Brooke Magnanti has released a new, revised edition of her book The Sex Myth, retitled Sex, Lies and Statistics. This was adapted by Brooke from her afterword (the foreword was written by yours truly), and I hope it will serve to encourage you to buy the book, which demolishes the shoddy garbage prohibitionists hold up in place of actual facts. And it’s on sale now!
Media are obsessed with promoting a view we would previously have dismissed as Victorian. There are indeed parallels. The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th brought new technologies to add to the dissemination of ideas through mass media (much like the Internet today)…with the predictable horror and blame that brought then, just like now. The political class made some unexpected alliances as a result; again, we see this happening. Feminism has joined the anti-sex bandwagon in a big way. Not just by blaming men for inequality between the sexes, but perhaps more profitably and successfully by blaming other women. Many mainstream feminist critiques gloss over old “man-hating” attitudes and place blame squarely on other women. Instead of embracing women who challenge convention, the preoccupation is with shooting them down. On the one hand, we’re told that anyone who believes women and men should have equal rights under the law is a feminist, whether they know it or not. On the other, we are told that one or another group of women are traitors. It’s the feminists who have taken up the finger-wagging role of the patriarchy. Take, for example, this quote by Julie Burchill: “When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.” Advocating the murder of large numbers of women is such a great way to win supporters to the cause, no?
The more you look at the key players behind some of the stories, the more you notice odd pairings. A group working closely with the anti-gay, anti-abortion US lobbying group using a female MP as the mouthpiece of their opinions on porn. The well-known feminists signing up to work with far right groups. Celebrities lending star power to issues they don’t understand at all. Almost all approaches to these issues fail to consider the diversity of factors involved. The “Swedish model” of sex work is an example of this. Lots of hype, not a lot of data on whether paid sex work has stopped or whether anyone’s life has been improved as a result. Columnists like Joan Smith can gush about jumping in to a cop car to see how the law is panning out, all while ignoring the fact that sex workers repeatedly confirm that the police are their greatest source of harassment, assault, and rape. Proponents of the Swedish approach mention how “pressure” is ramping up on this topic – pressure that they themselves have generated through unchallenging media coverage. When in doubt, follow the money. Over and over again the people fronting these campaigns are connected to industries with vested interests, radical right-wing think tanks, or anti-LGBT lobbyists. The deputy editor for the New Statesman previously worked at the Mail and is rumoured to have subedited Jan Moir when she wrote a viciously homophobic column about Stephen Gately’s death. Arch-feminists like Julie Bindel write for staunchly right wing, regressive magazines like the Spectator. There’s a saying where I come from: you got to dance with the one who brung you. I wonder, when everyone gets to the end of their dance cards, what promises feminists have made and what obligations they’ll have to honor.
Before 2009, when I wrote books under a pseudonym about my experiences as a sex worker, there was no small amount of grumbling in the press. After I won the Guardian Best British Weblog award in 2003, a number of female contributors to that paper signed a letter vowing that if I was commissioned to write for the paper, they would quit. Yet I continued to believe that if they knew I was real, they would feel differently. It’s probably not a surprise to you that I was unprepared for what any fool could have predicted would happen. Since coming out as a former sex worker, I have been criticized for being too middle class, too well educated, too independent. As if my very existence in sex work was, somehow, unique. But data across the spectrum of sex work shows this not to be true. In any case, if I admitted to a drug addiction instead, or had been homeless? That would have been used to write me off, too. It is bizarre to read articles by people who’ve never met me attempting to dissect this or that bit of my life. Some lazy commentators “blame” me for the existence of other call girls, or whatever new student sex worker is uncovered by the tabloids. As flattering as that is, it is not true. Prostitution is called “the oldest profession” for a reason.
After a while all such nonsense became background noise. I assumed the combined forces of feminists and the Rescue Industry had nothing worse up their sleeves. I was wrong. When the first edition of this book was published in Britain in 2012, it was embargoed before publication day and available to fewer than 20 people to review. Journalists who saw the book signed confidentiality agreements. So it was a great surprise to wake up on the morning of publication slapped with a libel lawsuit from Eaves For Women, the domestic violence charity whose hapless forays into research are touched on in this book. If their work had been published in academic journals, anyone writing to correct their numbers would have been treated professionally, but this was not academia I was dealing with. Obviously, I did not write anything about Eaves that could not be verified, and just as obviously, they had not been sent a pre-publication copy of the book by my publisher but had been given one by book reviewer – and Eaves board member – Julie Bindel. The firm representing Eaves in this lawsuit threat? The one with Bindel’s wife as a founding partner. The Eaves claims would have been hilarious if they had not been so ludicrous. They claimed I “hacked their servers” to get information about their income and expenditures (as with all UK charities, it’s public information available on government websites) and “broken confidentiality agreements” to discuss their research (I looked up their publications from conferences, also available online). Their arguments depended on evidence so far-fetched it could have served as a bad science example in the book itself. I later learned this was not the first time this had happened. Eaves had threatened to sue so many people, so often, they even served legal threats on Bindel’s own employer at the time, the Guardian newspaper for an article by Belinda Brooks-Gordon (Bindel is no longer on Guardian staff, but freelances for them). The intellectual dishonesty of someone like Bindel, who claims to be “silenced” and a “free speech” advocate yet uses archaic laws to try to silence opposition, is staggering. Unsurprisingly the threatened suit was without merit and quickly dropped.
Meanwhile, the media feminists of the UK rounded on me. Julie Burchill wrote one article claiming I was a “sex addict”, another calling me a “human toilet”, and compared me to a convicted (and executed) Nazi war criminal; this was especially offensive as I am of Jewish heritage. The “feminist” literature magazine that published those last two tidbits claimed they did not know what the words meant. Sorry, Mslexia, but ignorance is no excuse. They did not apologize. One feminist turned up at a talk in Edinburgh to shout to the audience that I was a pedophile and claim my screenshots of the Glasgow City Council’s website (showing how much they paid for anti-strip club consultations) were faked. Others picketed talks and book signings, sent death threats, and harassed me so frequently by phone that I gave up on carrying a mobile altogether. They contacted my former editor at the Telegraph in an attempt to get me fired – long after I’d already quit. Few in journalism seem to care that the people doing this are all a couple of degrees of separation from known anti-LGBT and white supremacist orgs in the US. All anyone wants is to see the naughty, naughty sex lady be punished. They don’t care how it’s done or who does it. This, I was told, was the price of being a sex worker in public.
Writers with the left-leaning New Statesman magazine, many of whom launched careers by harassing trans women and sex workers, also got the boot in. Their assistant editor, Helen Lewis, sits on the board of a charity that is anti-sex work and anti-trans women. She and other feminists joked on social media when a former partner tried to sue me for reporting his abuse (he later dropped the suit to much less fanfare). They encouraged Breitbart to run a week-long campaign of harassment and abuse. They egged on nasty “investigative journalist” Jeremy Duns who made sexual threats against me and my husband. They examined photos from my escorting days, speculating on whether I was “hot enough” have been a sex worker, and speculating about what diseases I might have. They circulated a list at public events suggesting that I and others were employed by a shadowy “Pimp Lobby” and financially benefitting from trafficking (if that’s the case, I have yet to receive a paycheck). The laughable list, compiled by Julie Bindel, included a number of people uninvolved with sex work at all, including an artist who died in 2010, so it’s clear fact-checking is not a valued quality among these people. The abuse peaked when they outed a trans camgirl whose Twitter account they thought had been written by me. It wasn’t – but in the process they humiliated a woman who was not yet out to her family. Their supposed evidence? We both supported Scottish independence, and both, at different times, used the phrase “snake oil”. In spite of having got it drastically wrong, no apology to the woman they doxxed was forthcoming. Why would anyone do this? In short, to control the narrative.
It would be unthinkable – to most people, anyway – to have a discussion about women’s rights that did not involve any women. Or a discussion about race that did not include people of color. But time and again when the topic is sex work, sex workers themselves are not simply ignored, they are actively excluded. What do sex workers want? A seat at the table. To be able to work together for safety. To report crimes against them without fear of arrest. For services to be made available that are not dependent on them giving evidence against others. To not live in fear of deportation or abuse by police. In short: they want the same protection under the law that any other worker can expect. And not only is this what sex workers want, it’s what the evidence supports as best practice. We’ve seen the benefits of decriminalization in New Zealand, in New South Wales Australia. We’ve also seen what goes wrong in Sweden, in the Netherlands, and in the US. International agencies from the WHO to Amnesty agree. But this evidence-driven support for decrim hasn’t come out of thin air. Much has been written on the disruptive effects of social media, but this much is true: if not for the internet, people like me would never have been able to challenge the stereotypes with facts. Marginalized people with multiple oppressions – black trans sex workers, drug using sex workers – who would otherwise fear being outed, are being taken seriously by a mainstream that otherwise would never have known they existed. The infantilized victims who need rich white ladies to save them, it turns out, are fully capable adults who can make their own decisions and won’t hesitate to tell you that. And that makes some folks with vested interests very upset indeed.
What happened to me was not the first nor even worst example. Entrenched second-wave feminists in media have harassed trans politicians out of their jobs, driven black cultural commentators off of social media, and consistently outed and trashed any sex worker who crosses their paths. Heaven help you if you happen to belong to more than one of these groups. They reserve the worst treatment for the most marginalized, secure in the knowledge that society does not care because they told society not to. The disinformation campaign used to sustain sex myths was a glimpse into a post-truth world where what matters is not what is right, but who can get the most money. Some of those folks were so threatened by one woman and one book that they tried to bankrupt, discredit, and silence one blogger. A movement backed by billions of dollars in international grants is so susceptible to people seeing the real data, they will stop at nothing to keep the truth from getting out. And they are not interested in ethical debate; they demand that their point of view be bowed to in any discussion, even (and especially) if that means keeping the discussion centered on their feelings rather than other people’s right to exist. They use the media not to understand, but to bludgeon. They simply do not care if their information is incorrect. I started off believing that open debate was the best way to win hearts and minds; I ended up realizing that some people will use that to drown out anyone who does not agree with their own intolerant, hate-filled views. There simply is no way to have a debate with people who characterize you as an “orifice” who “should be dead in a ditch.” There is no common ground to be found with people who willingly promote your abusers.
And yet, in all the negativity, there are signs of light. In the years from when I was a sex worker in 2003, since I came out in 2009, and after the first edition of this book in 2012, the ground has rapidly shifted. When Amnesty International rejected threats from famous feminists and backed the decriminalization of sex work based on the evidence, it was a win for a sex workers’ movement that far predates and will long outlast any one person. When I gave evidence to UK Parliament in 2016, the MPs – to my surprise – took the suggestions of sex workers on board in their report, rather that listening to entrenched and well-funded special interests. In Scottish Parliament, Rhoda Grant (who receives funding from the anti-gay, anti-abortion charity Care) has tried three times to introduce criminalization of sex work, and been defeated all three times. Evidence really does win out from time to time; it might not seem that way in the moment, but things are changing, slowly and surely. In 2009 and 2012, it felt as if every week brought new abuse from a media obsessed with surfaces instead of content. So-called progressives shame and reject us, even when sex workers were early supporters of feminism, gay rights, and other movements that have since gained public acceptance on the back of that effort. In particular, the most marginalized sex workers from black and trans communities were the ones most likely to be erased, people like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, and many more. Slowly and surely their legacy is being reclaimed, too. The pendulum of attitudes about sex and sexuality is always in motion. I hope that in my lifetime the burden of shame felt by so many for so long will be lifted. With evidence and hard work we can reclaim the narrative – and take back our lives from the playground bullies of shame and fear.
Brooke doesn’t pull any punches in this new, US edition; it’s a vital debunking resource for those who support sex worker rights, and you really, really, REALLY ought to read it!
