Stop Tolerating Sexual Assault- Decriminalise Sex Work Now

On the day the person who raped and murdered his wife was sentenced, Tom Meagher said, "I'm aware his previous victims in previous cases before Jill were sex workers, and I'll never be convinced that doesn't have something to do with the lenience of his [earlier] sentence." (at 4:33 in the video)

Adrian Bayley was previously convicted of 16 charges of sexual assault against 5 victims.  He served less than half the maximum sentence for one when he was on parole- and free to attack Jill Meagher. 

"It sends a disturbing message.  What it says to women is if we don't like what you do, you won't get justice. And what it says to people like Bayley is not 'don't rape', but 'be careful who you rape'."

There’s no denying that I, along with many of my fellow sex workers, were very moved by this sentiment.  This is the first time I’ve heard a member of the public articulate the impact of the prejudice that we suffer on their lives.  And for his respect and his compassion during what obviously has been a very distressing time, I say thank you.   

It’s clear.  The more we de-legitimise sex work and exclude sex workers, the more we accept sexual assault, misogyny and degradation as a part of our community. 

The light sentence Bayley received is merely the tip of massive iceberg of whorephobia entrenched in the practice of policy and underpinned by moralistic community attitudes. 

5 victims of sexual assault.  How did you think it was for these sex workers? Do you think the immediate thought that these people had after being violated was, 'I must go to the police'?  These are workers who avoid the authorities on a daily basis- if the role of the police is to prosecute them- routinely initiating operations that threaten their freedom and livelihood, how can police effectively protect sex workers?

Dig a bit deeper; these were 5 people that came forward.  How many more would there be out there that didn’t? We know that sexual assault is underreported in the general community- it's horrific to think of the number of people- including sex workers- that were possibly targeted by people like Bayley.

Turn towards the justice system- we know in our community that the Victims of Crime Compensation sex workers receive is significantly reduced if we continue to work.  This is reduced even further if the victim has been previously convicted of a violent crime. A victim of crime is a victim of crime- it shouldn't matter what their job is or what's in their history. 

We should be furious. Meagher probably doesn't know how true his words are, " What it says to women is if we don't like what you do, you won't get justice. "

Street based sex workers are human beings- they deserve the rights and protections that we all enjoy.  It will not help them if we continue to perceive them as victims or desperate.  If we infantilise them and undermine the perception  of their agency- we perpetuate the idea that what they are different to the broader community.  If we exclude and marginalise them then what we are doing is serving them up to perpetrators of violent crime. 

What’s sickening is the reaction from sex work abolitionists. 

Kathleen Malthzahn was quick to jump on Meagher’s words to push her own agenda. 

In her article appearing in the Guardian, Maltzahn calls for “adequately resource specialist organisations that support women subjected to violence in the sex industry,” a poorly veiled appeal for money for the organisation she founded, Project Respect.  (Or as it has become known as amongst the sex work community, Project DisRespect)

Until recently, the organisation had among its aims, “the  promotion of policies and practices that reduce the conditions which cause the sex industry to thrive.” Perhaps this was changed after it was embarrassingly pointed out to executive director KellyHinton while on air on ABC radio (skip to 26:39) that this runs contrary to their other aim of “supporting and sustaining the wellbeing of women in the industry.” 

What’s clear from its history, its founder, its persistent masquerading as an authority with the prerogative of speaking on behalf of sex workers is that Project Respect is anti- sex work.  They don’t believe in the legitimacy of our work- they just want to rescue the poor sex workers. 

Sex workers don’t need another hero.  

If we experience violence in our workplace there are already mechanisms in place that should appropriately respond to such cases. And if there’s any justice in the world it’s the same service that you would call if you experienced violence in your own workplace- to say we should be treated differently just furthers discrimination against us. 

If we are interested in protecting sex workers in illegal settings from the experience of violence then the first step is the decriminalisation of all sex work.  As we’ve seen in New Zealand, sex workers feel more enabled to access legal recourse in instances of violence.

We don’t need to fund another rescue organisation.  Abolitionsinsts are forever on a crusade to reduce the needs of sex workers to responding to "violence against women." Well guess what?- We're not just women. While violence may be a challenge faced by some sex workers, there is a plethora of other stuff that we struggle with.  If you want to dedicate resources to improving the lives and  working conditions of sex workers then fund sex worker organisation. 

In 1987, Melbourne was the first place in the world to see an organisation of sex workers receive government funding. Through mergers and acquisitions in the community sector, the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria was replaced with a service that was no longer made up of sex workers. It has been more than 10 years since a funded peer based organisation has existed in our state. Maybe it's unsurprising that I was probably the only person who paid tribute to the hard work of sex workers who had come before me.

It’s not like sex workers are incapable of speaking- how about you as a community be more capable of listening?

Sex workers are just like you, regardless of the way we work.  Look around you.  I can guarantee there are sex workers in your life. And if you think that you'll never hear from someone who was a drug dependant street based sex worker- you just finished read reading an article written by him.   

A Comment Mamamia Wouldn't Publish

So in the last week somewhat of a blog war broke out between Brooke Magnanti and Mia Freedman after they both appeared on ABC's Q&A on Monday the 8th of April.

Magnanti asked, "Should Mia Freedman Apologise...?" and Freedman had posted "No, I won't..."  and supporters and detractors have aired their opinions across the internet.  When I attempted to post the comment below on Freedman's site it disappeared. An editor's note appeared later claiming that "Any comments overly personal in nature towards Mia Freedman or Brooke Magnanti will be deleted." People who know me, know that I don't take to being silenced submissively, so I'm publishing it here.  Is this too personal? I'll let you be the judge.

I'm not going to ask Mia Freedman to apologise. 

Instead, I am going to share a story because I was in the similar situation to her- except rather than being the parent (I don't have any children) I was the one who heard my mother say something like what she broadcast over national television. 

When I was little- perhaps I was around the same age as her child, seven- I overheard my mother say something like, "I wouldn't want my son to be gay." Which was fine at the time, I was really young, my sexuality hadn't dawned on me. I could just put it down as an attitude my mother had just like many others that had no bearing on me at the time.  

But then I grew up and things changed.  I realised I was queer. And one of the most devastating things for me was the sudden realisation that I would possibly no longer have the support of my mother. I questioned whether she would be there for me if I needed help or if she would ever understand what I was going through as a teenager. These are sad burdens to carry as a 14 year old.  

The weight was much more than that.  I realised that the lack of acceptance I could expect from my mother was the tip of a very big iceberg of rejection that existed in the world.  The ideal of "unconditional love" had been forever shattered for me.  My identity as a young person- a queer person- became confusing and my life, chaotic.  Some people use the word that Mia does in her article, "appalling".  

This is the experience of sex workers everyday.  People wonder why many of us hide- it's the judgments Mia made- judgements she gives other mothers and people permission to make (and if you'd like to read this judgement one doesn't have to look beyond the comments some of her readers have made on her post)- that keep many of us silent. It is this silence that isolates family members from each other is the same silence that prevents sex workers seeking recourse if they have been assaulted, discriminated against or otherwise need help.

As a fellow writer/broadcaster, I feel I have a responsibility to not perpetuate prejudice- but perhaps that is a value that I hold and Mia Freedman doesn't given our different backgrounds.   

Years later, I have made peace with it all.  I am on speaking terms with my parents again and they accept who I am- but I had to reach an age and a strength where they had no choice in the matter- if they weren't going to accept me, I could turn around just as easily and not accept them. 

 And I am a sex worker. They had had to accept that too. 

 I'm not going to ask any mother for expressing their prejudice to apologise for two reasons- 

1) I feel sorry for them and their children because
2) the people their judgement is going to have the most profound impact on is not me but those children. 

The question of whether a parent wants their child to be a sex worker or not is irrelevent.  The issue is that parents who act in the way Mia Freedman does have sent a clear signal- if your children are ever to become sex workers they cannot rely upon you for support and, as someone who knows what that is like, it can be a hard and sad place to be. 

And here is where I feel most proud of people in my community who are parents.  These are rare and special creatures.  These are the minority of parents who are equipped with the knowledge and experience that could support a son or daughter who has chosen to do sex work. This is a support I could have only dreamed of when I grew up.  

PS: the use of the word "sex worker" is not a mere preference.  It's use is identified by Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS,  as best practice to ensure scientific accuracy, the preservation of human rights and respect for minority populations.  As a supposedly professional writer, one should become familiar with these international standards.

The terminology guide can be found here: 
http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/unaidspublication/2011/JC2118_terminology-guidelines_en.pdf    

How To Date A Sex Worker

The following text was originally published as a zine.  I had the pleasure of speaking to the writer of these words on The Vixen Hour. There are scant resources for the partners of sex workers so I am very grateful that someone has made this effort and shared his story. It's with his permission that I am able to share these words with you.  

My girlfriend is a sex worker, and I love her deeply.

This article is intended to be a resource for people in or considering a relationship with a sex worker, with advice on the more common difficulties that come up. (Stuff I would have liked to have been told back when I started dating my girlfriend, basically, and couldn't find any advice on the subject.) Most of what's written here translates into relationships of other genders and orientations, but because I'm writing from my own experience, the advice contained here will be primarily directed towards heterosexual cisgender men. 

I hope it helps someone get the love they deserve.

1. Talk about it.

This is crucial. A lot of guys, when put in the situation of their partner/crush informing them that they do sex work, will instinctively reach towards some agreement like, “Well … okay ... you can do that, just never mention it to me.” This way lies madness. You'll build the sex work up in your head into something far worse than what it is – which is a job – and give your jealousy a virtually infinite amount of tawdry ammunition to work with. Talking about it will probably be awkward at first, but talk about it anyway. When you're able to discuss her day at work openly, it loses its power over your ego. The unspoken always hurts us more than what's said aloud.

(Note: lots of sex workers might not be immediately keen to volunteer information about their work. Based on prior experience, they may assume that you won't be able to handle it, and frankly, most of the time they'll be right. It will probably be up to you to ask.)

2. If you feel insecure, don't hide it – work through it.

If you've never been in a situation where your partner having sex with someone else isn't cause for IMMEDIATE BETRAYAL-PANIC, feeling jealous (or at least a bit unnerved) is to be expected. Sex is an intimate thing, and there's a panicked little voice in the back of all of our minds that worries that if your partner has sex with other men, even in the most detached way, she'll never be 'fully with you'. That panicked little voice is an idiot. A sex worker can be a fully committed part of a deeply loving relationship – you just need to make sure that your insecurities allow her to be.

Sex workers who've tried to have relationships often have stories about guys who swore that they were fine with her job, only to have it surface later in much uglier ways (i.e. endlessly putting off having her meet their family, or suddenly calling her a “whore” during an argument). Don't be that guy. Don't lie to her, and don't lie to yourself. Jealousy is natural, but it's also conquerable. The most important thing is that you don't pretend that you're okay with it when you're not.

This is the hard part. The internal part. Our culture tells us so much damaging bullshit about sex workers, but do everything you can to block it out. Instead, try and focus on these four basic, golden, obvious truths:

1. What other men have to pay tons of money for, she shares with you for free.
   
   
2. Not even having sex with those other men – some of whom can be pretty unpleasant – puts her off wanting to be with you.
   
   
3. Work-sex is a performance. With you, she gets to be herself – animated and vulnerable in a way that she would simply never be at work.
   
   
4. She didn't choose to be with those guys. She chose you.

Keep those four things in mind, and the prospect of dating a sex worker becomes the exact opposite of emasculating. Even though there are all these men who pay to have just a brief experience of (heavily mediated) intimacy with her, it's you that she wants to share something real with. It's you that she chose. 

Don't make her regret it.

3. You shouldn't need her job to suck.

A lot of sex workers love their jobs, and will  have some really great, enjoyable sexual experiences there.

This is not a threat to you.

If a client turns out to have been a really amazing lover, you should just be glad that she had a good day at work – the same as you would if she were a teacher, waitress or CEO. If you require her to hide whenever she's had a great time at work, purely to satisfy your insecurity, it's going to drive a wedge between you. When she feels like she can speak openly about her experiences at work (the good stuff and the bad), it will bond you closer.

4. Respect her boundaries.

Crucial advice for any relationship! But particularly so with a sex worker. The 'playing a role' aspect of sex work can be disassociating, and as her partner, part of your role is to know how to make her feel like herself again. Sometimes this might mean giving her time as she adjusts from one sexual environment to another; sometimes this might mean backseating your desires. The idea that sex workers do not have the right to refuse sex is one of the most damaging aspects of the cultural bigotry surrounding them. Everyone has the right to refuse sex. Respecting boundaries doesn't end there, but it's a necessary first step, before any others may be taken.

5. Don't tell other people she's a sex worker without permission.

A minority of sex workers are completely 'out' to everyone they meet, but most are somewhere on a spectrum between 'my friends know' and 'you're the first person in my real life I've told'. It is not up to you to decide who else gets to know. In certain circles, telling people that you're dating a sex worker might get you appreciative gasps of shock, a smattering of activist/feminist cred – whatever, it doesn't matter. It's her choice who she lets know what she does. 

(And none of that “telling someone but making them swear they won't tell anyone else” bullshit. What was true in primary school is true now: when you do that, it gives implicit permission for the person you told to do the exact same thing you just did – that is: tell one other person – and before you know it, everyone knows and you no longer have a girlfriend.)

The ideal thing would be if our whole society grew the fuck up and let sex work be seen as a regular, respectable profession, but we're a long way from that. Pressuring her to be more 'out' than she's comfortable with is exactly as bad as pressuring her to hide her profession more than she wants to. These are her decisions, and you need to respect them.

6. Don't tell her to stop.

When she's had a bad day at work – the clients were annoying, one guy's dick was uncomfortably big, she forgot her lip balm, et cetera – the correct response is not “You should quit.” Everyone has bad days at work sometimes, and it's wrong to use those days as evidence that she should stop working, when bad days are accepted as inevitable in other professions.

There's a tendency in some guys to try and 'save' women from sex work, which is a devastatingly condescending attitude when the work is freely chosen. If the respect you have for a person doesn't include room for their autonomy, that isn't real respect. (This is why “I respect you too much to let you do this kind of work” is a bullshit, paradoxical position. “Let”?) As with #5, the important thing is to respect her capacity to make decisions about her own life.

7. Be on her team.

If you're anything like me, after you start dating a sex worker you'll start to notice disparaging comments made about them everywhere. All of the fashion advice that's based on not looking like a streetwalker; all of the jokes that treat 'dead hooker in the trunk' as an amusingly incidental consequence of a wild night out. Small signals that you don't accept the ignorant and destructive premise of shit like this – even if it's just squeezing her hand when someone in a movie says something stupid – can make her feel a little less attacked by them. It's a way of showing that you're on her team: of affirming her humanity in the face of a culture that frequently seems intent on taking it away. This is a small, important thing.

8. Listen to what she tells you.

There are lots of different kinds of sex work, and a variety of perspectives and needs held by those that do it. This article was written from my own experience, and it's limited by that. If a sex worker tells you that she's uncomfortable with something because of an experience she had at work, listen to her. If she tells you she loves her job anyway, listen to her. If she tells you to never call her by her work-name (even playfully, because it's a really important way she demarcates between her work and the rest of her life), listen to her. If she tells you that a particular piece of the advice I've given here doesn't apply for her, for fuck's sake listen to her.

There's a lot to unlearn around this stuff, and it hides in the language we use. Sex workers don't 'sell their bodies'; they sell an experience to lonely guys that need it. Their bodies remain their own. We have this received notion that because a sex worker has sex with their clients, they're somehow 'spent' – unavailable to a boyfriend in some crucial and irredeemable way. It's not true, any more than it's true that kindergarten teachers ignore their own children.

The truth is harder to face. The truth is that what most often blocks relationships between men and sex workers is men – our insecurities, jealousies, and need to own the people we love. If you work on yourself and are honest about your needs, there's no reason that your partner doing sex work needs to be an issue. (Honestly, the only times it's still weird that my girlfriend's a sex worker are when we're forced to conceal it in front of people who'd judge her.) The problem isn't that sex workers are incapable of devoted love, but that our masculinity is too scared and anxious to accept that love. The problem isn't sex workers, but the culture that degrades and dehumanises them.

Changing that culture begins with changing ourselves. Go for it.

by anonymous, because #5

Headlines that Perpetuate the Stigma of Sex Work

Stigmatising, derogatory, misleading, the media reporting of sex work is often more about shocking the audience than being accurate and respectful towards sex workers.   

These are all real headlines from the last few years.  

They come from a diverse rage of media outlets.  

This list is by no means comprehensive; it is a snapshot of the how the media perpetuates the stigma against sex workers.  

Part of show 3 of the Vixen Hour on JOY 94.9, 11pm on 21/01/2013

The Vixen Hour in MCV

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Exploring the Curiosity Around Sex Work: a Vixen Hour Vox Pop

The Vixen Hour is a radio program that is entirely produced and presented by sex workers and broadcast on JOY 94.9.

On our first show we discussed why sex workers were putting together a radio show. Part of this was acknowledging the many unanswered questions people have about sex work.

This vox pop is a compilation of responses that contributors made when asked the question, "If you could sit down and ask a sex worker a question, what would it be?"

A big special thank you to all the volunteers at JOY 94.9 who took part.

This vox pop was discussed as part of the Vixen Hour that was broadcast on the 7th of January, 2013.  You can listen to the whole show here.