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Hello and welcome to Behind the Battle Podcast with me, Paulson, Victoria. Now, a little bit different. I thought that we should read some books. And then I will do a chapter every episode. I hope this book has chapters. Um yeah. When the topics that need to be discussed or the history, like something that vibes with the podcast. And so the first book we're gonna read is Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Worker Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. Here we go. So the first page. Aren't even people. They are merely sexual persona. Erotic dollies from the land of make believe. In their performances, which is the only capacity in which we see these women. We are fetishized, they don't even speak. As far as we know, they have no ideas, no feelings, no political beliefs, no relationships, no past, no future, no humanity. Ariel Levy. When you consider how expansive something like prostitution really is, it should be alarming that we rarely hear the actual voices of people who have first hand experience in this industry. When I think about the relevance of prostitution in social movements as well as its stark exclusion from them, I could not help but wonder about the compelling opportunity for linkage, about the aspects of radical social justice movements that parallel the prostitution rights movement, that of visibility, autumnity. I cannot help but wonder about the compelling opportunity for linkage, about the aspects of radical social justice movements that parallel the prostitution rights movement, that of visibility, autonomy and equimity from the ground up introduction. Sex workers are everywhere. We are your neighbours. We brush past you on the street. Our kids go to the same school as yours. We're behind you at the self-service checkout with baby food and a bottle of Pinot Grill. People who sell sex are in your staff cafeteria, your political party, your after school club committee, your doctor's waiting room, your place of worship. Sex workers are incarcerated inside immigration detention centers, and sex workers are protesting outside them. Although we are everywhere, most people know little about the reality of our lives. Sex workers are subject to a lot of curiosity and discussion in popular culture, journalism and policy. When we are visible as workers on the street, in signpost brothels in digital spaces, our presence provokes disquiet. We are increasingly visible as workers in political spaces and here to our presence provokes disquiet. Many people want to stop us from selling sex or just ensure they don't have to look at us. But we are notoriously hard to get rid of, at least through criminal law. Prostitution is heavy with meaning and brings up deeply felt emotions. This is especially the case for people who have not sold sex, and who think of it in symbolic terms. The idea of prostitution serves as a lightning rod for questions about work, masculinity, class, bodies, about arch chetty pal, villainy and punishment, about who deserves what, about what it means to live in a community, and about what it means to push some people outside that community's boundaries. Attitude towards prostitution have always been strongly tied to questions of race, borders, migration, and national identity in ways which are sometimes overt but often hidden. Sex work is the vault in which society stores some of its keenness to fears and anxieties. Perhaps the most difficult questions raised by prostitution involved what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Feminist writer Kat Millet notes feminist notes feminist suggesting that all women are prostitutes, that marriage is prostitution. Sex workers have long noted with ambience the interplay between prostitution as a site of metaphor and as an actual workplace. In nineteen seventy-seven, the sex worker led collective prose program for reform of the law on soliciting wrote brackets in the iconic UK feminist magazine Spare Rib that it wanted the women's liberation movement to think about the whole thing and discuss it but not just use it, end quote, explaining that the women's movement has used the word prostitute in a really nasty way about housewives to sum up their idea of the exploited situation of women. They noted that this interest in the metaphorical uses of prostitute was not accompanied by much practical support for sex workers effects to tackle criminalization. In some ways little has changed. Contemporary feminist disapproval of prostitution remains unmoored. From pragmatism, more political energy goes to obstructing sex work than to what is really needed, such as helping sex workers avoid prosecution or ensuring viable alternative livelihoods that are more than respectable druggersy. As trans sex worker community leader CN Drosho has said, if you don't want sex workers doing the work, sweetie, employ them. Employ them, have a solution. Our concern is for the safety and survival of people who sell sex, like Dorocho and Prose before us. We are ultimately focused on the practical and material rather than the symbolic or metaphorical. Approaching sex work from this perspective provokes certain questions. What conditions best enable someone who wants to quit sex work to do so? What conditions led people to sell sex or make sex work their only opportunity for survival? What gives the sex worker more power in negotiating with an employer, and what reduces their power? All over the world, sex workers use strategies to stay safe. Working with a friend in the next room, or in a small group on the street, visibly noting down a client's car, number plate, or asking for his ID to show him that he is not anonymous? Can a sex worker call a colleague in as backup if a client refuses to use a condom? What are the consequences of calling the police or of being visible to them as a gaggle on the street? What does it mean for a sex worker when a client or manager is afraid of the police? Who is at risk of deportation and homelessness and why? These are the kinds of questions and questions about people's material conditions that concern us as authors and as sex workers. This is not a memoir. This book and the perspective of the contemporary left sex worker movement. This is not about enjoying sex work. This book will not argue that sex work is empowerment. We are not interested in making an argument around sexual freedom or the supposed capacity of the sex industry to felicitate sexual self, actual idealization for workers or for clients, despite the expectation that sex workers will tell our stories. This is not our memoir. This is not a memoir, and we will not be sharing any sexy escapades. Braggets, although as the founders of Sex Work Magazine spread, told the journalists at the launch of their first issue. It's not intended to arouse, but people are turned on by all kinds of things. So maybe someone will turn on will be turned on by sex workers fighting for social justice. Close bracket. We are not interested in formulating a movement with men who buy sex. We are not here to uplift the figure of the sympathetic client, nor the idea that any client has a right to sex. We are not here to prioritize discussion on whether the sex industry or even sex itself is intrinsically good or bad, nor, as we will unpack over the course of this book, we are uncritical of what work means in a context of insatiable global capitalism and looming environmental catastrophe. Sometimes people who support sex workers' rights attempt to show their support by arguing that the sex work industry is not actually a site of sexism and misogyny, an argument that is, in our view, misplaced. The sex industry is both sexist and misogynistic. We do not argue that nobody experiences harms within sex work, or that these harms are minimal and should be disregarded. On the contrary, the harms that people experience in sex work, such as assault, exploitation, arrest, incarceration, eviction, and deportation are the focus of this book. We are feminists, women both transgender and cisgender are at the center of our policies, and as a result, at the center of this book, people of all genders sell sex, transgender and cis men, non-binary people, and those with indigenous or non-Western genders, such as hijab, and two spirited people. It is important to acknowledge this because people's gender shapes their route into sex work, their experiences while selling sex, and their lives beyond. Equally, however, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the sex industry is gendered. The majority of those who sell sex are women, and the vast majority of those who pay for sex are men. In this book, we often refer to sex workers as she and clients as he. We are not under the mistaken impression that this is literally true in every single instance, but nor is it an error, or something we have neglected because in our view it reflects the gendered reality of the sex trade, as well as our own feminist policies and priorities. You may be expecting statistics and numeral data, providing that prostitution is one thing or another. Many existing books make the case for or against decriminalizing the sex work industry. With these kinds of arguments, of course data is useful, crucial, even in many contexts. When the World Health Organization wants to think about how to reduce HIV transmission among sex workers, it needs numbers. Sometimes, however, heavy resilience on statistics risks becoming a form of argument by authority. Someone cites a study saying one thing, others cite a study saying another. And the argument is who won. On the basis of whose numbers are more memorable or whose study was published in a more prestigious journal, some research can be poor in quality or misused by commentators, and much time is given to arguing about its credibility instead of using simple logic and empathy. The dependence on statistics in the prostitution debate is often a result of our invisibility and our and our legitimacy as commentators. Sex workers perhaps seem alien and mysterious, and the questions we raise too political, but numbers are reassuring seemingly apolitical and knowable. We use numeratical data in our writings and our activism and in our writing and in our activism, but it is not central to our approach. Instead of using a few key figures that prove sex workers' rights arguments, we want readers to think empathically about how changes in criminal law change the incentives and behaviors of people who sell sex along with clients, police, managers, and landlords. If you understand how those behaviours change and why, then you will have a much deeper understanding of how changes in the criminal law make people who sell sex more or less safe. Sex workers are the original feminists. Often seen as merely subject to others, whims, in fact, sex workers have shaped and contributed to social movements across the world. In medieval Europe, brothel workers formed guilds and occasionally engaged in strikes or street protests in response to crackdowns, workplace closures, or unacceptable working conditions. Fifteenth century prostitutes arranged before city councils in Bavia asserted that their activities constituted work rather than a sin. One prostitute, one prostitute under the PSEU Doom, another unfortunate, one prostitute who wrote the Times of London in eighteen fifty nine to state I conduct myself prudently and defy you and your policemen too. Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality? In nineteen seventeen, two hundred prostitutes marched in San Francisco in what has been called the original women's march, end quote, to demand an end to brothel closures. A speaker at the march declared nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her. They are driven into this life by economic conditions. You don't do any good by attacking us. Why don't you attack those conditions? End quote. Caring for each other in political work. During the second wave feminist movement, many pioneering radicals raised their children collectively and cared for each other beyond their boundaries of the biological family unit. Much less known and missing from the usual tellings of feminist history are the similar and preceding efforts of sex workers. For example, in nineteenth century Great Britain and Ireland, prostitutes created communities of mutual aid, sharing the income and childcare. A journalist observed at the time, the ruling principle here is to share each other's fortunes. In hard times one family readily helps another, while several help one. What each company gets is thrown into a common purse, and the nest is positioned out of it. Likewise, what embezi, street based, women of colour, women in colonial era, Narobi formed financial ties to one another, paying each other's fines, or bequeathing assets to one another when they died. Although largely invisible to outsiders, this sharing of resources, including money, workspaces and even clients, persists as a significant form of sex worker activism. Workers often collectively pitch in to prevent an eviction or offer an emergency housing. This kind of community resource sharing is often the only safety net sex workers have if they're robbed at work or if an assault means they need time off to heal. Mutual defense too. In a site of collective action, when eight sex workers were murdered in a small city of FIKA, Kenya in 2010, others from around the country flocked to support them. Felister Abdallah, an organizer with the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance, writes. In FIKA, our fala sisters had been killed, and enough was enough, end quote. They endured harassment and beatings from the police, even as they marched the streets demanding an end to the violence. The bravery and resilience of sex workers has played a part in many libertation struggles. In the 1950s, prostitutes were part of the Mao Mao uprising that led to Kenya's liberation from British colonial rule. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were part of the riots at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the Stonewall Inn in New York that kick-started the LGBTQ liberation movement in the United States. In times of rapid social change, working class sex workers are often at the heart of the action. As sex worker activist Margot St. James put it, quote, it takes about two minutes to politicize a hookah. St. James was a fierce defender of the heavily policed sex deviance in her San Francisco community. It's well past time for whores to organize, she said in the interview. The homosexuals organized and now the cops were afraid to harass them anymore. In the 1970s, an era when sex workers had barely any public platform, she organized for gay liberation amongst Harvey Milk and identified herself openly as a whore when she spoke frankly to Rolling Stone about her vision of liberating female sexuality from the pussy patrol of the state. She formed Call Off Your Old Tired FX Coyote for short, got the practice of quarantine and forced medication for arrest. Sex workers overturned in California and hosted twelve thousand attendees at her hooker's ball events, including celebrities and politicians connecting prostitution with pro-pleasure, pro-queer policies in the midst of 1970s counterculture proved to be an effective way of getting sex workers' rights on the radar. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed me reading the first few pages of Revolting Prostitutes. And yeah, this has been Behind the Paddle Podcast and Paulson Victoria. If you would like to support the podcast, that would be great. Go look at our links, maybe tip us, give us a review. Please do tell me what you think about this first episode of me reading a book. Bye.