Dan Savage Article On Sex Work

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[URL]http://www.thestranger.com/savage-love/2016/08/30/24522723/savage-love[/URL]



The current line from prohibitionistsâ??people who want sex work to remain illegalâ??is that all women who sell sex are victims and all men who buy sex are monsters. But talk to actual sex workers and you hear about considerate, regular clients who are kind, respectful, and sometimes personally helpful in unexpected ways. (A sex worker friend had a regular client who was a dentist; he did some expensive dental work for my uninsured friendâ??and he did it for free, not for trade.) You also hear about clients who are threatening or violentâ??and how laws against sex work make it impossible for sex workers to go to the police, making them more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and abuse, not less.
There is a large and growing sex workers' rights movement, NAJ, which Emily Bazelon wrote about in a terrific cover story for the [I]New York Times Magazine[/I] ("Should Prostitution Be a Crime?" May 5, 2016). Bazelon spoke with scores of sex workers active in the growing and increasingly effective decriminalization movement. Amnesty International recently called for the full decriminalization of sex work, joining Human Rights Watch, the World Health Organization, and other large, mainstream health and human rights groups.
But there's something missing from the movement to decriminalize sex work: clients like you, NAJ.

Maggie McNeill, a sex worker, activist, and writer, wrote a blistering piece on her blog (The Honest Courtesan) about a recent undercover police operation in Seattle. Scores of men seeking to hire sex workersâ??the men ranged from surgeons to bus drivers to journalistsâ??were arrested and subjected to ritualized public humiliation designed to discourage other men from paying for sex.
"These crusades do nothing but hurt the most vulnerable individuals on both sides of the transaction," McNeill wrote. "The only way to stop this [is for] all of you clients out there get off of your duffs and fight. Regular clients outnumber full-time whores by at least 60 to 1; gentlemen, I suggest you rethink your current silence, unless you want to be the next one with your name and picture splashed across newspapers, TV screens, and websites."
The legal risks and social stigma attached to buying sex doubtless leave some clients feeling like they can't speak up and join the fight, and the much-touted "Nordic Model" is upping the legal stakes for buyers of sex. (The Nordic Model makes buying sex illegal, not selling it. In theory, only clients are supposed to suffer, but in practice, the women are punished, too. Bazelon unpacks the harms of the Nordic Model in her storyâ??please go read it.) But sex workers today, like gays and lesbians not too long ago, are coming out in ever-greater numbers to fight for their rights in the face of potentially dire legal and social consequences.
Clients need to join the fightâ??or perhaps I should say clients need to [I]rejoin[/I] the fight.
In [I]The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution[/I], which I read while I was away on vacation, author Faramerz Dabhoiwala writes about "Societies of Virtue" formed all over England in the late 17th century. Adulterers, fornicators, and Sabbath-breakers were persecuted by these groups, NAJ, but their campaigns against prostitutes were particularly vicious and indiscriminate; women were thrown in jail or publicly whipped for the crime of having a "lewd" appearance. The persecution of streetwalkers, brothel owners, and women guilty of "[walking] quietly about the street" went on for decades.
Then a beautiful thing happened.

"In the spring of 1711, a drive against 'loose women and their male followers' in Covent Garden was foiled when 'the constables were dreadfully maimed, and one mortally wounded, by ruffians aided by 40 soldiers of the guards, who entered into a combination to protect the women,'" writes Dabhoiwala. "On another occasion in the East End, a crowd of over a thousand seamen mobbed the local magistrates and forcibly released a group of convicted prostitutes being sent to a house of correction."
Male followers of loose women, soldiers of the guard, mobs of seamenâ??not altruists, but likely clients of the women they fought to defend. And thanks to their efforts and the efforts of 18th-century sex workers who lawyered up, marched into court, and sued the pants off Society of Virtue members, by the middle of the 18th century, women could walk the streets without being arrested or harassedâ??even women known to be prostitutes.
I'm not suggesting that today's clients form mobs and attack prohibitionists, cops, prosecutors, and their enablers in the media. But clients can and should be out there speaking up in defense of sex workers and themselves. Sex workers are speaking up and fighting backâ??on Twitter and other social-media platforms, sometimes anonymously, but increasingly under their own namesâ??and they're staring down the stigma, the shame, and the law on their own. It's time for their clients to join them in the fight.