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Chicago Sex Workers Assail Slanted Media
Nicholas Kristof was baffled.
A year after the New York Times columnist rescued teenaged Cambodian prostitute Srey Mom from a Poipet brothel by purchasing her freedom for $203, she was back in the brothel.
Voluntarily.
In fact, she wouldn't even be rescued initially without her cell phone and jewelry which Kristof had to buy back for her.
Didn't she want to be saved?
Not necessary said organizers from Sex Worker Outreach Project-Chicago (SWOP) at a Chicago presentation in June, sponsored by the Open University of the Left and the Chicago Socialist Party.
The right wing-backed human trafficking movement, part of the "anti-prostitution industrial complex," deliberately blurs the line between sex work and sex slavery to further its moralistic agenda and line its pockets said Jasmine, a SWOP organizer at the presentation, called Sex Workers, Criminalization and Human Rights.
It has duped many, including the media, into seeing "sex slavery" where labor, immigration, gender and human rights abuses exist and occluded the plight of both consensual sex workers and women trafficked into household, farm and sweatshop work which is more common, charged Jasmine.
Sorry Nick.
The flip side of the missionary imperative to save -- the zeal to glorify the downtrodden -- also infects sex work perspectives said SWOP spokespeople.
Regardless of Heidi Fleiss' escapades, movies like Pretty Woman and college boys' tales of their Cool Trip to Nevada, sex work is not noble, salt of the earth employment that just needs legalization.
As long as sex workers are morally quarantined by illegality and stigma, they risk being robbed, cheated, raped, knifed, shot, beaten up, strangled, abducted, arrested and given diseases said "out" sex worker and SWOP member Pussy Willow, 47.
Not only are sex workers devoid of human rights, they can't even recruit community advocates because of the opprobrium, Willow added.
"How many of you admit to having bought the services of a sex worker," she asked the audience to a show of two timid hands. "When you're a sex worker, everyone wants to be your friend -- until it jeopardizes their family or standing in the community."
While SWOP-Chicago is only a year and a half old, it inherits a bloody sex worker history.
Thirty-nine sex workers were killed during the 1990's in Chicago by four different mass murderers.
Sex workers in Chicago's marginal neighborhoods were terrorized by Gregory Clepper -- alleged to have confessed to killing 40 more prostitutes -- Geoffrey Griffin aka the Roseland Killer, Hubert Geralds and Andrew Crawford but often had to keep working because of pimps and addictions.
China, a cousin of Kizzy Macon,17, who was murdered by Gregory Clepper, told the Chicago Tribune in 1996, "Kizzy would get high with anybody," and admitted she too had partied with the killer before he was arrested. "I didn't know he would kill her," she added.
Street prostitute Pam Bolton, killed in 1995, told the Chicago Sun-Times days before her death, "This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin."
Like other johns, Clepper, Griffin, Geralds and Crawford knew they could gain access to a sex worker for a few dollars, harm her with no police intervention and dispose of her body with impunity because no one would miss her.
A 2007 study by bestselling Freakonomics author and University of Chicago economics professor Steven D. Levitt with Alladi Venkatesh, found Chicago sex workers were victims of violence from pimps or clients once a month and forced into extorted sex with law enforcement officers or gang members in one out of 20 transactions.
"Condom use is shocking low," says Levitt in "An Empirical Analysis of Street Level Prostitution" and sex workers "absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward."
Nor are public health programs working, said SWOP members.
"They train workers to train workers to train workers to then go out and try to find 'victims,'" said Willow. "Meanwhile who is handing out a bag of condoms to the outdoor sex workers on Belmont avenue? Who is protecting women who are getting beat up?"
The true needs of the sex worker community are subverted by asinine "studies" full of social scientist babble said Willow, citing a recent, highly publicized report which "didn't even interview sex workers, just occasional johns called 'hobbyists.' Hello?"
Especially ridiculous said Willow is a $1000 "john school," where arrested clients of sex workers are remanded in California to "learn how to not buy sex."
"I'll teach them that for $250."
Martha Rosenberg is a cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable in Evanston, Illinois.
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13 Comments so far
Show AllLegalize, sanitize, recognize. Support your local massage parlour.
Uh, just because someone wants to do something for money, does that mean we should make it legal ?
Amsterdam's prostitutes have a 7% HIV infection rate. We can only imagine how many more are infected with other STDs. The danger of prostitution isn't just on the prostitute's end.
An old saying claims, "There is a little Hooker in all of us".
Yes, atheist -- because it is a transaction between two consenting adults. So prostitutes in Amsterdam, where prostitution is legal, have a 7% incidence of HIV infection. What is it in countries where prostitution is illegal? And what is it in the legal brothels of Nevada, where regular medical checkups are provided as well as protection insisted upon?
Making it illegal is a way to drive it underground and devalue, dehumanize and persecute sex workers. That's all it does.
Remember, it's only been about 90 years since every town in America had a legal brothel. Can we really say 90 years of puritianism has reduced the use of prostitutes?
The reason sex work is repressed is because it is the way of the future -- a future that scares the capitalist elite. It represents the alternative to the marriage and family model. Capitalists have always wanted to train sexual energy on procreation, so as to furnish primitive capital (bodies) for the profit machine (see Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici). Sex work diverts that energy. So the capitalists team up with the moralists to cultivate a popular stigma of shame associated with non-procreative sex, and to persecute sex workers and their clients.
One of the most glaring double standards in our society: pornography is legal, prostitution isn't. But in both instances, women are being paid to engage in sex. Maybe the prostitutes should film their transactions, then they could say it's "entertainment".
It's legal over here, thank God. Sex workers must register and get tested at intervals. The idea being: yes, you have a right to sell sex services for money; but no, you do not have a right to make of yourself a menace to public heath.
There's crime and drugs, of course, but nowhere near as bad as those places where it's illegal.
Isn't it time for a little more Carlin?
"Why is prostitution illegal? Selling is legal. F***ing is legal. Why isn't selling f***ing legal? Maybe I'm not supposed to understand this. Of all the things we can give to another human being, an orgasm is hardly the worst of them. In Vietnam, we gave out medals for spraying f***ing NAPALM on people!!"
Obama/Paul!?
Funny how the only definition of prostitution is...one who sells their body for money.
Everyday I see prostitutes get dressed and drive to their shitty 9 to 5 job to collect money at the end of the week and maybe get benefits too. That is called prostitution...virtually EVERYONE does it!!!
There are more ways of being a whore than exchanging sex for money!!! Duh!!!
ROCK ON STREET SISTERS!!! : )
Let's take prostitutes out of the hands of the pimps and put them into the hands of the politicians who know what to do with them. Maybe the former Governor of New York should be forced to do Pro-bono work for COYOTE.
It's sad to see that someone who claims to have disassociated themselves with religion (i.e. someone with the handle "atheist") would buy into the false piety of the conservative right. I just returned from a short visit to Amsterdam in which I journeyed through the red light district and had the chance to discuss life as a prostitute with one of the girls that works in the window (not as a client, for those of you who would make a big deal out of such things). The fact is that by legalizing prostitution, Amsterdam has succeeded in largely divorcing it from the other criminal elements (drugs, violence, etc.) with which it is almost invariably associated with in other places. In fact, the prostitution profession has been so thoroughly sanitized that real estate in the red light district is about the highest valued in the entire city. For those who are unaware, people (families) actually live in the apartments above the rooms with the windows where the girls work. Parents can be seen strolling through the red light district with their kids like it was any other part of town.
The fact is, the Dutch have taken a good hard look at humanity and decided to accept our own nature instead of trying to hypocritically (and self-destructively) hide it. Prostitution is the oldest profession there is and it is not going anywhere in any society any time soon. It will always exist. The question is, what are you going to DO about it? You can either put it up front, accept it as part of who we are, and move on with your life... or you can hide it, knowing it will continue to exist (in fact, more than a few of those who vigorously condemn it turn out to be active participants in it anyways), try to make the women who choose to prostitute themselves miserable (out of cowardice and arrogance), and then exponentially multiply the social ills associated with it by futilely trying to bury it in illegality.
We are human. We are sexual creatures. Get the f*** over it already.
I've always had all of the sex a man could ever handle from my age of 13 to 72 and I never had to go to a brothel to have it.
But, guess that don't work for everyone.