Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex

By Molly Smith

Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex; among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an afro-latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed with first-person essays, interviews, poetry, drawings, mixed-media collage, and photographs Working It honors the complexity of lived experience. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hardboiled, these dazzling pieces will go straight to the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781629639956

Molly Smith

Molly Smith is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM). She is the author of Revolting Prostitutes and has written articles on sex work policy for the Guardian and the New Republic. She is also involved with SCOT-PEP, a sex worker–led charity based in Edinburgh, which is working to decriminalize sex work in Scotland.

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Introduction

Matilda Bickers with Melissa Ditmore

I was avoiding writing this introduction with all my energy when my friend Josephine texted me that the prosecuting attorney for Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor, Michigan) had announced he would not be prosecuting the purchase or sale of sex between adults. Eliza Orlins, a public defender and candidate for district attorney in Manhattan, quickly retweeted and announced her intention to follow suit; while she did not win, the person who did has declared that he will not prosecute these charges. After twenty years of increasingly oppressive and harmful policies, are sex workers finally being listened to?

When I was seventeen, I started volunteering with Danzine, a harm reduction and advocacy group for sex workers based in Portland, Oregon. Danzine was unlike anything I had dreamed existed. Originally a zine started in 1995 by dancers to be read in the dressing room, sharing info about politics, sexually transmitted infections, and sex worker art and stories, Danzine was also a dynamic group of women who wanted to make their communities better and safer. They created a needle exchange service, planned art shows, called the phone tree of hookers who advertised in the back of local papers to keep an updated list of bad clients, and lobbied at city hall against the implementation of pro-free zones (areas of town where anyone suspected of selling sex could be stopped and condom possession was used as evidence against them) and other repressive ordinances. I volunteered with Danzine for its last year of existence, and so I started sex work with a solid grounding in local and federal laws around sex work, an understanding that sex work is labor, and a perspective of myself as a worker in a community of workers who faced specific forms of exploitation and abuse.

When Danzine went dormant, the absence was apparent immediately. Zines and blogs proliferated, but in terms of local publications, all that was left for the industry was a free magazine run by a club owner, funded by ads from other clubs and well-off local escorts. It was not a space to swap info about abusive or unfair management or bad clients. Two years after Danzine’s closure, when a group of dancers at my club tried to unionize, we had no way of getting the word out to other dancers.

I started Working It, the zine, in 2015, at the same time I started the Portland-based outreach project Stroll, to fill the social, organizational, educational, and communal gap left by Danzine. The title comes from two songs that were popular when I first started dancing. From the beginning, I wanted it to be expansive and inclusive, with workers from around the country or around the world sharing their art and stories.

I debated whether to address trafficking here. Initially, I didn’t intend to.

But this moral panic shapes the social and legal culture we live in, with very direct negative consequences for millions. The lived experience of the contributors to this book can only be understood in the context of the last twenty-five years of antitrafficking discourse and legislation.

The current conversation around trafficking in the United States is a direct offshoot of white supremacist fears that manifested in anti-immigrant legislation in the late nineteenth century. The first immigration laws at the federal level, beginning with the 1875 Page Act, excluding Asian women from entering the United States, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, were inextricably bound up with white fears about foreign workers and the sexuality of foreign women (Chinese, at that point). Subsequent immigration legislation doubled down on this, further tightening restrictions on which prospective migrants would be allowed into the country, based on ethnicity and sexual behavior.

The white slavery panic about white women and girls being kidnapped and sent overseas to be forced into prostitution was born of European anti-Semitism, but it proved to be easily exportable to the United States, where fears about interracial sex, and specifically white women having sex with Black men, added a new dimension: not only were there fears of foreign-born prostitutes corrupting the white citizenry, but any man of color was a potential threat to innocent, native-born white womanhood. How to address this was a subject of hot debate and many laws at the local, state, and federal level, but the most influential (and long-lasting) was the Mann Act of 1910, which prohibited the transportation or the facilitation of transportation of any woman or girl over state, territory, or District of Columbia borders for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.

Despite being so broad (and thus open to manipulation), the Mann Act has never been repealed, although it has been amended to apply only to acts that are criminalized in the jurisdiction in which they occurred. As recently as a 2015 City Club of Portland meeting, I heard a deputy DA from Multnomah County cite the Mann Act. I was there to offer a contrasting view of sex trafficking from the audience, one that proved to be necessary, as misinformation was piled upon misinformation. Escorts blur their faces in ads not because of the legal and social repercussions of being outed, but because we’re trafficked! A lipstick tattoo—like many people, including Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe and my friend Danika’s stepmother, I have one—is the new bar code of sex-trafficking victims. Amusingly (or not, depending on your mood), the deputy DA was referencing a woman’s possession of condoms as evidence of trafficking. The woman hadn’t crossed any borders, but the condoms were made in India: Boom! Interstate commerce!¹ This deputy DA was presenting to a City Club meeting, not a courtroom; I can’t tell if he would have been as disingenuous in front of a judge, or if the point was more to intimidate sex workers unfamiliar with the law into simply pleading guilty.

So a bad law over a century old is still on the books and still being used to prosecute people. What are more recent developments?

Trading sex or sexual services for money, food, shelter, or other commodities never disappeared, sexual abuse never ended, and white supremacist fears about interracial sex never really went away, yet white slavery stopped being such a driving international moral panic for decades. The reasons for this gap are beyond the scope of this introduction (a reading list is included on p. 20 for those interested in learning more), but the reasons for its resurgence have a direct bearing on all our lives. Globalization, increased ease of international travel, growing instability resulting from Western imperialism and ongoing exploitation of the global South, which has forced millions of people of color to migrate for better working conditions and wages—all of these have increased long-held white Western fears about migration and, ultimately, the ability of Western governments to maintain their control and influence in other countries. All of the factors that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Mann Act—the moral panics that drove fears of white slavery—resurfaced with renewed urgency in the late 1990s, increased after the September 11 attacks in the United States, and sped up after the recession of 2007 to 2009 created or exacerbated economic instability for millions around the world.

I want to underscore here the fact that women have greatly influenced every iteration of the national and international debate around trafficking. From nineteenth-century reformers who vocally agitated for new laws that would protect the vulnerable from abuse to the present unholy union between conservatives and feminists that is leading and fueling the current trafficking panic, women have had a large part in shaping this conversation. Despite all the surface differences that would appear to divide conservative Christians and avowed feminists, their shared determination to abolish prostitution and other forms of sex work have united them since the late 1990s, when they collaborated in shaping the United Nations’ 2000 Trafficking Protocol to inaccurately emphasize sexual exploitation as the key form of labor exploitation. This unexpected union continued to shape trafficking discourse over the next two decades, with the enthusiastic participation of the Bush administration. The guise of saving women and children from trafficking—protecting them from anything sex-related outside the context of marriage—offered a convenient shield for the Bush administration’s agenda of reversing a decade of progress on sex education and sexual health domestically and abroad. Funds for victims of trafficking in the United States were restricted such that services for trafficked persons, even those who had been forced into prostitution, were not allowed to be used to refer survivors to reproductive health services. Abstinence-only education was promoted across the US, while discussions around sex work increasingly framed it as the result of coercion and exploitation. Unfortunately, the conservative agenda affected US foreign aid as well, barring condoms and reproductive health material and denying aid to countries that didn’t conform with US policies against prostitution, which the US government equated with trafficking. Countries that repeatedly failed to meet US metrics on combating trafficking could be slapped with economic sanctions that would only worsen conditions for its citizens.

The effects of US legislation on other countries are not limited to USAID or sanctions. With the passage of SESTA/FOSTA in 2018, sex workers around the world were affected by the abrupt closure of advertising and screening venues as websites from the Craigslist personals to the Erotic Review and countless local others shuttered.² The remaining sites tried to cover their asses with responses that ranged from understandable to absurd: my local ad board no longer allows even one pubic hair to stray into an ad photo, while Slixa bars ads for using, among other words, treat, as in treat yourself. The fact that they’re still making money off the sale of sexual services while enforcing a Victorian prudery makes this funny but no less maddening. Trying to navigate the pardonable paranoia of review boards while still creating an ad that men will respond to is a fine and entirely arbitrary line to walk, but for many workers in many areas, ad boards aren’t even an option. Either the only local board is closed, or it’s too expensive to advertise on, or it doesn’t accept dark-skinned women, or some combination of all of the above. Street-based work has grown exponentially.

But why are adult sex workers affected by trafficking legislation?

While trafficking is defined in the United States as labor obtained through force, fraud, or coercion, in practice individual district attorneys, prosecutors, and police departments have considerable discretion with regard to where they direct their resources. Whatever the federal definition, the lived reality of individual sex workers across the United States (and in much of the world) is somewhat akin to Schrödinger’s cat: we are treated as both a trafficking victim and our own trafficker, depending on the needs of the local police and the prosecuting district attorney. That disingenuous deputy DA who claimed condoms violate the Mann Act went on to cite other signs of trafficking, most of which were racialized and none of which bear an actual relationship to labor exploitation: fake nails, hair weaves, possession of bling, possession of cash, and presence in one of the two main Portland strolls, where, historically, being stopped by police with a condom on you could get you arrested for prostitution and banned from the area for months at a time. Even if you lived there.

It sounds unbelievable, right? How did we get here?

Back in the early days of the Bush administration, estimates of the scale of trafficking-how many people’s labor was exploited around the world—were exponentially lower than today because they were much more rooted in reality. The Bush administration found antitrafficking to be a convenient vehicle for its antisex agenda, true; it also found antitrafficking to be a convenient corollary to the War on Terror. In fact, Bush himself made a speech before the UN in 2003, directly linking antitrafficking efforts to the War on Terror and creating a moral imperative to be against both.³ Bush’s 2003 speech is one of the first moments when we saw the numbers of people at risk of being trafficked jump (to 800,000 or 900,000); these numbers only continued to balloon over the next decade and a half. Try as they might, the Bush administration simply could not find enough trafficking victims to support the grandiose claims they were making to support the policies they were pushing—policies that, again, cut off funding for sexual and reproductive health education and services, as well as more basic forms of aid. Rather than dial back the febrile rhetoric, they threw more funding at their problem: more well-funded groups might turn up more victims, especially with such large financial incentives to do so.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) offer information about the numbers of trafficked persons their grantees serve, as well as numbers of investigations and prosecutions of human trafficking: From July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, DOJ grantees providing victim services reported 8,913 open trafficking client cases, including 4,739 new clients.… HHS supported 98 NGOs that served 1,612 victims of trafficking and qualified family members in 48 states and U.S. territories.⁴ United States law recognizes different types of human trafficking, and so the DOJ and HHS track types of trafficking: Grantees reported that 66 percent of clients served were victims of sex trafficking, 20 percent were victims of labor trafficking, five percent were identified as victims of both sex and labor trafficking, and the form of trafficking for nine percent was unknown.⁵ Service providers emphasize that labor-trafficking cases and victims are not addressed or recognized. The organization that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline explains this by saying that labor trafficking cases in the U.S. are chronically underreported due to a lack of awareness about the issue and a lack of recognition of the significant vulnerability of workers in many U.S. labor sectors.⁶

Young people are trafficked for labor and for sex, and some choose to sell sex but are deemed trafficked. The people most at risk of sexual exploitation continue to be adolescents, and the people most likely to sexually abuse or exploit them continue to be those closest to them: family and friends. The child welfare system remains implicated in the abuse of children, sexual and otherwise, and the group of adolescents most at risk of trading sex are LGBT young adults who have run away from home. People have visceral emotional reactions to the idea of children selling sex, or to the idea of children having sexuality at all, and these reactions keep us from having the conversations needed to create a world where people under eighteen don’t need to trade sex.

A note here on language: The many ways that language around trafficking obfuscates the realities of sexual exchange or exploitation are exemplified in the conversation around people who are under eighteen who trade sex. Eighteen is the legal age of adulthood and consent in the US; anyone under eighteen can’t consent to sex (with some exceptions within a certain range in certain states) and are thus considered trafficked by definition, regardless of whether they’re working alone or with other youth, are relying upon an older person for shelter and survival support, or are unquestionably being sexually exploited against their will.

Before we even get to the varied methods of research on minors who trade sex, we already see a blurring that reduces the specifics of each person’s situation into the catch-all of trafficking. But, as Samantha Majic and Carisa Showden show in their comprehensive analysis of existing research on domestic minor sex trafficking, the research gets hazy. Different researchers’ definitions of minor or youth are as varied as age 14–24, age 10–18, age 12–16, and so on.⁷ Their findings on this are worth quoting at length:

Findings about age are reflective of sampling practices and they intersect with social factors, especially family life and other facilitators into commercial sex. Notably, abolitionist researchers who collect their data from institutional records in law enforcement, child welfare, and social service agencies report that the youngest youth in their samples tend to be trafficked or exploited by family members, acquaintances, or caretakers. This is consistent with ethnographic research by critical trafficking scholars who also report that parental facilitation accounts for some of the youngest ages of entry into sex trades. In contrast, a large body of research on homeless youth, including LGBT youth, consistently reports that the longer these youth are away from home and exposed to the streets, the more likely they are to resort to trading sex, a pattern that accounts for higher rates of participation in sex trades among older youth.⁸

Majic and Showden go on to say:

The dominant narrative about young people’s engagement in the sex trades implies that transactional sex is in itself exploitative (hence the TVPA’s [Trafficking Victims Protection Act] automatic classification of these youth as victims of trafficking). Yet in prioritizing the dangers of commercial sexual exploitation, this narrative fails to account for the more prevalent source of sexual abuse of young people: families.⁹

The reality is, if you’re being abused at home by the people meant to be taking care of you, running away makes sense. The total dearth of youth shelters and services means that many runaways who can’t find adequate legal employment will decide that sex is something of value that they can offer in exchange for any number of things. Whether they offer it in a formal trade to adults willing to pay or continue to date people they otherwise wouldn’t in exchange for shelter, it’s uniformly designated as trafficking by US law, which simultaneously serves to inflate statistics and obscures the structures that create these problems. If you’re an underage person hiding from abusive family members in Portland, for example, you won’t be able to access any services until you’ve disclosed contact information for your family or guardian, who will then be contacted. Unsurprisingly, many young people bypass services here, preferring to stay on the streets or with anyone rather than return to their abusive families or guardians.

Given these unpalatable truths—and the reality that no conservatives want to spend the money to fund shelters and services for LGBT young adults—a new source of traffickers and trafficking victims had to be found. While the lack of funding for services for queer youth is a deliberate political choice in line with the religious values of the Bush administration, preexisting deeply held beliefs about women who sell sex or sexual services, old feminist canards about false consciousness, and political expediency all allow many more people in the political mainstream to accept unquestioningly the idea that no woman or young adult would willingly choose to trade sex under any circumstances outside of coercion. If that’s your starting point, it’s not a huge stretch to then frame anyone trading sex as trafficked, and the people around them as their traffickers, in line with the anti-sex work agenda shared by particular feminists and religious conservatives.

Which brings us to the lived reality of sex workers in the United States and why it’s such a huge deal that a prosecuting attorney and a district attorney have publicly announced that they will be prosecuting not only the parties buying or selling sex, but their roommates, boyfriends, parents, landlords, or anyone else around them. The United States federal minimum wage at the time of this writing is still $7.25 per hour, not enough to cover a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. While some cities have raised the minimum wage—for example, in Portland it’s $12 per hour—it’s never raised to what’s understood as a housing wage, a rate high enough that at full-time it will cover rent for an average one-bedroom with more than two-thirds left over. Millions of people are forced to work multiple jobs, scrambling to make ends meet, only one financial emergency away from disaster.

So what’s a body to do? When even full-time government jobs don’t pay enough to cover rent and groceries, where do you turn to close the gap? If paying for college is an option, do you try to go to college to expand your options? That’s not the route out of poverty it was for people born before 1980: college is leaving millions of people deeply in debt with minimal options to increase their wages, and in some states failure to pay your student loans on time will result in the revoking of the professional license you went to school to get. If paying for college isn’t an option, what then? Do you work eighty hours a week? What if that’s not possible? Or what if you simply don’t want to? The violence of poverty is compounded by the violence of being overworked, under-rested, and constantly stressed.

Sex work—the sale of sex or sexualized services like lap dances and sexual performances in person, online, or over the phone—offers another option. It’s not the get-rich-quick easy money that people believe: even the workers with the highest hourly rates live through stressful dry seasons when there simply aren’t clients knocking, while strip clubs illegally take large cuts of dancers’ money without paying a wage—a slow night can end with you leaving in debt to the club. Over the course of a series of slow nights or even a bad month, that debt can snowball to the point where it may not be worth returning to the club. It’s often hard and emotionally taxing work—and because it is work, it has the potential to be exploitative. A common refrain in the sex workers’ rights movement is sex work is not sex trafficking, which, while understandable, misses the point! But it does offer a flexible schedule and a range of prices for services that vary with the local sex economy but are always above minimum wage, and over time, even with dry spells, it can offer an income equivalent to, or higher than, a housing wage. It just makes sense. If you’re someone who doesn’t mind being physically intimate with strangers (and so many people do this for free!), why not get paid for it? To paraphrase the immortal words of Salt-N-Pepa, why not "use what you got to get whatever you don’t got"?

There are so many ways in which capitalism