No one is owed consequence-free hiring of sex workers, not when sex workers themselves labor under some of the most hostile conditions imaginable. And the idea that the outed man should be allowed to do what he wants with whatever other adult he wants? That, basically, adults should be able to carry out victim-less actions to improve their own lives? It would be really amazing if such a vociferous commitment to that notion were in evidence when credit card companies are furthering endangering sex workers’ livelihoods and safety, TV shows are treating sex workers’ precarious safety as entertainment, or when men brutally murder sex workers with impunity because they know this is a class of people who are not publicly valued.
—Former T&S co-editor Charlotte Shane on the misguided outrage concerning Gawker’s now-pulled story about Condé Nast’s CFO’s hiring of a male escort.
Why is there outcry against this but not against this but not against publishing every single man arrested for solicitation, largely working class black and brown men, in Chicago, things like johns day of arrests, and other public shame techniques?
I feel like the Conde-Nast thing is a bit of a shitstorm because of a few factors.
People feel like the “perpetrator” is a person of means, so therefore it’s OK to attack. People are suspicious of “the press” and think that there is a constant effort to doctor the news. This connects with that fear. And of course the man is gay or has male-male sex interests of some kind.
Those three together and we get cryptohomophobia, puritanical sexwork freakout, and political axes de jour in a nice melange.