Chapo Trap House - Bonus: SEX! Now that we have your attention: Work

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

Will and Virgil talk to writer, podcaster and sex workers' rights advocate Conner Habib and Tai, a self-described "whore of all trades". They discuss sex workers' labor issues, the atrocious SESTA/FOSTA bill, various models of sex work decriminalization, and why you can no longer use phrases like "lusty hands" on certain web forums. Sex Workers Outreach Project http://www.new.swopusa.org/ SWOP Behind Bars http://swopbehindbars.org/ Lysistrata https://www.lysistratamccf.org/ Follow Conner here: @connerhabib Find his podcast here: patreon.com/connerhabib

Hey everybody, Virgil here for a special bonus episode. I'm here with Will Manniker. Hello. Today, we're having a conversation with two individuals, Ty, a self-described horror of all trades. Howdy. And Connor Habib, author, hosted the podcast Against Everyone with Connor Habib and Sex Workers Activist. Hey, how you doing? And I want to start off the discussion with a very recent news story. Yesterday, Stormy Daniels was arrested by Columbus Police in Ohio for allegedly touching three undercover detectives while performing at a strip club. Those charges were dismissed. According to Columbus Police, the arrest was part of a long-term investigation

into allegations of human trafficking, prostitution, and other vice-related violations. That's interesting because I've heard in mixed accounts he was arrested for letting one of the customers touch her, not the other way around. Yeah, legally, it'll vary state by state. But in some of these cases, I have really weird rules that are also very closely tied to holding a liquor license. So in California, and I think in New York as well, if you have a liquor license, your club can't be full nude. So like, ATC, like Alcohol Tobacco Control, will work with law enforcement. And in my experience in Louisiana with the parish and that weird sub-sector of the law, they'll work together to really police these clubs and police the bodies of dancers.

So there's this whole umbrella of overlapping laws and regulations that are hard to figure out and can be turned on an individual at any given moment, largely on a whim, or based on selective law enforcement, even in Louisiana, a place, a state with three laws at most. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, I mean, these kinds of things have been going on for a really long time. I mean, obviously, it seems pretty obvious that Stormy Daniels was targeted for specific reasons. But you know, where I grew up, when I was growing up, there was like a shiatsu spa massage place and this guy went in as a customer and he couldn't afford the happy ending when it was suggested to him at the end. So we reported everybody that worked there to

the police. Then the police gave him money to pay for the happy end, to go in and pay for the happy ending next time. So he's given state money. Then when he got it, then the police busted the place. So these kinds of things happen all the time and police officers are often, you know, high quote unquote hiring sex workers, having sex with them and then busting them and then using the sex as the evidence. Now that's been sort of thrown out in certain states, but it's still used even though judges will sort of throw it out as outrageous. It's still a matter of routine in certain places. But like, you know, when I read the story about Stormy Daniels this morning and this disparity between who was touching who, in the account I read, it seemed to be that she

was arrested for letting a customer of the strip club she was performing at touch her. On stage, which is like really important because they won't make a distinct difference. Sometimes you can't have contact on stage, sometimes you can't have contact on stage or in lap dances or on the floor. They won't let you be fully or like semi-nude on the floor even. That's why some clubs require you to wear dresses. It's all very and like also I started dancing when I was 18. So you sign these contracts and you don't know what's going to happen and the clubs very rarely inform you the rules or the laws even you just like they don't have one of those big like laminated OSHA posters. No, well after the raids in New Orleans during Mardi Gras there actually

was this like giant poster in the dressing room and it was this like naked CGI girl. She was like very curvy and busty and she had all of these like CGI tattoos with the little like no signs over each breast, her butt, and like her genital area and it was like no. Like ATC code does not allow this. I think that like I mean Ty you probably know more about this than I do but I think that there's always been this bizarro like fine line about in strip clubs particularly since Barnes versus Glenn Theater which was the Supreme Court opinion in the 90s where like there's a very fine line between what's okay and where societal collapse is going to happen because something bad happened at the strip club according to the state. So like in that Supreme Court case it was like okay

you can't be naked but as long as you wear pasties and you have like a teabag like up your ass like the state won't collapse. So I think when you're talking you guys talking about like who touched who was touched and who did the touch in and all that kind of stuff I think it's important to note these things but I also think it's like it's just again exposing this weird idea that there's this line between total barbarism and like free sexual expression that happens at strip clubs that's always just sort of an inch away from being violated you know. In thinking about this like the member of the Columbus PD vice squad who got this assignment and let's be honest very likely to target Stormy Daniels because of her you know political associations and lawsuit against Donald

Trump that person's job is to go to a strip strip club and try to touch women and then when they allow it arrest them for it. Yeah like that's their whole job yeah. So like I mean like in that guy's mind he's protecting the community. Yes. Exactly. I mean I don't think that's what's going on in his mind. No he's just like getting paid to touch some boobs like honestly like if you were offered that job would you pass it on. Well modified to arrest people for letting me do it. Thank you for being moral. The voice of conscience. I am thinking about a like a poster like you said there's like an sort of an animated cartoon lady with big tits and it's just like here okay they should have like someone from DeviantArt creator poster or it's like the way Wario is

touching Luigi is bad. Do not do that. What these examples show to me and the example of the massage parlor that you mentioned earlier Connor is how the police in the criminal justice system and criminalization of sex work reinforces the power imbalance against the people engaged in sex work will very often come from vulnerable populations. I mean in your experience how would you rate the labor rights of sex workers under club. Oh non existent. I mean there are some protections for some kinds of sex work in some places like in California here for porn performers there are certain rules because porn is legalized in California which is what we can talk about legalization versus decriminalization later but there are some protections offered

here although those protections are usually pretty they're pretty terrible. I think that you know the important thing to remember as far as labor rights is because sex workers of all sorts are such vulnerable populations you can basically see what the state wants to do to you in your job if you're not a sex worker by looking at what it does to sex workers because it's getting away with everything it can by exploiting and abusing this community of laborers so you know when you look at that just think that's what they want to do to us you know. Yeah I was actually fired from a club in Manhattan because they caught one that I'm a labor organizer and I was trying to organize dancers at a separate club like not even there and I mean the same club also had this like

class action lawsuit for their racist hiring and employment practices which is really common in the sex industry in general but like a very large issue in Manhattan strip clubs especially. The name of the club was Pinkerton's. Yeah and I mean I think it's not just you know it's not just the labor rights you know afforded or protected by the state it's also all this sort of corporate the corporate interests I mean there's so many directions to go in with this so like you guys can take it away however you want but you know whether it's banking and payment processors whether it's you know just employment discrimination whether it's social media all these kinds of things end up either as an extension of the state or just on their own really messing with sex

workers rights just to do their job you know in whatever way they want to. I want to wheel back to the labor issue momentarily but first I want to get to what is basically the headline issue which was the passage of Cesta Fosta nearly unanimously in the Senate 98 to 0 I believe or no I'm sorry 97 to 2. Yeah 97 to 2 because John McCain's brain is fucked up well that would have been 98 to 2 yeah. You don't have to count Rand Paul it's fun. On a on a on a bipartisan basis and a lot of people still are not that familiar with what the law is or what it does and is well not familiar with how it impacts the safety of sex workers and I was I wanted to throw that to the floor to discuss this legislation. Well just first of all like what is Cesta Fosta

like how is how is this law sold and like practically what does it mean for people involved in sex work. Well yeah so it's kind of as you said it's like a bipartisan it's a bipartisan effort although there are lots of places you can trace it back to I enjoy tracing it back to Kamala Harris just because there's she's been at war against sex workers in California for a really long time against sex workers rights in California for a really long time and suing and initiating lawsuits against back page again and again and that's you know all the culmination of that is in my mind what led to the sort of bipartisan popularity of Cesta Fosta so it's really important I think to trace it back to her too just to show that this isn't a Trump administration thing and in fact

in some ways the only traction that we've gained in fighting against this and sorry I'll go into what it is a little bit more but in fighting against this has been the fact that we're in the middle of the Trump presidency not to be an acceleration it's about it but I can't imagine trying to fight a law that proposes to be against sex trafficking of young girls in a sort of Clinton administration with Gloria Steinem and Kamala Harris on stage like praising this law it would have been an absolute nightmare and it would have happened in that administration a hundred percent and so I think that um what you're seeing is a law that is proposing to protect people against sex trafficking um but because sex trafficking is I think intentionally vaguely defined it

affects all sex workers and so I think maybe Ty if you want to talk more about how it affects them that'd be that'd be awesome but I think that that's the foundation of it yeah so um it's pretty much made it like very impossible to screen clients to advertise on most places um back page was shut down before the closure or before the bill passed for separate reasons um and then a number of other advertising sites have moved offshore to kind of be immune from it but so it so it makes it basic it makes it like any any online hosting uh service liable if content is being hosted there that can anyway be connected to sex work exactly well no the sex trafficking is what it says but but it's a slippery definition of sex trafficking which basically I mean people have in their mind

this idea of sex trafficking of like frightened children being brought across borders and that exists nobody disagrees that that exists but the legal definition of it uh has extended to cover all forms of sex work or selling or buying exactly so if consenting adults if you're if you're two like sex workers working um in pairs which is very common for safety um you can be charged with trafficking each other if you're driving a worker so like yeah so it's like anything that if you're like you do to facilitate exactly uh exchange of sex for money between two adults is now part of sex trafficking which you know in in the public's imagination is like the movie Taken or something where your daughter is some oil chic or something it's also if um if you're

married to a sex worker even you could be like considered like profiteering off of the like laborer of the uh means I guess that was a sex worker there was a bill passed recently by the democratic governor of Virginia which I believe you know created a liability for the partner of a sex worker uh it's it's comparable to the it's comparable to the Rockefeller drug laws basically it's like saying if if you're caught with an ounce of weed you're charged as a drug trafficker yeah yeah no that's exactly what it is um to better understand like the effect of this law I think it would be good to talk about how up until now uh sex work has worked online and like like how people have used online now now that that's being shut down how do they use it before

to make uh their jobs safer and easier for them to do yeah so so I think like the basics of that are you know basically you there were sites that would host you um and you'd put an ad up on the site this isn't this isn't the only way but you put an ad up on the site and putting it out up on the site meant that people had to contact you often through the site and because of that there was much more of a screening opportunity you could also link up with other sex workers who are on that site and talk to them about uh you know what and talk to them about these potential clients um whether or not they were dangerous um there were also sites that have that would verify client clients sometimes like and say that this person has been using this service since 2011

or whatever it was so those are some of the ways um that it just makes things more dangerous for people because it's removing all that information there's you know another thing is like so you have a site like rent men um so rent boy was shut down but there's a rent man there's a rent man look at the grown-up version of it rent boys to bed yeah so the so the the thing with um rent men is you used to be able to put uh how much you charged on there as soon as sesta fossa was signed into law they sent an email out to everybody saying no you can't put your price on here so I would just want you to your fee on here so I want you to sort of imagine what that means for people who you know there are some people who are sort of uh wanted to have limited uh clients um for a

very high rate and then there are some people that wanted clients for you know like a lower rate where they just wanted to take on as many clients as they could now both those people had to do the same kind of screening had to have the same conversations um with people they had to also sort of put in this sort of sneaky language that was like hey just here to meet new people you know you had to like put that kind of stuff in the site so you can't even actually say what you're doing what you're good at what you think you know you might have I'm on there I'm on there just because I want to meet new people I'm also an adult friend finder because I want to make some adult friends yeah everyone um got really strict with their copy it seemed so I actually got kicked off

of Eros which is like an advertising site probably because of my copy and there's nothing explicit in it like I I know that words like desire or like lust or sin are now flagged and they just completely shut like took down my ad shut down my account I'm like permaband and they sent me an email and they're like oh yes like we've been advised by our legal team that you're doing like something illegal and I want I've really wanted to just send them an email back and it's like I'm a hooker everyone on this site is a hooker I don't know what you think this is dang language police over here uh so yeah there's always like they they flag words like uh like lust and uh yeah it's so Victorian like you can't say like mouth or like hands even like because I'm

on another site and they tell you they're like hey like heads up you know this isn't going to fly like we have new terms of service and like they'll tell you what words aren't allowed and it's absurd like my copy is short it was like cut in half let me ask you this what emojis can you use I definitely not any of the fruit ones not that not that no vehicles because that's a traffic game emojis no the one that's just a box definitely not that one so like um when when when cesta fosta was being debated before it passed with you know near unanimity uh sorry with a near unanimous vote like how how was this bill sold or like the

people who probably genuinely think it's doing some good like what what did they tell the public and themselves about the nature of this I mean they were like oh we're gonna like save traffic like sex trafficking victims and the narrative was really pushed that they were going to be saving like minors and children um which I mean if you look at um operation cross country which is a raid that has been carried out annually for I think over a decade now very few of their arrests are actually trafficking victims and like in the cases where they have arrested minors I think almost all of them have been like no like we were doing this like as survival work and they were all like like you know 15 16 17 they're all teenagers um it's also like the foster care system is a huge

just like pipeline into survival sex work a lot and like even like actual sex trafficking as well and no one wants to recognize that no one wants to tackle that as an issue well it's good because uh I just saw the other day a lot of these kids being held in ice concentration camps are going to be put into the foster system rather than reunited with their parents so uh yeah no yeah no I it's a really good point though Will because I mean I think it's like and I try to say that as much as I can if you care about human trafficking ice is human trafficking the prison industrial complex which Kamala Harris is wild about supports human trafficking is human trafficking and in fact the prison industrial complex is certainly sex trafficking if I mean for sure so it's like that

I think it's really good to bring those kinds of things up because the focus on what human trafficking is is conflated somehow with little girls undergoing this or this or this and then of course it's like well great I can point to that with ice you know or it's people who are forced into sexual sexual situations you know without their consent by forces that are more powerful well great that's the prison system you know I mean I think that there's there's a lot to point to that's not uh not consensual sex work at a strip club or online or whatever well and also if you're talking about uh you know prison and law enforcement and you know the the way it's used on you know the poorer populations of this country it is also about like knocking the legs out from any

potential future employment and something outside of a black market economy as well so like I mean if people again like talking about people who are concerned about sex work or you know runaway teens or something like that I mean a lot of teens run away because their parents are abusive or because their parents kick them out because they're gay or lesbian or something like that yeah and trans kids especially you know so I think it's like you and you're right to point that out as well it's like so there's a black market economy which is criminalized and then there's a prison system which is basically you know a slave slavery institution and so the the sort of dual work there of criminalizing something so you can put them in prison so they

could never get out you know and do anything else again so they can be criminalized again you know I think it's a cycle like that of course switch up a little bit like I mean I think when it comes to things like you know the the push behind criminalizing sex work and sexuality at play in our politics it's sort of like with the right it's easy to understand what's going on there they hate you know poor people sex labor rights of any kind are generally deranged in their outlook on human sexuality so it's pretty easy to understand however like there's it there's also like a liberal side to this as well and like you know acknowledging that there is part of the sex trade or sex work that is bad and criminal and exploitative I think we can all agree on that

but there's obviously a huge part of it that is not that that still really bothers a lot of people who are otherwise liberal and otherwise in favor of things like you know a gay and lesbian and trans rights and labor rights even what do you think is the hurdle about sex work that makes it still makes it such a kind of potent law and order issue for even liberal and democratic politicians yeah yeah I have so much to say so I'm gonna let you go because I don't want to overwhelm the answer to this on my own I don't know I mean like I know that part of reason why this is you know so taboo is because it offers like upward financial mobility for the most marginalized people and I think a lot of liberal people want to think that they're progressive but they honestly

aren't especially when it comes to poverty class about like migration issues about trans issues it really sex work does touch the most marginalized folks and it's also like very universal like it's practiced in like a lot of countries like if not every country so like they want upward mobility for you know immigrants and marginalized people but they want them to do it the right way by getting you know an internship and then you know going to the school that they went to and everyone just wants free labor yeah exactly yeah like people like me but like they like at the end of the day like still wish I would suck their dick for free and like it's a hard lesson to learn but I'm not gonna do it Connor I mean I yeah I think I think also you know I'm I'm so grateful for the

fact that the sex workers rights movement has taken on this tone of or this this rallying crowd of sex work is work but a lot of what you're referencing to also has to do with just a general sex negativity and a sexual liberation aspect that's really needed because the questions of sex work were really brought up and sort of handed to feminism at a certain point in its development now I think a lot of feminists are very supportive of sex work now and and and allies and a lot of sex workers are feminists but this sort of second-way feminism which is also really risen to power in the UK so you'll see a lot of um anti-sex work uh socialists in the UK as well that's sort of taking over the development was like they of the public discussion which is not uh doesn't make any sense

to me because it's hand in hand with you know the police with the sort of patriarchal you know by their own terms the patriarchal state system all that kind of stuff um but there's not there's not an idea that people get to do what they want with their own body sexually including charging for it um it unfortunately the left and not just liberals but the left have a long tradition of being very suspicious of pleasure and that includes Marxist and socialists who we would expect to find a lot of allies in um but because of that and and rightly so there's a good suspicion of pleasure in some for some reasons but but because of that it's sort of poisoned some of the strains of uh people that could be allies for sex workers so you know you have people that are like

anti-porn Marxist like Gail Dines or you have these almost like Maoist anti-porn anti-internet porn people and it's very strange people that are bound to obscenity laws that think it's all about objectification you know and you know I always try to say just to combat these people if you ask like one of these anti-porn or anti-sex worker activists like porn objectifies women well just tell me what do you mean by porn what do you mean by objectify and what do you mean by women and they'll give you shitty answers to all three or no answers at all but uh Connor it's sort of like you know from from the left if we take uh seriously the idea that sex work is work and examine it as work then the problem with it is the work part not the sex part right like work is

what sucks in our society not sex and if we combine the two together it would make it would stand to reason that the problem with sex work is all the things that make jobs and work in general awful and then what stands to reason that what could improve them would be the same things that would improve uh the lot of every other kind of worker in this country yeah I 100% agree with you that it would really really improve the labor conditions for most sex workers and so that's where a lot of our on the ground activism has to take place and so I'm really happy that that work is happy that those efforts are happening but I think that you know if you just talk to people who aren't even thinking about sex work questions we're all so fucked up about our own sexualities

about porn about our relationships all that kind of stuff that it wouldn't it wouldn't fully solve a lot of the problems that people face it wouldn't you know it would definitely create a center of gravity that would help solve some of them but I think we'd still have a ton of work to do I think that's a good enough segue to talk about the labor aspects of sex work and uh you know sex workers are left out of things like the labor movement they're left out of liberal advocacy uh rico laws trafficking what laws can target sex workers you say who work cooperatively which in an industry like this is a necessity uh Tygen you talk about any experiences with labor organizing with sex workers in New York yeah so I'm doing more things with I think

stripping just because it is legal it's easier to kind of like have a face in front of it um and you definitely have more rights trying to uh you know change things internally within the club and then also like externally so we've been meeting with um lawyers from uh sore and then sorry what's sore sore is um sore is like a lawyer's collective that um aid sex workers is not necessarily within like the labor aspect but we were meeting with them to kind of get a little boost and segue into um like people who have more experience in labor law yeah so I'm doing more of my labor organizing within dancing um also on the heels of all of the Mardi Gras raids in New Orleans sorry could you start just real quick explain what the Mardi Gras raids

in New Orleans that just happened were yeah so like I think nine clubs on Bourbon were shut down um and it was an ongoing thing they've been getting raided for a couple of years now um and also like historically the policing of sex work is a like ongoing battle in New Orleans um they used to have a really beautiful culture of burlesque that was kind of like chased out of the city and then like as there was all of the money left and then they had to kind of like rebuild that financially so we had seen this before like decades ago and then we're trying to prevent it now um we also learned that Disney like the company literally has a stake in the city of New Orleans so this is part of the reason why they were closing all of the ship of Disney

presents the bourbon street experience right yeah and it's also like even without the strip clubs it's just I love New Orleans I love Louisiana but it's like kind of terrifying during the Mardi Gras season just like to be in the streets around like so many like drunk men and like I'm a sex worker I'm just like I was a stripper for years and like I'm very used to drunk men like it's my bread and butter but it was just too many like so all these clubs are raided um by ATC and local law enforcement and then shut down for a period of time um maybe like a week or two weeks depending on the club some of them didn't get they were raided but not shut down um and then when they all reopened um I think a week before like that Tuesday or like a week and a half before

it was the environment was completely different um the rules had changed or the rules that had been there were enforced more heavily so you couldn't like touch your customer the customer couldn't really touch you and you couldn't like touch yourself in like breast, genital or butt areas and like you couldn't dance a certain way you couldn't like really like sit on a customer's lap again this is a state with no laws well uh so it's a weird thing where they where they want to they understand that uh like the tourism is largely driven by the kind of uh you know more wild aspects of New Orleans and that history but they also kind of want to clean it up so they kind of have a try they're trying to have it both ways are these weird like you know you can do this

but not this yeah it's also I think that the clubs in New Orleans are a little bit more independently run than other clubs where like all most of the clubs in Manhattan are are like a part of a corporation um and then the club I worked at the original owner went public with the IPO but then kept this one private so the rules are like all different and our houses are way lower and they're pretty chill and everyone knows each other but they weren't paying off the enforcement I guess and so they also collectively settled with the city to reopen for I think 28,600 which is the amount of money that some dancers could have made in that single season and like you know half a dozen clubs to it's not like they're like scraping up you know

less than 30k to reopen a business that's making like so much money at night especially like in the high season but uh back to uh to Manhattan and your experiences in New York you said that you were fired from a club because they got wind that you were trying to organize at another club so when you're organizing like you know your co-workers or you're trying to like you know broach this like what's your pitch like you know how do you is it is an easy sell I mean it depends on the club I worked at clubs where it's like a very close environment everyone knows each other and we sometimes like see each other outside of work um in more corporate clubs it's way more difficult because it's like super cutthroat and everyone's like I just care about my money and nothing else

and that's fine if you're like that but I mean I personally want to better the work environment and I want to better like my other workers so it's like hyper competitive uh among dancers it's harder to make an argument for solidarity yeah because it's like it's almost seen as like fucking with your money and like I lost a lot of people who I thought were my friends when I decided to take steps to organize a club that we had all prior worked at and some people still were working at um it's just I mean it's a difficult environment to work in it's also a lot of sex workers just inherently kind of understand things from the left they understand like being poor really sex and not having health care like we should have benefits and things like that but they don't

like really compute it as necessary or as something that like we can have and can fight for it's just something that we've kind of always lived in these conditions and like there's nothing that can change that it's sort of like at the end of the night if it's a difference in what you what you're taking home that night and that's like that's a harder sell yeah it's also yeah exactly so it's that money is so immediate and that's part of reason why I started that's probably why like so many other people started because you get that cash in your hand when you leave right you get it right then and there you don't have to wait two weeks for a paycheck you don't have to like there's it's nothing you have it and like imagine being imagine uh being a freelance writer uh

thinking about shit like that you know really six to nine months you could have a kid in the time you could get a five hundred dollar check from like some fucking outlet but uh uh first you want can we talk a little bit about like the differences in the the some of like the international models between legalization and decriminalization and the Nordic model yeah could you describe like what the Nordic model is when people talk about that Connor yeah I mean so the Nordic model is at its heart I mean the simplest way to explain it is like it criminalizes being a client of a sex worker but it doesn't criminalize the sex worker themselves it does still in some places criminalize sex workers themselves but really does decriminalize as being a sex worker but criminalizes hiring one

so it's basically strangling off the economic support that sex workers receive and in in some places you know if you're arrested as a client or you know rounded up as a client you have to go to john school which is like it's crazy where you have to like what is john school yeah it's not it's not as fun as it sounds like where you have to it's basically like uh when you get caught for drunk driving you have to watch like movies of like accidents yeah like that it's like this is how you're destroying people's lives by hiring someone for a blowjob you know it's like it's really it's really insane and so um that's basically it there are variations on it and maybe we can talk about those variations yeah are there like is the Nordic model sorry Connor the Nordic model is just sort

of one example of how a decriminalized model would look like are there others I think it's closer to legalization than yeah okay yeah exactly yeah so what is the difference then between legalization and decriminalization you just want decriminalization because you don't want the regulations from a state that is completely inept at regulating something this is something that as someone who's worked for porn performers rights for so long I kept coming across was dealing with politicians and officials policymakers who had no idea what the hell they were talking about because they were so out of touch with the community or pretended to be so out of touch with the community that they were trying to legislate for so you know think about the fact that politicians are the least uh

the least qualified people to regulate anything about sexuality whatsoever because they're first of all not supposed to have sex lives and they're not supposed to talk about them they're not supposed to have looked at porn or gone to strip clubs or whatever because they're scandals in this country or whatever it's supposed that's that in this country that's a terrible thing to have done even though they've all done it so you have these people that are completely inept and that's what the legalization eventually would boil down to is either trying to control and regulate sex work for you know whatever calculated ways that they want to do it or just being completely inept about it whereas your criminalization just allows us to do our jobs the way we want to

but like at any I mean in some hypothetical future day could there be a role for the state to regulate the labor practices involved I mean like regulate the relations I don't buy that argument wholesale economies I think it certainly is within the ambit of the state to regulate labor generally well sure but we yes I think that okay we can we can look at how the state regulates labor and other fields but like you know for instance when in California we had this whole battle to allow uh perform performers to perform without condoms okay and um Osha was involved and uh they were going to like if someone called Osha and said they're not using condoms on the set like the set could have been raided all that kind of stuff I had to go along with a lot a bunch of other

performers in front of these lawmakers and say look your science is outdated you don't understand our testing protocols our regulations the things that we do that actually make us safer than the general population as a population form performers because our livelihood depends on us not getting STIs so we actually have all these internal regulating processes that we've set up but that didn't matter to them it didn't matter that we actually you know had consulted with laboratories in our community that we'd actually assess the risk so on and so forth and I didn't I didn't have any stake in that I've only done porn with condoms so it's not like I was trying to defend my right to not wear one I just thought it was everybody's choice so what I'm saying again is like when it

comes to anything relating to sex work sexuality or sex it's a place where lawmakers are particularly unqualified so there'd have to be a long process of uh education and restructuring to be able to regulate in a way that made sense we also we have legal sex work in certain counties in Nevada and right that operates way differently than like how I would do my work I've never worked there but I have friends and comrades who work in the brothels there and like they have to do dick checks which is pretty much just like examining your clients genitals so the the the sex worker has to do a visual physical inspection yeah like you put on gloves and you you know like move it around look at it and kind of you know judge if it's safe for you and then like you're also using

condoms on top of that like judge if it's good or bad yeah you write it live one to five stars put that in a database so when you have there's when you have like the law in your sex life and like in your genitals like and we know from like uh especially like with all of like the Roe v Wade that people think is gonna go returned like it's not something you want politics in like it's also like the decrim system is just way simply to understand it's something that every single sex worker is advocating for um it's also going to make sex work like it's gonna keep it accessible to people who otherwise like wouldn't have access to it in a legal system so like a legal system could propose like you're in a registry you have to like follow certain testing standards um

you have to do like all of these things and all of these things are going to cost money and sex work is it is what it is because like anyone can do it if you have a certain drive and like need to make money i mean i guess the tension comes i mean i think we all agree that we don't want a lawmaker is being involved in your sex life but however i think it can be appropriate to have politics involved in your workplace but the problem is when your workplace and your sex life come together like i don't know i mean it's it's it's sort of tricky to point out what well that that's why i was saying before that it's it can't just be unfortunately it can't just be a labor issue at this point i would love if that were true but because the sexual

aspect of it is so out of whack in this country particularly it's there so much education is going to be need to be done before you can you know implement proper labor policies that actually protect workers absolutely and as well uh the fact that sex workers tend to come from vulnerable populations populations that do not have a lot of political power means that from the get go this debate is horribly imbalanced and it's especially on one side of the scale you have not just both political parties but the full thrust of this uh you know evangelical puritanism uh uh christian structure you know i i'm told that so many of the same groups that are pushing more tougher trafficking laws and pushing cesta fosta uh they they're also the groups that push

uh anti transgender bathroom bills or the groups that push abstinence only education yeah absolutely yeah i mean there's there's an almost one-to-one crossover in the uk at least between uh what we call swerves sex worker exclusionary radical feminist and turfs trans exclusionary radical feminist there i mean they're the same people so that's also something to keep in mind like if you're defending trans rights you're defending sex worker rights and if you're defending sex worker rights you're defending trans rights does not necessarily always true and there are people that screw up one side or the other but you're you're right to point that out and i i just want to say just to that there are lots of sex workers that do not come from vulnerable

populations although the ones that the laws think that they're protecting often do and that's why they do such a terrible job because also they don't understand those populations is well we're also having this discussion in the context of what is a rapidly growing police state churning against our most vulnerable populations and i wanted to uh turn the conversation to immigration and ice right now i think that the war on sex workers and you know broadly the war on sexuality has been one of the contributors to the rise of things like ice right hundred percent yeah so um in the subways in new york i think like six months ago it might have even been a year ago they've left these ads up um like i've seen them off the al like recently but it's like if you think

someone is a victim of trafficking call this number and like you can google that number something say something yeah and if you google that number it's literally an ice reporting line wow jeez and it's they're not even shameless about it they're not like redirecting it it's like literally an ice line where if you think someone is like a trafficking victim you are essentially like reporting them and outing them as a migrant and it's as well i'm willing to put a pin in the discussion of the regulation of labor and commerce of sex work when right now the terms of the discussion uh where when any where every any state intervention from the beginning is going to involve an organization like ice it's going to be poisoned from the beginning i mean that that that your example

about like the the subway hotline is is such a good one because like when people you know abolish ice has become sort of a uh a rallying cry for a lot of people in this country and like the the retort to that is oh what like you know we should have no border at all and like whatever i mean that would be fine but i think people when they think of ice they think of the people who are like you know on the border stopping people from crossing it or interdicting shipments of drugs or and they're not the border patrol still does that ice is a nationwide like you know snitch army that they were they do all their stuff hundreds of that if not thousands of miles away from the southern border with mexico in this country it's just like they exist you just like seek out people

in hospitals and schools and on the subway and just like pick them out and put them into this huge dragnet they're like they have almost nothing to do with keeping the border safe or enforcing that at all it's yeah it's just part of the gigantic like panopticon of surveillance and intimidation if you have too many iron cross tattoos to become a cop you become an ice agent that's it it is i mean it is it is so important to show how all these things are knitted together and sometimes you can see the seams like in early sasta fosta drafts and i don't know if it's still there i need to comb through again but there was a thing about so so in sasta fosta it's like if a user posts something about prostitution on your site then the site itself can be sued

but there it went one further originally where it said um and melissa georgrant pointed this out it said that the city that hosted the website where the website was located could be sued like there was some some bizarre thing like that and of course a lot of these were like sanctuary cities so sometimes if you just sort of look close enough you can see where these this weird as you're saying panopticon not to give too much credit but that you can see this like um these stitches and see that there's something really alarming at hand and you know i don't want to get all alex jim jennings prison planted about it but these laws do relate to one another for sure right i mean you have the organization that's ostensibly tasked with uh saving victims of human trafficking

as being the organization that also actively oppresses many of these people you can imagine someone who is undocumented who is uh engaged in sex work uh maybe in a brothel or something because they can't they don't have the papers to find any other employment in this country they can be told by their employer if you don't cooperate if you try to quit will report you to ice um i mean there's a sex work discrimination you know that even if you just want to be like it i bring an analogy to it as tai was saying before like the ways that sexual workers get sort of fired from their jobs for trying to do any labor labor organizing or trying to protect themselves or even like just trying to get a different kind of jobs so on the one hand i know

porn performers who are also meteorologists and lawyers and all that sort of stuff but on the other hand i know porn performers who were in porn and then like got fired from best buy because they're you know the employer found out that they were in porn so there's a way in which the stigmatizing they these things parallel each other even if they don't always intersect just to return to the panopticon for a second uh connor you mentioned fucco and just for our listeners here he goes yeah i want to i just want to give them i want to give you our listeners a brief primer on fucco it goes like this uh prison that's prison uh schools prisons society prison uh sex you better believe that's prison that's a little fucco 101 for you guys it's also so um like similar to like

john's school if you are found being like a trafficking victim then sometimes they like will also in like certain states send you to like a rehabilitation school but if you're an adult term school but if you're an adult um rehabilitation is often incarceration incarceration which is like what ice is doing i mean there isn't there's they don't have a solution for this they're just incarcerating people and like if it's a cycle then that's what it is and they will only profit off of it so can i i just want to say one more thing so so just also i want people to notice the kind of cultural creep that's happening with the human trafficking stuff um and so we're talking about how it relates to all these other laws that are in place but also immediately

um we saw anti people who are already doing anti-porn activism anti-sex work activism whose entire platform is based on the fact that well in some cases that sex workers can't consent no matter how much they say they're consenting to doing sex work and saying i want to do this or i've chosen to do this because i need money or whatever it is no matter what that that consent isn't considered valid by these people so right away um after and during excessive falses passage they started saying okay now we need to just show like every porn site is made up of trafficking victims every time you're watching porn like you're watching human trafficking and that is building and so i just want to caution people against that um and just know that that is

actually it sounds like a joke but the way that these people are pivoting um and it's not just christian fundamentalists it's like i said there are people you know especially in the uk that are using this argument i can um so just pay attention yeah i mean like i can follow that argument like partly because the idea is like if you say well you know sex work is a choice then you get into the question of like to what extent are our choices to work in the society really choices at all or how are they conversed which is obviously aside the point yeah yeah exactly but like but then but then like it goes too far where you literally don't believe anything anyone is telling you or like you uh you take one case in your head and apply it to like an entire uh spectrum which is a

convenient way to say i don't have to have solidarity with sex workers because i just don't like work i'm gonna i'm gonna go to the beach exactly but like i mean connor could you like you mentioned the uk and this kind of like the the swerve uh thing like the sex worker exclusionary feminism could you do your best like just describe what their argument is i mean i'm asking not because i particularly care to give it a platform on this show but i am genuinely curious like what what these people's line can you say like a dumb guy voice so that we don't give it a platform okay so so yeah i mean so basically you have um people who have been in the public eye as feminist way we include glorious dynam in this um but also people like uh like i said before gail dines and

julie bindel um who basically say one like i said before that sex workers can't aren't consenting no matter what you see to that sex work constitutes a special kind of labor as you just pointed out because it's like well who the hell wants any kind of job you know but for some reason these people are singling out sex work as the job that somehow is the most exploitative when in fact for in my in my understanding and from all those ex workers i know it's actually the most honest and most direct um transaction of services ever but um and then also there's this weird apocalyptic language around it so like chris hedges um just miserable leftist i call him the air shirt left yeah i mean i just anyway he's he had like an essay called this is what the end of the world

looks like and it was about porn so there's this idea of societal collapse right around sex work yeah chris hedges i picture him as smithers when he goes to the strip club and he's just crying in the corner with the two dancers he actually he actually did um someone told me i can't i'm not sure that this is true yet but i have heard through the pipeline that he has a book coming out where he sort of went undercover on a porn set just to expose how horrible it was which just sounds so awful awful to me and also non-consensual you know let me tell you about the crash server report it was meager at best yeah so so that's basically though that's those are the factors that i would combine like societal collapse the end of consent and also or like the the the

non-consent even when they consent and uh just the singling out of uh this is a special kind of labor and also like i guess like from the left this also you alluded to this before but also there's this idea that it's a symptom of like just the decadence of capitalism and bourgeois culture right yes i mean and of course sex work exists and has existed in all kinds of cultures that were not capitalist and including cultures that were didn't have economies that look anything like the kinds of even socialized or capitalist or communist economies so yeah i mean i think in a moral sense and you know you might have listened to this and you might not be sold on it but you should at the very least be opposed to cesta out of self-interest because we should look at it

in the same lens that we used to look at what's happening around immigration and refugees in this country which is a pretext for a drastic expansion of the security state of the police state uh built on the rotten foundation of oppressing a vulnerable population and as sex workers have been oppressed for uh well forever and you know i i was told by a friend that uh you know uh after cesta was passed the trans lifeline experienced significantly higher call volume uh for a long time walking while trans is used as a pretext for police brutality and for profiling and what cesta does is in a very uh narrow sense is it eliminates the section 230 or this race is section 230 safe harbor provision of the communications decency act of 1996 the

thing that basically made the internet free uh by holding content providers liable for a specific thing on their platform it's not terrorism it's not selling drugs you could go on reddit and by fent right now uh their reddit's owners are not going to be held liable for that but if there's any kind of transaction any kind of sex work going on in their platform uh they're going to be held liable for that and that it's this is where it starts with a vulnerable population without political power and shockingly without solidarity from the left which should have solidarity with them and it starts with them and it starts with undocumented people in this country and refugees in this country and you have to wonder who's going to be next in this in this grotesque

and stupid moral crusade and people need to demand as they're demanding the abolition of ice they need to demand the repeal of cesta and broadly demand the decriminalization of sex work and it does start with holding people on the left accountable it it starts with demanding that bernie sanders take back his vote it starts with uh demanding that candidates uh who are actively courting the left's support candidates such as synthia nixon uh face these questions and give a candid response about them and i i i want to close by asking both of you if our listeners wanted to show solidarity with sex workers what could they do i don't know i think the first and probably most important step into changing things is education so ultimately just like

listening to sex workers and giving sex workers a platform and just making space for us and like other marginalized people in this community on the left like i know that i've had issues with like the dsa because they like just didn't know how to make space for sex workers connor yeah um i think that understand so to a personal thing you can do is just understand that you are likely interacting with sex workers and i don't mean that as uh you know someone who's a sex worker and they're just not telling you yeah that probably is also true but um if you're watching porn you're interacting with sex workers sex workers are in your daily life if you've gone to a strip club but whatever you don't have to acknowledge or you don't have to know that you've directly hired a sex worker

for services in your house or a hotel room or something like that you've interacted with sex workers at some point in your life so i think first of all understand how normalized it is but you just don't realize that it's normal um and then i would also say like yeah we need to demand that uh this is seen as a bodily autonomy issue a labor issue and you know in the case of sesta fosta also a censorship an internet censorship issue so you know find uh find sex work organizations if you can and give them money frankly if you have it give money to uh all the whatever trade organization or whatever you can find to give money to or sex worker run um sex worker run clinics and then also um be wary of the human trafficking rhetoric it's it's too there it's

overextends itself and don't believe it just because amy schumer says it which i would think most people on this show don't already but pay us like mostly is there a specific organization either you have in mind um swap is great um i would also encourage everyone looking into their local organizations um i know that in new york we have it's listed shia i believe it's so difficult to pronounce um donate into local bail funds is also really great um doing uh the sex workers behind bars uh like pen pal uh thing like where you write to incarcerated sex workers is also really good i know that they're looking for people who um have like gone through uh sobriety and like also like reentered from being incarcerated as well so like interacting with sex workers even the

platform and just mostly paying us like to pay sex workers directly to like that's so it's so good and as well i mean i would say if you are an active member of the dsa uh this is something to keep in mind at your next meeting if there is perhaps some latent hostility towards sex workers in your organization or if you're anything less than fully welcoming of them because it is a critical population that needs to be organized and it needs to be in sex work needs to be a part of the constellation of left demands and and i think if if for no other reason and just understand that the the political group that's done the most work for sex workers in recent history has been libertarians so if you don't like libertarians do something to form

socialist unity with democratic socialist unity with sex workers you heard you heard it here folks don't let the libertarians uh have this one uh ty conor thank you both so much for coming on the show thank you let me uh and if you haven't listened to uh conor show yet against everyone with conor habib please check that out felix and myself have both been guests james adomian was just on he has he had scott thompson or the kids in the hall not too long ago what more do you people want yeah check it out thank you till next time bye thanks guys thank you bye