Going After the Pimps

Even though I’ve been talking about the subject on my blog for nine years, and have discussed it in countless interviews, lectures, articles and Twitter threads, some people still don’t seem to grasp why sex workers oppose criminalization of “pimps”, and why puffed-up oinking about “going after pimps” is so destructive.  So once again I’m going to spell it out succinctly.  Most sex workers are independents who have no management, but because the “degraded whore” narrative claims we’re all dominated by “pimps”, cops and prosecutors who want to look like big heroes go sniffing around for anyone they can pin the “pimp” label onto, so as to slam them into a cell.  Genuine management (“pimps” if you must, though I must point out we don’t make up special pejorative terms for managers in most businesses) charge a fee for finding clients, just as any entertainers’ agent does; some provide a premises (which the law is pleased to call a “brothel” or more absurdly, a “bawdy house” or “house of ill fame”) from which to work.  So when cops and prosecutors want to destroy someone by calling them a “pimp” and prosecuting them for “trafficking”, what do they look for?  People who receive money from sex workers and/or provide an apartment that they work from.  Who falls into the first category?  Drivers, maids, receptionists, secretaries, roommates, other sex workers who share an incall, partners, adult offspring, and even elderly or disabled dependent parents.  Who falls into both categories?  Landlords.  If you were a landlord and you discovered you were renting to a sex worker, and recognized you might be charged with “pimping” because of it, what would you do?  Evict her, of course.  Norway has the Swedish model, which is what the awful Kamala Harris supports despite her recent lie that she favors decriminalization.  Well, a few years ago Norwegian cops had a scheme called “Operation Homeless“, in which they sent letters to sex workers’ landlords threatening them with pimping charges if they didn’t evict the sex worker.  This is what Harris and other lying monsters like her mean when they say they want to “go after the pimps”: they want to persecute sex workers’ friends, family members, associates, employees and landlords so as to drive us into the streets and thereby make us vulnerable not only to rape and murder, but also to disguised criminalization charges such as “loitering”, “trespassing”, etc.  Swedish model proponents call this persecution “decriminalizing the seller”, despite the fact that sex workers are still subject to cop surveillance, expulsion from university, being forced into “re-education” systems, and even having their children abducted by the state on the grounds that they are “unfit parents”…and all this on top of the proven harms of the model itself.  So next time someone tells you how “johns and pimps” are the “real problem”, and cops merely want to “help” sex workers by persecuting them, you’ll understand a bit better what that actually means.