Sex Work
12/13/19 - Sex work brings out extreme views. On one end of the dial: "It's purely exploitative and nothing someone could actively consent to!" And on the other: "It's wholly empowering consensual trade that should be celebrated!" We talk with writer and sex worker Lorelei Lee about how sex work can be like other kinds of labor: underpaid, boring, unfulfilling, and yet not necessarily vile criminality or sublimely erotic and expressive. A pair of laws passed by Congress in 2018, SESTA and FOSTA, have made sex work more dangerous and subject to criminal prosecution.
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Episode Producer: Jordan Bailey
Show Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
Image by edkohler
LINKS
Lorelei Lee’s essay Cash/Consent in n+1
Kamala Harris on CYG
Survivors Against SESTA
Organizations and individuals Lorelei recommends:
HIPS DC
DecrimNY
Red Canary Song (NYC)
Bay Area Workers Support
Las Vegas Sex Workers Collective
SWOP South Side Chicago
supreme bae aka thotscholar
Kai Zhang
Tamika Spellman
TS Candy (nsfw)
TRANSCRIPT: SEX WORK
[Ads]
(0:23)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hello.
Ann: Hello Aminatou Sow.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Ann: I will not let go.
Aminatou: A tad bit eager. What's going on over there?
Ann: I mean do I sound eager? I really -- I am always happy to hear from you, like if you interpret that as eager.
Aminatou: Sam. Same Ann. Same Ann. I'm always thirsty to hear your voice. Hello.
Ann: I'm never like ugh, she's calling again? [Laughter]
Aminatou: Girl you know I don't call.
Ann: Exactly! You really leave me wanting more.
Aminatou: Wow, my therapist is going to love this. [Laughs] How's it going?
Ann: It's going good. I am excited about our guest and about the conversation we're going to have on today's episode.
Aminatou: Tell me about it.
Ann: On our agenda today is revisiting SESTA and FOSTA which if you are not someone who loves an acronym is the Sox Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, like whew, a mouthful. Essentially we are revisiting legislation that is purporting to protect people but is in fact making life more difficult and dangerous for sex workers.
[Theme Song]
(2:18)
Ann: Not something we've talked about in-depth before on the show.
Aminatou: No. We definitely talked to Kamala Harris about it when we had her on the show way back when.
Ann: Right. We talked to Kamala Harris last year. It was right before she announced her presidential campaign which she recently ended. But of course her work as a senator continues and the way that she talked to us about SESTA and FOSTA provided then and now a really good lens into how Congress sees this issue which by the way is very differently than many sex workers see it. So let's listen back to that portion of our interview with Kamala.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: When we think about the positions you've taken publicly and your record we're like yes, yes, yes.
Aminatou: Yes, yes, yes.
Ann: Pounding that like button. [Laughter] And a recent example of something where we did not understand your position was your vote on SESTA and FOSTA, the legislation that shut down online sex work platforms including Backpage. And much of the public conversation was about sex trafficking and your statement was like "I don't like sex trafficking, definitely 100." And you also expressed some . . .
Aminatou: It's like a first amendment issue.
Ann: Which you acknowledged. But I think for us we saw that as largely a labor issue.
Kamala: Tell me what you mean by labor issue.
Ann: Basically that it was a platform for sex workers to safely do their job or with more control. And what I think we were reading and hearing from people in that profession is this was going to make their lives more dangerous and more dangerous.
Aminatou: And more dangerous, yeah.
Ann: I'm curious if some of that feedback has reached you and how you've responded.
(4:00)
Kamala: Well first of all I've spent a large part of my career -- in fact the majority of my career -- working on issues that are crimes against women and children. And a vast majority of those as it relates to sexual assault and domestic violence and human trafficking. So that's been a part of my life's work and I'm very, very familiar with the issues and I have personally sat down with I can't tell you how many victims of those kinds of crimes.
And the issue with Backpage, I actually have history with Backpage. I have been advocating for years that Backpage needs to shut down and they wouldn't because they were incredibly arrogant. And they had a business model that was about in particular -- and this was the reason that I called for them to shut down -- they were trafficking off of selling children. Minors. So yeah I want them to shut down and I'm glad they had to and I'm glad those guys are being prosecuted and I'm never going to defend their conduct. Never.
Now the idea of protecting sex workers is absolutely something I care about as well. Absolutely. And I can tell you countless cases where I have sat down with also sex workers who have been the victims of crime and survivors of crime because they were not protected, because we relegated them to some kind of moral classification that suggested that they're not worthy of or deserving of protection and dignity. And I reject those kinds of policies as well. But on that particular issue that was as much as anything for me an issue about protecting vulnerable people and looking at in the case of Backpage folks who were profiting off of the exploitation of girls and boys.
(5:55)
Ann: So that feedback in terms of the perspective of sex workers and basically the labor issue as we see it has reached you? Yeah.
Kamala: Yeah, and that's legitimate. That's a legitimate issue and it's been around for a while and I support that. I support the need for those women, and there are men also who are sex workers, and the need that they rightly have for protection and support and dignity as workers who are voluntarily and not being the subject of any kind of coercion or trafficking, I totally protect the right they have to have safety in their workplace.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: We've also I don't believe featured anyone on the show who is a sex worker.
Ann: Exactly. So we are remedying that or beginning to remedy that by featuring one voice of one sex worker and advocate. Our guest today is Lorelei Lee. She is a writer, advocate, adult film performer, and she recently published a piece in n+1 that I found extremely educational in terms of the history of legislation, federal legislation and at the state level, about sex worker trafficking, about the ways in which consent or like sort of consensually performing sex work or being against your will trafficked, like the ways that language does not allow for a gray area that is often a lived reality. And also just the real impact on the lives and safety of sex workers when lawmakers who have not actually engaged them or listened to them make laws that purport to be for their benefit.
Aminatou: I'm really excited to hear this interview.
Ann: So yeah, here is Lorelei.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Lorelei thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Lorelei: Thank you so much for having me.
Ann: We've been wanting to have a more in-depth conversation about legislation related to sex work for quite some time on this show. Kamala Harris was a guest we had on last spring I believe and when we asked her about it she said a lot of things that we really want to go back and examine and have frankly not gotten around to it until now so I really appreciate you being here and engaging in this conversation with us.
Lorelei: Yeah. I'm happy to do it.
(8:10)
Ann: So in this article that you published in n+1 recently you returned to in a couple of different ways this idea of there being a kind of binary in terms of how sex work and sex workers are framed by people with different opinions and stakes, sometimes not very strong stakes in the issue. And I'm wondering if you can kind of outline a little bit what that binary is or what these kind of two views are.
Lorelei: Yeah. So I think it's complicated. There seemed to have developed in the last 20 years these public conceptions of sex work and trafficking as being dichotomous and I think this originates with the conversations in 2000 around the passage of the TVPA which is the main sex trafficking law -- and labor trafficking as well -- in the United States and also the Palermo protocols were passed in the same way and that's an international trafficking protocol.
There were arguments there between the various groups about whether trading sex was something that could be done consensually or whether it was always coerced. And so that sort of I think merged with Carol Leigh coined the term sex work in 1978 or '79 as a way of talking about her own feeling of having agency in the work and actually as a response to language that she felt was objectifying that was being used by feminists at the time to describe all sex work as the use of women's bodies. And so she wanted to use the word work to sort of push back and talk about agency.
(10:04)
And then after those conversations happened around the domestic and international legislation I feel like sex work as a term got captured and became a way of saying consensual trading of sex. And so oftentimes people will do that, they'll say consensual sex work in opposition to trafficking. And we think of trafficking as encompassing things that people don't consent to.
But we don't usually talk about other kinds of work in that way and this conversation about consent has become a barrier I think to talking about a lot of the things that people in the sex trades are trying to organize around and talk about like discrimination, labor conditions. When you go to talk to a congressperson or someone they'll always want to ask first "Did you consent?" Or they'll want to hear about how poor you were or whether you worked through a boyfriend or a manager. And they'll want to try to take these facts and do their own analysis, right? Like everyone's trying to do some kind of calculus where it seems like an outside person should be able to assess your life and tell you whether you were consenting or not.
These terms like describing one's self as a sex worker or describing one's self as a trafficking survivor, those are terms that oftentimes are more focused on a political goal than they are descriptive of people's actual experiences I think which tend to be messy and complicated.
(11:50)
Ann: Right. I mean I think you made a comment in this article about how this work is as good and as terrible as other low-wage work or we don't ask people to say "Did you consent to work for below minimum wage plus tips waiting tables?"
Lorelei: Yeah, yeah.
Ann: And it's like well no, I didn't choose this because I would not want to be on my feet or I would not want to do this particular job and also I have rent to pay. But it's interesting because obviously, you know, there's this . . . I don't even know if I could say immersion opposition but like another layer that you write about is the way that people who might consider themselves to be more -- I'm air quoting here -- like "pro sex work" or coming from a point-of-view that it should be decriminalized sort of go all the way in the other direction and say "Aren't you so empowered by the work that you do?"
Lorelei: Yeah.
Ann: Or expect you to kind of feel political about it. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that other extreme.
Lorelei: Yeah. So sometimes it's a kind of respectability thing. It's like this desire to professionalize sex work. I mean I think there are a couple of layers to this. One is that politically folks who have been opposed to the criminalization of sex work are libertarians and sex-positive feminists who have political aims that sometimes align with the aims of people in the sex trades but not always. [Laughs] But they have been the folks who we've been able to, I don't know, gain some kind of public access or public power from and so the desire to shape our own narratives in that way, there's like a draw to shape our own narratives that way because you can get a politician to oppose criminalization using that kind of story.
(13:52)
And that respectability piece I think is really big and it's like . . . I'm also queer and I've also been a little bit frustrated with the sort of marriage equality framings of queerness which I think sometimes do a similar thing. It's like love is love is trying to place queerness within a framework that people already accept and understand and sometimes I think sex work as work is trying to do the same thing, to frame it within terms that people -- especially people living under capitalism -- think are positive. That we are producing value for society right? So there's two different sides of it. There's like the empowerment piece and there's the productivity piece and both of those are reductive narratives that try to create something only positive.
Ann: Right. I want to go back to something you said a while ago. You were talking about this legislation from 2000 and you also mentioned that some of these different narratives sort of arose or become used as a way of convincing legislators to either decriminalize or criminalize or take some kind of action. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about the recent history of legislation related to criminalization and decriminalization.
Lorelei: Well I think sort of the 101 is that the United States has a regime of full criminalization of sex work. What the law requires prostitution which has all kinds of different meanings depending on what law you're looking at is generally regulated at the state level and what the law describes as trafficking is generally regulated at the federal level.
(15:50)
And most states have a lot of different laws that criminalize what the law calls prostitution. Those laws include criminalization of the selling of sexual services, the buying of sexual services, criminalization of what's sometimes called brothel-keeping but sometimes that just means criminalization of your landlord if you're a person who trades sex indoors in a space that you rent, or it means sex workers working together in a group. Sometimes a brothel just means three sex workers working in the same location.
There's also laws against loitering for the purposes of prostitution and those laws allow the police to arrest people if they are wearing a certain kind of clothing and standing in a certain neighborhood or just people who they profile as being people in the sex trade. So usually that means women of color, trans women, black trans women specifically.
So in the US we have all of these many, many laws that criminalize the trading of sex then we on top of that have a number of laws criminalizing trafficking. And every state has laws criminalizing trafficking and we also have federal laws criminalizing trafficking. And under federal law trafficking is described as commercial sex done through forced fraud or coercion or commercial sex done under the age of 18. And the person who's criminalized can be in that case -- it doesn't have to be someone who forced you to trade sex; it could be a person who purchased sexual services from you and recklessly disregarded, as the law says, the fact that you were forced, defrauded, or coerced into that transaction.
(17:40)
So those laws have had a lot of effects. They aren't used very often to bring prosecutions. More often they're used to give grants to organizations that do various things: grants to law enforcement at the local level to do investigations where after those investigations the charges that are brought are not trafficking charges. Usually they're promotion of prostitution charges and they're also used to fund organizations that do things like create trainings for hotels or Uber or, you know, other kinds of private companies. These kinds of anti-trafficking trainings that companies can put their workers through then use that as a defense to civil liability that is created by these laws.
And what those trainings often do is just encourage private companies to profile people who they think are people in the sex trades and exclude them from their services. So we've seen that happening in hotels and rideshare services and we've also seen that happening online with the law that has gotten the most attention, the most media attention in the last couple of years, which is FOSTA/SESTA.
Ann: This is the law that we were talking to Kamala Harris about that passed last spring. I believe it was signed last spring. Before we get into that legislation itself . . .
Lorelei: Yeah?
Ann: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the lived experience of someone who might be performing or providing sexual services, like what the day-to-day is and if this legislation is something that everyone has kind of come to accept and we're just doing business around it or if this is like really . . . I'm wondering if you could just speak to that piece of it because I think it's easy to hear about a law and be like this is what it is meant to do. I would just love to hear you speak about the impact level.
(19:45)
Lorelei: Yeah. So I mean of course I can't speak for everyone's experience obviously.
Ann: Of course. [Laughs]
Lorelei: Yeah. So I can just talk a little bit about what I think the impact has been in my own life. The impact that they've had on me is they have shaped other people's perspective of who I am and what my life looks like. And that has played out in all kinds of different ways including a lot of really painful rejection by family members or people that I've dated or by folks who are non sex-working people. You know, either people think you must be on drugs or you must be under the control of your boyfriend or your manager.
And so I have worked through third parties right? I've worked through -- I got my first sex work job through my boyfriend at the time and later in my life I have worked through a manager. I've worked through a boss. And those experiences were not experiences where I felt like I had a huge amount of control over my work but I had as much control as I did working at a coffee shop, working as a waitress.
So the result of this construction of trafficking as being the primary way that people engage in trading sex is that you are only allowed the option of exiting the work if people are going to see you as someone worthy of spending time with. It's like you either have to exit the work or you have to demonstrate that you enjoy your job on a day-to-day basis. And that mediates every interaction that you have with non sex-working people. Like they need to fit your story into one of those slots or the other and that means you have very few people that you can just interact with.
(21:52)
It's hard for me to describe the level at which that exclusion can shape your whole existence. For me the antidote to that has been finding a sex work community, people that you can just talk to and talk about your day-to-day. You know, if you've had a bad day at work being able to share that with someone who's not trying to rescue you from your job. I mean I will say I've also spent plenty of time hiding from cops. [Laughs] And that's real.
Ann: Talk about that a bit. [Laughs]
Lorelei: Well something I've been thinking a lot about is a lot of my work has been in adult film which is ostensibly legal but there are regulations in California and one specific regulation that passed, that was a condom mandate. Before that law passed we were able to talk publicly a lot more about who we were working for and sharing information with each other about which producers are shitty, which directors are going to try to get you to do things that you didn't agree to do ahead of time. You know, or who's actually violent and not safe to work for.
And after that law passed almost all of the shooting in Los Angeles went underground and we were no longer able to -- especially talk online. You know, directors would be like "Don't tell anyone you shot here today." But also even before that law passed we'd be going from like the office where we got our makeup done to the location where we were going to shoot and I would be in costume and in makeup and just standing on the sidewalk or something. You know, you'd see a cop work and you'd be like oh no, I have to hide the way that I work. And that's a result of the criminalization of trading sex in other forms, the criminalization of what the law calls prostitution, but it's also a result of the de-legitimization of trading sex as labor and the public narratives about how that work is degrading.
Ann: Right. You can't separate the two.
(24:10)
Lorelei: Exactly.
Ann: It's not like a clean line, yeah.
Lorelei: Exactly. So there are multiple forms -- legal regimes. There are four general categories of legal regimes around the world that regulate the trading of sex and those are full criminalization like we have in most of the United States, legalization which is in parts of Nevada and that's where selling sex and buying sex are both legal but they have pretty heavy regulations around them, regulations that you wouldn't apply necessarily to other industries such as mandatory health checks where the state is holding your health information or licensing where the state has sort of public records of everyone who's doing this very stigmatized work.
Another legal regime is decriminalization which is in place in New Zealand and in New York State a group called Decrim NY has just presented a full decriminalization bill. And also very exciting, in the District of Columbia right now they're considering a full decriminalization bill. And that means the decriminalization of buying and selling sexual services as well as the removal of criminal laws like those loitering laws, brothel keeping, other forms of criminalization that are not necessarily aimed directly at the worker but are aimed at delegitimizing the work.
And then the fourth form is the Nordic model. Sometimes it's called the equality model which I think is a euphemism. And sometimes it's called decriminalization. Like Kamala Harris when she says decriminalization I'm pretty sure she's actually talking about the Nordic model. And that's where the selling of sexual services is technically legal. It's not criminalized. But everything around it is criminalized. The buying is usually criminalized. Advertising is usually criminalized. Brothel keeping, etc. All those laws stay in place.
(26:15)
And under that model you get the delegitimization of the work. You also have the criminalization of harm reduction methods. So brothel keeping, working together in the same place, is a harm reduction method. Advertising is a harm reduction method. You know, the ability to screen clients ahead of time. That's what advertising is. It's the ability to screen your clients before you meet them in person.
[Ads]
(29:48)
Ann: I want to ask about SESTA/FOSTA now and I have to read the full acronym off my screen, it's so long. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act which is SESTA and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act which is FOSTA. I would love to hear you talk about how and maybe where you were when you first heard this was on the horizon, that it was a possibility that it might happen.
Lorelei: I first learned about these bills in 2017 or early 2018 and I don't remember how I first learned about them. I mean probably from other sex workers on the Internet. So these bills were introduced in 2017 but I don't think that most of us knew about them until later than that. It seems like the public conversations, like the media that was happening in early 2018, it was all about these bills as being like the supporters of them are survivors of trafficking and the opponents of them are free speech people, like free speech online people. And those are the only interests at stake.
Ann: Like the libertarian empowerment people you were referring to earlier? [Laughs]
Lorelei: Yeah, I mean that's one group. I shouldn't . . . I don't want to describe all online free speech folks as libertarians because I don't think that's true at all.
Ann: Sure.
Lorelei: There's a lot of people who believe we should not regulate speech but believe in all kinds of other regulation. But yeah, that was sort of framed as the interest of tech companies or for people online to say whatever they want which a lot of people think has done a lot of harm. The interests of people in the sex trades were not really considered. And then over the next few months I mean we started having some community meetings and we formed an organization, Survivors Against SESTA. Some folks that I work with worked very hard and didn't sleep much and, you know, it became an emergency because the bill started to move really quickly.
(32:00)
And we could see what these bills were going to do. I mean so FOSTA creates criminal and civil liability for the promotion or facilitation of prostitution by website owners, managers, and operators. But it doesn't make clear what promotion or facilitation means. In other laws promotion or facilitation just means to make easier and the federal law also doesn't define prostitution which is defined differently in all kinds of anti-prostitution laws.
So we could see the potential for online harm reduction materials, sharing of information online by people in the sex trades, for that to create liability for websites. And even before the law passed that's exactly what happened. Companies started seeing this law as creating liability and shutting down the spaces online where sex workers were speaking and sharing information and started kicking sex workers off of places like social media that have become these kind of public forums for information sharing but also for political organizing.
So these laws that pretend to protect vulnerable workers have had the effect of preventing marginalized and vulnerable workers from connecting with each other and organizing and doing the kind of collective community empowerment that we have historically thought of in this country as being the way that workers gain rights.
Ann: I would love to just kind of go back to the comment you made about this really be alarming or this really being like an oh my god.
Lorelei: Yeah.
(34:00)
Ann: Because I don't know if people who are outside the community really understand the importance of -- I mean obviously yes the Internet and sex, okay. But in terms of functionally speaking I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what you knew was at stake.
Lorelei: Yes. So the ability to advertise online, it is really hard to emphasize how much of a safety tool that is. So if you're advertising online it's easier for you to be independent. You can get clients on your own without having to have someone else do it for you. That someone else being a person who then has control over what clients you're seeing, what clients you have access to, what hours you're working, when and how you work, what kinds of work you're doing because they're doing the negotiating for you right?
So even if that person is not violent or exploitative that person has suddenly a lot of control and if that person is violent or exploitative they have that same amount of control right? So online advertising is one thing that's been huge. But the other thing that's been huge is being able to build things like blacklists of dangerous clients or clients who won't pay and being able to share that information widely. So we knew when we saw FOSTA and SESTA moving through Congress those of us who'd been in the sex trades before and after the Internet and had worked online and offline just knew like viscerally the difference in your likelihood of being in a dangerous situation or being in a violent situation depending on whether you have access to online tools.
(36:00)
And there are lots of people, still people in the sex trades, who were only recently getting online this year right? Who suddenly went back to doing street-based work, outdoor work, or getting clients in clubs and hotels. In-person client seeking where you're doing the negotiation in person and you don't have that layer between you of extra screening that you have when you're seeking clients online.
So we saw a lot more people working outdoors before the bill even passed. I also had friends who were saying things like they were going to try to do other kinds of work than trading sex and when FOSTA/SESTA was passing they were like I don't think I can. The public dialogue around these laws has so stigmatized this work that I can't imagine myself having access to non-sex trading jobs in this environment.
So it did two things right? It had the material impact of websites and online companies were suddenly profiling and discriminating and kicking people offline but it also had this effect of increasing fear among people in the sex trades and increasing that sense of stigma and that sense of lack of access to everything. Everything in the civilian world.
(37:40)
We also saw a lot of people who because of no longer having access to online tools losing clients, facing housing insecurity, food insecurity. Like immediately. Those of us who have larger public profiles of doing organizing around this stuff, I was getting phone calls, messages, DMs on Twitter from a lot of sex workers who were really scared and needed immediate material support. So yeah, it's a crisis.
Ann: And this completely tracks with you talking about the impact of other laws which is that you don't actually need the law to take effect for it to have an extremely harmful impact. It's the narrative. And speaking of that the conversation that happened among legislators, some of the things that were said by members of Congress to kind of bolster their support of these laws, also had some rhetoric that I think is honestly just so fucked up and so, so horrific.
Lorelei: Yeah.
Ann: And, you know, some of it as well -- and this is why I wanted to ask you about it -- because you really point out how it is not only existing harmful tropes about sex work and sex workers; it's sort of this layer of describing trafficking as slavery targeting white women in particular. And there's this horrible racist element to it that completely missed me at the time and I would really appreciate you talking a little bit about that discourse surrounding this legislation.
Lorelei: Yeah. I think that to understand the racism that is embedded in the anti-trafficking laws I think it's useful to compare the current dialogue to the dialogue of the 1870s/1880s/1910s. So Ann Wagner who is the original cosponsor of FOSTA has actually written about these laws from 100 years ago as being the first anti-trafficking laws and those laws were the Page Act of I think it's 1874. I might have that year wrong. But this was the first law limiting immigration into the United States and it was passed pretty soon after the passage of the 13th amendment.
(40:05)
So almost immediately after the United States became officially technically an anti-slavery country, and in the 1870s the US really embraced that narrative and started talking about the freedom of contract and meanwhile of course peonage was still happening. Black folks were still being contracted into what was, you know, we can't really call it anything except slavery.
But because the United States had built this narrative of being an anti-slavery country that narrative was used to build up racist tropes about immigration and so in the 1870s you have a lot of immigration from China of migrant workers and Chinese women working in the sex trades in California. And it's a very similar narrative to now white workers in California were worried about competition for jobs but also there was this racist conversation about white men visiting brothels where Chinese women were working and folks in public health started writing tracks -- you know, white people started writing about Chinese sex workers poisoning the Anglo-Saxon blood.
And so all of this was being used to just build up public support for limiting immigration. And so in 1874 they passed this law, the Page law, that prohibits entry into the United States of women from China for the purposes of working in prostitution. But in effect it limits all Chinese women from immigrating. So the Page law sort of sets the stage for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888 which most people think of as being like the original racist immigration law right? But it's actually preceded by this anti-sex work law.
(42:15)
And there a number of immigration laws that get passed then between 1874 and 1910 and then in 1910 we have the passage of what was called the White Slave Traffic Act. And this was again built up around a narrative that said that white women were being enslaved, right?
So these are two different stories where slavery becomes anti-American and becomes a harm against white people. So the story in 1910 is the story that white women are being seduced into prostitution or forced into prostitution and the person who's doing the seducing is different -- takes different forms but oftentimes it's black men, it's immigrant men. And this is built up around this sort of fear of misogynation.
So fast-forward to the passage of FOSTA/SESTA and the rhetoric has not changed. We're still describing trading sex as slavery and I think there is a harder conversation to be had about when forced labor should be called slavery in the modern era and I think that's very complicated and I am not saying that we should never use that term but I think in the United States we have this history that has created a conversation about modern slavery that centers whiteness and centers the sort of saving of white women or white women's purity and that that is a white nationalist notion and that it underlies the regime of anti-trafficking laws in the United States.
(44:00)
And, you know, I think that we need to reckon with that and I also think this is a way of distracting from the lasting impact of the enslavement of African-American people, you know? And distracting from conversations about things like reparations.
Ann: Right. Well and almost prevents a nuanced conversation about race and who is disproportionately represented in sex work or like what economic opportunities are -- I mean I feel like it just precludes a number of nuanced conversations that feel incredibly important.
Lorelei: And what the impact is of passing more and more criminal laws right? Like the pretense that passing criminal laws is the way that we're going to address exploitation. In actuality, you know, we have the prison industrial complex. Criminal laws in general in the United States are used to target marginalized people and they're used to target a lot of the same folks who are actually people in the sex trades right?
I think calling trading sex modern slavery distracts us from having that conversation about what the actual impact is of the passage of more and more criminal laws because everyone is anti-slavery. [Laughs] Yeah.
Ann: Yes. Right, and it's also this -- I mean I just think about the way these laws are even named. Nobody's going to raise their hand and say "Oh, I'm definitely pro-sex trafficking." You know what I mean?
Lorelei: Yeah.
Ann: There is this sense too of the narrative being so controlled and locked in. Speaking of conversations that are precluded then when you have this approach, it's like I think about how, you know, I don't know the actual prevalence of people who are trafficked by the definition that these legislators might use it but it's very clear that they are not interested in really in a granular way trying to figure out who those people are and direct services and resources to them.
Lorelei: Yeah.
(46:15)
Ann: You know what I mean? There's sort of a lie. There's a lie at the heart of saying this is the number one concern.
Lorelei: Yeah. And I think something -- so FOSTA creates restitution in criminal cases, restitution for victims, and it also creates civil claims. And we have this sort of idea in American law that giving like one person at a time an amount of money to compensate for violence is the answer to systemic inequality that is leading to that violence right? But you can't solve that one person at a time.
We have to talk about structural change. I mean my own experiences fall under the legal definition of trafficking and if you had gone and arrested my boyfriend I would have immediately been trying to get bail money, you know? And we hear these stories from people in law enforcement talking about how victims of trafficking don't think of themselves as victims and you have to arrest them multiple times before they will talk about their story as one of victimhood and they'll protect their traffickers because they've been brainwashed.
But I mean look, I don't speak for everybody. I can only talk about my own experiences. But I have come to learn that my own experiences are encompassed in what the law calls trafficking and when I think about what the response to that could've been that could've helped me at the time not be in a situation where someone else was controlling my trading of sex the answer certainly would not have come from law enforcement. I would not have been helped.
(48:00)
Certainly things like affordable housing, you know, public higher education, healthcare. If I had had healthcare. I mean the other thing we don't talk about much is sex work is a disability issue. I have several forms of chronic illness. I have lived for many years with invisible disabilities and with no healthcare and the only way for me to get healthcare has been to trade sex in order to afford it. And simultaneously trading sex means that you face a lot of stigma while accessing healthcare so that's a whole other conversation. But like we need to talk about structural change if we're going to talk about remedying the inequality that leads to exploitation of vulnerable workers.
Ann: Right. I want to return to the timeline just a little bit. You were saying that it didn't even take the official yes vote's passage of these bills in order to start seeing an effect so maybe it's incorrect to frame this as a before and after. But if you could describe maybe an after or since maybe the beginning of the discussion surrounding these bills. Maybe we date it there then instead of the passage. How has the landscape changed for people who trade sex or engage in sex work?
Lorelei: Yeah. People are poorer. People are in crisis more. More folks are working outdoors. Around the country people started to form sort of like, you know, community organizations. It's funny, what that just means is everybody getting together in a space in person [Laughs] and then -- yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ann: Communication organization. That's what it is, yeah.
(49:52)
Lorelei: Somebody will be like we can have everybody come over to my house and let's talk about ways that we can try to support each other through this. And so a lot of what that has been has been, you know, people who make more money one month sharing that money with people who are facing eviction. Folks have created a lot of emergency funds and, you know, we've tried to create more offline information sharing systems. People in the sex trades are resilient. I will say that. But yeah, life is a lot harder for a lot of people. Those spaces where people had access to resources just don't exist as much anymore.
Some organizations went offline. Like organizations that were more official than those community organizations that I was talking about went offline for fear that they had liability for sharing black lists or for sharing information about safer sex working practices. They took down their websites, you know?
Ann: I want to ask about -- and this is maybe a kind of Pollyannaish question but I feel like I want to ask it -- which is if legislators and maybe the rest of us were in more routine dialogue with sex workers what do you think that -- like on one hand the actual legislation might look like, and then on another hand what would our conversations look like? Or how culturally could maybe things change? And I know those are two maybe different things so I'm sorry to lump them together if it's a lot.
Lorelei: No, I mean I think they go hand-in-hand. Cultural change has to happen in order for legal change to happen and sometimes legal change pushes cultural change. I mean media is a big part of that. Allowing people to share their stories in all of the complicated ways that they exist in real life is crucial right? And this stuff is happening. In D.C. there was a 13-hour hearing on a local bill for the district that's under consideration and community organizations in D.C. are behind that legislation. And it is women of color. It is trans women. It is black women who are just on the ground doing grassroots organizing and creating comprehensive decriminalization legislation by just pushing their way into conversations with lawmakers. It's really exciting.
(52:40)
And in New York State as well there is a comprehensive decriminalization bill in consideration at the New York State legislature that, you know, was created by people in the sex trades really pushing for it. I mean something else I think that has happened since FOSTA is that that like sense of urgency -- I don't think it's just FOSTA. I think it's also that the national conversation has shifted around criminalization as a tactic for responding to violence and we're seeing a lot more conversations about prison abolition, a lot more conversations about criminal justice reform writ large. And I think sex workers have been pushing those conversations as well for decades and are currently using those conversations to talk more broadly about decriminalization of sex work. So, you know, exciting things are happening and I think if people want to have a vision of what sex worker justice might look like that visioning already exists and you can see it. You can watch the 13-hour hearing. It's recorded. You can hear people testify about visions of justice.
(54:08)
Ann: I love that. I also know that you have really gone out of your way to say at multiple points that you are grateful for conversations with people in the community that have shaped your views about this and made you feel supported. And I'm wondering for people, I mean in a way that might make sense for those of us outside the community, if there are resources or folks you might suggest we follow or read or support.
Lorelei: Yeah!
Ann: Or yeah, like basically I'm asking for some shout-outs.
Ann: Yes, so I can give a shout-out to a few different organizations then in those organizations there are really incredible activists that you can follow. And so I will just say in my n+1 article at the end of it I have a list of folks that I specifically have been in conversation with about -- especially about the complexity of the dichotomy of sex work in trafficking. And so I want to just tell people go to n+1. The article is called Cash Consent. Look at the list at the end of folks and those are all folks you can follow on Twitter or find online. Well not all but some. Many of them. But also . . .
Ann: Right, and we'll link that in the show notes too P.S.
Lorelei: But also I would shout-out to HIPS DC, to Decrim New York, to Red Canary Song which is a New York based organization, Bay Area Workers Support, the Las Vegas Sex Workers Collective. SWOP South Side Chicago is another organization that is run by folks who I really just deeply admire. Some writers. supreme bae is someone that everyone should follow, thotscholar on Twitter, a really incredible theorist/artist and writer. Kai Zhang is also someone on Twitter that folks should follow, really deeply involved in organizing of massage parlor workers and one of the co-founders of Red Canary Song. Tamika Spellman who's an activist with HIPS DC. TS Candy who is just an incredible organizer and public speaker and activist with Decrim New York. I feel like I could go on and on but maybe that's the place to start. [Laughs]
(56:25)
Ann: Well one of my favorite experiences is being -- and it happens, trust me, all the time -- being at the end of an interview for the show and having a person just go on and on and on with all the people in their community. I actually love it so much. I think it is really beautiful and I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show and thank you for your incredible writing on the subject.
Lorelei: Thank you so much. Thank you for this conversation. I really appreciate it.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: That was really thoughtful and informative. I learned a lot Ann.
Ann: Yeah. And I really appreciate Lorelei coming on the show. I mean this is a show we wanted to do -- an episode we've wanted to do for a while and I think we recognized that it is not always the safest thing for people who engage in sex work to publicly speak about their experiences. We want to thank Lorelai for coming on the show and doing just that and educating us. Extra special thanks to Jordan Bailey for producing this episode.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.