Of Sex Work and Censorship
2020-12-27 · Guest: Maggie McNeill (Former sex worker and blogger) · 51:37
Criminalization and social perception of sex work
Bob Zadek interviews former sex worker and blogger Maggie McNeill about the criminalization and social perception of sex work in America. They discuss the arbitrary nature of prostitution laws, the racial and class-based disparities in enforcement, and the hypocrisy of “Sugar Daddy” websites being legal while street work is criminalized.
Topics: Sex work, prostitution laws, criminal justice reform, racial disparities, feminism, human trafficking, escort services, decriminalization
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek — Host
- Maggie McNeill — Former sex worker and blogger of “The Honest Courtesan”
Introduction: The Last Vestige of Puritanical America [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio—14 years or something like that and counting. Thank you so much for joining me again this Sunday morning. We are, this morning and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
I thought it might be fun at this time of year to discuss for an hour or so the last vestige—yes, I think it’s the last vestige—of puritanical America. There’s not much left of Puritan standards in American life, except there is one that stubbornly refuses to catch up with the centuries as they go by. And that subject, of course, is—not of course, but the subject is sex work in general, our love-hate, or just hate, or mixed, or hypocritical relationship with the occupation of sex work and how it is moralizing in the extreme.
Libertarians universally rail against criminalization of an activity which has no victim, which is totally private, which doesn’t harm anybody—or does it? It doesn’t harm anybody, is totally private, and what can be more private than sexual relationships? So these relationships, which are totally private, which are up to the participants alone to make an uncoerced decision to participate or not—it doesn’t bother anybody, nobody should care, but they do. And we have cared since the founding of our country. And we have, in general, the states have more or less criminalized prostitution since our founding. At the federal level, prostitution or illegal sexual activity started to become illegal probably in the early part of the last century with the passage of the Mann Act, which was transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. And ever since 1910, the federal criminal law has criminalized prostitution.
What strikes me as strange is nobody questions why we still have these archaic laws on our books, why anybody in America cares about this. Now, please remember, we are not talking about acts that are acknowledged to be criminal and should be prohibited. We’re not talking about exploitation of minors in America. We’re not talking about coerced activity. We’re not talking about anything like that. We are talking about the act of a male and a female, or two females, two consenting adults agreeing to trade sexual favors for money and all of the related activities that spin out. Nobody seems to wonder why it is criminal and should it be.
To help us understand the issues, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Maggie McNeill. Maggie knows about these issues firsthand. She was, in her prior life, a sex worker. She understands the experience firsthand, and she has for over a decade—I think it’s around a decade—been blogging about the relationship of society and sex work. Her blog, The Honest Courtesan, is widely read, and her columns are heavily researched. In short, Maggie knows what she is talking about, both from her studies and from her own life experiences. So nobody can help us understand and try to find some rational basis for all of this—the criminalization of sex work. And Maggie and I will explore how the enforcement of these archaic criminal statutes that criminalize or attempt to criminalize private sexual activity, how they are inherently, inherently racist. And during this somewhat unpleasant woke period in American history, we ought to be highly sensitive at least to the racial component of all of this. Maggie, welcome to the show this morning.
Maggie McNeill: Good morning, Bob. Good morning, good morning.
Bob Zadek: Good morning. Nice to have you back. The last time you visited with us was quite a number of years ago. It was too long, so we’re happy to have you back. Now, Maggie, we are talking about sex work. Sex work is a benign concept; it sounds benign. And as we get into it, what activities are included in your writing as to sex work? What activities, and are all of them illegal? Are some of them illegal? Where are we in America today on criminal law and sex work? And as sex work, we are talking about, just to make it clear to our audience, we are talking about consensual activity conducted by adults, uncoerced—well, uncoerced by force. There may be economic pressures that cause people to take certain steps, just like there are economic pressures that cause people to take any job because they need the money. We are not talking about that. We’re talking about coercion in the sense of force and overcoming somebody’s free will. So what are the activities broadly speaking that would be covered by sex work, broadly speaking, and which of them are still criminalized generally in America?
Defining Sex Work and Its Legal Landscape [02:21]
Maggie McNeill: Well, Bob, sex work is an umbrella term. So it applies to anything—it’s a little controversial even among sex workers, like who qualifies as a sex worker and who doesn’t. But in general, selling one’s own erotic labor is sex work. So therefore, prostitution, of course, stripping, performing in porn, camming as we call it—in other words, putting on private shows via a webcam—phone sex, any of those kind of things. Whereas something like, for example, managing a brothel is not considered sex work. It’s certainly adjacent, but it isn’t—it doesn’t involve one’s own erotic labor. Working in an adult bookstore wouldn’t be sex work either.
Of the various branches, the only one that’s really fully criminalized in the United States right now is, of course, prostitution. But even many of the others, like stripping and porn, of course, they’re often attacked. They’re not strictly criminal, but we have incidents like, for example, a few years ago in San Diego, where the cops raided a strip club and had all the dancers line up and strip-searched them. And you know, people thought it was funny, but it’s not, because it wasn’t in a context of performing; it’s in the context of scary dudes examining your body with guns on their hips.
Bob Zadek: Public humiliation. Public humiliation.
Maggie McNeill: Yes, public humiliation. You have all these kinds of things. And you have, of course, the censors trying to censor porn. So again, that’s under attack even though it is legal. So you’ve got that sort of zone. The only ones I think that are rarely attacked are the ones that the prohibitionists certainly probably know about them, but they’re simply not flashy enough for them. Phone sex, for example. Nobody attacks phone sex because it has almost no visible presence that the prohibitionists can get a hold of. And I can’t think—I’m sure they probably could—but I can’t think of a way that they could sell that to their donors that wouldn’t sound silly. You know, “We’re trying to stop people from talking dirty on the phone to one another.” You know, that’s a lot harder sell than criminalizing porn or prostitution.
Bob Zadek: Now, is there—one doesn’t read about a lot of, at least it doesn’t make the headlines, arrests for prostitution. Is prostitution a crime on the books but it is not enforced? Is it enforced sporadically? Is it enforced in certain parts of the country more than others? What is the degree of enforcement? We have, of course, regretfully, lots and lots and lots of criminal laws that are selectively enforced at the whim of local law enforcement officials. How much, how aggressive is prostitution enforcement in general in the country? And if you have specific anecdotes or parts of the country, share those with us.
The “Sex Trafficking” Narrative and Police Funding [05:01]
Maggie McNeill: Sure. If you had asked me this question 15 years ago, I would have told you that enforcement was indeed sporadic. What happened was in about 2008, 2009, the police departments of the country realized that the growing sex trafficking hysteria was a cash cow. One notable example was in, I want to say ‘09, the city of San Jose, California disbanded their vice unit for lack of funding. The following year, they regrouped it, rebuilt it with the same cast of characters, but they now called it the Human Trafficking Task Force, and it was under a federal grant.
So there’s a lot of money to be made for police departments in so-called sex trafficking busts. In other words, all they have to do is claim that their prostitution stings or prostitution raids are to go after so-called sex trafficking, and the feds give them money for it. Lots of overtime, often lots of nifty gear to go with it, that sort of thing. And they can sound like heroes to the media. They can say, “We arrested 30 traffickers and we rescued 150 women.” Well, of course, nobody’s being rescued. Absolutely nobody’s being rescued; lives are being ruined.
And very often—and this is—there’s no nice way to say this—one of the primary activities that cops use to get what they laughingly call evidence of prostitution is to rape or sexually assault the sex workers. And then call that, “Oh, well, you see, she had sex with me in this context, and therefore this is evidence of prostitution.” So that’s pretty awful.
And it depends—to answer the other part of your question—it depends on the state. Some states are extremely aggressive in their enforcement, some states not so much. Florida is very bad, Texas is very bad, Ohio is extremely bad. And in the others, it comes and goes. You know, you’ll see—some of them are kind of surprising. Like New Mexico is, eh, for the most part, a little blasé about it, but Arizona right next door is extremely aggressive. And Washington State—people often think of Washington as a very liberal state, but the fact is they do quite heavily go after sex workers up here. I’m in Washington now, by the way. And Pennsylvania…
Bob Zadek: And you mentioned the phrase “trafficking,” “sex trafficking.” What does that mean exactly? Because it’s in the news a lot. It’s in the news a lot. It happened with Kraft in Florida; that was a sex trafficking raid. We can discuss that if you will, just because it got a lot of publicity. Kraft is, of course, the owner of the New England Patriots football team, and he beat the rap, as they say in film noir. He was acquitted in his trial; he had pretty good facts and pretty good lawyers. We may discuss the Kraft case just because it was in the news a lot. But just to define the term, what is sex trafficking in its law enforcement, somewhat technical sense? Because we’re going to be using that concept during this hour.
Maggie McNeill: Yeah, it’s a—I’ve actually written snarky columns before about the lack of meaning of the phrase “sex trafficking.” It is generally used to mean pretty much whatever the speaker wants it to mean. If you’re the feminist censor types and the Christian fundamentalist censor types, they use it to mean almost anything sexual. You have the immigration hawks use it to mean undocumented border crossing. Cops tend to use it to mean prostitution.
But legally, in the strict, strict legal sense, what it means is the use of force, fraud, or coercion. That’s the phrase that’s used in all these laws: force, fraud, or coercion to get a person to perform prostitution. So in other words, if you lied somehow to a person, misrepresented what percentage of the money they would be getting, and then, “Oops, no, I’m really taking two-thirds of it,” that would be considered sex trafficking. If you literally put a gun to someone’s head or threatened their family or something, that would also be considered sex trafficking.
But those kinds of incidents are so fabulously rare that they just don’t make good bang for the buck. So the police departments will do things like—there was a series of raids right around Thanksgiving in Ohio, Florida, and Massachusetts, if I remember correctly, but don’t hold me on that one—where the cops did your standard ordinary old prostitution sting. You know, putting the disguised policewoman out in 70s movie drag, or putting fake ads on the internet to lure unwary clients, that sort of thing. And then they arrest 150 people, 200 people, and they call it a massive sex trafficking raid, and everybody was rescued. And there was no sex trafficking. There are no allegations of sex trafficking; nobody is accused under the sex trafficking laws of that state. But the press never asks this question; that’s the problem. They just repeat the police press release, and nobody says, “Well, if this was a trafficking raid, why was nobody charged with trafficking?” They just never ask that question.
Models of Regulation: Criminalization vs. Decriminalization [08:42]
Bob Zadek: So we have this—those of us who pay attention to policy behind criminal law statutes, we rail against—it makes us wince when we learn about criminal law that is arbitrary, that is so broadly defined that it’s impossible to know if you are breaking the law. How could any body of citizens be expected to respect the law if it is vague in its drafting and arbitrary in its enforcement? That just builds disrespect, which weakens civil society in general.
Now, in prostitution, in the crime of prostitution, is it a crime to be the customer or only a crime to be the seller? Is it a crime to be the buyer as well as the seller? Are both breaking the law, or is only the seller breaking the law in general?
Maggie McNeill: In the United States, under what we call full criminalization—and that full criminalization, by the way, is pretty rare in the world. I mean, the United States has it, a lot of former communist countries and communist countries have it—so in Russia, in a lot of the former Soviet republics, in Vietnam, in China, those places, and in theocracies, you know, like your Islamic states in the Middle East. In those countries, they tend to have full criminalization, in which everything associated with it is illegal. So selling is illegal, buying is illegal, advertising is illegal, talking about it is illegal, etc.
In most countries, what they have is what we call legalization. And under legalization, which sounds a lot more benign than it actually is, under legalization, the act itself is not illegal. But many, many things around it are illegal. So for example, the actual selling of sex might be legal, but keeping a place where you could meet customers would be illegal. Advertising might be illegal. Helping someone else in some way, like being a maid for a sex worker or being a driver for a sex worker, those would be viewed as criminal. So that’s under what’s called legalization.
And then decriminalization means it’s not illegal at all. It’s treated like any other service industry. There might be rules around it—for example, you can’t put a brothel in this zone district, or you can only have this many employees in the building, or that sort of civil regulation like you might see for health clubs or restaurants. Decriminalization does have things like that, but not criminal laws.
And then finally, you’ve got this weird hybrid that has become very popular in the past few years, which is called the Swedish model or sometimes the Nordic model. And that has some kind of a pseudo-feminist background to it, where basically women are held to be not capable of making a rational decision when it comes to sex work, and so the man is responsible. And so in those places, on paper, selling is legal but buying is illegal. And I say on paper because the fact of the matter is in those places, if they want to prosecute a woman anyway, and there is technically no law for prosecuting under selling sex, there’s generally all sorts of other things they can get her on. They can get her on advertising, they can get her on helping other sex workers, which they will call pimping. They can keep her on having an apartment that she sees clients from, which they’ll call brothel-keeping, and sorts of things like that. And then even when they don’t prosecute them, there are civil penalties. They will take their children away, they can be evicted from their homes, that sort of thing. They’re not criminal penalties, but they’re awful enough. I mean, I would dare say a lot of mothers would feel having their children stolen from them would be worse than a criminal penalty.
Visibility and Racial Disparities in Enforcement [10:55]
Bob Zadek: In my preparing for this topic for the show, I was struck by what I learned that if you look at the span of human history on Earth, prostitution has always been around as long as there have been males and females, which is kind of a long time. Prostitution has always been around, and the flyspeck of time when prostitution was considered a crime is a couple of hundred years in the span of all of human history. And so for the most part, prostitutes were simply carrying out a professional activity. It’s recorded throughout history, throughout the literature, throughout religious tomes, and it is simply a fact. It is an activity which goes on because it is human nature, consenting adults negotiating—one person has a skill or is willing to do something that somebody else is willing to pay for. And it is purely private, uncoerced, as I said earlier in the show. And it just went on.
And we have this flyspeck of time, mostly coextensive with the American experience since we are a country, that prostitution really became illegal. It’s this tiny bit of time that probably will disappear shortly, but here we are in the midst of it. And it’s astonishing to me how this victimless activity—there is no victim, it is simply consenting adults, and now I’m speaking in the inner libertarian in me—consenting adults simply negotiate a transaction where both parties get a benefit, or else they wouldn’t be doing it. And we have criminalized it, except in a few counties in America it is decriminalized, but you need a license for it for some reason.
So that’s what struck me, and that’s why I got really curious about how we got here with this. Now, in discussing the subject of prostitution enforcement in America today, just like drug criminal law enforcement, you recall back 20 or 30 years how there was a hue and cry appropriately about the law enforcement enforcing with higher penalties the use of crack cocaine because, and most people felt that crack cocaine was criminalized with higher penalties because it was carried on mostly in the inner cities, mostly by minorities, whereas powdered cocaine was more of a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity and it was not as—the penalties for using cocaine and other drugs of choice for the middle class were penalized less. Well, the same is true in spades when it comes to prostitution. And is it true, Maggie, and if so, how much, that the crime of prostitution is not enforced across the board? There are activities which clearly would meet the definition of prostitution—we’ll discuss them later on in the show—but carried on in the middle class and upper middle classes, and they are almost never enforced. And yet prostitution carried on by inner cities and lower class and minorities is enforced. So tell us a bit about the selective enforcement, mostly against minorities, of prostitution laws around the country. How much of it is racially motivated, or not motivated, but in practice punishes minorities more?
Maggie McNeill: I would say it’s a very serious discrepancy. And what I mean by that, I suppose, is one of the things among sex worker activists, we have a sort of a grim joke about it, where what’s being punished in prostitution enforcement is visibility. The more visible you are, basically the more that the schoolmarms and the bluenoses can see you, the more likely you are to be targeted by the cops.
So of course, the number one group that is targeted by cops, of course, is street workers. You know, the sex workers who are on the poorer end of the socioeconomic spectrum and rather than advertising on the internet like the more middle-class-ish sex workers do, you know, they will do the traditional what everybody knows about, walking on the street to be seen. But of course, being seen by the clients also requires being seen by the busybodies.
I was going to share a story that a colleague of mine once shared. This colleague of mine, a friend of mine, about a dozen years ago, a middle-aged guy was going back into the dating scene, having been away from the dating scene for a long time. And he had a first date who he met with another middle-class, middle-aged woman, and they were sitting having dinner on their first date. And the woman related to my friend that she was old-fashioned, and in her standards, the man always paid. That was how she was brought up, and so if he was going to date her, the expectation was he would be paying for vacations and for meals; that’s just the way she was brought up. And it struck me, what is the difference between that and prostitution? Not that this woman relating the story—she was quite sincere and that was how she was brought up, she was relating her standards—but since it was clear their dating relationship would probably end and have a sexual component to it, and since that was not going to go forward unless he paid for everything, what in the world was the difference except for the race and the class?
So now you were telling us, Maggie, about the racial component, how police in their enforcement, they simply are satisfying middle-class standards. And the middle class says to law enforcement, “Okay, we gotta keep our real property values up, so don’t have anything visible that’s going to make us feel unpleasant or uncomfortable.” It’s like litter in the streets—I don’t mean to speak disparagingly about sex work, but it’s like, just get it off the streets, just clean the streets so we don’t have to deal with it emotionally and visually as we go about our daily lives. So Maggie, continue with that explanation.
Maggie McNeill: So as I was saying, since it is the more visible aspects of sex work that are criminalized, you think of the groups that are doing the street work tend to be the most socioeconomically disadvantaged. And so since in the United States there are more poor black people than poor white people, at least in cities, then you tend to see a larger percentage of street workers are black, and therefore a larger percentage of street workers are the ones that are getting arrested.
And the massage parlor phenomenon, of course, is largely dominated by Asian ladies. And so when you do massage parlor enforcement, you’re going to tend to enforce more against Asians. I mean, I don’t think we really have time here to explain the whole thing, but the short version is if you look at the history of prostitution enforcement in the United States, it was since the very beginning tied in with racist philosophies and racist enforcement methods. The very first federal prostitution law was the Page Act of 1875, which was also intended to discourage immigration by Chinese. It was the same law: anti-prostitution and anti-migration. And so from the very root of prostitution law in the US, at least on the big scale, it’s always been tied together with especially anti-Asian racism, but also anti-black. And again, for the visibility model, the idea in a lot of the early anti-prostitution rhetoric you see from the late 19th century, a lot is made of white sex workers seeing black clients. So the racists just didn’t like that stuff, and that was a lot of the spur for the laws.
Bob Zadek: My regular listeners will immediately, I suspect, recall that when we have done shows on drug criminalization, which started early in the 20th century in the United States—before that, most drugs that we now—opium, heroin, marijuana were not illegal, but starting in the early part of the 20th century, they started to become criminalized at the federal level and thereafter at the state level. All of that had a profound racial component as well. We recall there was an article I recall in the New York Times around 1913, as I recall, when the New York Times, publishing a news story allegedly fact-based—how times don’t change—and it reported that marijuana should be criminalized because the evidence shows that when black men use marijuana, they become better pistol shots and they become more sex-craved. And so, and of course, opium and Asian as well. So we see exactly the same racist tendencies dressed up in some moral clothing so it’s not overtly racist, but it’s the same thing, and that’s just what’s going on with prostitution.
Feminism and the “False Consciousness” Argument [12:55]
Bob Zadek: Now, Maggie, what always struck me as being—I couldn’t reconcile it, I just couldn’t intellectually understand it, and perhaps you can help or not—a lot of mainstream feminism rails against sex work in general, prostitution, strip clubs, and pornography. It is mainstream feminism to oppose that, which struck me as being utterly hypocritical because, after all, if part of the mantra of feminism is “it’s a woman’s body, she can do what she wants with it”—but what strikes me as being somewhat hypocritical is how do feminists, how do mainstream feminists defend their opposition to sex work, their criminalization of sex work? How do they defend that and yet maintain that a core principle of feminism, if that is a belief system—so Maggie, how do feminists defend and explain away, if they do, the hypocrisy of on the one hand a woman has total dominion over her own body and she can do whatever the heck she wants with it, after all it is her body—a belief system that I of course concur with—how do they defend that and yet oppose that a woman cannot perform sex work, which is after all exercising dominion over her body in a different way? Where does the opposition of feminists to sex work come about?
Maggie McNeill: Well, Bob, I mean, their rationalizations of why those two are different—abortion and sex work—their rationalizations are frankly incoherent. What it basically boils down to is they use a concept that they borrowed from Marxism, which is the concept of false consciousness. Basically, the nutshell version is if you make a decision that we disagree with, then you clearly are not making that decision in your right mind. You’re making that decision out of some kind of—you’re misled, your mind is not correct. So they call it false consciousness, the idea that you’re not in your right mind when you made that decision in the first place.
And so basically what the feminists do is they simply say a woman who’s deciding to have an abortion is making a rational decision. A woman who is deciding to do sex work, well, clearly she’s not in her right mind; something’s wrong with her. And therefore we have to make that decision for her because she’s not in her right mind. And it’s that nakedly hypocritical. There really is just no way you can address it rationally because all they’re going to do is turn around every time you disagree with them and say, “Well, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not in your right mind. It’s patriarchy, you’ve been misled,” that sort of thing.
The Economics of Autonomy and Flexibility [14:55]
Bob Zadek: Part of the argument, I think, in support of criminalization of prostitution is that the women who engage in prostitution are not engaging in an uncoerced activity; they are coerced and they are under intense pressure because, after all, nobody would do that work unless their free will was denied to them. And therefore, it’s exploitation. “Exploitation” is a word like “greed” that is so misused in society; it virtually becomes, if you have no argument, you either use “greed” or “exploitation” as a placeholder since you have no better argument. So tell us about, since you can speak with great authority because of your life experiences, how much of that is malarkey and how much of that is true? To what degree is it a rational decision, uncoerced, for people in the sex trade industry, sex workers, using the phrase broadly? To what extent, as an insider in that industry, is that accurate and to what extent is that just hype to justify an indefensible position?
Maggie McNeill: Well, I mean, Bob, you know, in any—as you alluded to earlier—why does anybody work? People work to make money. People work to make a living. Sometimes a person’s choices may be constrained. A person may only have a limited number of jobs that they are qualified for or that are available at a given time. And the fact of the matter is sex work is nearly always in demand. So even if a woman or a man—some men do do sex work; it’s not a very large percentage, but there are some—and so if you have no other options, sex work can look like a good one. If you’ve got limited options that are pleasant, sex work can be the best one.
In my case, for example, I have a great difficulty—and people laugh at this, but it’s the truth—I have great difficulty working for other people. Tremendous difficulty. I don’t play well with others. I have trouble taking orders; I have trouble not doing things my own way. And having a business of my own that I control, that I’m the one that makes all the decisions, is really, really good for my mental health. And so for me, sex work was a way for me to make a lot more money than I would have made at the other things I was qualified for.
And that’s what comes up over and over when you talk to sex workers that have been in it for more than a hot minute. They usually will say that the two things they name are money and flexibility. A lot of women who are single mothers do sex work because it allows them to be with their children and work around the children’s schedules. “Okay, I only take appointments in the day when my kids are at school,” that sort of thing. I used to have an escort service; I had a girl like that work for me. She only worked within school hours. One minute past school? Nope, didn’t take it, because it was just she did it when her kids were there. And with a lot of other jobs, you simply can’t do that. That kind of flexibility is really, really good.
The Hypocrisy of Escort Services and Sugar Daddy Sites [16:18]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned “escort service.” In preparing for the show again, Maggie, I got curious because I didn’t even know exactly—I’ve seen the phrase used, “escort services.” I knew they were legal, they were advertised, and it was a legitimate commercial activity. It probably was licensed, I presumed, but I don’t know that for sure. And I did a little research on escort service. And it was astonishing to me how they have to—they being escort services and regulators—how they have to sort of walk this fine line.
An escort service is simply a service, and typically the person rendering the service is female, but doesn’t have to be, and the customer is male, and the male will hire an escort to be on his arm at a public event so he can be seen with a trophy woman and accomplish whatever business or personal or social purposes he wants to accomplish, and he pays the woman for an evening or whatever it is of her time. He is buying time. And then, all that, there’s no sex. But what if they kiss? And then you have to define what happens there. And then, so escort services to me must make regulators insane as they draw these absurdly artificial fine lines. And I get intrigued because I’m an attorney and I just imagine drafting the legislation and drafting the statutes. And I learned that there are these hard issues. So you hire an escort for the evening and you pay her from 9:00 at night until 1:00 in the morning, and then she’s done. And then she hangs around, and you like each other, and then you have sex. Well, does that switch the whole thing to prostitution, or has she stopped being a paid person and then starts to become a date? And you end up with these absurd distinctions. And for what end?
Escort services are the perfect example of when white people do it, it’s fine. But because it isn’t done on the street and because people are wearing tuxedos and evening gowns and the result is exactly the same—there’s some money that gets swapped along the way and some sex that gets swapped along the way. It’s the same deal and the same core human motivations. And one, you’re dragged into jail by a policeman because you’re wearing a short skirt on a street corner, and the other is a part of middle-class and upper-middle-class life. The hypocrisy is astonishing to me.
And then Maggie, if you could speak to—again, I did a bit of research, I wandered into a world I knew nothing about, and I started to learn about something which I never heard of before called “Sugar Daddy” websites and Sugar Daddy services, which are, I emphasize, totally legal. Another example of it’s okay if white people do it. Tell us about Sugar Daddy websites. It’s like Match.com for rich people. Tell us about Sugar Daddy websites and tell us that—explain to us how they are legal and what transpires there, and then I challenge the audience: try to distinguish that between prostitution which is illegal. Maggie, we’re running out of time, but give us a quick visit to what Sugar Daddy websites are and the fact and try to help us understand why they are legal.
Maggie McNeill: The engine that drives Sugar Daddy websites is women who want to pretend they’re not whores and men who want to pretend they’re not paying for sex. And so what happens is you have a lot of different pricing structures in sex work. You’ve got, you know, almost nobody charges by the act anymore, but pretty much you’ve got charging by the hour, charging by the minute, that sort of thing. It’s a form of sex work where the pricing structure is monthly, usually. Some girls on there do sell dates, do sell individual dates, and of course once you get to that point…
Bob Zadek: Maggie, you’re breaking up a little bit. I’ll just continue until we get Maggie back. On the Sugar Daddy websites, you have women who will advertise with photos that they are looking for a—no punches pulled—they are looking for wealthy or wealthy-ish males to be their companion. And they indicate their price structure: they expect their medical school tuition to be paid, they expect to be taken on two or three paid vacations a year, they have their rules. And in effect, the men are told, “Do not call unless you are prepared to pay these fees.” Clearly, there’s no question about it, there is a substantial sexual component to it all, and the men advertise on Sugar Daddy websites what they’re prepared to pay. Is that or is that not prostitution? And yet that is mostly upper-middle-class.
Conclusion and Resources [17:35]
Bob Zadek: So sorry, Maggie, sorry we dropped you again. I think the Puritan police are managing this. So in—how is there any way that these Sugar Daddy websites, which I’ve been explaining while we were getting you back, is not prostitution as defined in the criminal law statutes?
Maggie McNeill: Frankly, Bob, we’re not entirely sure. The main reason seems to be, the main rationalization seems to be that because the girls aren’t charging by the hour, because it is not a short-term case. But even as an escort, I made long-term arrangements. I made arrangements that went on for months and months and months. I just recently had an arrangement that went on for about 16 months. And so, you know, we’re not talking about a sharp line. There is a region, you could say, in other words, if you’re looking at the wall of sex work, that to a degree escorting occupies one region of that wall and sugaring occupies another region, but there’s certainly no clear line between them. They smudge into one another.
Bob Zadek: So just to summarize, because we’re going to run out of time very shortly regretfully, but just to summarize: the reason I chose this show is because it invites arbitrary enforcement, it’s clearly racial, it criminalizes totally private behavior with no victim, it is imposing through criminal law morality—the most private of decisions people must make. And that is why it has no place in society in America at this point in time.
Now Maggie, you write brilliantly on this subject on a very informed basis. How can our listeners follow your work, please?
Maggie McNeill: The easiest way, I think, to get started with my work—I have six books on Amazon and a documentary, actually. So if you go to Amazon and simply search Maggie McNeill and spell the last name M-C-N-E-I-L-L, you will find all my books. They’ll all be put right there. And if you’ve got Amazon Prime, you can even watch my movie for free—well, not for free, but for part of your contract with Prime. So that would give you a really good opening into my work. You can also just Google my name. I’ve got one of those little Google info bars, so it’ll lead you to my blog, it’ll lead you to my Twitter, to interviews on YouTube, all that sort of thing.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Maggie, for sharing an hour of your time. Thanks so much, Maggie.
Maggie McNeill: Oh, you’re very welcome, Bob. You’re very, very welcome.
Bob Zadek: Thank you to my friends out there for allowing us into your home this Sunday morning. Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Thanks so much and have a good rest of the weekend.