By bae_blade
Three years ago I was supporting myself primarily through sex work. Up until that point I had been comfortably pulling 35k and was able to invest most of my time in creative and academic pursuits. I was happy, and through the support of other hoes I had the knowledge to keep myself safe.
In 2015, NYC prosecutors arrested the founders of Rentboy.com in their New York office under conspiracy to promote prostitution. Around the same time other sex worker sites like RedBook saw their founders arrested in their homes, and California began a lawsuit to try and shutdown the massage and personals section of Backpage website.
With Rentboy suddenly defunct I found myself scrambling to find new sources of income. I started looking for more official employment, but still had to trade sex in the meantime. Craigslist and Adam4Adam became my primary means of finding clients.
Rentboy’s main “john” demographic seemed to be traveling business men, which were my favorite because I found them to be relatively safe. For one, they were never in town long, and not having the client live in the same city as you makes it much less likely that they can stalk you. I also had a lot more tricks in hotels as opposed to private residences. Hotels are my favorite place to meet clients because they are a lot less private than somebody’s house or car. If you communicate which hotel you’re going to with a trusted friend, there’s security footage of you going up to the client’s room, which you can use as leverage if they try to kidnap or murder you.
Once I met somebody at a motel in the Bronx, and I was getting really bad vibes from him. He was a completely different person from the pictures he had sent and he wouldn’t show me the money we had agreed on. He was intimidatingly large and when I tried to leave he blocked the door. I said “Listen, my friends have access to my (Rentboy) account and they know I’m at this hotel and in this room. If anything happens to me tonight I promise you won’t get far.” He looked pissed but he did let me leave. Initially he had offered to pick me up in a car (which was a van) and if I had agreed to that I would’ve had a lot less control over the situation.
Rentboy and other escorting sites gave you one extra step of negotiation between you and the client, and that extra step can make all the difference for your safety. If you’re trading sex try to always share your location with someone, and if you have someone you trust, give them passwords to your accounts.
Craigslist was a little different from Rentboy. My ads were constantly getting flagged for removal by God knows who, so it was nowhere near as reliable income wise. Exchanges happening via email instead of via phone calls (which was the usual for Rentboy) were a huge disadvantage. Having to negotiate via email left me open to people contacting me through temporary email accounts and stringing me along. At least via phone I could tell if somebody was using something like a google voice number, and that made it more difficult for trolls to mess with you. Through email, however, there’s never any way to know exactly who you’re talking to. I got countless fake addresses, and was sent on many wild goose chases.
Since Rentboy was taken down suddenly overnight, and having changed phones multiple times, I found myself without access to the majority of my original client list that was on the Rentboy website. The pay was almost double what I was making on Craigslist, so I started to accept jobs I would have otherwise refused—just to keep up. I found myself doing things I wasn’t completely comfortable with, and spending time with a lot of meth users—a habit I eventually picked up myself. By the time I started receiving requests for job interviews, I had been assaulted in ways that required time to heal, and I was using drugs to the extent that I was unhirable. I wasn’t the only one either, a lot of other hoes in my circle struggled similarly with the sudden disappearance of their primary income. However, despite this sudden drop in my quality of life, Craiglist is still by a wide margin safer than trading sex on the street.
Yet as of last week, sex workers won’t even have Craigslist as a resource to find clients, as the FOSTA Bill has called for the removal of all personals and sex trading sites which will affect the safety of whores all across the nation. A lot more sex workers are going to have to return to working on the streets, in bars, and under the discretion of abusive pimps. Despite its deceiving name, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act will be a gift to people who are in the business of human trafficking.
FOSTA only targets prostitutes NOT human traffickers (which unfortunately in legal terms are not distinct from one another). Pushing whores back out on the street means somebody can quickly stuff you into a van when no one is looking. In a bar somebody can drug you and take you away when it appears you’ve had too much to drink. You’re more likely to have to get in a client’s car, in which you can quickly find yourself at the mercy of a driver with no chance of getting help.
When client-worker negotiations must all happen in person and in relative secrecy, the client has a lot more room to negotiate and push boundaries. Using a website allows you a barrier in which you at least have a chance to feel a person out. You can see if what they tell you online adds up when you meet them in person, and then make an informed decision on whether or not you want to move forward. You can see if they keep dodging direct answers to your questions when you’re trying to set things up. You are more protected by there being an extra step to accessing you. To a ridiculous extent FOSTA favors johns, abusers and MF HUMAN TRAFFICKERS. It almost seems as if lawmakers in DC want sex workers to be more vulnerable, and have less agency. Senators and congressmen would certainly benefit from there being less of a paper trail when it comes to hiring escorts.
In 2007, the DC Madame or Deborah Jeane Palfrey was indicted on money laundering, illegal mail use, and prostitution-related racketeering charges. During the court proceedings she handed over 10,000 names from her client list in the Washington DC area. She was scheduled to appear on ABC in which leading up to the interview reporter Brian Ross had teased a few names on the list, which resulted in the resignation of then Republican senator David Vitter, Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias and adviser to the Pentagon, Harlan Ullman. Days before the ABC interview she was found in apparent suicide behind her mother’s house.
If the DC madam scandal, and the ongoing Stormy Daniels drama tells us anything, it is that sex work is an issue closer to members of the United States government and men in power than they want to be known. Sex workers having greater safety, agency, and credibility is a direct threat to the careers of “family values” oriented politicians in DC. Sex worker rights are an issue that to the public may appear obscure but involves members of the government at every level #yoursenatorisajohn. We are some of the most hated and silenced voices because of the truths we know. One of the aims of the FOSTA act is to create silence, and its repercussions will be felt by more than just sex workers.
Shortly after Craigslist personals were shutdown Reddit changed its user policies and banned subreddits r/Escorts, r/MaleEscorts, r/Hookers, and r/SugarDaddy. It’s only a matter of time before backpage goes down, as well as every other website facilitating escorting. Even apps and websites that don’t explicitly facilitate sex work could come under fire. What gay dating apps are there not sex workers on? FOSTA is intentionally vague and could be used to target any website or web based application that “facilitate human trafficking.”
No, they probably won’t shut down Grindr immediately, because the gay stream would probably take actual/meaningful political action, but under FOSTA the legal potential exists. It’s so vague that really no social media site is off the table. There are more instances of human trafficking occurring on Facebook than there are on Backpage. Such as Justin Strom who in 2012 used Facebook and Myspace to create the largest teenage human trafficking ring in Washington’s history. These social media giants will not be targeted, however, because at the end of the day this is about punishing prostitutes—not preventing human trafficking.
If the government was actually interested in pursuing human traffickers they would leave services like Rentboy in tact. They would push for legalization or at least the decriminalization of sex work. This would allow sex workers to share information about potential human trafficking networks without fear of criminal prosecution. Sex workers are the most likely to come in contact with human trafficking networks, so creating a situation where we cannot speak out against them only creates more victims.
FOSTA could seriously impact queer movements. Statistics show over half of all trans women of color have escorted at some point or another, and this new legislation will further destabilize the most marginalized of any demographic by removing what little safety and opportunity trans women could find escorting online. Seeing as trans women face constant street harassment and violence, forcing sex work to occur on the street is obviously going to impact the community negatively. Given the prominence of sex work as a tool of survival in queer and trans communities—having fewer people in the community able to rise out of survival economies and participate in political discourse only hurts us.
Who’s to say this won’t simply be used as an excuse to target queer digital resources, and silence powerful voices? Willful ignorance and sly wording could be used to target artists and people outside of the mainstream sexual politic. People have been getting banned for posting explicit content for years, and in the future that content could come with criminal liabilities. Ultimately all of this is a step towards greater censorship and digital policing.
White supremacy recognizes the power of the internet in the the struggle against empire. It saw movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy make use of digital communications to great effect on the ground, create international solidarities, and conversations around race and gender became impossible to silence. When I find myself in the company of youth, I see that sharing our stories unfiltered by traditional media outlets has had an effect.
It is clear with movements like Youth Against Gun Violence, that this new generation has heard many of our stories, and adopted the parts of our politics that speak to them, and this terrifies those who wish to cling to archaic powers. The right and white supremacists know that in the realm of civil discourse they cannot suppress our truths with their gaslight indefinitely, so now they are attempting to remove our voices from the conversation entirely.
bae_blade is concerned with issues of racial and gender equity, sexual liberation/health/education, and anticapitalist system change.
