Don't destroy, rebuild!

Via Clarisse Thorn's 'Love Bites', two stories about the ways in which sex-positive people are not quite what radfem and anti-sex work people would have us believe.

It sometimes seems as though those radfems especially want us to believe that sex-positive and pro-sex worker campaigners are all selling the "happy hooker myth" and either ignoring or deliberately hiding the wrong things that happen in sex work.   It's often claimed that only the emotionally or sexually abused could possibly choose certain lifestyles.

Sex blogger The Beautiful Kind publicly came out last month, with an extensive article (with interviews with her parents and ex-husband) in the St. Louis paper Riverfront Times revealing her real-life name and face.   It's a frank piece including biographical information concerning early traumas relating to sexuality, much as those radfem theorists would have expected.   The thing is, though, it seems to fall down when you look at a person who has, through her exploration of sexuality and writing about it, developed into a much more stable person, who is bringing up a healthy and inquisitive child (see the article).   Maybe it's true that if we got rid of nasty traumas in childhood then kink, power-exchange and so on would all disappear within a generation or two, but equally you could say that if we got rid of disease then hospitals would disappear within a generation or two.

Clarisse picks up especially on the issues around being an out sex blogger bringing up a child, quoting the original article on these matters.   Everyone except TBK herself wanted to remain anonymous, and no connection to her daughter was to be made at all, even though there was still the fear that someone might make the connection:

"I'm most afraid of anything happening to my partner or my daughter," Holliday says. "I don't want them to feel the heat of my courageous decision. If anyone says anything about me, and it's true, I'll own it. They can't shame me — 'Oh, she's a slut.' OK."

Although there's bad stuff in the story, it has a happy ending, and that ending involves kinky or alternative sex. It seems as though the biggest problem now is the people who want to make sure it doesn't stay happy!

Another activist, sex worker and sex-positive campaigner, Serpent Libertine, has written about some of the bad experiences she has had in sex work. She says:

I have had quite a few negative experiences in my years as a sex worker and almost exclusively, those experiences were when I was working for other people. Managers, agents, agencies, pimps, panderers, whatever you want to call ‘em, these people are almost always fuckin’ lazy assholes who seek to profit off women’s work.

 Serpent Libertine draws some conclusions about what can be done to stop these people operating in incredibly shady ways:

The best thing the internet did for sex workers was allowing us to stop depending on these pimp-like agents and establishments and work independently. We no longer needed these people do do our advertising, answer the phones, and pretend to do some sort of screening process that we had little knowledge of.

...

Friends I know who have worked in the brothel system say the same things. The owners instill all sorts of rules and regulations and workers are treated no better than if they were working illegally. So obviously, a decriminalized system that would allow workers to work independently is the only way to go.

...

I found a way to eliminate those from my life and never will I work for any type of agent, manager, or establishment in this industry again. This is what made the difference from me being a scared, depressed sex worker to a emotionally stable and fully independent worker who loves what she does.

The problem is not solved by changing how you criminalise sex work.   The problem is that sex work is illegal in the first place, meaning that sex workers cannot utilise the same protections against exploitation that everyone else has.   The Nevada model, as Serpent Libertine points out (and several others have as well), actually encourages exploitation because of the narrow conditions under which a sex worker has permission to work, which puts power in the hands of those who provide access to fulfilling those conditions (i.e. the brothel owners) and takes it away from the worker (the classic Marxist knock against capitalism in general, but I digress...)

The point being that we can recognise that in sex work as it currently exists there are problems, even quite deep structural ones.   As Serpent Libertine explains, the internet is helping to get rid of some of those already.   There is no need to try to destroy sex work through this or that law (and history suggests it's not possible anyway).   We can instead look to rebuild, tearing out the useless and exploitative structures and putting more power into sex workers' hands.   With more people coming out, as The Beautiful Kind did, the issues that still make sex work a trap (in that it is harder to exit than to enter, still) can be eroded - it's mainly social stigma that keeps "respectable" businesses from hiring ex-sex workers so we need to stop that being an issue.   And with changes that put more power in the hands of sex workers who want to work, the exploitation and unethical treatment that Serpent Libertine highlights in her piece can also be priced out of the market.