying” your Job
- 5. Sex work in Formal and Informal environments — Decriminalization vs. Legalization
- 6. Supporting sex workers does Not mean Supporting “Pimps”
- 7. The magical “Just Transition” out of Sex work is an old Fairytale: the Reality is Human Rights Abuses against women
- 8. Intersectionality of Migrant labor oppression
- 9. Sexual Power under Socialism — Reappropriating What’s Ours
- 10. Defund Police, and Fund Housing, Healthcare, Education
1. The Vast Majority of Sex Worker Organizers Are Not “Privileged”
The vast majority of sex workers do not exist in a simplistic binary between “privileged” and “forced.” The strongest sex worker unions in India are composed of the least privileged sex workers. It is unfair to dismiss the vast majority of these sex workers’ efforts to create unions, create savings banks and microcredit to fund education for their children, and create exit strategies for each other, as “privileged” or “neoliberal”. These are Indian women, living under the rules of this Capitalist system that we all have to navigate, who consider themselves Third World feminists too, who fight trafficking while supporting sex worker rights.
In reality, decriminalization is not as helpful for “privileged sex workers” as it is for the most vulnerable sex workers of color and migrants, who are most frequently targeted by police. The UN Development Programme reported after surveying 48 countries in the Asia Pacific to show that decriminalization is most urgently necessary for the poorest sex workers working in the most difficult positions. Under the Nordic Model in Sweden, Norway, France, Ireland, and Canada, which criminalizes the buying of sex, migrant and trans sex workers like Vanesa Campos are the ones most hurt by mass deportations in Sweden, evictions in Norway, doubling of violence against sex workers since the passing of Nordic Model in Ireland, and fatal discrimination against sex workering mothers at the hands of social services, also in Sweden. Criminalization of any part of the sex industry, including the purchase of sex, hurts the least privileged sex workers most.
In New Zealand, under full decriminalization, where sex workers are encouraged to work collectively and independently, “pimps” and traditional brothel establishments have shut down and gone out of business, as workers have left many of these establishments to safely work for themselves. The evidence is clear from human rights organizations, public health experts, and sex worker movements around the world that full decriminalization is the best way to truly grant equal civil rights to people in sex trades, and to protect their safety. It’s not a perfect solution, and besides decriminalization, there are still so many more laws needed to protect sex workers and guarantee workers equal civil rights. Migrant sex workers in New Zealand are still criminalized because there is no immigration visa for sex work.
However, by including sex work as in the country’s occupational handbook, and offering resources to workers to navigate labor disputes, save their money in the legal financial system, and transition out of the work in the time frame that they choose, New Zealand has decreased the amount of violence in sex trades, and the number of “pimps” who control the income of sex workers. The decrease in stigma has also led to better treatment in society for sex workers, which also contributes to psychological violence and discrimination. By recognizing the equal humanity of sex workers, and making sure that sex workers have neither criminal records nor legal registration records of their time in sex work, New Zealand has given sex workers more of a “right to exit” and navigate their own lives, safely, than other countries, like Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and France that have further criminalized sex work through “End Demand” policies.
In the United States, prostitution was not illegal in the early days of the country. Before 1850, historian Timothy Gilfoyle wrote that “women had greater control and influence over prostitution than in any other period of American history.” According to journalist and academic, Alison Bass*, in her book Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, “By the 1860s, prostitution had grown into a thriving commercial enterprise in New York City, with six hundred brothels scattered around Broadway and Soho.” This was during Emma Goldman’s days of organizing as a labor activist for garment factory workers, and also defending women who choose to work in prostitution. A study by Dr. William Sanger in 1858 showed that many as one in ten young women between the ages of fifteen and thirty living in New York City had worked in prostitution at some point, alongside being wives and taking on other jobs in cleaning and domestic work. These prostitutes, wrote research William Acton, “consistently enjoyed better health than other working women and were no more likely to fall victim to alcoholism, insanity, suicide,” or other problems. This did not mean that prostitutes did not experience exploitation; it was a highly Patriachal society of stigma and male dominance of all economic activities. In fact, local politicians tried to profit from the legal sex trade, and prostitutes organized against them to retain control over the full earnings of their own labor. While working class life was hard for all women, who were denied the same employment opportunities as men, their choice of prostitution over the harmful garment work environment, is not unlike the same choices that women in Cambodia make today, as garment workers and sex workers unite together to fight for better conditions in both garment factories and the sex industry.
*NOTE: I was just informed that Alison Bass appropriated the work of a sex worker activist, while outing this person and her friends with identifiable information and work names, without any consent. This journalist, who is now taken on academic positions and positions herself as an expert in sex work, has never taken accountability for the harms she has inflicted on the lives of the sex workers she researched. I didn’t know this when I quoted her work above. Some more ethical sources to cite on the history of racist violence against sex workers in the U.S. and globally are: Invisible No More by Andrea Ritchie, Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Sex Workers Unite by Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Lies and Statistics by Dr. Brooke Magnanti, and the incredible compilation of writings of sex workers on the Tits and Sass blog, edited by Caty Simon, Josephine, and other sex workers.
The criminalization of prostitution in the United States pushed the industry underground, and greatly increased the number of pimps and criminal gangs involved in the control of the activities and earning of prostitutes. Whereas previous to 1850, most prostitutes in the United States had been working independently, without a pimp, criminalization shuttered the doors of the many red light districts across the country, where many sex workers had previously played respected roles in small towns, in public affairs and philanthropy.
However, criminalization did not stop the sex industry from existing, it merely became hidden, with greater degrees of control by organized crime, and higher incidences of violence. The prostitution abolition movement was led by Protestant and Catholic religious groups that urged sexual satisfaction within the marriage, along with suffragettes who believed that prostitution would magically disappear if women had the right to vote — this way of positioning the upper middle class “good girls” against the working class and immigrant “bad women”, in order to earn political privileges for the bourgeois who claim to be “saviours” of their immigrant sisters…is a tactic that continues today with corporate and carceral feminism winning their “equality” while advocating for increased policing and immigration border control, all in the name of “saving” women from human trafficking.
The White Slavery panic preceding the Prohibition Era was littered with as many false statistics and narratives, sensationalized “yellow journalism”, and emotional appeals to the middle class, divorced from the realities of women working in sex trades — as the American anti-trafficking movement is today. The utter racist bullshit of the White Slavery panic was eventually disproved, and little by little, investigative journalists of the time uncovered the false narratives, and finally the newspapers went quiet. However, today, the renewed utter racist bullshit of the American anti-trafficking movement has been debunked over and over again, but too many highly paid nonprofits are invested in this narrative, and receive funding from police for proliferating these lies, that they will not retract their falsehoods, and are cold-hearted about the collateral cost of sex worker lives funding their elite Saviorism.
You should know that the “Rescue Industry” elites like CATW, Sanctuary for Families, Polaris Project, AF3IRM, and Ruhama, the direct descendents of the Irish Magdalene Laundries —have the blood of sex workers on their hands. They have created and profited from so much violence, through the criminalization of prostitution and the creation of “rescue” programs to “transition” prostitutes to other work. This is a historic form of class, race, and gender violence, that we have yet to get accountability and reparations for. How many more lives will be lost to this religiously subservient “feminism” that has no qualms about killing her fellow sisters and brothers in the name of helping them?
The Prohibition Movement advocated for the criminalization of prostitution along with the purchase of alcohol. While the latter was repealed as a big mistake, which led to increased gang violence and an underground culture of speakeasies that enriched organized crime, the criminalization of prostitution was not repealed alongside the criminalization of alcohol, even though the same violence accompanies both.
Contrary to what you have assumed in your writing, full decriminalization actually decreases “pimping” and trafficking, while so-called “partial criminalization” by continuing to arrest sex buyers, keeps the sex industry underground in the hands of black market dealers. Any element of criminalization makes the sex industry more dangerous, and creates a source of income for traffickers.
Your point about employment law versus criminal law for protecting sex workers from violence from clients — ignores the fact that rape, assault, theft, and forced labor is already illegal for everyone in society, under existing criminal laws. The problem is not that we need additional laws for violence experienced in prostitution, but that it is precisely the criminalization of prostitution that denies sex workers access to these equal protections, and makes these laws more difficult to enforce when workers won’t come forward when harmed. Stigma against sex workers has also made sex workers the targets of violent criminals and thieves, who know that they are unlikely to report to police.
Only by decriminalizing the sex trade are sex workers given equal protection under existing criminal laws and employment laws, which would better enable enforcement against non-consensual sex of any kind, kidnapping, wage theft, and assault.
Why are organizations that say they care about people who are exploited in sex trades — so insistent on not listening to those very same people when they dare to disagree with their condescending point of view? Why do they not instead fight alongside and for sex workers to have equal protection under the law? Why do they not fight against the stigma of sex work, which is so psychologically devastating to people in sex trades, but instead choose to reinforce those harmful social attitudes with lies and a persistent stance of domination over people in sex trades?
Every person in sex trades needs to be affirmed in their individual circumstances. We reject the false straw man accusation of AF3IRM, that sex worker rights organizers are somehow opposed to the “Right to Exit.” There’s nothing further from the truth; sex worker mutual aid groups are frequently helping members exit and find other forms of employment that they prefer. In fact, that is one of the main reasons for mutual aid, and groups in India that pool money together to help workers with education costs or to start new businesses. We also echo the words of the 65,000 Indian sex workers unionized at Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, who say that “everyone has a right to not be ‘rescued’ by outsiders who neither understand nor respect them.”
We absolutely fight for the Right to Exit. In fact, we go further to demand the right for any sex worker to refuse to perform any sexual service at any time, for any reason. People in sex trades do already set specific limits for themselves in terms of which services they offer, and this is clear even from the Review Boards in cities from New York to Bangkok, where clients are constantly trying to trade information about what services are offered by which workers, using these “disgusting” underground message boards, precisely because there is no legal method for people to disclose this information.
Frequently, a massage parlor worker is willing to give hand jobs but not full sexual services, or she is willing to give a blow job but not do anal sex. These services are spoken about in code words, which yes, can seem very objectifying to outsiders, precisely because it is not glamorized in the language of professional work.
If a worker is visited by a client who they don’t like, they need to be able to say no, to refuse specific clients, and be supported by their employers to do so. It’s a violation of the labor rights of sex workers that this is not the case for all workers, in every work environment! The sex worker movement in Thailand has successfully fought for, and continue to fight for the right for sex workers to refuse specific clients, and refuse specific services, without being penalized by their employers. However, it is not helpful when outsiders rush in and arrest all clients and workers, calling the entire industry violent, and causing more violence through arrests.
In the circumstance where a sex worker is being pressured to cross her set boundaries, or give a service she does not want to give, there is currently no legal protection for this worker, short of quitting the job and calling the cops to criminalize everyone. This is a labor justice issue! It is a worker issue that requires precise labor protections and enforcement mechanisms, because it is not an issue of general sexual violence against this worker. She or he wants to work! But she or he also wants to be able to set and enforce boundaries.
Criminalization gets in the way of workers trying to set boundaries for themselves, who seek protection for specific labor abuses, and specific forms of harassment. Why are sex workers who want to do this work to pay for our living expenses and families, like every other worker, not allowed to fight for our labor rights?
2. Sex Work Is Not Rape
I understand and absolutely affirm you when you say that your entire sex work experience was rape. I am sorry that you were raped multiple times by different clients. I am so sorry that you felt you had no other options but to continue sex work. I am sorry you were so alone in your experience, and had no one to turn to for emotional support — that you were homeless and isolated. Nobody should ever have to be forced into prostitution under those conditions. You are absolutely entitled to your anger, and your belief that all prostitution should be abolished.
However, in translating your belief into law, please know that there are people who would be harmed in the process, and no one is entitled to harming other people. Moreover, I am wary of the ways in which certain organizations appropriate our pain and anger as survivors to serve their own political agenda, and weaponize our pain against one another.
If we agree to respectfully disagree, I’d rather focus on the points where we agree, and can support each other. We both fight for the right to a safety net for all people, including housing as a human right, universal healthcare, free schooling and job training, and decent wages for all, in all occupations.
Our movement that fights for the decriminalization of sex work is led by Latinx migrant trans women and Black LGBTQ youth who have turned to sex work to survive.
Black, migrant, and LGBTQ sex workers are leading the fight for full decriminalization, not “privileged” sex workers. Stop invisibilizing the leadership of sex workers of color in our movement!
I disagree with the broad stroke notion that all prostitution is rape, and that somehow the exchange of money erases the possibility of consent. This twisted logic negates the possibility for sex workers to name (and get justice) for incidences of rape, on and off the job. Plus, the condescending attitude that sex workers can’t determine for ourselves when we are being raped —and that other people know better than we do about the sexual violence we are experiencing — is extremely messed up!
The conflation of sex work with rape was an actual problem in Philadelphia where a sex worker, Dominique Gindraw, was raped at gunpoint, and this was ruled by Judge Theresa Carr Deni as a “theft of services”, since Gindraw was a sex worker. The difference between prostitution and being forced to have sex at gunpoint, should be clear in this example—and the worker should have been trusted to determine for herself when an incident is rape, and when it is consensual services in exchange for money. However, when policymakers do not listen to sex workers, they make it much harder for sex workers to get justice in the face of violence.
If all prostitution is rape, then we, as a society, set the expectation for all sex work to be violent, erasing the unique acts of violence that sex workers experience, by blaming sex workers for participating in an “inherently violent” industry.
This is a form of victim-blaming. It is punishing survivors of violence, instead of helping to empower these people, by bringing this industry to light so that people can work above ground, and demand fair and equal treatment without relying on illegal intermediaries. It makes it impossible for sex workers to legitimately fight for safer working conditions, or expect any better from our workplaces. The stigmatized notion that “all sex work is inherently violent” directly contributes to violence against sex workers.
3. Choosing between different jobs under Capitalism is a choice — And it is violent to take that choice away
While there are certainly some trafficking victims who have been physically coerced to engage in prostitution completely against their will, and they need the full protection of the law to escape kidnapping and physical capture, the reality is that the majority of people in sex trades are economically driven to do work. These people choose sex work over other ways of making money which they deem to be equally or more exploitative — from nail salon work, to domestic work, garment factory work, farm fruit picking, meat processing, street vending, or other service sector jobs, as well as white collar jobs.
The working conditions for all these occupations need to be improved, which is why we fight alongside our allies at other Worker Centers, including domestic workers and street vendors. Immigrant and racialized workers compose of an exploited underclass under Capitalism that have constrained choices. The working conditions of sex workers is inextricably tied to the labor rights of other workers.
In this world we live in, wage labor means constrained choices for all workers. Making a choice to do sex work over cleaning toilets, or sewing garments at a few cents a piece in a sweatshop, is a very real choice that most sex workers have to negotiate every single day — and the social stigma and shame that comes attached to these choices, certainly makes living with the choices harder.
All choices are constrained by circumstance, by the very definition of the word “choice.” Many sex workers juggle sex work alongside other jobs that don’t pay enough money, such as a grocery store shift that doesn’t offer enough hours. It is unreasonable for you to say that because a sex worker has worked another job, they are no longer qualified to speak. It is also unfair to say that for someone to choose sex work over domestic work, that she must be “brainwashed under patriarchy” or “Stockholm Syndrome,” that her choices must be invalidated by superior feminists, and that she should therefore be compelled to go back to doing more socially respectable work for lower pay.
It’s strange to me that some anti-prostitution advocates say that just because a sex worker would not perform their service “for free,” that it means it is necessarily coerced. What kind of privileged person does their work for free, anyways?
As undocumented Latinx sex worker Maya Morena wrote, most people on Earth work for money, not for “voluntary pleasure.” Voluntary work is also exploitative, as are the unpaid internships of many of the NGO’s that only employ upper middle class youth who have no experience of working class poverty, to “save” others. It creates a class of elite “feminist heroes” who find their life’s purpose in interfering in the lives of less privileged women.
The lying (and murdering) anti-trafficking arm of the nonprofit industrial complex, and all its false efforts at half-way relief for the people they pity and deem beneath them, is very neoliberal indeed.
4. Labor Rights Are Not Contingent On “Enjoying” Your Job
Labor for most working class women, such as nail salon work or factory assembly work, is certainly not done for free or out of “passion”, and it is not generally experienced as pleasant or “empowering”. But not liking your job does not make it so that you are not a worker, deserving of labor rights.
In fact, people who are doing the most bodily harmful and stressful jobs, like farm workers, construction workers and day laborers, domestic workers, and sex workers, deserve all the more protection because their work is particularly difficult, and their poverty makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
Gendered and bodily labor, such as modelling, professional dance, and entertainment work is often sexist, and women’s bodies are judged on tabloids and review boards across the internet based on how they fit a mainstream norm of beauty; but that does not mean that police should take down Hollywood, or arrest every person who consumes magazines or movies.
Domestic work is also gendered, and activists at AF3IRM like Ninotchka, the co-founder, have also advocated for the abolition of domestic work. How does she imagine the abolition of domestic work in a non-carceral way? Through raiding households and educating middle class American mom’s and dad’s about not hiring Filipinx domestic workers? — You can see how this paradigm is naive and harmful, when applied to other labor sectors, and fails to address the real needs and vulnerabilities of domestic workers: low wages especially for live-in nannies, unreasonable work hours, harassment from employers, visa dependency on employers, and lack of regulation or authorities for workers to report harm done to them without putting their immigration status and livelihood at jeopardy.
It is absolutely pivotal that when sex workers say we need labor protections, people simply listen and support us. Please do not presume to know better than sex workers about our labor conditions or needs.
You are siding with the oppressor when you do so: police, immigration border control, patriarchal sexual morality, and organization that profit from diversion programs mandated by court systems.
Do you not see the ways in which you are being used by the people who silence us, to advocate for harm against us all?
5. Sex Work in Formal and Informal Environments: Decriminalization vs. Legalization
Your assessment of the antagonistic labor relations between client and worker is brilliant. Workers’ interests are not aligned with their bosses or customers, and the struggle is indeed often fought on the terrain of the bodily labor of the worker. It’s the same problem faced by domestic workers who are Home Health Aides that are forced to work 24 hours for 13 hours of pay. There needs to be labor institutions and laws to better protect them from this.
If you want to help current sex workers fight against the specific forms of pressure and labor negotiations we have to deal with daily, help create legal mechanisms so that we can enforce the limits we set on what sexual services we provide — no kissing, or bare back blow jobs when we say so; no session with a client who doesn’t take a shower first. Whatever a sex worker demands, she should be able to get through labor laws, not through policing and prisons, and a criminal record that keeps her from her Right to Exit.
You are right that not all sex workers work, or want to work, in formal labor structures, like massage parlors or dance clubs. Many sex workers prefer to work informally, independently, through pickup work on the street, in hotels, or off of social media platforms.
And you are right, that is precisely why we fight for full decriminalization of sex work, and not legalization of sex work, which requires licenses and registrations, and creates a two-tiered system of those who are licensed and others who can’t get a license. For sex workers that prefer to work informally, they simply want to be decriminalized, so they have full access to all other protections under the law against violence, theft, and rape.
Please watch this video about the difference between decriminalization and legalization, by author of the book “Revolting Prostitutes,” which goes into more depth on this topic.
The only decriminalization is “full decriminalization” of both the sex worker and the buyer. People who say they want “partial decriminalization” make no sense — the transaction is still criminalized — and this “Nordic Model” or “End Demand Model” has been proven over and over again to be deadly for sex workers, especially migrants and mothers. But anti-prostitution organizations like Sanctuary for Families, Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women, Equality Now, and AF3IRM appropriate the language of the sex worker rights movement by claiming they are “decriminalizing” sex workers but not buyers, in the gaslighting way that they always do. It is not decrimization if the transaction is still criminalized, and sex workers still have to work underground, and face mass evictions and deportations.
Self-glamorizing elite “Protectors” like Alexi Ashe Myers and celebrities like Ashley Judd should be ashamed for appropriating the “decrim” language and hard-earned activist wins of DecrimNY and the global sex worker rights movement, while actively promoting policies that further violence against sex workers, and expressing disgusting contempt for an undocumented migrant sex worker, the sort of person that they are paid extravagantly to help, but silence and cruelly make fun of instead.
These horribly classist elite “Protectors” have so much to learn from my lovely and brilliant friend, Maya Morena. They should listen to beautiful, fiery TS Candii, lead organizer of DecrimNY, who was racially profiled and thrown out of a panel organized by Sanctuary for Families at the Incarnation Church, in a meeting about protecting people in sex trades, while violently excluding those very people. They should listen to kind and hard-working Bianey Garcia from El Colectivo Intercultural Transgrediendo, the collective of trans and migrant sex workers at Make the Road NY, which is at the heart of DecrimNY organizing.
Listen to Cecilia Gentili, a trans woman and migrant Latinx former sex worker, who is a long-time leader of transgender justice and queer liberation, and co-founder of DecrimNY. Listen to Jared Trujillo, lawyer at Legal Aid Society, who traded sex as a runaway teenager and now fights as a public defender for economically marginalized youth going through the racist criminal justice system. Listen to Leila Raven, queer mother and fierce activist for prison abolition, who also traded sex as a runaway teenager, and led an organization to help other youth navigate the same situation, safe outside the justice system, which only causes more harm to Black and brown survivors.
Listen to Tamika Spellman, Alicia Sanchez Gill, and these black trans women in DC who have experienced violence in sex trades, and nevertheless, want sex work to be recognized as work. Listen to Monica Forrester, indigenous sex worker and outreach worker with other indigenous street-based workers at Maggie’s in Toronto. Donate to Ceyenne Doroshow at Glitz who is building a home for other Black trans women in sex trades. Listen to Gizelle Marie, who organized the NYC Stripper Strike, centering Black dancers discriminated against at strip clubs who demand equal treatment. Last but not least, listen to graceful and powerful SX Noir, who publicly challenged Ashley Judd, and organized the Black Sex Worker Liberation March on August 1st, bringing over 1000 people to Times Square to listen to Black sex workers, trans, street-based workers, mothers, sisters, some who have experienced trafficking and forced prostitution within prisons and outside of youth group homes.
These are the organizers and leaders of the sex work decriminalization movement in New York and DC, and they are Black, trans, queer, migrant, people of color, and survivors of violence and trafficking. Listen to all survivors. How can you call these people privileged, or undeserving of having a voice, when they tell you that “sex work is work”?
One key reason why the “End Demand” movement will always be harmful for people in sex trades is because it actively increases stigma against sex workers. In informal trades like sex work and street vending, social stigma enables greater violence and harm. This is why sex workers around the world organized around the slogan #StigmaKills after the death of Swedish sex worker rights activist, Jasmine Petite, under the same laws that Equality Model advocates now want to introduce in New York. You can read more about Jasmine Petite, Layleen Planco, and Yang Song in our original letter to AF3IRM and the DSA, with many more links and resources, which I will not repeat here.
The informality and illicit nature of independent work puts discretion at the hands of police to enforce in a biased way, or solicit bribes and sexual services, in exchange for non-arrest. This has been the problem for so many indigenous women in sex trades who have been violently exploited by police and made to disappear; by police officers like Daniel Holtzclaw who specifically targeted Black sex workers and homeless drug-users in sex trades for serial acts of rape; for Chinese migrant sex workers who experience extortion and death at the pressure of police in Flushing; for street-based youth in New York City who have been raped by police officers and then forced to have sex with Corrections Officers engaged in pimping underaged prisoners; for Black and Brown teens trading sex in Chicago who say that police are the biggest source of violence that they face; for South African women who are raped by police and denied access to HIV treatment; for Chinese and Cambodian sex workers forced into “reeducation” labor camps where they have been assaulted and killed by guards.
Human Rights Watch researched sex work in China, Tanzania, Cambodia, South Africa, and the United States, “where workers are often forced to conduct business in dangerous back streets, parks, and abandoned buildings.” They say: “Whether interviewing sex workers in wealthy US cities or small South African towns, we consistently find police abuse to be one of criminalization’s main cruelties.”
A list of other global human rights organizations that are standing up for decriminalization and the rights of sex workers:
- United Nations Global Commission on HIV AIDS and the Law
- United Nations Development Program in Asia Pacific
- World Health Organization
- Lancet Journal of Public Health
- Human Rights Watch
- Amnesty International
- American Civil Liberties Union
- National Center for Transgender Equality
- Black Youth Project 100
- Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
- International Women’s Rights Watch - Asia Pacific
- CREA (Global South Feminists organization in India)
- Roundtable of Harvard academics researching the best policies to fight trafficking (spoil alert: it’s defending sex worker rights)
- The many organizations in the DecrimNY Coalition and DecrimNow DC Coalition, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York Transgender Advocacy Group, the LGBT Center, GAPIMNY, National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Legal Aid Exploitation Intervention Project, Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defenders, UndocuBlack, and Workers World Party
- American Jewish World Service
- Open Society (And yes, it is anti-semitic to echo right wing conspiracy theorists in targeting George Soros, when so many other human rights organizations also support the decriminalization of sex work.)
6. Supporting Sex Workers Does Not Mean Supporting “Pimps” — in fact, it eliminates the need for “Pimps”
Currently, many of those charged with “pimping” or “profiting from the avails of prostitution” are other sex workers, or even the boyfriends and live-in partners of sex workers, who share expenses. Landlords and drivers who provide essential services to sex workers can be charged as pimps. This creates legal discrimination in housing and services for sex workers, and also socially isolates sex workers in dangerous ways.
Workers who want to share a space or operating expenses are often charged as pimps or traffickers, even though they are equally vulnerable to the same working conditions as ones arbitrarily designated as victims by police, in order to process an arrest under a narrow framework. This includes many youth in sex trades being charged with “pimping” or “trafficking” each other when they are close to the same age, and share the same vulnerabilities.
Fighting against the “profiting from the avails of prostitution” law does not mean that we condone “pimping” when it is violent, extractive, or coercive. We, of course, oppose violence, wage theft, and coercion. However, we believe that third party workers, such as managers of clubs or drivers, need to be regulated and inspected. We think that under the law, they should be designated as administrative helpers of sex workers, and should demonstrate that they are under the employ of sex workers, rather than the other way around.
Under New Zealand’s full decriminalization laws, Third Party workers need to acquire an Operator’s Certificate and be registered and regulated by the state. Sex workers are encouraged to work independently or in small collectives. However, if four or more sex workers want to work together, and they want to hire a bookkeeper, driver, cleaner, or other third party person — presumably they would require administrative help — then that help needs to be regulated through an Operator’s Certificate.
The global sex worker rights movement, comprised of hundreds of sex worker organizations in every continent, is advocating for the full decriminalization of sex work. However, decriminalization is just the first step. Beyond this, Red Canary Song also believes in legalization and regulation of third party workers, like drivers, phone receptionists, graphic and web designers, landlords, cleaners, and tech platforms that profit from sex workers while discriminating against us.
The New Zealand model has been shown to increase the bargaining power of sex workers with respect to brothel-owners, and has resulted in a decrease of the number of brothels rather than an increase, since many sex workers, when given the choice and safety, choose to work alone. It has also succeeded in decreasing the amount of violence that sex workers experience on the job.
However, the New Zealand model is still not good enough. Migrants are not protected equally under the laws. While migrant workers in New Zealand also report feeling safer in their work, and benefit from decreased stigma, there is no visa for sex work, so their work is still illegal.
We think that the regulation of third parties should be done legally, and not through the murdering of all pimps, as you suggest, because nobody gets paid for murder, except the police.
7. The “Just Transition” out of sex work is an Old Fairytale: the Reality is Human Rights Abuses
When you talk about a “just transition” out of sex work, and compare this to the fossil fuel industry, it is an amusing comparison, with historically terrifying parallels. First of all, sex workers are selling a service, not a natural resource. I am not sure what you might be proposing in terms of a “clean energy” alternative.
Sex workers are always working towards our exit. Many create new businesses, such as bakeries and laundromats with the only source of capital they have readily available. Others put themselves through school to find new jobs. We don’t need nuns or rescue organizations to arrange a “just transition” for us via state violence. We need access to housing, healthcare, education; and we also just need society that respects our equal dignity, and protects our right to exist.
Historically, the idea of a “just transition” has been tried many times, and is still constantly being enacted in diversion programs across the country that collect problematic statistics about the sex industry, compelled through the force of the criminal justice system. From the Magdalene Laundries, where Irish prostitutes were imprisoned by nuns to do laundry work, while their babies were tossed into mass graves; to the “re-education programs” in former Khmer Rouge camps that Cambodian sex workers were forced to go into, in order to learn a more socially acceptable trade of sewing — forcing sex workers to “transition” into a different form of work is not a novel idea. A “just transition” is the oldest punishment in the book for the oldest profession.
Leftists who romanticize the false idea that Communism somehow eliminated prostitution through “education and jobs” seem to be blissfully unaware of how, in China, sex workers have been tortured and raped in such “reeducation camps” — where they were forced to do back-breaking prison labor resulting in countless deaths, and forced to memorize and regurgitate Communist Party propaganda to prove that they have “matured” in their revolutionary consciousness. After being sufficiently “reformed”, former prostitutes were forcibly married off to soldiers in Xinjiang, the Western-most Province in China where currently, a Han ethnic majority Chinese military occupation is committing genocide against a Uyghur Muslim minority, who are surveilled and also forced to labor in “reeducation” camps.
Even with all this brutality, China has never been successful in eliminating prostitution, except for creating false state statistics. Leftists who believe in the rhetoric of the ending of prostitution via “education and jobs” — through the literal disappearance of people into “reeducation” labor camps — prove themselves to be naive about both prostitution and Communism. In Cuba, prostitutes were also sent through “reeducation” under the Military Units to Help Production (UMAP) camps, where they endured humiliation, torture, and rape. It did not stop prostitution from existing there either; today the Cuban police rely on arresting prostitutes to secure their wages — not unlike police in the United States, who prey on repeatedly targeting the “lowest hanging fruit” to get overtime pay.
Under Capitalism, in Thailand, sex workers have jumped to their deaths from the roofs of American religious nonprofit organizations, where they were kept against their will to do “fair trade” sewing labor. Right now, anti-trafficking nonprofits in Ireland are run by the very same people at Ruhama who locked sex workers in laundromats and killed their babies — supposedly for their own good. These “End Demand” NGO’s are actually making the situation worse, and use trafficking, “the new terrorism”, as an excuse to target sex workers. They lobbied for laws that criminalized the purchase of sex work, and since passing, has led to a massive increase in violence and abusive incidents.
As Asian sex workers, we also bear the brunt of being the symbolic embodiment of nationalist shame. The horrors of war for Korean and Chinese comfort women, and women working in the Philippines under American military occupation, are appropriated as political ammunition for nationalist outrage against Japanese and American imperialism, yet the actual survivors are subject to the double violence of social shame by their own communities and families. Mixed race children born to women who have traded sex with foreign soldiers or tourists for survival are treated as social pariahs. Their visibility serves as the shameful reminder of the nation’s economic and militaristic weakness in the face of invaders.
In Patriarchal fashion, Asian men are offended by the way “their women” in prostitution are catering to white foreigners. Organizations like AF3IRM echo this Patriarchal nationalism when they equate prostitution to imperialism and the rape of Asia, the debasement of national pride, as if the sexuality of all Asian women belonged to Asian men, and each sexual transaction with a white person is a theft from rightful owners. AF3IRM also compares the pollution of rivers and the environment to the “pollution” of women’s bodies in the sex trade, commenting with disgust on the presence of chlamydia in polluted water samples.
The shame that other Asian women feel towards Asian sex workers, and the way they blame Asian sex workers for the fetishization and stereotypes ascribed to all Asian women, is misdirected, especially when not accompanied with an examination of how their own attitudes towards sex workers contribute to the general stigma that society relegates to this trade — which then becomes ascribed to all Asian women. They could end that cycle by nurturing a more positive culture of support for current sex workers, who are being violently reduced by the history of war into a permanent second-class womanhood as symbolic bearers of shame, symbolic non-existence.
While forced prostitution of any kind is a human rights violation, to reduce all people in sex trades to the permanent symbol of the comfort woman or the trafficking victim, is to perpetuate a different form of epistemic violence that denies our voices any possible complexity, visibility, equality, or dynamic for change. Asian sex workers today are not responsible for the negative associations of the sex trade; neither are we responsible for the global economic structures that make sex work one of the most highly paid ways for a woman without education to survive. Changing those economic and social structures does not start with violently silencing sex workers.
The same patriarchal attitudes that insist on reducing all people in sex trades to trafficking victims, is emblematic in a refusal to see, or rather, a demand to project fantasy upon sex trade workers — even when the masturbatory heroism of “protecting” sex workers by forcibly “rescuing” them, leads to human rights abuses against these workers.
What exactly does AF3IRM mean by non-carceral methods to hold clients and “pimps” accountable? How would these methods be put in place, without policing or prisons — and without focusing on surveilling sex workers? If you actually look at the legislation that AF3IRM supports in Hawaii, you will see that it is far from being “non-carceral.” Please read the important piece that Purple Rose has written on AF3IRM’s collaboration with police and carceral systems, to create rescue programs coerced through the justice system.
Organizations that run post-arrest diversion programs like Project Rose, and that operate in collaboration with the New York Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (formerly “Prostitution Diversion” courts), are profiting, as pimps and police do, from the criminalization of sex work. By increasing stigma against the sex trade, they also cause psychological and spiritual damage to sex workers by reinforcing patriarchal ideas of women’s sexuality, which also contribute to keeping the sex industry underground.
How do you propose to take away the livelihoods of sex workers in a “non-carceral way” without the use of violence, when the very way that you promote this idea is actually incredibly violent?
8. Intersectionality of Migrant Labor Oppression
I am not defending men’s right to pleasure when I note that in Flushing, the majority of customers of sex workers are Latinx construction workers. I am, however, defending these migrant women’s right to charge money for their time and labor.
What we emphasized in our previous letter to AF3IRM is that both groups of immigrant workers are marginalized in particular ways by the border and immigration law: to extract physical labor, without paying the fair reproductive wage of their labor, so that they can afford to bring their families to live with them in the United States. This is the same kind of bodily labor extraction that led Chinese railroad workers to toil in the U.S. after the emancipation of slavery, as a replacement labor force, whose reproduction was controlled by national immigration laws that do not want Asians to settle down, create families, or be woven into the fabric of the United States.
Some migrant men also sell sexual services to survive. Some also sell their bodily services in other ways, as day laborers. Migrant women and men working informally in sex and construction trades have more in common with each other than the white, middle class workers who try to “rescue” them. Their complex relationships to each other demonstrate this clearly.
I bring up the migrant men of color who are the majority of customers of Flushing massage workers because I think it’s important to highlight the intersecting layers of class oppression, and I don’t think it’s helpful to lump all customers together as a kind of “bogeyman” — The majority of sexual service buyers arrested for soliciting prostitution in the United States and Canada are not white men, but people of color. Furthermore, many immigrant sex workers in Flushing know that they make a higher wage than their construction worker clients do, and the relationships are not as cut and dry across class relations as you portray them to be.
I believe that women, cis-gendered and trans, as well as men in sex trades, have a right to charge and be paid for services that historically, husbands have demanded of wives for free. This form of heteronormative Patriarchal control over the bodies of women has been enforced through the ideology of religion, to create an artificial scarcity of women’s sexuality, which men have profited from. That value belongs to us, and we deserve to be able to control our bodies, and create value however we like, for our own survival, and to feed and shelter the people in our lives, without being penalized for disobeying Patriarchy.
Women’s bodies have been used to advertise cars, sell cigarettes, and make many men rich — but when women try to appropriate our own sexualities for our own financial benefit, suddenly we are “sluts” and “dirty” — we have historically been demonized for being “seductresses”. For women to wield our sexuality for profit has long been considered evil, because Patriarchy fears women’s sexual power, and violently enforces a code of morality that demands women be gentle and subservient mothers, whose sexualities are monopolized by the male guardians in their lives — fathers or husbands, who historically have legally “owned” women as their property.
The feminist revolution we want is for women to control our own bodies and choices, and for the value that we have always created from this to be deemed legitimate and dignified. We live under Capitalism now, and right now, people need to survive. How can you take this option away from people who need it the most, while denying them the safety they ask for, and silencing their voices? How is that feminism?
9. Socialism & Reappropriating Sexual Power
As sex workers, we understand that we don’t live in a Socialist society right now, but those of us who affiliate with the DSA want Socialism because we believe in fighting for a world where every person has a safety net of housing and healthcare as basic human rights, where no one has to trade sex because they have no other options. In such a world, we believe that trafficking and economic coercion in sex work will no longer exist.
However, even after achieving such a world, I think that the exchange of sexual services for resources may still exist, in one form or another. Sexuality is not only a site of victimization, but it is also a form of women’s bargaining power. In so far as marriage has been a cartel between women, and sex workers have violated that agreement, we understand why some women would deem us to be traitors to the gendered bargain. However, we really don’t think that marriage has historically been such a great bargain for women.
So long as any communication platforms exist — from the street to social media channels — people will find a way to sell sexual services. You can’t outlaw us out of existence, because the reality is: many people want to trade sexual services for other resources. Nothing short of violent policing and surveillance can realistically stop people who want to trade sex for money from doing so.
There is also nothing inherently sexist, exploitative, degrading, or immoral about a woman, non-binary person, or man trading sexual services for other resources — except when that person is being controlled by another, or when their wages are being stolen from them by a “pimp”, police officer, or “rescue” organization worker. Sex workers need to reclaim our power and our labor from all three thieves, and unabashedly demand that the public treat us with the respect we absolutely deserve.
We are here for the fight towards socialism and a more equal society, but please, focus your energies on providing the housing, resources, healthcare, education, and jobs — please stop focusing all your energies on criminalizing the source of our survival until we’ve achieved the socialist utopia we all dream of.
To be blind to our reality, and to aggressively invisibilize all sex workers who don’t fit your point of view — is actually both extremely naive, and horrifically violent to people in sex trades, especially to the most marginalized immigrants, trans and queer sex workers, Black sex workers, people of color, and Third World sex workers who are leading the global fight towards decriminalization.
10. Real Abolition: Defund Police, Decriminalize Sex Work, and Fund Housing, Healthcare, Education
I want to conclude this response letter by highlighting that there are actually many points where we agree.
We both agree that what’s most important is increasing the range of choices available to sex workers — by working towards changing the socioeconomic conditions that force people to take on jobs that that they would prefer not to do — without resorting to carceral methods that trap people who participate in the sex industry in a cycle of criminalization and poverty.
We are both opposed to trafficking and against any form of non-consensual sex, and we both support every sex workers’ right to exit.
We both also agree that people trading sex should not be criminalized. We agree that the most important policy measures for helping workers transition out of sex work, is not policing, but rather housing, healthcare, education, and job training.
Our common enemy is supposed to be oligarchic corporate finance, military imperialism, and the prison industrial complex. We both support prison abolition, demilitarization, and defunding the police, to transfer carceral funding to schools, healthcare, and housing as a human right for all people — NOT to social services that are contingent upon arrest, or as a seemingly less punitive alternative to incarceration.
There is so much that we can fight for together. I do not want to fight against you, when there are many policies that we can more successfully push for side by side.
You are not the enemy. I will never treat you the way that AF3IRM treats us, when they slander and silence anyone who dares to use the word “sex worker.”
Many of us who have spoken up against AF3IRM are former members or have attended workshops by AF3IRM, where we have experienced ostracization and silencing for daring to speak to a different perspective, our own truths. We are calling out the violence of AF3IRM because their eagerness to silent sex workers, their abusive language and treatment of people who disagree with them, and their refusal to listen to the people they claim to want to help — is deeply psychologically harmful! I support Purple Rose and many other sex workers who have spoken up to try to hold AF3IRM to account.
I am just one person in a much larger global sex worker movement in over 150 countries that is growing stronger every year, even in the face of the hateful sex work prohibition movement that would rather see us dead than listen to us. Little by little, we are winning this battle, because we have to — because we have no choice but to fight for our lives.
As a feminist sister, I support you unconditionally in your personal growth.
I also hope that you will one day extend the same compassion to us, and listen to the vast majority of current sex workers who tell you that sex work is work. We deserve an equal seat at the table when it comes to policy that impacts our lives. We are people too, and it’s a beautiful time right now, that we are standing up for ourselves in increasing numbers. The organizations that want to abolish our existence - have humiliated us, manipulated us, gaslit us, profited from our pain, and hurt us, so so much. But they can’t shame or bully us into silence. We have a duty to fight for our equality, and we have a duty to win.
As bell hooks wrote in the conclusion of “Ain’t I a Woman”:
Denouncing housework as menial labor does not restore to the woman houseworker the pride and dignity in her labor she is stripped of by patriarchal devaluation…To perpetuate the notion that all men are creatures of privilege with access to a personal fulfillment and a personal liberation denied women, as feminists do, is to lend further credibility to the sexist mystique of male power that proclaims all that is male is inherently superior to that which is female….
It is a contradiction that white females have structured a women’s liberation movement that is racist and excludes many non-white women… Often times I am asked by black women to explain why I would call myself a feminist and by using that term ally myself with a movement that is racist. I say, “The question we must ask again and again is how can racist women call themselves feminists.” It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism.”
Women who have built their feminism by excluding and degrading sex workers are not feminists. Sex workers are taking that term back. From Maya Angelou to Aspasia to Ching Shih, we have long been feminists. Sex workers are on the forefront of many movements, fighting for systemic change and liberation for all people.
And we don’t actually need the permission of anyone — not other feminists, not the media, not even the law — to insist on dignity and equality for our humanity. The most important change that is happening now, is not even the policy push that will pendulum back and forth between political factions. It is the growing consciousness of our sex worker liberation, which will not be extinguished.
Imagine if we all rise up, and we look straight in the eye, the policewoman, the nun, the socialite philanthropist, the judge, and the journalist — if we show them that we are not ashamed! That we demand to be treated with respect and take our equal place at the table! And we will not back down. Then they can not, in good faith, go on lying and stealing from us much longer. Because we contain multitudes, but we will not be split one from another. The long arc of justice is our spiritual care, and willingness to fight, for one another.
=========
Other notes:
Red Canary Song was brought into this conversation after we defended Purple Rose, another trans member of AF3IRM who is a sex worker, and who was treated badly by AF3IRM. Since speaking with Purple Rose, we found that several other sex workers and trans people have had the same experience with AF3IRM, including being bullied, called names, publicly shamed, and harshly punished for expressing any views that disagree with the orthodoxy of the group.
Survivors are tired of being pitted against survivors by SWERF’s in a public death match for all to see.
A branch of AF3IRM protested outside the workplace of several sex workers, and vandalized the door of that workplace, claiming to be fighting for the people working inside, but doing so without the permission of those people, and using language that actually degrades and stigmatizes them. They repeatedly refuse to use the term “sex worker,” and they mislead other people on the left into believing that their stance of viciously attacking anyone who identifies with the term “sex worker” is somehow morally correct.
The stigma that organizations like AF3IRM perpetuate towards sex workers and trans people in their own membership, does so much spiritual and psychological violence to these members. Their insistence on aggressively silencing and denouncing everyone who disagrees with them, has policy implications that costs our lives — the lives of current sex workers.
Thank you, Esperanza, for taking the time to read and write, in a caring and respectful way, in good faith. I appreciate your intelligence, your passion, and your desire for justice. Please know that no matter what you believe, I will always support your right to have that belief, and to live with safety, dignity, and self-love.
I hope that we can both face the internalized stigma within ourselves, with gentleness and kindness. I hope you find healing and community with people who really value you for all the dignity and complexity of your experiences.
With love always,
Kate Zen
—
Many thanks to Purple Rose and Lorelei Lee for reading over my draft, and helping with edits. Please read Purple Rose’s writing about AF3IRM.
In response to Esperanza’s letter, here: https://medium.com/@bfonseca.e/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab