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The Taxman and the Domina

It’s tax season! That makes me think of a story I found out about a few weeks ago involving a Domina and a silly man with a government job.

A tax collector from Secaucus, NJ named Alan Bartolozzi wired (maybe more than) $780,000 in taxpayer money to a Domina with addresses in 5 states. He wired money internationally too, but there isn’t any info out there on where… I imagine somewhere sunny. She featured the guy on her website, but it’s down. I am assuming he’s dressed up in sissy clothes or bent over with objects inside him based on my own experience with government workers, but I could be wrong.

The Week In Links: April 1st

AdultCon by the numbers

India has already blocked the new .XXX domain.

Time covers Vallejo, California’s attempts to eliminate street prostitution. (Naturally, street prostitution is a “plague.”)

A Las Vegas artist enlisted strangers to interact with sex toys made in her body image “in an effort to mimic the kinds of interactions that sex workers have with their clients.” Because sex workers are just like disembodied silicon body parts.

South Africa may soon see a reality TV show dedicated to finding the best porn star.

Antigua lawmakers refuse to even entertain the idea of legalizing prostitution. A-holes.

Canada’s Supreme Court, however, agreed to hear challenges to its prostitution laws. And a huge coalition formed in Quebec to advocate for sex worker rights.

Minnesota may pass a law that stops prosecuting minors for engaging in prostitution.

Sadly, another body has been found that seems to have been the victim of the (still at large) Long Island serial killer who targets prostitutes. Meanwhile, in the wake of finding the bodies of two (former?) prostitutes, Memphis police are denying that they have a serial killer on their hands.

Shoplifting Safety: How Civilians Deny The Consent of Sex Workers

Mary Mitchell. (Photo by Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times, via Mitchell's Twitter feed)
Mary Mitchell. (Photo by Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times, via Mitchell’s Twitter feed)

Content warning: this piece contains discussion of sexual violence.

You may have read the recent editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times, an opinion piece in which Mary Mitchell argues that sex workers who are raped by a client are making a mockery of “real” rape survivors by even considering what happened to them to be sexual assault. Luckily, the majority of commentators discussing the editorial see it for what it is: a blatantly discriminatory piece of rape apologism. While the actual piece itself has been critiqued by multiple different authors and websites, the question of how sex work, sexual assault, and consent are related is a frequent topic in the discourse around sex work and its legality. Rather than stopping at simply declaring Mary Mitchell to be a peculiarly regressive quasi-feminist, it may be more helpful to examine the ways Mitchell’s views are actually in line with how most non-sex workers see our ability to consent.

Mitchell’s piece is filled with questionable reasoning and a variety of anti-sex worker phrases. She makes sure to allude to a victim narrative by mentioning “pimps” and “trafficking” (neither of which were present in this crime), but at the same time wishes to hold sex workers accountable for our own sexual assaults. Even more strangely, her qualifications of what deserves to be called “rape” (you know, “rape-rape”) seem inconsistent. She wants us to know that she doesn’t think women are responsible for their own rape if they “dressed too provocatively or misled some randy guy,” but seems to think that a man threatening a woman with a gun for sex is somehow not really sexual assault. What’s important for her is that we sex workers put ourselves in a situation which will obviously lead to sex: we’ve already consented by agreeing to take money. “It’s tough to see this unidentified prostitute as a victim,” she writes, because it’s clear the sex worker was going to consent anyhow. What is the difference between financial stability and not being shot to death, anyways?

It would be nice if Mitchell were the only person who thought this way, but unfortunately, the world is full of people with similar opinions. I’ve heard too many men joke, “If you rape a hooker, is it rape or shoplifting?” to read this as an isolated incident. And surely enough, there is at least one recent case where officials have dismissed sexual assault charges when a sex worker is the victim. In fact, the judge in that scenario, Philadelphia’s Teresa Carr Deni, used the same exact arguments that Mitchell did: calling the sexual assault of sex workers rape demeans real rape victims; it is actually more a “theft of services” (a direct quote from both Mitchell and the judge, incidentally).

Rather than an opinion held by particularly vicious bigots, I think this is actually a belief held by most non-sex workers, including many of our clients. Sex workers, in the eyes of many, are just people who are particularly lascivious, who get into sex work because they are that into having sex with lots of people. Almost every sex worker I know has a story of a client who thought that after one or two times of meeting, the sex worker would be willing to stop taking payment for their work; clients habitually try to barter us down on the presumption that we must be getting our own payment (in terrible sex). Even people who purport to be allies might hold this view: a non-sex worker who had worked on campaigns for decriminalization once asked me as I was heading off to meet a john they thought was particularly dangerous, “What is the thrill?”

In this view, our entry into sex work is a sort of broad consent: we’ve consented to whatever a client might do to us simply by being in the life. Any ability to individually consent to one round of sex is swept away, let alone the ability to consent to certain acts and not others. This is especially true for sex workers whose demographics are already highly fetishized as “always up for it,” like trans women or black women, and especially sex workers in both those demographics.

The Week In Links—July 5th

Suzy Favor Hamilton in all her badass athletic glory (photo by Getty Images)
Former escort and college athlete Suzy Favor Hamilton in all her badass glory (photo by Getty Images)

The New York Times ran a substantial piece on the still-unsolved Long Island sex worker murders by Robert Kolker, author of a forthcoming book on the same subject.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric assassinated by a US drone strike in Yemen, “regularly visited high end prostitutes” — if you think 7 times over ten months counts as regularity. How wonderful that this is a topic of discussion, and not his status as a murdered US-born man not charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime. (Can anyone clarify what counts as “high end” in the eyes of mainstream media? The only requirement seems to be working indoors.)

Canada’s recent Supreme Court case has sparked a discussion about indigenous women’s (overrepresented) presence in the nation’s sex trade.

There’s been a bunch of brouhaha over a recent bust in Melbourne, from which we’ve learned that being an East Asian migrant sex worker equates to being exploited. Strangely enough, none of the 100 women “saved” have been interviewed.

A German straight male escort is profiled here, if you’re curious. Warning: link contains confessions.

Suzy Favor Hamilton continues to be punished for working as an escort; the Big Ten has stripped her name from their female Athlete of the Year award.

Irish Senator David Norris, our new hero, says “the deliberate blurring of the boundaries between trafficking and sex workers is wrong.”

What’s Trafficking Got To Do With It: The Media and the Cleveland Kidnappings

(Photo by the Edinburgh Eye)
(Photo by the Edinburgh Eye)

Last week in Cleveland, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry escaped from Ariel Castro’s “house of horrors”  where he imprisoned the women in a nightmare of rape and torture for almost a decade. Castro has been arraigned on four charges of kidnapping and three charges of rape. The courageous women escaped with the help of Charles Ramsey, a neighbor who broke into the home after hearing Berry’s screams. A charismatic man, Ramsey became an instant celebrity after declaring he knew “something was wrong” when he saw that a “pretty little white girl ran into the arms of a black man.”

Everything about the Cleveland kidnapping case—from Ramsey’s critique of race to the captive women’s histories of abuse—has stirred important conversations about domestic abuse, sexual abuse, police incompetence, and race. Unsurprisingly, for those of us who follow trafficking hysteria,  it’s also inspired a lot of talk about sex trafficking.