Sex workers’ rights will continue to roll on regardless. – Brooke Magnanti
Once again, we’ve been forced to endure another round of the press pretending that politicians paying for sex is somehow shocking. I’ve got news for you, kiddies: virtually all of them do. If I had to come up with figures, I’d guess that politicians basically fall one percentage-category higher than ordinary men, so that 20% of them pay regularly, 50-70% occasionally and essentially all of them at least once or twice in their careers. Yes, this is a completely gut-level guesstimate based mostly on the number of politicians I’ve had between my legs and the secrets I know from having been around the block so many times I’ve lost count, but…is it actually so difficult for amateurs to believe, despite all of the known histories of courtesans throughout history, the frequent “scandals” of our day and the hard-to-miss fact that the client lists of prosecuted escort services are literally never revealed?
Throughout history, powerful men have lusted to keep all of the tail for themselves, and prostitution laws are just the latest incarnation of that; “democratically elected leaders” are just as keen as hereditary nobles to use armed thugs to keep the peons from getting notions that they’re allowed to have sex with other people merely because those others consented to it. It’s just what “leaders” do.
This particular round of “BREAKING NEWS: BEAR SHITS IN WOODS!” stars a UK politician named Keith Vaz:
A married Labour MP has stepped aside as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee after allegedly paying two male escorts for sex…at his London flat eight days ago…Mr Vaz, a father of two…made it clear that he will step aside as chairman of the committee, which is currently examining prostitution in the UK, after the allegations were made public…he said: “I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children”…
First of all, what is this obsession the UK press has with reporting whether anyone involved in a news story has spawned or not? Frankly, I fail to see how it’s at all fucking relevant; it’s like reporting how many bowel movements the subjects have had this week. Unless the children are somehow involved in the story, why should anyone care about this? I don’t fucking care what some politician had for fucking breakfast, nor where he buys his underwear, nor how many times he managed to impregnate some chick. Second, are people so stupid that they actually think it’s notable that a sex worker’s client is married? Because most of them are, you know; in my experience it’s about 70% or so. If anything, being married makes a man more likely to come to us, not less, because there’s a greater need for his sex to be discreet and string-free. And third, why is nobody commenting on the fact that the Sunday Mirror appears to have set Vaz up? As he said to the BBC, “It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way.” That seems to imply that the paper was an active participant rather than merely paying two sleazy, unethical escorts (who ought to be taken out back and shot) to violate the most basic principle of our profession, and that breach of confidence could potentially end up hurting all UK sex workers. Dr. Brooke Magnanti writes:
…This soon turned into calls for the Committee’s recommendation to decriminalise sex work to be discounted…If you think Keith Vaz is singlehandedly responsible for sex workers being treated like human beings, you are very stupid, stop writing now. The “Swedish Model” favoured by anti-sex work campaigners complaining about Vaz kills women. And y’all still go apeshit over who puts a consensual dick where and when. The money governments spend on anti-trafficking puts women in abusive jails and detention centres worldwide…Press, public, and governments put ideology before lives…People who weren’t there trying to rewrite Home Affairs Select Committee’s hearings on prostitution…Maybe you remember; it was in a lot of papers…All of the contact with the Committee before that hearing had been skewed heavily towards the Swedish Model…Go on, watch the video. This was not softball. Paris Lees and I…got into actual arguments with MPs who…don’t seem to believe they answer to taxpayers or need input from sex workers, you know, the very people who would be affected by any changes to the law. 99.9999% of the people commenting on Vaz today weren’t in that room, and if they are saying the investigation was biased towards sex workers, they are lying…[we] had to stomp hard on bullshit lines of questioning to get any of our points across. We went there fully expecting, and pretty much got, a beasting…Sex workers influenced the outcome of the inquiry in spite of, not because of, Keith Vaz…
She concludes with the point that experienced activists knew that something like this would happen; prohibitionists are evil authoritarians who will stop at nothing to harm sex workers, and they know they’re losing so they’re going to get a lot more desperate in the months and years to come. Lots of allies are going to be outed and worse in a prohibitionist attempt to put heads on poles to scare the others away. But it’s much too late for that; the movement is past the watershed now, and the momentum will continue to build no matter how many bodies these sick control freaks try to throw in its path. But now I’m guilty of the same thing I complained about at the beginning, namely feigning shock at the obvious: Of course people who think “sending a message” trumps human lives aren’t going to care how many lives they need to destroy to advance their cause; it’s what they do.
