Let's Talk About Sex Work
TOPICS DISCUSSED
Sarah talks with Kaytlin Bailey about the decriminalization of sex work.
Sex worker rights advocate, comedian, and writer, Kaytlin Bailey is the Founder & Executive Director of Old Pros, a non-profit media organization creating conditions to change the status of sex workers in society. Host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, she is also the creator of Whore’s Eye View, a 75-minute mad dash through 10,000 years of sex worker history.
A globally recognized leader in the sex worker rights movement, Kaytlin Bailey has been quoted in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York Post, The Village Voice, The Nation, Reason, and on NBC. She has written op-eds for The Daily Beast, Vice, and recently for 11 syndicated newspapers on California Senate Bill 357. Kaytlin Bailey has been invited to speak on Fox Business, Sirius XM, at Yale Law School, Penn University, and UCLA.
Kaytlin Bailey’s views are backed by Amnesty International, The World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and UNAids who all agree that the decriminalization of sex work is the only policy that reduces violence.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.
[00:00:14] Music Interlude.
[00:00:34] In case the title didn't alert you, today's episode features mature themes and language. Please take care as you need to. While I was on my June sabbatical, we got an email that had our team saying yes out loud. The pitch came from Old Pros, a nonprofit media organization working to change the status of sex workers in society. Alise quickly arranged an interview, which Sarah recorded in short order. Why did this email stand out in the sea of pitches that we receive each week? Sex work had not been on our whiteboard of topics for this quarter. I think it's because we see sex and our attitudes about sex at the root of many, if not most, of our major controversies. You can't have a real conversation about abortion without talking about sex. And just a quick shout out here to Ohio voters for getting to the polls in August in order to keep the rules the same for their November abortion initiative. Gender identity and masculinity, the whole of the Barbie movie, pretty much everything connected to what Republicans love to term as wokeness, conspiracy theories, legitimate concerns about trafficking and human dignity. All of it relates to sex. And you really can't have a complete conversation about sex without talking about sex work.
[00:01:47] The criminalization of sex work in particular says so much about the gaps between who we say we want to protect and who we actually protect, what we say is dangerous and what is actually dangerous. We know this topic will push a lot of buttons. When I try to step back and make a list of declarative sentences expressing my opinions about sex work, the list is as convoluted and contradictory as it gets. It's also short. I have a lot more questions than sentences, and that's why I think the conversation you're about to hear is so valuable. You probably won't agree with everything you hear. That's not the point. The point is to keep thinking and keep listening and keep working toward a world with a much healthier perspective on sex. With that goal in mind, here's Sarah and Kaytlin Bailey.
Sarah [00:02:51] Kaytlin Bailey is a sex worker rights advocate, comedian, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a nonprofit media organization creating conditions to change the status of sex workers and society. And she hosts the Oldest Profession Podcast. Kaytlin, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:03:08] Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah [00:03:09] I'm so glad you're here. Can I tell you something really weird but relevant about Pantsuit Politics?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:03:15] Sure.
Sarah [00:03:16] Okay. So if you were to log on to the back side of pantsuitpoliticsshow.com, our website, you would find that pretty consistently in the top five pages on our podcast is a page called Strippers versus Prostitutes, A Comparison. It is a term paper I wrote 20 plus years ago, that I referenced on a show in 2016 and that we then posted the text of. And it just gets consistent traffic, which I just think goes to show that there are so many questions about sex work that don't go answered, that don't go discussed, and the fact that this like weird 20 plus year old term paper I wrote gets so much traffic is proof of that.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:04:10] Yeah, I absolutely think that there is an appetite for more information about sex worker rights, sex worker politics and what we focus on, which is sex worker history.
Sarah [00:04:19] Yeah, I think that's so true. Now, I'm intrigued. When I was reading your bio, you describe yourself as coming out as a sex worker in 2015. I love that language. Tell me more about that.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:04:29] Thank you. The shame and stigma around sex work I think is deeply connected to the LGBTQ+ movement. Sex workers have always been a part of that movement. The shot glass heard round the world that was thrown by Marsha P Johnson, that started the Stonewall riots that was led by sex workers. Same with Compton's Cafeteria, which predates Stonewall by a few years. And the sex workers and members of the queer community have always shared spaces and a shared stigma and rights that threaten one of us. Whether you're talking about trans kids, whether you're talking about censorship on porn or erotic materials or access to basic reproductive health care or information medically accurate sex ed, we are all in this together. In order to take on the public role that I have through Old Prose and telling my story as a sex worker, I needed to go through a coming out process, which I think like for many folks started with me telling strangers and lower stakes folks and eventually led up to me coming out to my family, which was especially challenging with my my dad, who spent 30 years in the Army. He was a Green Beret, and we loved each other very much, have a lot of respect for each other. And I knew that so much of his identity as a good dad was wrapped up in whether or not I chose to engage in this work or chose to tell my story publicly. And we eventually got to a really great place, my dad and I. But it took a couple of years of really rewriting those narratives and showing up and having really hard conversations.
Sarah [00:06:20] Well, you're a comedian, and so I know you understand when those bits bubble up and they touch something-- the psyche. You said that I thought about the Chris Rock bit. Keep her off the pole. Your only job is to keep her off the pole. And how we laugh, but we're laughing because we want to talk about something, because it's touching on something much, much deeper.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:06:37] Absolutely.
Sarah [00:06:38] And I wonder, as you look through this history-- I love the historical emphasis-- what other threads are you picking up? What other patterns are you seeing? When we talk about sex work and we talk about the ways we think about it culturally and the way we legislate it and do policy around it.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:06:57] Well, sex worker rights and the criminalization of abortion and contraception have a shared history, This dates back to the Comstock Law of the 1870s. Anthony Comstock built his career attacking Victoria Woodhull, who was the first woman to open up a brokerage firm on Wall Street, the first woman to address Congress on the issue of suffrage.
Sarah [00:07:19] First woman to run for president.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:07:20] And the first woman to run for president. Right. But many people have not heard about her because she was also a sex worker. And this demonization of loose women and this demonization of public women, which is sometimes a synonym for sex worker, but is just as often a synonym for a woman literally taking up space in public. And so, we criminalized abortion, contraception, prostitution and alcohol all at the same time. And that was during the progressive era here in the U.S. And we did a lot of it in the name of specifically protecting white women. One of the major pieces of national legislation on this issue is the Man Act, which is also known as the White Slave law. And like many of our anti-trafficking laws today, this was sold to the American people as a way of protecting vulnerable women. But we didn't protect any women from the people who were actually committing violence against us. Instead, we made it a crime to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes, which led to criminalizing very consensual interracial relationships and inconveniencing a lot of women in show business on their way to their next gig.
Sarah [00:08:36] We talked about this. We had Monique Belton on, who's a black influencer who went viral during the George Floyd protests and that sort of moment in American history. And I said, what happened there reminds me of that time in the progressive era where it's like, you want to argue give us voting rights, give us more rights because we're morally better, but that shit is a trap. That's a trap.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:09:03] Yes.
Sarah [00:09:03] Like when you hold someone up, it's sort of like the wise Indian. When you're saying we're different because we're better, that is a trap. Don't fall for it. There's a lot of historical incidences where you shut off your humanity. It's just another form of dehumanization where you don't allow for the nuances and complexity and you say, "We deserve this treatment because we're human, not because we're special."
Kaytlin Bailey [00:09:28] Absolutely. I have it right here. Rights Not Rescue. Which is one of the many phrases that we have. But one of the main problems is that we've conflated violent exploitation with prostitution. And prostitution has become a symbol of exploitation in this country, which means we spend an incredible amount of energy trying to suppress or eradicate the oldest profession, which actually distracts us from our shared goal of ending or reducing exploitation. So there are absolutely adult consensual sex workers were a huge part of the market. We've always been innovators and early adopters of the front lines of arts, technology, financial services. And there is absolutely exploitation both in the sex industry and also in every other labor sector. According to the Labor Department's own numbers, the overwhelming majority of people who are violently exploited in this country work in agriculture, domestic labor, mining, food and bev. But we aren't devoting any resources to help raising the negotiating power of those workers. Instead, we're using the apparatus of the state to seek ice on undocumented workers or we're paying law enforcement to crack down on consensual adult sex workers. And we're selling all of this as somehow being anti-trafficking. But anti-prostitution does not equal anti-trafficking and vice versa.
Sarah [00:11:02] I think that distinction between sexualization and exploitation is so important and so key. And, again, talking about the history, not just in the United States, I just did a book report on our premium channel about a book about modern Ireland called We Don't Know Ourselves. And it was so wild. I was reading about how the Catholic Church was so powerful in Ireland obviously, and the anti sexualization sexualized everything. It was just like, don't talk about sex, don't think about sex, don't have premarital sex, don't use birth control. And at the same time, I was watching Shiny Happy People, that documentary about the Duggars. Same thing. This one had this great line where she was like, if somebody is like, don't look at your sister's boobs. What are you going to do? You are going to look at your sister's boobs. And inside those environments where you have such a hypersexualized mindset, it creates ripe environments for exploitation because you're focusing on the sexualization and not the exploitation and not the abuse and not the violence.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:12:10] And I think specifically something that documentary, Shiny Happy People, does so well is drawing a line between how the stigma and shame around sexuality really disempowers victims from any kind of self advocacy. If you want to talk about organized sex trafficking, the Catholic Church is a really great example of an institution that has invested a huge amount of resources into sexually exploiting not just women, but also children. Something that we talk about at the Oldest Profession Podcast and also in my show, is that the Catholic Church was actually the largest brothel owner in Europe for a period of 400 years.
Sarah [00:12:50] Wow!
Kaytlin Bailey [00:12:51] Yeah. And they were able to get away with that thanks to the Madonna-whore complex and the demonization of women. And I think it's so important, especially for contemporary feminists, to understand that homophobia and the stigma against sex workers is the foundation of misogyny and that policing prostitution is not protection, it's patriarchy, it's coercive control. Because the way that you police prostitution is that you govern, you dictate, you control where women go, who they talk to, what they wear. And it continues to shock me that this is still a debate amongst contemporary feminists where there is an antagonism between sex workers and incredible heroes of the feminist movement like Gloria Steinem, who continue to advocate for policies that direct law enforcement to continue to harass and subjugate and control people who are engaging in work that is older than money, and has always been a path towards a kind of liberation. Purchasing power is important, especially when we're talking about the hundreds, if not thousands of years, before women had property rights.
Sarah [00:14:09] Yeah. Now, I think that makes so much sense. And I think this idea that when you criminalize prostitution-- again, when I was writing that term paper, I don't even remember what course it was in, but I do remember learning a lot about the decriminalization of prostitution. It made so much sense to me. Of course, if you say what you're doing is illegal and then someone abuses you, be it a client, be it a pimp, be it whatever, well, are you going to the police? No, because you're also breaking the law. You're vulnerable if you go to the police.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:14:38] Exactly.
Sarah [00:14:39] And I think there are certain progressive circles where that's accepted. And I really want to get to the more policy legislative side. But I think culturally, I think it's so interesting to me that you say we're going to have to have a cultural conversation and cultural change. And, look, here's where I think there's an application about this that is much harder for progressive circles, much harder for everybody. I think this is true when it comes to child sex abuse and pedophiles. When you say when I go around in my community and I see on the back of a truck murder your local pedophile, does that create an environment where someone can report something problematic? Or if they feel or if they see something with their family members, they feel comfortable going to the police or they feel comfortable saying, I'm having these thoughts? Of course not. Of course, they don't feel comfortable saying that. You create this when you put it in the dark. You are ripe for exploitation.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:15:30] Especially in an environment where we are again increasingly conflating visibly queer folks, trans folks, with pedophilia and sexual exploitation. And that is a very old story and it is deeply connected to the history of sex worker rights and moving towards a future where we can share our wisdom and participate in the communities that we're already a part of.
Sarah [00:15:59] And I think it's just important to to articulate too. It's not like we're going to get to some utopia where sex and exploitation and violence-- I don't want to say are connected, but are tied up. It's a deeply vulnerable act. There's a lot going on there. How do you make sense of that? We're not trying to get somewhere where we fix it and there's no longer violence and exploitation tied up with matters of sex. So how do you piece that apart in your own mind?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:16:27] Well, we know that decriminalization of sex work is the only policy that reduces violence. And the reason that that is, is because it increases the negotiating power of providers. And this isn't just me saying this. This is backed up by the World Health Organization and Amnesty International human rights organizations around the world. We've implemented a lot of policies. New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003. And when they did an analysis and report came out in 2015, they found that sex workers were reporting less violence, more comfort in declining clients that they didn't feel safe with, and I think critically more comfort reporting crimes committed against them to the police for exactly what you were saying before. We know that we don't see these results. When you talk about legalization or regulation, we don't see these results when we're talking about end demand policies or criminalizing clients or third party folks. And we certainly don't see those results with criminalized prostitution.
[00:17:23] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:17:39] It seems like to have the cultural conversation, you have to tease apart this sense of the reality we're not telling you we're creating a utopia because then people don't believe you. But also, I think there's a deep sense with sex, even though we've come so far in so many areas: LGBTQ rights, facing the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, all these things, to tell people it doesn't have to be like that way. There's this sense of intractability I think sometimes when you talk about our sexual culture.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:18:07] When I'm talking to my fellow progressives, folks that have spent a lot of time in reproductive justice, I cut my teeth as a political advocate, as an abortion rights advocate. And so, I think that there's a distinction between being pro-abortion and pro-choice. And you can recognize that this is a difficult personal decision, while also recognizing that criminalizing abortion doesn't make it go away, it only makes it less safe. And the same can be said for prostitution policy. People engage in sex work on the full spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion as they do with any job and as they also do when seeking abortion care. But what we know is that criminalizing this or pushing it further underground again doesn't eliminate, but it does make it less safe for everyone involved.
Sarah [00:18:59] Right. It's like you're not saying we're going to fix it, but we're going to step in the right direction. And I wonder, do you have any success or momentum or even just anecdotal experiences with right wing people who are concerned about the power of the government and don't want the power of the government in certain places? Is there any movement there? Because I've had movement with my religious friends, deeply religious friends around abortion on this, saying, we don't have to talk about the morality or ethics of this. We need to talk about is the government making it worse or better?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:19:28] Correct. Absolutely. And so I think there are a lot of principled libertarians. The Libertarian Party was the first to adopt the decriminalization of sex work as part of their party platform. There are folks on the right that are interested in getting the government out of people's bedrooms or massage parlors or other private spaces. But this is really a bipartisan issue. Democrats have supported some really bad policies when it comes to porn and prostitution over the years. And so, I love to blame the right, but I think there's a lot of shared responsibility and there has to be a lot of cultural movement across the board. I think the most important demographic to move on this issue are feminists who have never engaged in sex work themselves, and recognizing that there's a lot of shared issues between folks that engage in this and just basic fundamental rights for women who want to participate in public life.
Sarah [00:20:23] How do you talk about or work through the policy implications of that distinction between sex work and porn? Are there policy differences with the decriminalization? Because it is different. And I would think you'd get a little more fear and pushback with porn because that affects a lot more people, at least in theory, than prostitution.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:20:48] I think it's important to say that the stigma and shame and false narratives is shared. Sex work is a really broad umbrella term that includes porn performers, content creators, legal strippers, criminalized full service providers, dominatrixes, phone sex operators. I want to include Hooters waitresses because we're trying to build a big tent. Anyone that exchanges any kind of erotic labor for money or something of value, which is a really broad and expansive thing. And this is something that predates us as a species, right? This is literally older than money. Right now full service sex workers and also content creators have a lot of the same shared battle space. Because we've all been using the Internet to connect, schedule and screen our clients. And so, one of the activating moments for me was in 2018 when Donald Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law, that's a federal law that stands for Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. This is when Backpage was seized by the FBI. Craigslist erotic services went away, and all of the platforms that sex workers had been using to safely schedule and screen our clients. If you want to talk about cutting pimps or potentially abusive third party folks out of the equation--
Sarah [00:22:12] Yeah, it was like centralizing.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:22:14] Exactly. These message boards and platforms were great for us. And so, now content creators, even legal content creators, are facing very similar barriers with this conflation of sexual expression with violent exploitation. So they're all of these laws that are now limiting like Visa and MasterCard from processing on Onlyfans or porn sites. They're trying to make users or viewers of porn upload their ID, which I would never encourage anyone to put themselves on a stigmatized list.
Sarah [00:22:49] Right.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:22:49] And so, there's a lot of shared cultural fights, even if the minutiae of the different laws that we face are different.
Sarah [00:22:58] And that's so hard because I know a lot of those laws came about because of research into some of these platforms where teen girls were getting videos and stuff posted without their permission and couldn't get them taken down. So how do you see the processes that, again, protect against exploitation without further criminalizing legitimate sex work?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:23:19] I think the problem with criminalizing or trying to aggressively repress erotic content, especially in the name of reducing exploitation, is that it paints everyone with a really broad brush. It's the same problem as conflating clients with predators.
Sarah [00:23:36] Right.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:23:36] We need to be able to make these distinctions. So if all porn is exploitation, then when you report revenge porn or when you report that your image is being used without your consent, even if you are an adult content creator, if you find that your content is being shared by third party platforms where you're not profiting, that's a violation and you ought to be able to report that. But when we conflate all of it as being exploitation, we lose the ability to make those distinctions. And this comes back to I think maybe an oversimplified call from the MeToo movement of Believe Women. Listen to us. We will tell you. Sex workers will tell you. Content creators will tell you what is and what is not consensual. We have so much to contribute about negotiated consent and being able to articulate and enforce boundaries when it comes to our bodies and our images. But we cannot do that when all erotic expression or all sex work is conflated with exploitation and violence.
Sarah [00:24:45] That's what happens when you conflate everyone and call everyone a victim, then you're protecting them and not listening to them and you're thinking you know best. And they are in a situation that doesn't know best. And saying you don't have to start from scratch, they can tell you what they need. They can empower. Like that cultural conversation is the empowerment part. So tell me how you got to the I love the standup committee aspect of this and the historical educational aspect of this. So how did you come to see that as such an important part of the process?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:25:16] Where shall I begin? So working as a standup comedian, I obviously have very strong feelings about freedom of expression and being an active agent in my own life. And so, I had done sex work both from coming from a place of of curiosity and feeling very drawn to these stories. I've been reading about courtesans since for as long as I can remember. I have been obsessed with sex workers in history. So it's sort of an innate interest of mine. But I also used sex work to subsidize my career in comedy, which is not unusual. Sex work has funded, I think, more students, artists and entrepreneurs than all of the grants combined. But when SESTA/FOSTA passed in 2018 and I went to my fellow mostly male comedians. When I felt like this was an existential threat to freedom of expression on the Internet, I was met with a lot of blank stares. People were not making that connection I think because of some misogyny that was very much present in that community and not seeing women or especially sex workers as people.
[00:26:23] But that was sort of an activating moment for me. I became the founding director of communications for Decriminalize Sex Work, which is a national advocacy organization pursuing a state by state strategy to try to decriminalize sex work. And they're doing great work in 11 states across the country. But, ultimately, I left that organization to start old prose because after speaking with legislators for two plus years, it became very clear to me that we are not going to get good policy change on this issue until we really invest in narrative and cultural change. Legislators are terrified of their own constituents when it comes to this issue, and I think it's really important for us to change the story about sex work. It's a necessary step to changing laws and ultimately the legal status of sex workers in our communities.
Sarah [00:27:15] And it's not like you can ignore it. It's a very popular subject matter in pop culture. If you just pretend like it doesn't exist, then that's what's filling the space. Well, then now that you're an expert, I have to ask you what you think are the-- well, let's start with the worst portrayals of sex work in pop culture. Like really famous ones that you think are truly terrible.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:27:35] Oh, goodness.
Sarah [00:27:37] I'm assuming Pretty Woman.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:27:38] Pretty Woman I think is bad for many reasons. I mean, it's an endearing story. There's nobody that walks away from that movie thinking that Julia Roberts is the villain or victim in that story. But what you see in the first 20 minutes of that film is that she's just really bad at her job, actually.
Sarah [00:28:00] But that's why we're supposed to like her, right?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:28:03] Exactly. Because if she was a good--
Sarah [00:28:05] Prostitute, would she be a hero?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:28:07] Then she wouldn't have been rescued.
Sarah [00:28:07] We wouldn't root for her.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:28:10] Exactly. Yes. I know that there have been several terrible documentaries that have been made about sex work. There is a really good one coming out called The Stroll. That's a history of sex work in the Meatpacking District. And the way that the trans community really came together and provided a lot of mutual aid and support in a society that had effectively failed them. And I think that's a story that is really present in sex work. Whether you're talking about brothels or online communities, sex workers really have been provided a lot of care to the communities that they're a part of.
Sarah [00:28:47] I love that.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:28:48] Yeah.
Sarah [00:28:49] Let me tell you, maybe it's because I came of age with Pretty Woman. And so, this narrative was implanted in my mind. I've watched a lot of pop culture. When you said courtesans, I immediately thought of Harlots, which I think is a great show.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:28:59] Harlots is great.
Sarah [00:29:00] So good. So well done. I think the way they tease apart the difference between sort of high culture-- this is back in I guess it's probably like the 1700s and the sort of low income and the wars they have between each other. It's a very female focused show. I think it's great. I used to love the-- I think it was only on for a couple of seasons with Billie Piper, the The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. I think that's the name of it.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:29:25] Also The Deuce, which is very good.
Sarah [00:29:27] Yes, I was going to bring it next. I couldn't remember the name of it. I'm so glad you remembered it. I thought that show was-- I mean, it's Maggie Gyllenhaal. She's not going to do a story about women in any profession without bringing this nuanced, complex performance. But I think that you need that. If you're going to change the conversation, these beautifully, complicated, with some real depth portrayals of sex work are going to be essential. And it makes it sad The secret Life of a Call Girl is set present day, but the other two are so past oriented. I think you'll notice this, we're not just trying to rewrite history; we're trying to tell you right now that the present is different than you think it is.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:30:05] Yes, absolutely.
Sarah [00:30:06] I think that's so important. So tell us where, though, the legislative fight is right now.
[00:30:10] Music Interlude.
[00:30:19] We're going to work on this cultural conversation, but where's the legislative fight?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:30:22] Yes. So the overwhelming majority of arrests in this country happen on the state level. Right. And I think a really good example of this is what happened a couple of years ago with the Robert Kraft sting himself in South Florida. Do you remember this?
Sarah [00:30:35] No.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:30:36] Yes. So Robert Kraft is the owner of the New England Patriots. He is a maybe famous or possibly infamous billionaire. I'm not a huge fan, but he was caught up in a sting that happened in South Florida. And what happened was there were five different law enforcement agencies, three local police departments, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security were all invested more than six months with these elaborate schemes to install hidden cameras in these totally legally licensed massage parlors that were sometimes providing consensual sexual services. There were no community complaints. There was no allegation of trafficking or violence or anything that was happening. But they spread out. They installed all of these hidden cameras and recorded what I can only imagine was like the world's most boring... And in the culmination of that investigation, they descended on I think it was four or five massage parlors and arrested all of these men. I think it was like 200 men and then 19 women. And they threw themselves to press conferences and they sold this narrative to the American people that they had rescued these sex slaves from this international sex trafficking ring. But when the dust settled, the only people who were actually facing criminal charges were the 19 women that they had ostensibly rescued from this very consensual, again, legally licensed massage parlor. Nobody arrested was under the age of 30. And Robert Kraft, who is the most famous person who was caught up in this sting, sort of became the face of it.
[00:32:21] But I think it's important to remember that he was a 70-year-old widower who paid a 45-year-old woman to massage a different part of his body. And as a taxpayer, I had a lot of questions about why the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security is involved in that non-issue. And I think it's also important for listeners to recognize that this is what so-called anti-trafficking efforts look like when they are conducted by law enforcement. And that is happening all over the country. That was just a very high profile case that happened to get a lot of media attention. But these stings are happening everywhere. You have law enforcement officers that are effectively larping as providers or potential clients, and they're arresting people for engaging in consensual adult sex work and selling that right to their local communities and tapping into this big pile of anti-trafficking money that is very aggressively committed to the false conflation between sex work and violent exploitation. So that's what most arrests look like.
[00:33:30] There are also some really bad federal laws. The first federal anti-prostitution law is also our first federal anti-immigration law. That's the page Act of 1870, which criminalized the racist term Mongolian women from immigrating to the U.S. for immoral purposes. We see that language repeated again with the 1910 Man Act, or the White Slave Law, which made it a crime to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. And then today's version of that is the SESTA/FOSTA law that Donald Trump signed into law, effectively trying to erase the oldest profession from the Internet that we helped build. So there's a lot of federal repressive laws that make it difficult for folks to travel. They're starting to use facial recognition technology to prevent or to connect people to their ads online, making it difficult for sex workers to leave or reenter the country. But, again, most of the arrests are happening on a state level. There's a lot of movement-- I don't know how policy nerdy you might get here.
Sarah [00:34:39] Very.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:34:40] Oh, good. So there's actually a little known history, but Rhode Island kind of accidentally decriminalized prostitution for a six year period between 2003 and 2009. It was a combination of Coyote, the first sex worker rights organization in the country, filed a lawsuit for sex discrimination in Rhode Island in the 1970s. And so the judge decided that because both buying and selling sexual services was criminalized, but only providers who were overwhelmingly women were being arrested for that. So the judge tasked the legislature with fixing the law because of sort of congressional incompetency. When they revisited that law, they maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally erased--
Sarah [00:35:29] It sounds like when they stumbled into the Senate and almost killed Daylight Savings time until everybody freaked out about it. It's like nobody was watching.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:35:35] Nobody was watching. So in the 1970s, they rewrote the law but nobody noticed this loophole. So people were still being arrested in Rhode Island for prostitution until 2003, when an attorney who was not a criminal attorney, a friend of his came to him in a moment of panic and said my friend was just arrested for prostitution. Can you help? And he said yes. And because he wasn't a criminal attorney, he was like, well, I'd better go look at the law.
Sarah [00:36:07] Oh, he saw the water. I love it.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:36:10] Yeah. And s he took the case in front of a judge, asked the judge to reread the statute. He agreed with his assessment. And so he started winning these cases until 2003. There was a lot of newspaper and media coverage. And it became well-known that it was not a crime to engage in consensual adult prostitution behind closed doors in a private space in Rhode Island. And that remained true until 2009 when they re-criminalized prostitution. What's so exciting about this is that statisticians from universities in California--
Sarah [00:36:46] The researchers were like, yay!
Kaytlin Bailey [00:36:48] Exactly. A natural controlled experiment. So for this six year period where it was well known that you could not be arrested for engaging in adult consensual sex work, gonorrhea rates dropped 40 percent.
Sarah [00:37:02] Forty percent.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:37:03] Reported rapes dropped 30 percent. This policy is a policy that increases public safety and health. You want to reduce STIs, you want to reduce violence against women, stop arresting people for engaging in the oldest profession.
Sarah [00:37:22] Wow! That's so interesting. And so is this data being used in campaigns in other states?
Kaytlin Bailey [00:37:27] Yes. We're doing our best to spread good news about these studies and the public policy implications. There are also really great advocates in Vermont, Washington State, Washington, D.C., New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, that are pushing legislators to think differently about the oldest profession. In New Hampshire, for example, there's a coalition between libertarians and progressive advocates to try to rewrite laws giving, sex workers who are seeking medical services, making it a crime to discriminate against folks based on their profession so that sex workers can tell their health care providers the truth about what they do. There was recently a win in Rhode Island creating a study commission that is sort of forcing the legislature to acknowledge the impact of decriminalization in New York. There are two competing bills that are making their way through the New York state legislature, one that would decriminalize sex work and the other that would criminalize clients or third party folks. Like managers or security folks, the people that sex workers hire to help them do their job more efficiently. So we are trying to fight that law and raise awareness around the one that would decriminalize sex work. A couple of years ago, there was a 14 hour hearing in Washington, D.C. on a bill that would have decriminalized sex work in the nation's capital. That bill failed. But as a result of the publicity, arrests in D.C. have dropped over 90 percent.
Sarah [00:39:04] Wow.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:39:04] So there is movement on this issue. Washington State, California, Oregon, sex workers are increasingly being heard by our elected officials, and we are starting to be seen more and more as citizens and constituents and contributors to our communities.
Sarah [00:39:23] Sorry, I got a little emotional there at the end.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:39:26] This is an emergent issue. This is really happening.
Sarah [00:39:30] And I'm just grateful for those voices I think I got a little emotional just because I know that takes enormous bravery, because the cultural conversation is not where it should be. And I think anybody contributing to that in powerful ways will have such an impact. And I know you're one of those people and I thank you so much for that work. Tell our listeners where they can learn more.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:39:49] You can learn more at Oldprosonline.org. We send a newsletter out every Friday. That's a round up of sex worker race related news and content. There's a ton of resorts guides and you can access all of that on our website. You can listen to the Oldest Profession Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And you can see me live. I'm taking my one woman show, which is a combination of standup comedy, history, lecture and personal storytelling, where I cover 10,000 years of history from a sex worker's perspective. It's called Whore's Eye View, and I'll be touring that show later in the Fall. So you don't want to miss that. Please join our email list or follow us on social media at Old Pros Online. And there is just one thing that I wanted to leave your listeners with.
Sarah [00:40:32] Please.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:40:33] Which is you do not have to be able to imagine yourself engaging in this work in order to stand with sex workers against criminalization. And I think it's really important for progressives to hear and really understand that it is impossible to help a group of people that you are hunting. So any effort to eradicate or suppress or erect barriers around this work really creates barriers to safety.
Sarah [00:41:08] Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on Pantsuit Politics.
Kaytlin Bailey [00:41:11] Thank you.
Beth [00:41:13] Thank you, Kaytlin and Sarah, for that discussion. You heard a quick mention of the Backpage case in the conversation. The federal government has brought a host of charges against Backpage.com. The case has been a real journey. It will go to trial for a second time this month. Last week, I discussed the charges and the issues in that case in detail on our premium podcast More to Say, so be sure to check that out. And then join us here again on Tuesday for the latest news and a look at what we got wrong about Covid. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.
[00:41:44] Music Interlude.
Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.
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Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.
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