Dear Everyone;
Jon Carroll has a very nice column about sex workers and Scarlot Harlot aka Carol Leigh who is a sex worker going back some 35 years and who is credited with creating the words sex workers. Interesting reading which should be of interest to a few of our yahoo group readers.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/07/20/DDGKOR2RGA1.DTL
JON CARROLL
Friday, July 20, 2007
Scarlot Harlot (real name: Carol Leigh) looks a lot like your grandmother, if your grandmother had bright orange hair and a blouse so loud it could set off car alarms two blocks away. She's been an activist for the rights of sex workers for 35 years, and for part of that time she was also a sex worker herself. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary credits her with coining the term "sex worker." She's involved in a large number of organizations, including BAYSWAN (Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network), SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Project) and, most relevantly for this discussion, the Sex Workers Film & Arts Festival, which ends Sunday.
All sorts of details at sexworkerfest.com. You might want to try one of Sunday's offerings, a three-hour bicycle event described as a "cultural tour of San Francisco's sex industry featuring live, costumed performers." Or, that evening, you could venture out to the Lick My Kitty cabaret, featuring performance artists in what one can only assume is a wide variety of genres. Or both! God, I love San Francisco!
Lots of people disapprove of sex workers, and Carol Leigh disapproves of people who disapprove of sex workers. "I think they need to talk to some sex workers first. I think they need to hear from the men and women who do the work, as opposed to the people who want to stigmatize the people who do the work."
I talked with her for an hour at an outdoor Oakland cafe, an amusing conversation punctuated by wandering garbage trucks (with drivers leaning out the window and yelling at passers-by, "Where's Wellington? Where's Leimert?") and a fabulously dramatic house fire that brought two hook-and-ladder crews and five cop cars and was put out in less than 15 minutes. So I'm going to paraphrase a lot here, because some of the specific quotes were lost in the ruckus, and saying, "What? What?" got to be too tedious. Also, when she gets up a head of steam, Carol Leigh can do 120 words a minute without breaking a sweat.
On trafficking: She says that the stigmatization of sex work has hindered, not helped, the fight against traffickers, that is, people who force young women (mostly) to work in the sex industry against their wills. "It's part of the entire immigration problem" because undocumented workers in a wide variety of jobs are required to work long hours for low pay with no legal recourse. Massage parlor work is a "continuum." Leigh: "I worked in a massage parlor, and it was a good job, much better than the strip clubs, where you are always being pressured to give free sexual favors to the managers, where you even had to pay to go onstage."
(It's true -- this is me here -- that harsh enforcement of immigration laws in fact protects the exploiters because it ensures the silence of the victims.)
More generally, said Leigh, "sexual control is part of social control." She said sex workers learn very quickly about hypocrisy, about how the same people who seek to criminalize sex work also patronize sex workers. "You have to have a sense of humor about it," she said. "Sex workers get a pretty good view of society as it really is."
As to whether sex workers are exploited, Leigh says: "A lot of prostitutes enjoy their work. That's taboo to say, but it's true. Dominatrices, for instance -- they almost all just love what they do. We're in the entertainment business, so sometimes we have to have a smile on our faces when we're not feeling happy, or we have to go to work when we feel bad, but who doesn't?"
She wants to reach out to sex workers who are unaware of their rights or afraid to seek medical help for fear of prosecution or just plain shame. The St. James Infirmary (named after Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE -- Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics -- and the George Washington of the sex worker movement) offers free confidential medical and social services for sex workers.
"The concept we have is harm reduction." Sex worker activists are advocating a less dangerous and less repressive world -- and who could be against that? They contend that anti-prostitution laws just hurt prostitutes, a group that is already marginalized and demonized.
"We understand that people have a problem with what we do. We want to start a dialogue with those people." It's the world's oldest profession, according to popular lore; if the women in the business think that it's about more than male lust, then maybe other people, particularly the people making the laws and writing the letters to the newspapers, should at least hear the other side.
Besides, a bicycle tour is good aerobic exercise.
There is malum in se and malum prohibitum, and the trick is always figuring out which is which. Whores know that.
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