A favorite photo of mine from when I was in Buenos Aires.  That city has sex work ad cards all over the place, like you would see in Las Vegas.

Yesterday, Argentina's president Cristina Fernandez banned sex work ads in print, supposedly to combat sex trafficking.  Fernandez is Argentina's former first lady who succeeded her husband to the presidency, and is the country's first elected female president.  She drew criticism as a senator for having unfair influence through her husband's office as the president, and her most commonly mentioned personality traits are her love of fashion and being unable to handle criticism.

With an election coming up in October, people are asking questions about whether her true motive on banning the adult ads is simply to take advertising dollars away from newspapers who don't favor her.  This could be another sad case of sex workers getting caught in the middle, and bearing the dangerous fallout, of other people's political ambitions.

Highlights from the Rueter's article for those of you short on time:

Argentina's government is banning prostitution ads in newspapers and other mass media as of Friday, saying it is combatting violence against women.

[...]

But some of the president's opponents fear it may be used to punish opposition media this election year by removing an independent source of revenue for an industry that in many cases depends on official advertising, a flow of revenue that press freedom groups say has been unequally directed toward the government's supporters.

[...]

Fernandez specifically took aim at the newspaper Clarin, a frequent antagonist. She cited the opposition paper's Area 59 section as particularly unethical. Area 59 has included columns of ads for escorts, "gym teachers" ''massage therapists" and "underwear models" offering "pleasures without limits." Until now.

[...]

In Argentina, most media organizations are aligned either with the Fernandez government or its opposition. Many on both sides have run solicitations for sexual encounters. But Grupo Clarin's conglomerate of newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, internet providers and web sites may have the most to lose.

Marketing director Emiliano Szlaien of the LectorGlobal media research firm estimated the ban could cost the Grupo Clarin $5 million.

It's somewhat strange for me to be talking about forced trafficking so much lately, because while I do care about how anti-trafficking organizations hurt consensual adult sex workers and ignore genuine victims, and have read much more on the subject that most other people, I will be the first to tell you that I am no forced trafficking expert.  My only real blog post about trafficking is advocating that people seek out better sources for information.  After a couple of weeks of peeking at the Twitter feed of Ashton Kutcher's fans talking about trafficking, it's very clear that most people lobbing opinions on the subject (and angrily contacting their elected officials) know nothing beyond sensationalist crusades led by celebrities, covered by media outlets who gussy up the story to be as dramatic and upsetting as possible.  I might not be an expert, but I certainly have a more informed opinion than most other people publicly blathering about the subject.

I need help in creating an important resource that does not seem to exist yet.  Unlike the mainstream anti-trafficking and anti-sex work groups that view all males as probably drooling for a chance to rape a child sex slave, I want SWAAY to show real consideration and appreciation of clients who strive to be ethical.  I think the American sex workers' rights movement is missing out by neglecting to court clients as allies or consider them potential supporters.

For one, I am still still seeking short pieces of advice from current and former sex workers on how clients can be respectful and ethical towards us.  I am hugely disappointed that after a month of the site being live, not a single sex worker has submitted a suggestion for how clients can treat them better.  (Admittedly, I am limiting my scope to sex workers who have worked in the US and are willing to post a photo of themselves.  But I personally know oodles of sex workers who show their face online, and they've not shown any interest in reaching out to clients through this part of the site, despite my mentioning it regularly.)  We all tweet and blog gripes when clients do something that pisses us off or violates our boundaries, but there's almost nothing written about how to not be that douchebag who gets ranted about.  Let's do something positive and help people understand how we do want to be treated.  What seems like common sense to us can be a confusing and vague world to others.

Secondly, since I have not seen such a resource anywhere yet, I'd like to add information specifically for clients of sex workers who might be concerned about seeing an underage prostitute or someone who is being abused.  Clients are in a better position than celebrities, NGOs, and even sex workers to locate and report potential victims of exploitation.  Yet, I don't believe I've ever seen anything from the sex workers' rights movement targeted at clients to give them information about how they might attempt to identify and report suspected forced trafficking, abuse, or underage victims.  The short answer is "call the police from a payphone in an area without security cameras," but that's not good enough.

The DNA Foundation, as well as other anti-sex work anti-trafficking organizations, have their own hotline for people to call to report abuse.  (I sincerely wonder what kinds of calls those numbers get if the organizations running them train people to consider all sex workers as victims who need saving.  "Hello, Mr Kutcher!  This is Bob in San Franciso.  I wanted to report a strip club I saw, which no doubt filled with trafficked slaves.  Am I hero now?")  Does anyone on "our team" have a phone number people can call?

I do hesitate to tell people to phone the police.  What if a well-meaning client triggers a raid on an area of prostitution (like an hourly motel) and ends up just getting a lot of hard-up people arrested who are not victims?  What if the police do indeed find a 16-year-old engaging in prostitution, arrest them, and ship them back to an abusive family from which they escaped and are desperate to never see again?  There's no easy solution, especially since "rescue" means arrest first, ask questions later, and can mean sending people into more abusive situations.  (As someone who was kicked out shortly before turning 16, yet never engaged in sex work at the time, I know that I would have been fucking livid if someone had tried to "help" me by involving the police.  I might not have had a stable address and enough to eat at all times, but I vastly preferred that lifestyle to other options.)

But where do we start?  How can we genuinely work to include clients in the fight against both forced trafficking and serious abuses, as well as the inadvertent mistreatment of consensual sex workers?  What are answers that don't involve arrests and involvement of the state, which can make things worse on already disadvantaged people?  Would clients carry a business card-sized list of non-governmental shelters and support services to give to anyone they think might want to seek help?  These are the tough questions I'd like to see the sex workers' rights movement addressing.

Edited to add: a commenter pointed out this awesome-looking UK resource: Redline.  It seems to be exactly what I wish we had here in the states.

Until they notice and modify it, any tweet with the word "trafficking" is posted on the front page of demiandashton.org, a celebrity foundation that conflates child sex slavery and consensual adult sex work.  They will no doubt start screening featured tweets soon, so jump on it now.  This bug/feature has been used by sex workers' rights supporters since about noon on Wednesday, and is still in effect, please use it to post real information about trafficking and sex work, such as:

Video: SEX WORKERS WANT TO STOP TRAFFICKING http://bit.ly/goDVC7

Videos from sex workers in developing world often cover how anti-trafficking orgs harm them http://sexworkerspresent.blip.tv

Learn about real trafficking issues from researcher Laura Agustín: http://www.lauraagustin.com

Want to help trafficking victims? Don't give your money to celebs, give it to shelters like Youthcare: http://bit.ly/qlW5eJ

The clients of sex workers are not boogeymen hoping to rape children. They don't deserve to be lumped in with trafficking.

Sex workers support the fight against trafficking. See a list of our own orgs here: http://www.swaay.org/groups.html

Guerilla warfare is about small groups going up against a strong, larger enemy, and using that large enemy's own resources against them.  Come participate in some electronic guerilla warfare that uses these celeb's fame to tell the world what's actually going on about sex work and human trafficking.  Hat tip to @iamcuriousblue for pointing out the Twitter widget on Kutcher's site, which was ripe for re-purposing once I figured out that it posts anything mentioning the T-word.

The long-term question is, after the site gets modified to exclude criticism, how can sex workers' rights supporters use Kutcher's fame campaign against him to publicize truths about sex work and how to really help trafficking victims?

Update: Belle de Jour suggested buying up misspellings of the domain and pointing them at better resources.  I bought DemiNAshton.org/.com, which are now forwarding to SWAAY.org.  Viviane suggested keeping an eye on these charity event calendars if we're looking for DNA events to protest: CharityHappenings.org and Eventful.com.  If anyone knows of an upcoming event/appearance for Kutcher/Moore/the DNA Foundation, please share the info so it can be met with a sex worker-led protest!

 

It's vanishingly rare for a large media outlet to cut through the knee-jerk emotional hysteria surrounding sexual trafficking, but The Village Voice knocks it out of the park this week.  Make sure to read Real Men Get Their Facts Straight: Ashton and Demi and Sex Trafficking.  This is probably going to end up being of my my top favorite articles of the year.  After completely destroying the bogus "there are 100,000-300,000 child sex slaves in America" myth, it goes on to look at the celebrity philanthropy industry behind the hype:

The actors were watching TV in bed when they saw a horrifying documentary about sex slavery in some faraway foreign land and decided they needed to get involved.

But how to help?

Sex trafficking is a grim problem, and not one actors know a lot about—even if Moore played a stripper in a movie and has alluded to how she was "manipulated and taken advantage of" by a 28-year-old boyfriend when she was 15 years old.

So Kutcher and Moore did what any savvy Hollywood couple would do, which is call Trevor Neilson. Neilson isn't a household name, but he's quickly establishing his Santa Monica, California-based Global Philanthropy Group as the premier charity consultant to the entertainment industry's biggest and brightest. Neilson is a former Hillary Clinton staffer and Gates Foundation director who has been the subject of glowing profiles in Details and the New York Times.

"The king of Hollywood philanthropy" and his wife and business partner, Maggie, can charge up to $200,000 a year for their services because they're the best in a new and growing industry. The concept of a celebrity charity consultant is relatively new, but it makes sense, as Hollywood grows ever more concerned about image management. Neilson is the guy Madonna called to help her save face in the debacle surrounding her failed Malawi schools.

The Neilsons cooked up a 140-point "secret sauce" plan of attack for the Demi and Ashton Foundation (known as DNA).

[...]

Getting data about sex slavery was not easy, she says: "Versus most social issues I've worked on, there is actually a dearth of data—so it was absolutely cobbled together."

Accuracy is not a major concern for Maggie Neilson.

"All of the core data we use gets attacked all the time," she says. "The challenge is, it's that or nothing, right? And I don't frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed. While I absolutely agree there's a need for better data, the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I'm not very interested in."

Really, go read the whole thing.  I promise you'll love it.

"I'm against sex work, but I'm not against sex workers."

It's the get-out-of-jail-free-card of many feminists, religious campaigners, and other protectionists.  They support us!  They acknowledge our choices!  They see us as real people!  And they can't wait to show their loving solidarity with us by putting us in jail, taking away our income, and making our jobs as dangerous as possible.

It's such an astoundingly hypocritical argument, it leaves me stunned every time I see it.  That's why I refuse to buy into their de-personalization propaganda that insists on a vast separation between destroying the porn industry and impacting the people who work in porn, or pushing the police to conduct raids on places of prostitution and affecting the lives of people engaged in prostitution. They see nothing odd about trying to have it both ways: being the heroic would-be saviors of the fallen with one hand, and with the other, the cause of the fallen's increasing unhappiness.  They're the abusive boyfriend who brings you flowers after giving you a black eye.

While I'll use terms like "anti-porn activist" when I want to be specific, by and large, I use the phrase "anti-sex worker activism" to describe the religious/political movement to attack sex workers by calling for further criminalization of their lives.  I'd like to see more people adopt this language, because it's important to not play into the anti's strategic disinformation campaign that swears it's possible to take away sex worker's livelihoods, and even imprison them, without affecting them as people.  We all know this is a lie, so let's stop letting their language frame the debate.

There's no other social movement I can think of, other than overtly religious conversion campaigns, where activists insist on "loving the sinner."  Anti-fur protesters don't dump red paint on storefronts while holding banners that say "We love furriers and mink farmers!  We're here to help them find different careers!"  Women's shelters don't have mission statements that say, "We're here to support men that batter and rape their wives.  Our mission is to help those men by providing a place for their partners to hide from them, and legal resources for those women to file charges against them to put them in prison for a long time."  It sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?

Don't let anti-sex worker activists keep playing this intellectually dishonest game.  Their public personas rely on being seen as saviors of sex workers who are here to fight for the humans trapped in the sex industry, but it needs to be confronted that they are working against the expressed wishes of sex workers, they are negatively impacting our lives, and that there's no such thing as "supporting" sex workers by making our lives difficult and dangerous.  Their language seeks to discuss sex work as concepts and theories, we need to use language that shows how deeply personal and non-abstract sex work is to sex workers.

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