Sex Work

Despite American society becoming increasingly sexualized, we’ve become less and less tolerant of the sex trade. Regardless, though, Weitzer says the time to discuss the possibility of decriminalizing prostitution is now. After all, we’ve seen “the gradual if incomplete normalization of some other kinds of vice or deviance over the past 40 years,” he writes, citing the examples of gambling, gay rights, marijuana and the proliferation of pornography. Whether you agree with his conclusion or not, his book is a trustworthy guide to recent research on the global sex trade.

Weitzer spoke to Salon by phone about the harm done by criminalization, the benefits of indoor sex work and how trafficking is eclipsing debate over consensual adult prostitution.

Why is it so important to draw a distinction between street prostitution and indoor sex work?

Street prostitution differs from indoor sex work in some substantial ways — both in the way it manifests itself and in the kinds of people who tend to end up in street prostitution. Street prostitution has higher rates of addictive drug use and a higher percentage of workers are runaways, underage and have a pimp. Indoor sex work isn’t always preferable to street work, and there are some places in the world where people work indoors at high risk and are heavily exploited or experience violence, but in general, we find that indoor prostitution is potentially better for sex workers.

There’s also an impact on the surrounding community of street-level work insofar as the negotiations take place on the street. Residents often try to pressure local authorities to crack down on street prostitution – they’re annoyed at sex acts being performed in public, workers getting in fights with potential clients or pimps, ordinary people in the neighborhood being hit on by clients or propositioned by the sex workers themselves. There’s a litany of grievances.

You hit on this earlier: You argue in the book that street prostitution is a social problem. What does that mean in terms of how we address the problem?

It’s very complex and requires more resources than are currently being devoted to street prostitution throughout the U.S. and many other countries. It’s not just a criminal justice problem where arresting people, maybe incarcerating them for a short period of time or fining them, is going to resolve the problem. It’s a social problem because many of the people who work on the street are disadvantaged to begin with. They come from broken homes or are runaways, and are engaged in survival sex — they’re basically a much more desperate population than what we find indoors.

Very few resources are provided to help people get off the street — basically it’s this revolving door of criminal justice and law enforcement. Few cities provide many, if any, resources to help street prostitutes leave the trade.

If you were given the power to unilaterally redesign the U.S. approach to prostitution, what would you change?

My view is to differentiate street prostitution and indoor prostitution. I talk about the two-track policy in the book as one option in the U.S. Street prostitution would remain a criminal offense because of the social problems associated with it, but there would be much more resources put into trying to rehabilitate people working on the street. Track two would be de facto decriminalization: You stop enforcing the law against indoor workers, which means law enforcement doesn’t go out of its way to stage stings unless there’s some other evidence of a trafficking problem.

That’s what I would advocate for the current situation in the U.S. The book raises a number of ideas for how nations that are considering legalization might approach it, but the U.S. is not in that category right now. As a halfway measure, we could talk about this two-track policy. Some cities already do that, they just don’t broadcast it, but there are other cities that put a fair amount of resources into monitoring and busting people who work in the indoor trade.

We know that criminalization is not working very well, wherever it’s practiced. Basically, it forces people to operate in a clandestine manner in the illegal economy, much as with drug criminalization. It subjects the workers to greater risk, they do not feel comfortable contacting the authorities when they have been abused or exploited, and it increases the chances that pimps or other exploiters will get involved with them because the workers are already vulnerable and may feel that they need extra protection.

What do you make of the Village Voice boycott? Is the newspaper profiting from child sex traffickers as its critics claim?

That’s a good question and it’s very hard to answer. Whatever evidence there would be of that would be very anecdotal. To substantiate the claim, you would have to do a representative sample of ads on this website and then have data to prove that a certain percentage are underage or trafficked. It’s one of those claims that’s easily made, law enforcement and activists can cite anecdotal evidence, but to generalize that to the majority, or even a substantial minority, of people who advertise there would be very bad science and problematic.

One thing that advertising on such a site does offer law enforcement is the opportunity to monitor. That is what Craigslist argued, but unsuccessfully. It can be used as a vehicle for identifying people who appear to be underage or trafficked. Without those kinds of mechanisms for advertising, it becomes even more difficult for the authorities to identify and locate people who may have been abused. You could look at it as law enforcement shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating a source that might prove beneficial.

How could legalization affect trafficking?

There are these claims made by anti-prostitution activists that legalization will only make the situation worse for sex workers because it will open the door to more trafficking, or traffickers will be able to operate with less fear of arrest. I’ve never understood those arguments. We know from the drug debate, criminalizing something as a vice when there is demand and supply increases the chances of violence within that economic sector. It also increases the chances of coercion and exploitation. If it’s true that legalization increases trafficking, then you would expect to see some evidence of that and I have not.

How do we address the issue of abusive pimps? Even with legalization you still see a number of pimps.

It depends on the society. You’ve got a fair number of them operating in the window area of Amsterdam, but if you go to Antwerp they really cracked down on organized crime and pimping in general.

I think you can draw a parallel to marriage. We know that domestic violence happens between husbands and wives, but nobody’s arguing to criminalize marriage. There is violence in prostitution, just like there’s violence in marital relationships — the key is to focus on the violence, not the larger institution.

“In the dead of night, alone at home, the loneliness sometimes becomes unbearable,” writes one man. “There aren’t many places to go in the middle of the night, and most of those choices don’t necessarily ensure any kind of reasonable human interaction.” Another man explains, “Nobody talks to me, nobody cares what I say. I’m a 24-year-old drone who wastes his days sitting at a computer reviewing spreadsheets that don’t really matter,” he says. “I just want to talk to someone who cares, and $1 every 3 minutes is a lot less than $250 an hour for a therapist.”

It isn’t just sad sacks looking for companionship — although there are plenty of those — it’s also men who harbor intense resentment toward women: “I’m old in years – 61 – even though I’m an 18-year-old at heart, and I like to think this is my revenge for all the beautiful women in the world whom I can’t approach, whom I can’t get, this idea that I can have some young beauty dance and smile at me any time I want.” There are also the guys who are happily married and simply enjoy the occasional entertainment of beautiful, naked women.

Reading these letters, you become acutely aware of the vulnerability in their wanting, the dependency of their desire. This isn’t an accident: Breslin, who for years lived in the San Fernando Valley covering the adult industry, says she was never interested in the real stars of porn — the women. As she wrote for the Good Men Project, “Stripped of their clothes by the medium, stripped of their dignity by the nature of their work, and stripped of their pride by the all-seeing, unblinking eye of the camera that followed their every desperate thrust, Porn Valley’s working stiffs offer a peek behind the curtain of masculinity at manhood laid bare” — and so too do the men of the latest “Letters” project.

Breslin spoke to me by phone from her apartment in Chicago about Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs, what she’s learned about male desire and why feminist debates about the sex industry drive her nuts.

You seem particularly interested in men’s role in the sex industry. Why do you think that is?

To me, the sex industries are this great petri dish for discovering what drives people, because you get to see them behave in extreme ways. A lot of the focus is on the women, though, because that’s more titillating. Often times, people studying or writing about sex work are men, and they’re more drawn to questions like, “What kind of woman does this? What is her life like? What kind of female mind does it take to be able to sell her body for sex?” I’ve always been very interested in men and trying to figure out how the male mind works, and sex work seemed like a way to really find that out. The sex industry is like the private X-rated Disneyland for men. In the sex work world, men get to do things that are socially unacceptable, whether that’s getting fucked in the ass or being ruthless sexually, so the analogy I like is the Wizard of Oz — I always want to see what’s behind the curtain.

Sometimes it seems like every stripper, every call girl, every sex worker of every stripe has a blog — but johns and strip-club regulars? Not so much. You hit on the fact that the stories of sex workers themselves might be more titillating, but why else aren’t we hearing from the men?

Well, I think there’s a taboo these days around men talking openly about their sexual fantasies or their participation in the sex industry. Right now, it’s quote-unquote not OK for a man to have sex with a prostitute or to be married and go to a strip club, and that’s partly due to political correctness and partly due to feminism that those things are pathologized.

Speaking of feminism and pathology, a recent Slate piece about the misogyny of porn moguls like Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner rubbed you the wrong way. You responded on your Forbes blog by arguing that porn simply shows male desire as it is. I wonder, how did your years in Porn Valley change your view of men?

I know a lot about sex work, but I feel like I also got a great education in men. The main thing was that it made me more sympathetic toward men. When you’re on the set of a gang bang and there’s a hundred guys all fucking one woman, you actually see that it’s not just a bunch of animals. You see how complicated it is to be a man — you know, you’re supposed to be big and strong, but you also have these desires and conflicted feelings. Ideally, anything laid bare will invoke compassion, and that’s what it made me feel. Like a friend of mine says, “You see men as they are and you love them anyway.”

What about how your experience reporting on sex work influenced your view of feminism? You’re often critical of feminism, especially where it intersects with the sex industry.

When it comes to sex work, a lot of the time feminism gets it wrong. They sit at one extreme or another. First, feminism as a movement took the stance that sex work is bad and inherently exploitative of women. And then there’s this movement in the last 10 years or so that, no, sex workers are empowered and they’re in control of their bodies and they’re feminists too and we should support that. Both of those are just radical positions and, in my opinion, any radical position is going to be inherently wrong. There are women in the sex industry who are completely fucked and strung out on drugs and being exploited and being victimized. And there are also women like Nina Hartley who are born to do sex work and are high functioning and understand themselves and how to function in that world.

My main problem with feminism and sex work is that the majority of feminists talking about sex work are in the academy. They took women’s studies classes and 99 percent of what they learned about sex work is, like, on the Internet or from one porn star they met once. If you have something to say about it, you should go into that world and study it and get to know those people and spend time there. Instead, feminism is just manufacturing abstractions about what sex work is, and they’re too chicken to go in and really explore the industry. So for the most part, feminism can’t tell me anything about sex work because they’re too busy posturing as feminists to find out what that world is really like.

It’s funny because, as you know, I emailed you when I was an aspiring journalist in college and I asked you for advice on how to end up doing what you were doing at the time, which was reporting on the realities of the industry. You were totally supportive but you were also like, look, whatever you do, don’t go to Porn Valley. Your exact words were, “It’s a meat-grinder for the human condition.”

I mean, studying the sex industry is really challenging work. It’s hard to be a sex worker, it’s hard to inhabit that world and it’s also hard to study it and be around it, because it’s brutal. It’s not, in my opinion, a business like any other. These are people whose jobs are to stick part of their body into somebody else’s body, or have somebody else’s body inside of their body. That’s tough work.

That’s part of why not a lot of women have written about it. The payoff after you’ve spent time writing about or working in the sex industry is your understanding of human nature is unrivaled. You just see people flayed. You see what impulses really drive us. It was hard for me for several years to come back from that. Once you’ve seen humanity laid bare, there’s a time when you kind of want to unsee it, go back to living in Cinderella land.

It’s always complicated. It’s never black and white. It’s never all misogynist or all feminist. It’s complicated because it’s a business that reflects our interior, and the interior is always conflicted and at war with itself.

Your friend’s line – the one about seeing men as they are and loving them anyway – resonates with me. I was drawn to the world of Internet porn as a curious post-pubescent girl in an attempt to figure out what boys and men wanted, and later as a journalist writing about sex. It was so much darker, and so much more complicated and foreign, than I could have imagined it would be. For a long while I struggled to reconcile my affection and love for men with the reality of what I found out there in the ether.

The sex industry can be really ruthless and brutal. If you’re around that enough, you start to wonder if everybody’s impulses are really base and everyone’s either trying to fuck or kill each other. You don’t see the flipside of healthy nuclear families and dads who mow the lawn on the weekends and swimming lessons in the toddler pool. Over time, I’ve been able to have a yin and yang attitude about it, which is that that darkness is always there, but there’s also this other part of it that is about lightness.

The thing I would say most male porn stars have in common is that they desperately want women to love them. I did a TV pilot years ago that was gonna be about my life as a sex writer and when we were done wrapping the pilot, the executive producer and I had lunch and he said, “So what is the porn industry really about?” And I said, “What do you think it’s about?” He said, “Love,” and I said, “Yeah, that’s right.” It’s like I wrote in the Forbes post, the story is that the guy always gets the girl. Women are exalted, and sometimes the misogyny you see is actually a reaction to intense desire. It’s a challenge to be able to hold those seemingly contradictory ideas in your head at the same time — you know, “I totally want to possess this woman because I love her so much, but at the same time, being ruled by that desire makes me want to kill her.” And that’s how you end up with crazy gang-bang videos.

Getting back to the latest “Letters” project, what have you learned from it so far?

The “Letters” projects have been of varying success, but I love it as a genre because I find the letters very endearing. I’m always kind of surprised by how enamored men are by women. What I see as a sub-context in the latest project is how much power the stripper has. She’s the focus. It’s not about a guy manipulating some woman to get what he wants, it’s about, “I have to pay to get this girl to even pay attention to me and when she does, she gives me the thing that I want that I can’t get at work and I can’t get from my wife and can’t get by myself,” and I think they’re sort of awed by that.

That gets back to that common theme of love –

I think the other piece of it is the loneliness. They’re starving for human connection. I think our female desire is for emotional connection to transcend that inescapable loneliness of being a human being, and theirs is physical, so they go to these places where someone will touch them.

Ever since the birth of her daughter, the intersection of motherhood and sexuality has been a theme for Young, who is the director of the feminist art gallery Femina Potens. In an earlier exhibit titled “Becoming MILF,” she served breast milkshakes and displayed a quilt made of burp cloths and “porn star panties.” Controversy certainly comes with this territory: A couple of months back, I wrote about how her maternally focused performance art – including posing for a black-and-white photograph while dressed up like Marilyn Monroe and breast-feeding her baby — inspired a fellow sex worker to accuse her of appealing to pedophiles, which then led to an insider Twitter war. It was a trying time for Young, and made her fear for her family’s safety, but it hasn’t stopped her creative output. She’s writing a children’s book called “My Mommy Is a Love Artist” and organizing an anthology written by members of her group “The Sexy Mamas Social Club.”

We are joined in bed by a handful of her friends and collaborators as the conversation ranges from the extreme, like the challenges of practicing bondage while lactating and age-appropriate ways to explain the concept of pornography to a child; to the prosaic, like how little sleep new moms get. That one of our bed-mates has a 2-year-old girl on her lap lends the sexual parts of the conversation a vague friction, which is fitting, given that Young’s work explores the cultural tension between being a mother and being a sex symbol. It’s part performance art, part interview — and a total trip.

Can you explain the image of you with the spinner between your breasts?

With this one, this is really about the different ways that people see your breasts after having a baby, and the way that you view them yourself. You’re feeding your child with your breasts but you’re also a sexual being. I can be with my partner in the other room making passionate love when we’re interrupted by a crying baby and then I have to rush in and use those same breasts to feed my child.

I think that was even challenging for my partner, he felt like, “Your breasts are Emma’s right now. What if I mess something up? What if I disturb our child’s eating by … squeezing too hard?” There are certain things that even I don’t do with my breasts now; I don’t have them tied up or do any corporal punishment to them. I don’t want to damage any of the milk ducts right now.

Why is the issue of sex and motherhood such a potent subject?

People obviously have a lot of issues around moms, regardless of whether their sexuality is documented on camera. Just Jane Smith having a sex life and having a kid and being out about it is controversial.

I like to make art about what’s going on in my life right now, and my child is totally consuming my life. Even when I’m not with her, my identity is affected by her existence. She’s my inspiration for basically everything that I do now. People would tell me before that everything would change when I had a kid, but I thought they meant, “You’ll never do adult film again” or “You’ll never make art again.” It’s not those kinds of things but rather why you’re doing it or how you do it.

We’re creating our own family, in our own way, instead of feeling like we have to move to the suburbs and have nine-to-fives and give up all that we are because we have a kid.

How much do you personally struggle with this new identity? It seems you’re trying to deliver a message to a general public that has a hard time thinking about a mom’s sexuality, let alone one who’s in the adult business. But I’m sure you also struggle with it internally as well, right?

I’ve spent the last 10 years in the adult industry and I feel like I have become an expert at certain things — like sex! — that I get paid to do. Now, all of a sudden, I’m in a world where I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m just trying to write and to connect with other moms with similar experiences. That’s why I created the San Francisco “Sexy Mamas” club a month after Emma was born. As I started talking about my own experiences, moms started coming up to me and were like, “Thank you so much for doing this. This the first time I’ve been able to be ‘out’ about being a part of an alternative sexual culture and also being a mom.” I think that I find happiness in not feeling isolated and not feeling shame about who we are. That’s really the core of what I do, whether it’s in the adult industry or in art.

What do you talk about in the Sexy Mamas club?

Sometimes we just hang out and have lunch and talk about normal mom stuff, like our struggles trying to get our children to sleep and what solids they’re eating — but we don’t have to be afraid about talking about work or sex as well. Our kids also have each other; they play together and are growing up together.

How do you explain what you do to fellow moms who don’t have that shared experience of sex work?

A lot of times I lead in with the educational element. I’m like, “I speak on sexuality at places like Yale University and I direct for Good Vibrations.”

Let’s talk about the controversy over the breast-feeding image.

What was interesting was that people were projecting all these fears and hang-ups that they have onto that image. So I think there’s obviously some conversation that needs to happen around it, and hopefully we can create some safe spaces for those conversations.

The controversy seemed potentially very frightening. I was just recently reading about a case in which a couple was arrested after their daughter found naughty photos they had taken of themselves and brought the shots to school. That was in 1999, just over a decade ago.

That’s why when people started using the p-word [pedophile], it just seemed so incredibly loaded and dangerous. As a mom, you’re constantly worried: Am I doing the right thing? Am I giving her enough love? Should I be here talking to you instead of being with her right now? It is gut-wrenching to leave her when I go to work every day. And then you feel like you’re not doing as good of a job at work because you’re thinking, “I have to hurry home to my child!” These are things that every mom, especially every working mom, deals with. It’s really challenging on top of that when you have numerous articles and comments from strangers about how you’re not doing a good enough job parenting, because you already have your own anxieties around that anyway.

The one question I always hear asked of moms who are in the adult business is, “What are you going to tell your child?”

What I tell everyone is that I plan on being honest with my child and talking with her in a language she understands, which is the same as I do with any member of my family or anyone who is outside of the adult industry. Finding some commonality, something that they understand and can relate to, and talking with them on that level.

I’m creating a children’s book right now that’s called “My Mommy Is a Love Artist.” It’s about a mom who creates art and film that captures the love that people have for one another. There are hearts everywhere and it’s like, “My mom goes on a safari, she goes through the wildnerness and finds people who are having magical experiences together and then captures them on film as they have their magic love.” It shows them holding hands and kissing. It advocates for love and for connection. And a lot of the people that I do shoot are real couples. Everything that I do is about capturing actual authentic pleasure. I think you can explain pleasure to a child — they have pleasurable moments, they love to give hugs and to receive kisses and be tickled. I’ll inform her about more things as it makes sense to address them, but I want her to understand the basic concepts of what I do. Right now, though, it’s all Elmo to her!

Another question that a lot of people ask is, “Have you told your family?” I really don’t see shame in what I do and I don’t want my child to feel that I do anything that is shameful. I don’t want her to feel that our bodies are shameful. But I also want her to come to her own conclusions. She can either support this when she gets older or she can have her own valid reasons for not supporting it. I can’t make her be a sex-positive feminist when she grows up.

She has to rebel somehow, right?

She might be out there picketing Good Vibrations or something!