#juno mac

[gatheringbones]

[“People are attracted to the concept of a Nordic-style law that criminalises only the sex buyer, and not the prostitute – but any campaign or policy that aims to reduce business for sex workers will force them to absorb the deficit, whether in their wallets or in their working conditions. As a sex worker in the Industrial Workers of the World observes,

I find that how easy, safe, and enjoyable I can make my work is directly related to whether I can survive on what I’m currently making … I might be safer if I refused any clients who make their disrespect for me clear immediately, but I know exactly where I can afford to set the bar on what I need to tolerate. If I haven’t been paid in weeks, I need to accept clients who sound more dangerous than I’d usually be willing to risk.

When sex workers speak to this, we are often seemingly misheard as defending some kind of ‘right’ for men to pay for sex. In fact, as Wages For Housework articulated in the 1970s, naming something as work is a crucial first step in refusing to do it – on your own terms. Marxist-feminist theorist Silvia Federici wrote in 1975 that ‘to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it.’ Naming work as work has been a key feminist strategy beyond Wages For Housework. From sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s term ‘emotional labour’, to journalist Susan Maushart’s term ‘wife-work’, to Sophie Lewis’s theorising around surrogacy and ‘gestational labour’, naming otherwise invisible or ‘natural’ structures of gendered labour is central to beginning to think about how, collectively, to resist or reorder such work.

Just because a job is bad does not mean it’s not a ‘real job’. When sex workers assert that sex work is work, we are saying that we need rights. We are not saying that work is good or fun, or even harmless, nor that it has fundamental value. Likewise, situating what we do within a workers’ rights framework does not constitute an unconditional endorsement of work itself. It is not an endorsement of capitalism or of a bigger, more profitable sex industry. ‘People think the point of our organisation is [to] expand prostitution in Bolivia’, says ONAEM activist Yuly Perez. ‘In fact, we want the opposite. Our ideal world is one free of the economic desperation that forces women into this business.’

It is not the task of sex workers to apologise for what prostitution is. Sex workers should not have to defend the sex industry to argue that we deserve the ability to earn a living without punishment. People should not have to demonstrate that their work has intrinsic value to society to deserve safety at work. Moving towards a better society – one in which more people’s work does have wider value, one in which resources are shared on the basis of need – cannot come about through criminalisation. Nor can it come about through treating marginalised people’s material needs and survival strategies as trivial. Sex workers ask to be credited with the capacity to struggle with work – even to hate it – and still be considered workers. You don’t have to like your job to want to keep it.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[theoutcastrogue]

No change in law can fundamentally alter the attitude of a police officer – and they will continue to symbolise intrusive violence to the poorest and most vulnerable – but decriminalising prostitution offences explicitly removes one of the tools in their arsenal. Police officers in decriminalised jurisdictions find that an avenue to exploit or bully is ‘closed off’ to them – a strategy far more effective and radical than trying to ‘sensitize’ machismo outlooks and siege mentalities.

It is closing off avenues to abuse – by rolling back police power – that will reduce harms against sex workers. This must be implemented with a slew of other reforms that address the other vulnerabilities of over-policed populations, such as Indigenous sex workers, and sex workers of colour. Those who will continue to be treated as troublesome and disorderly – like drug users, queer youth, migrants, or homeless people – know that decriminalisation is not enough by itself. As Alex Vitale writes, ‘Reforming police forces to make them better trained, more accountable, and less racist are all laudable goals. But they leave intact the basic institutional functions of the police, which have never really been about public safety or crime control.’ When people like drug users and sex workers are made vulnerable by the denial of their basic human rights, and when an officer can easily gain cash or sexual gratification from their compromised position, it is not enough to hope that those tasked with controlling their lives will simply be nice.

– Molly Smith & Juno Mac, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (2018, Verso)

[gatheringbones]

[“Carceral feminists hold that if we could abolish prostitution through criminalising clients and managers, the trafficking of women would end, as there would be no sex trade to traffic them into. As the deputy prime minister of Sweden writes, ‘It is very obvious to us that there is a very clear link between prostitution and trafficking … Without prostitution there would be no trafficking of women.’ This perspective also views prostitution as intrinsically more horrifying than other kinds of work (including work that is ‘low-status’, exploitative, or low-paid), and as such, views attempting to abolish prostitution through criminal law as a worthwhile end in itself. For those who hold these views, defending sex workers’ rights is akin to defending trafficking.

In these conversations, trafficking becomes a battle between good and evil, monstrosity and innocence, replete with heavy-handed imagery of chains, ropes, and cuffs to signify enslavement and descriptors such as nefarious, wicked, villainous, and iniquitous. This ‘evil’ is driven by the aberrance of commercial sex and by anomalous (and distinctly racialised) ‘bad actors’: the individual villain, the pimp, the trafficker. A police officer summarises this approach as: ‘we’ll put all these pimps, all these traffickers in prison … and that’ll solve the problem’. Numerous images associated with modern anti-trafficking campaigns feature a white girl held captive by a Black man: he is a dark hand over her mouth or a looming, shadowy figure behind her.

Fancy-dress ‘pimp costumes’ offer a cartoonishly racist vision of 1970s Black masculinity, while American law-enforcement unashamedly use terms such as ‘gorilla pimp’ and link trafficking to rap music. There is a horror-movie entertainment quality to this at times: tourists can go on ‘sex-trafficking bus tours’ to shudder over locations where they’re told sexual violence has recently occurred (‘perhaps you are wondering where these crimes take place’) or buy an ‘awareness-raising’ sandwich featuring a naked woman with her body marked up as if for a butcher. Conventionally sexy nude women are depicted wrapped in tape or packed under plastic, with labels indicating ‘meat’.

Conversely, the victim is often presented with her ‘girlishness’ emphasised. Young women are styled to look pre-pubescent, in pigtails or hair ribbons, holding teddy bears. This imagery suggests another key preoccupation shared by modern and nineteenth-century anti-trafficking campaigners: innocence. A glance at the names chosen for police operations and NGOs highlights this: Lost Innocence, Saving Innocence, Freedom4Innocence, the Protected Innocence Challenge, Innocents at Risk, Restore Innocence, Rescue Innocence, Innocence for Sale.

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. 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.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[gatheringbones]

[“In the autumn of 2016, the two of us and a colleague attended a feminist conference in Glasgow. A somewhat hostile but curious woman came over to speak with us. She ran an NGO, it turned out, that defended the rights of migrant women across Europe, and she wanted to talk to us about the men – the punters. Weren’t they disgusting, she wanted to know. How could we disagree that they should be punished? We agreed that clients are often bad, but explained that punishing them produces harms for people who sell sex. We mentioned the evictions of sex workers in Nordic countries. Our interlocutor agreed that these evictions are real; women are thrown out of their houses in Scandinavia, yes. In fact, she told us, migrant women come to her NGO complaining that they have been thrown out of flats or hotels in Sweden, sometimes in the middle of the night. She continued, a note of derision entering her voice: ‘When that happens, I just think to myself’, she told us, mimicking her interactions with these evicted women, ‘I just think, lucky you: at least you’re not murdered’. She rolled her eyes at us.

We aren’t asking you to love the sex industry. We certainly don’t. We are asking that your disgust with the sex industry and with the men – the punters – doesn’t overtake your ability to empathise with people who sell sex. A key struggle that sex workers face in feminist spaces is trying to move people past their sense of what prostitution symbolises, to grapple with what the criminalisation of prostitution materially does to people who sell sex. People in these spaces see abstractions like ‘objectification’ and ‘sexualisation’ as universally relatable everywoman concerns. When we point out that the policies which flow from such discussions often lead to sex workers being evicted or deported, we are seen as raising ‘niche’ issues – or as obtusely unable to understand the ‘bigger picture’. We need to push our sisters to grapple with the ‘niche’ questions. Nobody can build a better, more feminist world by treating sex workers’ current material needs – for income, for safety from eviction, for safety from immigration enforcement – as trivial.

Both carceral and liberal forms of feminism are attractive because they offer seemingly easy answers to complex problems. Women’s work is underpaid and undervalued? Ask for that raise! Sexual violence is endemic? Fund more cops! There’s commercial sex online? Pass legislation to kick sex workers off the internet! Carceral feminism even styles itself as radical in doing so: radically uncompromising with male sexual entitlement, radically seeking to ‘burn down’ the sex industry. Such radicalism evaporates on closer examination: cops are not feminist. The mainstream feminist movement is correct in identifying prostitution as a patriarchal institution; they conveniently miss that policing is, too. Attempting to eradicate commercial sex through policing does not tackle patriarchy; instead, it continues to produce harassment, arrest, prosecution, eviction, violence, and poverty for those who sell sex.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[gatheringbones]

[“Feminists’ discomfort with proximity to sex workers reached a fever pitch during the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s. In this era, radical feminists locked horns with ‘pro-sex’ feminists over the issues of pornography and prostitution. The radical-feminist perspective on sex work holds that it reproduces (and is itself a product of) patriarchal violence against women. This analysis could extend to all heterosexual sexual behaviours, as well as public sex and kink (commonly known as BDSM, for ‘bondage, domination, submission/sadism, masochism’).

The focus in this era was on censoring porn and ‘raising awareness’ rather than addressing prostitution through criminal law directly, but a nonetheless vehement anti-prostitution stance became commonplace in the feminist movement. Writer Janice Raymond stated that ‘prostitution is rape that’s paid for’, while Kathleen Barry said buying and selling sex was ‘destructive of human life’.

The defence of porn and prostitution that followed in response was based on ideas of sexual liberation through nonconformist sexual expression, such as BDSM and the ‘queering’ of lesbian and gay identities. Many ‘pro-sex’ or ‘sex-radical’ feminists posited that not only could watching porn be gratifying and educational, it could upend patriarchal control over women’s sexual expression. Moreover, that the sex industry was sticking two fingers up at the institution of marriage, highlighting the hypocrisy of conservative, monogamous heteronormativity. While some people who fought for sexual liberation were sex workers – such as LGBTQ and AIDS activist Amber Hollibaugh – many sex radicals advanced their arguments from a non–sex worker perspective. Defending porn often meant defending watching it, rather than performing in it.

Radical feminists famously described sex radicals as ‘Uncle Toms’* pandering to the primacy of male sexuality, while they in turn were derided as ‘prudes’ invested in preserving sexual puritanism. Rather than focussing on the ‘work’ of sex work, both pro-sex feminists and anti-prostitution feminists concerned themselves with sex as symbol. Both groups questioned what the existence of the sex industry implied for their own positions as women; both groups prioritised those questions over what material improvements could be made in the lives of the sex workers in their communities. Stuck in the domain of sex and whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women (and adamant that it could only be one or the other) it was all too easy for feminists to think of The Prostitute only in terms of what she represented to them. They claimed ownership of sex worker experiences in order to make sense of their own.

Anti-prostitution activist Dorchen Leidholdt spoke to this feminist impulse; ‘this de-individualized, de-humanized being has the function of representing generic woman … She stands in for all of us, and she takes the abuse that we are beginning to resist.’ It was in this context that former prostitute Andrea Dworkin’s work became highly influential in the movement, and set a new tone for criticism of sex work. The Prostitute, she said

lives the literal reality of being the dirty woman. There is no metaphor. She is the woman covered in dirt, which is to say that every man who has ever been on top of her has left a piece of himself behind … She is perceived as, treated as – and I want you to remember this, this is real – vaginal slime.

Her confrontational writing style – and her experiences in the sex trade – helped to legitimise and normalise similar usage of graphic and misogynist language in ‘feminist’ discussions of sex workers and their bodies. Barry, a contemporary of Dworkin, likened prostitutes to blow-up dolls, ‘complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation’, while Leidholdt wrote that ‘stranger after stranger use[s] her body as a seminal spittoon … What other job is so deeply gendered that one’s breasts, vagina and rectum constitute the working equipment?’ Academics Cecilie Høigård and Liv Finstad wrote of women who sell sex that ‘at the core they experience themselves as only cheap whores’.

Sex working feminists have long found themselves harshly excluded, and not only by de-humanising language in academia, but by explicit lack of invitation into spaces. Kate Millett recalls a feminist conference on prostitution, held in 1971. Disgruntled working women arrived to demand a seat at the table: An inadvertent masterpiece of tactless precipitance, the title of the day’s program was inscribed on leaflets for our benefit: ‘Towards the Elimination of Prostitution’. The panel of experts included everyone but prostitutes … all hell broke loose – between the prostitute and the movement. Because, against all likelihood, prostitutes did in fact attend the conference … They had a great deal to say about the presumption of straight women who fancied they could debate, decide or even discuss what was their situation and not ours.

Unlike the hostile environment of radical feminism, sex radicals were welcoming and supportive to sex workers. This influence helped shape the movement’s growth. In 1974, COYOTE hosted the first National Hookers’ Convention. The bright orange flyer nodded to the way prostitutes had been shunned from the women’s movement: emblazoned with a hand touching a vulva, it proclaimed, ‘Our Convention Is Different: We Want Everyone to Come’”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[gatheringbones]

[“You might be thinking that we seem to be talking about people smuggling rather than people trafficking, and that those two things are different. People smuggling is when someone pays a smuggler to get them over a border: in UK law, human trafficking is when someone is transported for the purposes of forced labour or exploitation using force, fraud, or coercion. It’s tempting to think of these as separate things, but there is no bright line between them: they are two iterations of the same system.

Let’s break it down. It is common for people to take on huge debts to smugglers to cross a border. So far, so good: clearly smuggling. But once the journey begins, the person seeking to migrate finds that the debt has grown, or that the work they are expected to undertake upon arrival in order to pay off the debt is different from what was agreed. Suddenly, the situation has spiralled out of control and they find themselves trying to work off the debt, with little hope of ever earning enough to leave. Smuggling becomes trafficking. The discourse of trafficking largely fails to help people in this situation, because it paints them as kidnapped and enchained rather than as trying to migrate. It therefore seeks to ‘rescue’ them by blocking irregular migration routes and sending undocumented people home— often the very last thing trafficked people want. Although they might hate their exploitative workplace, their ideal option would be to stay in their destination country in a different job or with better workplace conditions; an acceptable option would be to stay in the country under the current, shit working conditions, but the very worst option would be to be sent home with their debt still unpaid.

By viewing trafficking as conceptually akin to kidnap, anti-trafficking activists, NGOs, and governments can sidestep broader questions of safe migration. If the trafficked person is brought across borders unwillingly, there is no need to think about the people who will attempt this migration regardless of its illegality or conclude that the way to make people safer is to offer them legal migration routes. 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. (ICE, the brutal American immigration enforcement police, was only created in its modern form in 2003; the previous iteration of it is as recent as the 1930s, an agency called Immigration and Naturalization Services.) The mass migrations of the twenty-first century are driven by human-made catastrophes – climate change, poverty, war – and reproduce the glaring inequalities from which they emerge. Countries in the global north bear hugely disproportionate responsibility for climate change, yet disproportionately close their doors to people fleeing the effects of climate choas, leaving desperate families to sleep under canvas amid snow at the edges of Fortress Europe. As migrant-rights organiser Harsha Walia writes, ‘While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies and the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.’

A system where everybody could migrate, live, and work legally and in safety would not be a huge, radical departure; it would simply take seriously the reality that people are already migrating and working, and that as a society we should prioritise their safety and rights. Some journalists and policymakers argue that migration brings down wages. However, the current system, wherein undocumented people cannot assert their labour rights and as a result are hugely vulnerable to workplace exploitation, brings down wages by ensuring that there is a group of workers who bosses can underpay or otherwise exploit with impunity. Low wages and workplace exploitation are tackled through worker organising and labour law – not through attempting to limit migration, which produces undocumented workers who have no labour rights.

However, instead of starting from the premise of valuing human life, the countries of the global north enact harsh immigration laws that make it hard for people from global south countries to migrate. You don’t stop people wanting or needing to migrate by making it illegal for them to do so, you just make it more dangerous and difficult, and leave them more vulnerable to exploitation. Punitive laws may dissuade some from making the journey, but they guarantee that everyone who does travel is doing so in the worst possible conditions. Spending billions of dollars on policing borders actively makes this worse, without addressing the reasons people might want to migrate – notably, gross inequality between nations, which in large part is a legacy of colonial – and contemporary – plunder and imperialist violence.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[gatheringbones]

[“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. 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.

Meanwhile, the very nature of police work involves perpetrating violence: in arrests or when they collaborate in incarceration, surveillance, or deportation. In 2017, there was outrage in the United Kingdom when it emerged that the Metropolitan Police had arrested a woman on immigration charges after she came to them as a victim of rape. However, it is routine for police to threaten to arrest or deport migrant sex workers, even when the worker in question has come to them as a victim of violence.

Carceral feminism looms large in sex-trade debates. Feminist commentators pronounce that ‘we must strengthen police apparatus’;that criminalisation is ‘the only way’ to end the sex trade; and that some criminalisation can be relatively ‘benign’. Anti-prostitution feminist Catherine MacKinnon even writes with ambivalent approval of ‘brief jail time’ for prostitutes on the basis that jail can be ‘a respite from the pimps and the street’. She quotes like-minded feminists who argue that ‘jail is the closest thing many women in prostitution have to a battered women’s shelter’ and that, ‘considering the absence of any other refuge or shelter, jail provides a temporary safe haven’.

Sex workers do not share this rosy view of arrest and incarceration. One sex worker in Norway told researchers, ‘You only call the police if you think you’re going to die … If you call the police, you risk losing everything’”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[gatheringbones]

[“Is sex bad?

People are preoccupied with the sexual dimension of sex work. These anxieties manifest in ideas of bodily degradation and the threat that sex workers pose as the vectors of such degradation. The prostitute is seen as a disease-spreader, associated with putrefaction and death. We are envisioned both as removing corruption from society (a nineteenth-century French physician spoke of the ‘seminal drain’) and as a source of contamination, disease, and death in our own right. Puta, the Spanish word for prostitute, has links with the English putrid. Another preoccupation holds that to have sex (or to have sex in the wrong ways – too much, with the wrong person, or for the wrong reason) brings about some kind of loss. Often, contradictory ideas about sex and these visceral threats or losses are intertwined in cultural depictions of the sex worker – forming a figure that Melissa Gira Grant names the ‘prostitute imaginary’.

Sometimes the connection between these ideas is obvious. For the Victorians, the ‘loss of virginity’ risks ruin and a grim death from syphilis. The ruined woman is reconfigured as an agent of destruction, spreading disease in her wake. Sometimes the loss is a spiritual decline she precipitates in others; in 1870, for example, journalist William Acton wrote that prostitutes are ‘ministers of evil passions, [who] not only gratify desire, but also arouse it [and] suggest evil thoughts and desires which might otherwise remain undeveloped’. In The Whore’s Last Shift, a 1779 painting by James Gillway, the tragic figure of a heavily made-up nude woman with hair piled high stands by a broken chamber pot in a dirty room, washing her filthy – and clumsily symbolic – white dress by hand.

Attitudes towards the prostitute imaginary can be read in context with the more familiar paradox around a specific body part. Ugly, stretched, odorous, unclean, potentially infected, desirable, mysterious, tantalising – the patriarchy’s ambivalence towards vaginas is well established and has a lot in common with attitudes around sex work. On the one hand, the lure of the vagina is a threat; it’s seen as a place where a penis might risk encountering the traces of another man or a full set of gnashing teeth. At the same time, it’s viewed as an inherently submissive body part that must be ‘broken in’ to bring about sexual maturity. The idea of the vagina as fundamentally compromised or pitiful is helped along in part by a longstanding feminist perception of the penetrative sexual act as indicative of subjugation.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018