Freedom Transcript: The Truth About Sex Work (with Kaytlin Bailey)
A conversation about the politics and ethics of sex work.
Kaytlin Bailey: What's happened is that we've turned prostitution into a symbol of exploitation and that symbolism has blinded us to make any effective policies around actually reducing exploitation in the sex trade because we're so focused on eradicating it in its entirety when the truth is that all labor exists on a spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion.
[music]
Trevor Burrus: I'm Trevor Burrus.
Aaron Ross Powell: I'm Aaron Ross Powell. This is Freedom, a show about ideas that matter. Freedom is an independent listener-supported show. If you value these conversations, please consider becoming a supporter. You'll get access to episode transcripts, bonus content, and our Discord community. Learn more at freedom.audio/join, or look for the link in the show notes.
Trevor: On today’s episode, we get into the difficult and interesting questions around sex work. Our guest is Kaytlin Bailey, a sex worker rights advocate, comedian, and writer. Kaytlin is the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a nonprofit media organization, creating conditions to change the status of sex workers in society. She's also the host of the Oldest Profession podcast and the creator of Whore’s Eye View, a 75-minute mad dash through 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective.
For our listeners who don't know, I think it's good that we just start with who you are and then we can get into the deep questions in involving.
Kaytlin: Sure. my name is Kaytlin Bailey. I'm the founder and executive director of Old Pros, and we are trying to create the conditions to change the status of sex workers in society. I'm the host of the Oldest Profession podcast and a former sex worker myself.
Trevor: When we talk about sex workers, how big of definition is that? Is that everything from--
Kaytlin: Sex work is a really big, broad umbrella term that includes anyone who exchanges erotic labor for money or something of value. Of course, that includes standard full-service prostitution, but it also includes legal sex workers like porn performers or strippers or off kilter sex workers, dominatrixes, foot fetish models, phone sex operators, and of course, I want to include Hooters waitresses because we are trying to build a big tent.
Aaron: You said you wanted to change the status of sex workers and that status can be interpreted in a number of ways.
Kaytlin: Sure.
Aaron: There's legal status. Much of sex work is illegal, and so making it legal, decriminalizing it, but there's also social status issues as well that most sex work is considered on the fringes of society, and rightfully so by many people in the sense that there are a lot of people on the left and a lot of people on the right who don't want us to elevate the status of sex workers, rather, they want us to get rid of sex work. What is that broader mission?
Kaytlin: Sure.
Aaron: Is the focus just on decriminalization and I guess how does that relate to the social status question?
Kaytlin: Sure. Decriminalization or stopping the arrests is the first priority of any sex worker rights advocate, but we really do envision a future where not only is no one arrested for engaging in this work, but also people don't lose their jobs, their homes, or their children. We believe that sex workers have so much to contribute to the communities that they're already a part of. Conversations around negotiated consent, mental health.
I believe that sex workers have been at the cutting edge of every major artistic, financial, and technological innovation for all of human history. I believe that we have a lot to contribute, but the stigma and shame around our work prevents many of us from being able to make those contributions. The first priority is to call off the hunt, as it were, very literally.
Trevor: There's so many interesting questions that we'll be diving into philosophically around these questions, but one I think is interesting is male versus female, and perception of if sex work, let's say, it was mostly men doing it I think it would probably be legal. I think that says something interesting about the way that women are treated, especially when they're perceived as selling themselves in a way that I think is different than if a man does it. I'm not sure, there's of course many, many male sex workers. It affects both genders. It's obviously always been a gender issue.
Kaytlin: Yes, absolutely. I believe that hoephobia is the foundation of misogyny and this idea around controlling the freedom of movement, freedom of expression of women underlies much of our prostitution policy. Many of our laws against prostitution are actually a reaction to feminist liberation. We didn't criminalize prostitution in this country until the progressive era, the 19th century, and we did so very much as a reaction to middle-class women entering the workforce.
The invention of bicycles was a very destabilizing moment for nervous dads around the country. We create these false narratives and justify much of our patriarchal control in the language of paternalistic protection. You're right, for thousands and thousands of years, there's just more interest in controlling the frankly, sexual freedom of women and so much of that is wrapped up in our anxieties around paternity, which is the obvious predecessor to patriarchy.
Aaron: It seems like too there's the control angle, but there's an economic angle because it occurred to me as Trevor was asking his question, that one of the counterarguments that gets raised, sex work is dangerous. It's people selling their bodies. We shouldn't enable that to say what about all these things that men do? Being a soldier for cash, I mean, members of the military get paid is putting yourself in harm's way in often fairly awful ways-
Trevor: Construction work.
Aaron: -that just be okay or construction work, mining.
Kaytlin: Mining.
Aaron: My uncle [crosstalk].
Trevor: The crab fisher that we watch a whole show about those people.
Aaron: My uncle spent his entire career installing aluminum sliding in Buffalo, New York often during the winter, which is horrendous. This is really hard work that is damaging to the body. When you make those kinds of arguments, they don't tend to land. People are fairly dismissive of them. It seems at the same time you could see arguments about the economic impact of say caregiving "women's work" in the home as mothers and care caregivers and so on.
That shouldn't enter into the marketplace. That shouldn't be paid work. The stuff that we think of as traditionally what women do, which caregiving or in this case providing sex is not something that we should make part of the marketplace, and it's morally wrong to do it.
Kaytlin: I think what people are actually reacting to is we have real feelings around women acquiring actual purchasing power. That economic stability, the ability to leave abusive or exploitative relationships. The ability to be an active agent in your own life. Married women weren't able to have their own credit cards until the mid-1970s. There's a lot of different economic policies around curtailing or limiting women's access to money.
I don't think that you have to be a libertarian to recognize that that's wrong. I do think it's interesting that we only seem to want to discuss the corrupting influence of money when we're talking about women or other traditionally oppressed people acquiring some of it. I would point out that sex workers have been able to exercise quite a bit of economic control hundreds of years before other women acquired property rights or the ability to move freely in society trading respectability for access and agency.
Trevor: What have you seen in your time doing this because the interesting thing that's happened, and I wouldn't say recent, I'd say 20 years, whether or not that's your theory of recent, but we've seen more opposition for sex work from the traditional left than I think we did 20 years ago. Obviously, you always had the preachers and the moral majority who were going to oppose sex work legalization, but it seems we have more people on the left. Do you agree with that, that you see more, or is about equal or?
Kaytlin: I'm a fairly historically minded person, so I would tell you that I think that this alliance between feminists and anti-vice folks dates back to the Temperance Movement. The same group of folks that were trying to close down bars were also very focused on closing down brothels for very similar reasons. We criminalized alcohol, prostitution, and abortion in this country, all for very similar reasons. It certainly dates back to the porn wars of the 1970s.
Gloria Steinem spent a large chunk of her career trying to criminalize porn as a symbol of violence against women and continues that crusade today trying to push these, so-called end-demand laws, where we know everywhere these policies are implemented, violence against sex workers specifically, and women generally, increases. This is a very old alliance between so-called liberal feminists and anti-porn conservatives who have found a lot to agree about over the course of the last 100 years. Sorry, but I-
Aaron: Go ahead.
Kaytlin: -hope the recent criminalization of abortion across large swaths of this country, dissuades some of my feminist colleagues from believing that we can make big distinctions between access to healthcare and information about women's bodies and obscenity. That conflation dates back to the Comstock laws of the 1870s, which are, unfortunately, making a popular resurgence.
Aaron: It does seem to be the case that a lot of these industries, so the porn industry, there is exploitation that happens in it. There are people who are working in it, who if they felt they had other options, would choose those other options. Obviously, prostitution can bring with it a whole host of bad things or people who are not happy in the role but feel they need to be doing it. That's the picture that we have, and that's what people are latching onto, is it's not so from the left. It's not like this prudishness or controlling of women's sexuality is like, these are exploitative industries and we need to do something about it.
Kaytlin: What's happened is that we've turned prostitution into a symbol of exploitation and that symbolism has blinded us to make any effective policies around actually reducing exploitation in the sex trade because we're so focused on eradicating it in its entirety. When the truth is that all labor exists on a spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion. Although there are many people who could not imagine themselves engaging in this work.
I, for example, couldn't imagine working at a slaughterhouse, but I know that criminalizing that work doesn't expand the options of any folks that are working there. Similar to abortion, no amount of criminal censure or policy is going to eliminate the oldest profession, but we can make it less safe. So much of the so-called exploitation that's associated with sex work is a direct result of criminalization and efforts at coercive control. Before criminalization, the overwhelming majority of people that worked and ran brothels were women. They were some of the largest property owners in the West, for example, for a period of several decades.
When you criminalize prostitution or abortion or immigration, you end up pushing these things into the hands of criminals. When we criminalize prostitution starting in 1910, and then really taking off in 1917 with America's involvement in World War I, which we justified as disease control, you pushed sex work out of the primarily women-owned brothels, which were a gathering place and a place of refuge for women escaping abusive relationships, trying to get purchasing power for themselves. This was a place where they were often giving folks harm reduction information. Like how to prevent STIs, and how to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
A place where information about how to access abortion is kept, you push it out of the brothels and into the hands of pimps, not because clients are necessarily dangerous, but because for the first time in American history, women walking alone risked being arrested for maybe prostitution, but also promiscuity, which was criminalized for many decades in this country. If you were a sex worker, you needed a man in order to navigate public space and procure clients. That's not an inevitability of sex work. It's the direct result of criminalization.
You see a very similar pattern, for example, in Nevada. Nevada is the only state with legally regulated prostitution, but many of those regulations come from this very hoephobic perspective where we have to contain and control the people that engage in this work. It concentrates power amongst primarily overwhelmingly male brothel owners. Nevada, the only state with legal prostitution has the highest arrest rate per capita for prostitution-related offenses. It's not an especially liberating model.
Trevor: The porn industry is thriving, let's say, at least in terms of minutes watched, but it is legal and regulated, and in places like California where much of it is made, they are consistently passing laws to theoretically protect condom wearing laws, for example. At the same time, there's a lot of people who say this is not necessarily a good thing. If we have porn on a level that no society has ever had, and there is a lot of exploitation of young women in this industry, even though it's a fully legal and regulated industry, and where this is taking society is not a good thing. If we did that with prostitution, that would just become another bad thing where we're just indulging and not actually trying to get better.
Kaytlin: This isn't really a unique argument. The same can be said about the food and bev or entertainment industry. There's a lot of general exploitation of young and naive people. Again, there was a brief, glorious moment in the history of pornography in the early days of the internet when sex workers really for the first time were able to safely and securely develop direct relationships with clients. Whether they were purchasing content or negotiating time or whatever the business model was.
Because of these regulatory efforts, that's really pushed a lot of porn performers or content creators into the hands of these larger, often monopolistic industries that can afford to do compliance and to do the rigamarole of all of this. It's actually really disempowered content creators. Not because sexy stuff is uniquely exploitative, but because of all of the anxiety and regulatory issues, it's becoming harder and harder for independent content creators to survive and thrive on the internet.
Trevor: Is it wrong that I think I have this part of my brain that says to me, and maybe this is the homophobia that's been instilled in me by the patriarchy, but there's a part of my brain that says that completely conflating exploiting a young naive food worker with exploiting a young, naive person to film sex videos or however, whatever sex work, saying those are just the same thing, just seems wrong,
Kaytlin: They're not the same thing.
Trevor: Okay.
Kaytlin: Sex workers have much more ability to push back against, for example, sexual harassment-
Trevor: One is worse but I'm
Kaytlin: -recourse as a waitress.
Trevor: No, we could talk about what the law is, but what I mean is it seems like exploiting someone because they're pretty 19-year-old and using their body is worse than get that guy a burger. Is that just my hoephobia?
Kaytlin: Right. Except the prevalence of sexual harassment in food and bev, I don't think can be ignored because it's not just getting me that burger. It's get me that burger and you pinched my butt and there's absolutely nothing that I can say about that. Or sexually harassed by a boss or manager. There are horrific examples of sexual exploitation outside of the sex industry.
My experience in the sex industry, and this is corroborated by many of my peers and colleagues, is that when something horrific happens to us within the context of sex work, we have the ability to push back on that. We can put somebody on a blacklist, we can report that to our community. Whereas, what we can't do, of course, is report that to law enforcement as a member of a criminalized class. We don't have to rehash the lessons of the Me Too movement to talk about why people--
Trevor: What I'm asking is that [crosstalk] it's not so much about food and beverage, it's about conflating. Including even things like mining, like we brought up with men and men's physical labor. We just say, "oh, this is all using bodies." That's the conflation. We can and should strengthen sexual harassment. We have to some extent, but let's assume we do that with the workplace.
We still are trying to protect women from making a decision at 18 that could affect them way into the future. No one works in a fast food restaurant then 40 years later says, "I don't want anyone to know that I worked at a fast food restaurant." There seems to be an important difference.
Kaytlin: We've done so much violence in the name of protecting women from their own choices. I did sex work for two distinct periods of time. I've built a career around talking about that. I'm the daughter of a soldier who spent 30 years in the military. He was deployed four times to three different wars in our country's history. He was the one who was waking up in the middle of the night screaming for the last few decades of his life. We can talk about trauma and selling your body and exploitation, but I think it's important that we really talk about it instead of using prostitution as a symbol of all of the things that we're too afraid to face.
Because there's absolutely horrific exploitation that happens across labor sectors. Agriculture, domestic labor, food and bev, to say nothing of the professional violence that we ask of our soldiers and law enforcement officers. To pretend that erotic labor is this special subcategory, I think does two things. I think it ends up blinding us too much of the actual exploitation that happens outside of the sex industry. Then also by conflating adult consensual sex work with the horrific crime of human trafficking, you end up hurting the people that you claim to want to help. The fastest way to trap somebody in a life of prostitution is to arrest them for it.
Aaron: Picking up on Trevor's point though, one of the things that I have remarked on in the past is how much the Western world, even the parts of it that consider themselves to be robustly secular, have internalized this Abrahamic faith-based perspective on all sorts of things, but on women and women's sexuality is just baked into the way that we see the world. So much of this is just, there is something sinful about women's sexuality, about a sexually liberated woman.
I'm thinking there was a reason magazine years ago did a whole debate thing about fusionism and whether libertarians needed conservatism, and the lead essay in it, which was quite bad and poorly argued its main thing was these libertine libertarians don't want us socially shaming young women who get into sex work, but that's necessary for the health of society, which is just, I think it's somewhat like obviously wrong in the sense that they're not saying that about young men who are sleeping with lots of partners.
It's just this internalized very Christian worldview that I think is really without foundation, without real moral foundation, but we're stuck in thinking that way. That manifests as there is something fundamentally different about this kind of thing or that sexual work is different from violent work. Television is full of violence, but people are super prudish about anything sexually related. I think it's a really unhealthy way of looking. If anything, we should be condemning violence more and celebrating sex more, right?
Kaytlin: Yes. 100%. I just don't believe that people that make other people cum are the thing that's tearing society apart. I don't think that was true during the time of Abraham. I don't think that was true during the time of Jesus. I don't think that's true right now. I think that these periodic moral panics that we have around sex and sexuality are really our own projection and our own unwillingness to face the things that we have actual anxiety about.
I would go further and say that this coercive control masquerading as concern for women is less about sex in particular and more about our real anxieties about women acting as active agents in their own lives. We don't like public women not as a synonym for prostitution, but very literally women taking up public space. So many of these concerns, again, it comes across as concern or what about your reputation or what if you regret it? We don't do any of that for folks that engage in again, really violent work. We lionize people that join the military or the police force. We don't talk about like what if you regret it?
Maybe it's because I grew up in a household with somebody suffering from PTSD, but all of the things that people said would inevitably happen to me as a sex worker, didn't. They very obviously happened to my father and we didn't have any language for that. I think that we should absolutely be concerned about, again, trauma and exploitation, but by narrowing our focus and again, turning sex work into this rich symbol that has allowed us to ignore those very real problems when they don't present themselves in this white slave propaganda way.
Aaron: There's also a circularity to the reasoning because, and this goes back to my status question at the beginning. One of the reasons it is hard to get people to change the laws on sex work is because sex work is low status in the cultural sense. People don't want to do anything that looks like you're supporting it. Often the arguments about-- Trevor's point about people will later regret having done sex work in a way that they might not later regret having done fast food work or whatever. All of that is simply because we have chosen to make this thing shameful.
Kaytlin: Correct.
Aaron: Then we use the fact that it is shameful purely by choice to argue that people shouldn't do it because they're going to suffer consequences from that but then that people aren't doing it is why it's shameful and we're just trapped in this really nonsense self-reinforcing moral worldview.
Kaytlin: We like to make the lie true. Like, don't do drugs because you might be arrested. Okay, well stop arresting people for doing drugs. Has anyone tried that? We've done a very, very similar thing with prostitution. Like don't engage in sex work you might lose your kids. Don't engage in sex work you might lose your apartment or you might make it impossible for you to hold down a different job.
Before that, during the American plan, when we criminalized promiscuity in this country, we were snatching women off of the street, forcing them to undergo medically questionable STI tests, and then poisoning them with mercury. It became this thing of like, oh, please don't do prostitution, or you might die of mercury poisoning. It's like, well, has anyone tried not poisoning the prostitutes with mercury yet? That seems like the obvious solution here.
I think you're absolutely correct that none of this shame or stigma or criminality is innate or an inevitable result of sex work in and of itself. Instead, it is the direct result of that criminalization and stigma. That stigma is directly tied and has been used for thousands of years to limit not just sex workers' access to the public sphere, but women's access to the public sphere.
Trevor: I could be someone though who thinks that all the legal reforms that you abdicate for should happen for the purpose of safety and autonomy and all those things, and thinks--
Kaytlin: Public health.
Trevor: Yes, and thinks that sex work should be shamed. You could have both those opinions, right?
Kaytlin: Yes.
Trevor: It's like believing all drugs should be legalized and still trying to tell people they shouldn't do drugs.
Kaytlin: Sure.
Trevor: It seems a little bit more difficult to try to go for the no-shaming side because I also think it's important to not shame people who use drugs. When it comes to not shaming people who do sex work, it's so ingrained. I wouldn't argue like an inevitability based on human biology, but as you said, paternity, like why do we treat women differently? Changing that seems impossible, changing the laws, do it, but trying to get people to think differently about the status of women in society or that they should and say that, men are being oppressed too. Men's bodies are oppressed by war. Absolutely.
Kaytlin: Absolutely.
Trevor: We don't shame that. Then a woman who uses her body for a different purpose just saying, we should not shame any of it, or we should shame all of it. Maybe we should shame soldiers more and sex workers. Not shaming is a very different thing than legalizing.
Kaytlin: Sure.
Trevor: I'm not sure you can get there in any society made of human beings. Does that matter?
Kaytlin: We believe that changing minds is a necessary and critical step in order to drive the cultural and legislative breakthroughs that we need to secure human rights for sex workers. We also believe that media, art, and storytelling are powerful levers for shifting beliefs and breaking down these taboos. I believe that it is important and necessary for sex workers in particular to be able to reclaim our legacy as community builders.
We have this narrative that sex workers are always low-status, desperate, helpless victims pushed between a rock and a hard place, forced to do the most unthinkable thing when in reality sex work has funded more artists, entrepreneurs, and students than all of the grants in human history combined. We have made real important contributions in artistic worlds. We were some of the biggest philanthropists, again, in the West as the largest landowners.
We have been community builders and visionaries. You don't have to agree that all sex workers are somehow the embodiment of the sacred horror or healers or any of that to recognize that sex workers have had a hand in shaping history. Whether you want to acknowledge that or not, it's just an undeniable fact. One of the things that we focus on at Old Pros is reclaiming and elevating this history. Our goal legislatively is to end criminalization. Decriminalization means that no one is arrested, evicted, fired, or loses custody of their children just for engaging in this work, which does free us up to respond to sexual predators, kidnapping, other forms of horrific trafficking or violence.
We don't need everyone in society to recognize sex workers as high status for them to recognize that sex workers are already members of their community. That's the thing about sex workers is although we are members of a criminalized class, we have always been and will continue to be literally everywhere. We are in every social strata, we are in every community, we are in every geographic area. I'm not sure what else to say.
Aaron: I want to take a moment, I'm going to get on my soapbox for a moment and run with this and slightly in a way that's pushing back on Trevor and picks up on something Kaytlin you and I were talking about before we hit the record button which is, I think that it is damaging to the cause, not just of sex worker rights and liberation, but a lot of other kinds of issues. We go back to anti-racism. We could go to trans rights, gay rights, et cetera, to argue them purely within a legal context or within an acknowledging of the shamefulness, but sort of context so like drug use.
One way to argue for liberalization of drug laws is to say like, yes, drugs are bad in all these kinds of ways, but it is wrong to be criminalizing them either because it's rights violation or it has deleterious social effects. We can say, yes, it would be great if these women who are into sex work weren't doing something like this, but we should decriminalize it. We basically acknowledge the validity of the social stigma on this stuff and then argue from the legal side of it. I think that on the one hand, it prolongs the suffering of the people in these shameful and then criminalized communities, but I think it has a degree of just being unethical in it.
The fact is believing that peaceful drug use is a moral wrong is itself a moral wrong. Believing that being transgender is a moral wrong is itself a moral wrong. Believing that freely chosen sex work is a moral wrong is itself a moral wrong. We shouldn't be arguing from within the context of a moral wrong, but instead pointing it out in the same way that we shouldn't have said yes, most people oppose interracial marriage and it is the case that it's probably something shameful about interracial marriage, but it should be decriminalized. Rather, we say, no, there is absolutely nothing shameful about interracial marriage.
Kaytlin: Correct. From a political strategy point, I believe that legislation will flow downstream of culture on this one. I think that legislators are terrified of their own constituents even when you do a good job of convincing them that all of the studies suggest that if you want to reduce violence against women, if you want to reduce STIs, then the only policy that achieves those goals is the decriminalization of adult consensual sex work.
Even when they look at these peer-reviewed studies from all over the world, even when we see the results, they're afraid of the social narrative around sex work. That's why I think it's so important for us to focus on status, on stories, and shifting the narrative and pushing back and moving the Overton window. It's not my job to reaffirm conservatives' or liberals' visceral anxieties around the world's oldest profession. It is my job to simply insist that we have always been here and many of us have been major contributors to the societies and the cultures that we're a part of.
Trevor: To dovetail off of Aaron's question and play some devil's advocate, as someone who's worked on drug policy for years, one similarity between the anti-drugs and the drugs that are prohibited and then prohibiting sex work is a judgment that it's a particularly titillating euphoric type of experience and if you did spend your entire life on heroin or some sort of extremely just amazing drug, imagine the most amazing drug ever, it doesn't exist.
It just makes you feel constantly good and that's all you did. That's one reason why we have to stop people from doing that. It's so titillating, it's so good that living your life just in a hole of false pleasure is a bad thing. I think similarly with sex work if you just spent your entire day masturbating to porn stars or only fans or going to prostitutes, people would say that's not a life well lived which is why A, we're going to prohibit it, and B, we will shame it.
The shaming part is interesting because if someone told me all they do every day is masturbate, I wouldn't be like, you go, bodily autonomy. I have no judgment whatsoever about that. I have no judgment whatsoever. Again, I think that's a very deep reason why this is not perceived like being a soldier. Maybe there are psychopaths who joined the army or the police, there definitely are but that's not why most people are doing this. It's not giving them some euphoric high and everyone knows how good sex feels, or hopefully, they do or will at some point. That just seems like something that you shouldn't do all the time or encourage and that's why we shame it.
Kaytlin: Skipping over the physiological limitations of what it would mean for especially like a cis man to masturbate all day, good luck with that. It might be causing individual harm and people can choose to waste their life in a variety of ways, whether it's playing video games or watching porn or doing drugs. There are a thousand ways to waste your life but if we are really truly afraid of euphoria or euphoric pleasure, then that also sets a foundation for criminalizing or outline all kinds of art.
I think that there is something really beautiful about dedicating your life to the pursuit of pleasure. I think that there's more there than dedicating your life to, I don't know, enforcing borders or forcing people to comply with dumb laws but even if that is a waste of a human life, I think that it is the cost of liberty that we allow people to waste their life however they want.
Aaron: As you were saying that, it occurred to me even this ties into that earlier point about women, or I'll say, I guess feminized, like the lower status of that because there are definitely-- we would look down on the person who samples heroin every day, but the sommelier who dedicates their life to wine, we tend not to look down on, we celebrate that. Maybe you could argue the sommelier is not getting intoxicated on wine all the time.
Kaytlin: Depends on the sommelier.
Aaron: Right. The examples that you gave of a life dedicated to pleasure in an aesthetic sense, the artists, and so on. We often tend to view that as a feet non-masculine and there are people of whom that is like a high-status thing to be doing that, but they are the ones in these weird non masculine cosmopolitan coastal enclaves that get sneered at.
It does seem like a lot of this is just bound up in like there's kind of a manly way to be which is violent and physical work, so we don't sneer at the person who dedicates themselves to athletic pursuits, even though every long distance runner talks about the runner's high as a big factor of why they're so into it. This stoic non-emotional and so all of those lives of pure pleasure are everything that that is not, and so then are sneered at.
Kaytlin: I agree with you, and I think that there's something about sex work that-- again, this is something that's older than money. It's about deep connection, the emotional intelligence that's required at all levels of this craft. Not only just to keep yourself safe, but also from a client and sales perspective. I have a lot of regard for sex workers across the social strata, and I think that sommelier example is really apt.
The full spectrum of status exists in sex work, from exploited busboys or folks who have their bosses holding their passports, or garnishing their wages, all the way up to executive chefs. The full spectrum of feelings is also associated with this work, but the social-cultural narrative that we have around it has not succeeded in reducing the amount of sex work that happens, or in alleviating any harm and suffering that's associated with it. It's only compounded those things.
Trevor: In your studies of history, have you found any society or period of time where male sex workers were treated with similar disdain as female sex workers? It is interesting and in many ways, we talked about homophobia, patriarchy, are at the bottom of this, but if you learned that a woman is a porn star, there's a lot of people who are going to be like she's dirty. If you learned that a man is a porn star, there's a lot of people who say badass. That dichotomy is anyway at the core of this.
Aaron: Or just to pick that up, the difference in the way that stories about a male teacher, male high school teacher sleeping with a student, but then when there's stories of a female high school teacher sleeping with a student you get all these, especially on the conservative media, like right on, or there's nothing wrong with her. When I was 16 I would've loved to sleep with my teacher, kind of reactions.
Kaytlin: Right, there's a lot to unpack there. Most of the criminalization around male sex workers have been wrapped up in our various gay panics that have happened. Whether you're talking about the 1800s or the 1920s or the 1940s and '50s, so much of the legislation or crackdown around male sexual service providers, have a lot more to do with the criminalization of homosexuality. The CANs laws in Louisiana I think are a really great example of this. They were written around the 1850s in an effort to crack down on the gay male hustler scene in New Orleans.
CANs stands for Crimes Against Nature, but in the 1980s or '90s, those same laws began being applied to black and trans sex workers in Louisiana. This of course culminated during the hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thousands of black women were turned away from shelters as registered sex offenders for these CANs laws violations. Rentboy was famously seized in the early 2000s, several years before Backpage was seized by the FBI. We absolutely have examples of criminalization, but we have less interest in controlling the sexual behavior of men.
The tone of that enforcement is different, but it absolutely exists. In terms of the criminalization of male sex workers that provide services to women, I haven't heard a lot about that. The examples of this across history are rear, I think that has a lot more to do with the limitations around women's purchasing power, than it has to do with innate differences between the sexual appetites of men and women, although those differences also exist. Most male sex workers provide services to male clients.
To Marcus who is a famous, I'm having a little bit of a brain fart right now. I cannot remember if he was Greek or Roman, but he was censored by the Senate for engaging in sexual services in his youth. The stigma goes back a long way but again the criminalization of male sex workers has a lot more to do with our anxieties around homosexuality, than it has to do with controlling the kind of sex or men having sex.
Trevor: What about human trafficking? You mentioned it casually, but we consistently hear big numbers, very scary stories of human trafficking connected with the-- Of course, if you legalized that could change these black markets, but the fact that you could still have an exploited woman brought from a different country or put into a situation even in a legal market, but is it a huge problem right now the way we hear about it?
Kaytlin: Much of what we hear about human trafficking especially the conflation between human trafficking and prostitution is a lie. There's a lot of bad numbers, and bad statistics, and bad storytelling around this. A lot of this dates back to the white slave panic and the white slave law of 1910. We really want to characterize black men, immigrant men as kidnappers of women. The reality is that most sex trafficking in this country looks a lot more like domestic labor than it does like other forms of labor trafficking. According to the labor department's own numbers, the overwhelming majority of people who are violently trafficked in this country work as domestic laborers or in textiles or in agriculture.
We do have a trafficking problem in this country. It's just not concentrated or even overrepresented in sex work. There are examples of people being exploited in sex work, and my argument is that much of that is exasperated or enabled by the criminalized nature of this work. If sex workers were able to report crimes committed against them, or if we were not members of a criminalized class, we would have more negotiating power, and more tools to help reduce exploitation and keep ourselves safe.
Aaron: This parallels a lot of the arguments about trans issues right now, because there are lots and lots of people who are very concerned about children being mutilated, and kids on puberty blockers, and it turns out the actual numbers are vanishingly small. It's a total moral panic, but because it's this moralized moral panic, just like the panic about sex work, people are caught up in it and it seems like reinforce confirmation bias just ratchets up in those situations. How do you get people listening to data that is basically contradicting their entire worldview on a particular matter that they see as of primary moral importance?
Kaytlin: I think that you're absolutely right, that the parallels between our trans panic right now and sex panic are very, very similar. We've done this periodically throughout history. Satanic panic, witch burnings. We've gone through many cycles of this as a species. My favorite statistic around trans issues is that if what we care about is the sexualization of children, which we're defining as under 18, then we really ought to be looking at breast augmentation of which there are 30,000 cis young ladies that get breast augmentation before their 18th birthday.
Whereas, there are only I think it's 300 or 400 some tiny percentage of people that for example get top surgery or gender-affirming care in that way. I absolutely agree with you that our imagination outpaces the actual data on this. One of the stats that I like to tell people is that 90% of the federal government's trafficking prevention budget in 2020, was used to arrest consensual adult sex workers. It was not used to detect traffickers or assist victims in any way.
A really great example of what this looks like is the Robert Kraft thing that happened in South Florida several years ago. This is an example of five different law enforcement agencies, three local police departments, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, all of which invested months of surveillance studying these legally licensed Asian massage parlors in south Florida, coordinated an undercover operation where law enforcement officers were able to receive sexual services on the job at taxpayer expense, and then did a coordinated raid where they publicly humiliated 200 men.
Threw themselves press conferences lauding themselves as heroes for rescuing sex slaves. When the dust settled, the only people who were facing criminal charges were the 19 women who had been ostensibly rescued from this situation, all of whom were legally licensed masseurs, operating legally in South Florida, some of whom were sometimes, providing sexual services for extras, nobody arrested was under the age of 30.
This is what our so-called anti-trafficking efforts look like in the United States. As a taxpayer, I have a lot of questions about the way that law enforcement is used to police the aggressively consensual sexual choices of adults happening behind closed doors. I would much prefer that anti-trafficking energy being used to look into, I don't know, for example, the hiring practices of the third-party contractors that Marriott Hotel uses to clean their hotel rooms. That is probably an area that is more rife with exploitation than massage parlors.
Trevor: Where is this done the best in terms of countries' policies? Because throughout Western Europe, I don't know the data but I know it's legal in Germany, obviously, Amsterdam. It's legal in different ways and you talked even in Nevada, it's not optimal for various reasons.
Kaytlin: Yes. Nor is it optimal in Amsterdam or Germany. Legalization or regulation does not necessarily increase the negotiating power of sex workers. Rather it corrals sex workers into these other forms of control and exploitation.
Trevor: Is there a place that does that correctly? If there's not, what should we be doing instead of empowering big brothels and things like that?
Kaytlin: There absolutely is. New Zealand, I think is the best example. They decriminalized adult consensual sex work in 2003. They did it in a way that really allowed independent, practitioners to set their own rules and operate. In New Zealand, if you want to engage in sex work and you just sort of wake up on a Tuesday and negotiate at a bar and something bad happens to you, you can report that crime to law enforcement because you have not committed any crimes. It doesn't matter that you didn't get a license.
It doesn't matter that you're not registered. However, if you're a sex worker who is working with more than three other people, then you have to apply for a business license. Then all of the labor laws that already exist in New Zealand apply to you. There are a couple of extra laws around encouraging safe sex practices, et cetera. Nobody is facing criminal charges for just engaging in this work. Another great example of the sky not falling down when you decriminalize prostitution is what happened in Rhode Island, actually, between 2003 and 2009.
It's a little bit of a complicated story that's a combination of litigation on behalf of a sex worker rights organization and congressional inaction and judicial decision. There was a period of time in Rhode Island between 2003 and 2009 where it was not illegal to provide sexual services behind closed doors. During that period of time, we've studied it, gonorrhea rates dropped 40%, and reported rapes dropped 30%. The sky did not fall down in Rhode Island.
Trevor: How do we change the social stigma? How do we change the social attitudes? I agree that it's downstream and I spend a lot of time talking about drug war that the first thing we have to do is stop shaming drug users. It's very difficult to make that happen. Maybe the first thing we have to do is change the laws and then people will get a different perspective. How can we change their attitudes about this, hoephobia, the patriarchy? It's a big question but where do we start?
Kaytlin: I think that we can start by changing the stories that we tell about sex workers. There are so many examples throughout history and many of my contemporaries who are excellent, writers, performers, or entrepreneurs. We can start elevating the stories of sex workers. I think that we have to go through a very similar process that the LGBTQ plus community went through. Whether you want to acknowledge this or not, I can almost guarantee that many of your listeners already know and probably like a sex worker who is already a member of your community.
Because of the history of stigma and shame, that person might not be out. I think that as we start to erode this social stigma, as we start to make inroads through state and federal legislators in the country, you're going to start hearing from more of those sex workers. I think that is really the long and difficult path to changing the status of sex workers. We hope to elevate those stories through the Oldest Profession podcast and the stories that we choose to tell. We also hope to empower our would-be allies by making these talking points and important pieces of information more accessible. You can learn more about that at oldprosonline.org.
Trevor: Thank you for joining us on Freedom. This is a listener-supported show. If you'd like to get access to episode transcripts, bonus content, extended conversations, and/or Discord community, go to freedom.audio/join.
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