The walk from the subway to the Society of Illustrators isn’t long. So when I say that my apprehension grew with every step I took along Lexington Avenue, I mean that it expanded rapidly, like the chorus of a Pixies song.
It was early autumn, and just starting to get cold in Manhattan. I wore black sweatpants, a jean jacket, a purple scarf. Soon I wouldn’t be wearing anything at all.
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There’s been some good and thoughtful reporting over the Rentboy arrests over the last few days. From Graeme Reid at Human Rights Watch:
...Read MoreRentboy.com connects male escorts to clients in the same way that Uber does for transport, or Airbnb does for accommodation. There are no middlemen, thus affording users control and autonomy over the services brokered through the website. The website connects consenting adults. None of the government statements about the raid have alleged any coercion or involvement of underage persons.
It is hard to see the harm done by Rentboy.com, but it’s easy to see the harm done by the raid on society at large. The criminalization of voluntary, consensual sexual relations among adults is incompatible with the rights to personal autonomy and privacy – internationally recognized human rights that everyone, including individuals engaged in sex work, is entitled to. Criminalization creates barriers for those engaged in sex work to exercise basic rights and to seek access to justice, health care, and other available services.
Here is how I try to tell the story: drunk, haltingly, laughing hysterically in voicemail to my therapist. At the next session, we dance around it: “I think the word you used was ‘whore.’” I package it as neatly as I can: I was too young for a real job, I was on my own, I needed the money. She says she doesn’t blame me, but it sounds like forgiveness. That isn’t what I want.
I skate around other angles: “it was,” I remind her “less than a year after I was first raped– I was still pretty messed up about that, and like, still am, probably.” It doesn’t matter; she doesn’t blame me, the case is closed. It isn’t. If I tell the story differently I will not be forgiven.
At fifteen I lacked good judgement. That was apparent, on some level, even then. The fear that had nestled inside of me the first time my now ex-boyfriend raised a hand to me had morphed into something different: adolescent invulnerability on steroids–I survived him, I can survive anything. I don’t need to be afraid anymore.
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Last night, federal agents seized longtime Bay Area sex work advertising network MyRedBook, arresting the editors and disabling the site in the process as part of an ongoing sex work sting.
Longtime Bay Area based escort/massage advertising website MyRedBook seized by FBI. http://t.co/OuTLq7y478pic.twitter.com/aPv03szoSe
— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) June 25, 2014
“The hotels are always full here,” Mike tells me on a slow Tuesday night at Babe’s sports bar. He’s come for the hockey, a lone Bruins fan in a desert of pump jacks and roughnecks. Mike moved to this oil and natural gas boomtown in New Mexico from the northeast nine months earlier. He’s a chemical engineer for an oil company you’ve probably heard of, and he’s got stories about the hotel he lived in before finding an apartment. I ply him with bourbon, doing my archetypal duty as bartender-confessor, and his tongue gets loose. “Girls go door to door, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t, what do you mean?”
“Girls, you know, working girls, they go to the hotels.” Mike lived in a hotel for six months because housing can be hard to come by in a town built for 25,000 but currently housing 50,000. Apartment complexes can’t be constructed quickly enough with most skilled workers flocking to the oil fields for fast and dangerous money, and investors are wary to sink money into apartments that may be empty when the oil stops flowing. Some say it’ll be 5 years from now, some 15, but everyone knows it will stop.
“You mean sex workers?” I ask him, using my Bay Area sex-positive lingo.
“Yeah, hookers,” he says, shrugging in his suit and tie like he’s trying to get away with correcting my grammar.
“They come knocking at your door, do they?” I raise my eyebrow, wondering where this confession might lead.
“Yeah, so I’ve heard. It’s never happened to me,” Mike backpedals, his eyes wander up to the TV screen where young men on skates are running each other down.
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“I know who held the knife, but they might as well have put it in his hands,” wrote the mother of Jasmine, a 27-year-old woman who was murdered on 11 July by her former partner. “They” here refers to the Swedish state, which had removed Jasmine’s children from her home within hours of learning that she was a sex worker. Custody of the children was awarded to the man who subsequently killed her.
As his aggressive behaviour escalated, Jasmine’s appeals for help were ignored by social services until social workers experienced his violence themselves. Because of her sex work, she was considered to be committing ‘self-harm’, ‘romanticising’ the sex industry, and unable to identify her own best interests. This unnecessary focus on her profession obscured the actual threats to her safety.
For Jasmine’s friends, colleagues, and allies, it is impossible not to link this tragedy to Sweden’s ongoing campaign against the sex industry. Since 1999, numerous measures have been employed to try to eradicate sex work under the guise of preventing violence against women. The most publicised measure is the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, which the authorities have aggressively marketed to other countries. While research time and again has shown that this approach has not been as successful – or as harmless – as its proponents claim, the other legal measures in place also merit scrutiny.
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