The War on Sex
2022-10-04 · Guest: Cathy Reisenwitz (Editor in Chief of Sex and the State) · 52:46
Legal landscape and decriminalization of sex work
Bob Zadek and Cathy Reisenwitz discuss the legal and social landscape of sex work in America. They critique the “moral panic” surrounding human trafficking and the unintended harmful consequences of legislation like FOSTA-SESTA, advocating for decriminalization as a path to safety and agency.
Topics: Sex Work, Decriminalization, Human Trafficking, FOSTA-SESTA, Moral Panic, Operation Choke Point, Sex-Positive Feminism
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek - Host
- Cathy Reisenwitz - Editor in Chief of Sex and the State
Introduction and Defining Sex Work [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, I’m Bob Zadek, host of the country’s longest-running libertarian broadcast. We are nationally streamed at 8:00 AM Pacific Time Sundays on the 860 AM The Answer app. My podcast archive provides more than a decade of historical issues, and BobZadek.com offers resource material, book lists, and other topical podcasts and more. My show strives to offer in-depth content on social, political, and economic issues with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining. Every show will meet our standard of ideas, not attitude.
Our country is controlled by two major political marketing cooperatives. They’re called political parties, but they are not. In theory, the unifying force in a political party is a set of common beliefs that at election time, voters get to choose which set of beliefs they support. It’s the source of continuing astonishment to me that our country can survive with so many issues that both parties get wrong.
Today we’ll discuss one of those issues, which is driven by religious fanaticism, misplaced moralism, political opportunism, sexism, racism, and class warfare. That’s a lot for one issue to cover, but it does. To help me sort out this important issue that nobody seems to get right, I’m happy to welcome to the show Cathy Reisenwitz. We’re going to discuss sex work in general and its decriminalization specifically. Cathy is the editor in chief of Sex and the State. Her writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Daily Beast, and Reason magazine. She’s been quoted by the New York Times Magazine and has appeared on Fox News and Al Jazeera America. Cathy, welcome to the show.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Thanks for having me, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Okay, we’re talking about sex work—quite a broad, somewhat undescriptive topic. First, tell us—it’s not like the official definition—but as we discuss it during this hour together, tell us what you and I and what we both mean by sex work, so the audience has, as a starting point, a frame of reference.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Absolutely. So the analogy I like to use is the food industry, right? We all understand that the food industry encompasses a wide variety of subcategories: restaurants, grocery stores, food carts, yada yada. Sex work is similarly an umbrella term. So it encompasses all forms of erotic labor. So this is everything from someone who writes erotica, to someone who performs in pornography, to someone who does the term of art as “full-service sex work.” So that would be your escort. So yeah, that’s the sex work umbrella.
Legal vs. Illegal Categories [03:57]
Bob Zadek: Now, some of what you said—there’s a lot of activities—they’re all, we use the phrase “sex work,” which means it’s basically service for money or service for some compensation, almost always money. So we’re talking about a service provided by one person to another. Now, clearly all of the subcategories of sex work—not all of them are illegal. So give us in broad terms, which types of sex work are legal, which types of sex work are illegal, which are regulated—just in very broad terms so the audience can follow along as we have our conversation—and which are benign and not get very much attention whatsoever?
Cathy Reisenwitz: Yeah. Well, so there’s—yeah, there are many categories of legal sex work. So for example, making pornography is legal. Being an OnlyFans creator is legal. Being a stripper is legal. Being a phone sex operator is legal. The main category of illegal sex work is, as I said, full-service sex work. So a straightforward exchange of sex for money is not legal in most parts of the United States, in most parts of the world. It is a little gray sometimes because there are many places where escorting is legal. And so escorting is when you pay someone for their time, during which sex may or may not happen. There’s also sugar babying, which is legal, and that is where you pay someone to either go on a date with you or be in a relationship with you, and generally sex occurs, but it doesn’t necessarily have to.
So yeah, that’s—and then as far as regulation goes, a lot of sex work is highly regulated. When you look at strip clubs, for example, there is a lot of restrictions on where strip clubs can be located. There are often laws about how naked the performers can be at the strip club. Sometimes there are laws that dictate if it’s a full-nude strip club, you can’t serve alcohol, yada yada. Even phone sex operators are restricted, regulated in what they can talk about on the phone. So a lot of sex work operators have to worry about getting obscenity charges if they talk about certain acts. Just talking about the act can get them an obscenity charge. So yeah, sex work is highly regulated, but the category that I’m focused on decriminalizing the most is full-service sex work, because the harms of criminalization of full-service sex work are so great and the case for decriminalizing it is so compelling.
The History of Sex Work Criminalization [06:53]
Bob Zadek: Compliments of Bill Clinton, we have now learned post-1990s that it’s a sensible question to ask: what does sex mean? You said, and you slipped it by us, but we’re not—by the way, we’re not going into details. We’re not going into mechanics. But in general, you said “exchanging sex for money.” Now, of course you weren’t quoting from the statute, you were helping a lay audience understand what we’re talking about. But the exchange—it must be the statutes must be pretty specific because criminal law has to be specific or else somebody cannot tell if they’re breaking the law. So in very broad terms, with no prurient details—again, I don’t want to get salacious—but what does that mean to our audience? What can you and cannot do for money?
Cathy Reisenwitz: Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I’ve read some of the statutes, but I don’t remember the language. And I’ve been continually surprised at how broadly a lot of legislation is written. But I would say often it is kind of up to the interpretation of police and prosecutors what constitutes sexual contact. For example, if you give a naked massage, right, but there’s no genital contact—is that sex work? Unclear. But generally speaking, when I hear about people being arrested and charged for sex work, there is genital contact involved.
Bob Zadek: So it’s general, but it’s not a precise statutory definition. So therefore, in the margins, people can be committing a crime without realizing it.
Cathy Reisenwitz: I think if you are paying someone directly for a service you would consider sexual, you probably know whether you’re doing that. But again, when it comes to sugar babying or escorting, it is—you probably know whether you’re having sex or not, and you probably know whether you’re paying someone, but the line is messy around: are you paying for the time or are you paying for the sex? You know, that’s harder to prove.
Bob Zadek: Now, what’s so interesting about—at least to me—about this topic is that in the history of mankind—now, probably mankind, I’ll probably go to jail for saying that because I should find a gender-neutral term, but oh well, if they’re going to come and get me, they’re going to come and get me—in the history of mankind, for most of recorded history, the world morality did not criminalize the kind of sexual activity that we today, 21st century America, criminalize. It’s in the span of human experience, it is an unbelievably new concept.
So we have, in general, criminal law ought to respect an underlying morality, ought to respect some baseline that everybody agrees if this happens, it violates some normal human interaction that is bad for society and ought to be prohibited. But yet, for most—since morality has deeply historical roots, it’s interesting to me that the underlying morality which criminalizes sex work is almost new to the Western Hemisphere and insofar as the world is concerned, it’s not new in history. So just to give us some idea, if you happen to have thought about it or read about it, where did we get this from? How did this all of a sudden, if humans have inhabited the planet for so long without really criminalizing this, how did it all start? And by the way, I have a secret reason for asking which I’ll share when you finish your presentation. But let’s just start with that. Any idea where this all started?
Cathy Reisenwitz: So from my reading, my understanding of the situation is that some of the first laws against prostitution were passed in the early 1900s in the United States. And the laws mentioned and coincided with two trends. One was an influx of immigrants into the United States and a lot of young women moving from rural areas to urban areas without their families. And so this created a kind of moral panic around “loose women” from overseas corrupting the nation’s native-born men and naive girls from the country getting pulled into sex work and getting corrupted by sex work. And so that kind of created the demand for these laws against prostitution.
Sex-Negative vs. Sex-Positive Feminism [10:30]
Bob Zadek: So what’s interesting is, as with so many topics that I cover, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s drug regulation, in so many topics and even to some extent gun laws, they have a bigotry, an ignorant, almost superstitious bias at its root. It’s not founded in sound public health. It’s not bounded in harm to others because if there’s any activity that’s private to the people involved, it’s sex work. So who—and even identifying the victim—who’s the victim? The person who is the seller or the person who is the buyer? Even picking out who the victim is, we have a bit of a challenge.
And also to complete the circle, if you will, it’s the same bias when you described it: naive country girls coming into the city. That’s the same bias which drove our country to prevent women from voting for so many years because women were delicate flowers that needed to be protected. And it was sexist. It was: women couldn’t make their own decisions and look after themselves. And therefore one would think that the same movement that got us to the point that women are universally acknowledged as being of equal right, with equal competence and equal dominion over themselves, that same movement ought to have been equally forceful in undoing the sexist bias in criminalization and regulation of sex work.
So tell us if you will, just because it’s almost like the role of the NAACP and organizations that seem to protect the rights of blacks, mostly inner-city blacks, but all blacks, but yet they oppose school choice, which is profoundly beneficial to blacks, but they do so for political reasons. So it’s always been strange that black rights organizations have been so vigorous in opposing school choice. Same with those women’s rights organizations and their position on sex work. And am I right in saying that in general, there’s a strong women’s movement to continue regulation or criminalization of sex work? And help us understand that very strange position which seems to be contrary to what women ought to want for themselves.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Yeah, totally. So as problematic as it is to talk about mainstream feminism, yes, within whatever you could call mainstream feminism, there is strong strains of what I call “sex negativity,” which is the idea that—it’s in opposition to sex-positive feminism, which is a subset of feminism which says that sex is inherently morally neutral. And so what the sex-negative feminists seem to believe is that sex is magic. That a woman can fully consent to cleaning a toilet for money or doing domestic labor for money or making a latte for money, but for some reason she can’t consent to having sex for money.
And I think what feminists have done, mainstream feminists—many feminists, we call them “sex worker exclusionary feminists” or SWERFs—is they have identified correctly that sex work is often exploitative, right? That there are lots of harms that are associated with doing sex work and a lot of exploitation associated with doing sex work. All true. But they’re ignoring that there are lots of harms and exploitations associated with all work, and that it varies with how much power you have in the work that you’re doing. So if you’re a CEO, you’re probably going to be exploited a lot less than if you’re a janitor. Same with sex work. If you’re a high-end sex worker who is well-educated and has lots of other options, you’re going to be treated better than if you are a survival sex worker who has to work outside.
And more importantly, what they’re ignoring is that what makes sex work more dangerous than it needs to be and more exploitative than it needs to be is its criminalization and stigmatization. That without criminalization and stigmatization, the people doing sex work could easily do other things if they find that they’re being exploited or they don’t like it. And we find when you decriminalize sex work, where that’s been tried, there are lower rates of exploitation, there are lower rates of violence, and there’s less trafficking. So instead of looking at the situation and saying sex work is worse than it needs to be because we’re stigmatizing and criminalizing it, they’re saying sex is magic, it’s a special category, and so we need to use the force of law and violence to force women to not engage in it. And so that’s where they really like miss the boat.
The Impact of FOSTA-SESTA [13:14]
Bob Zadek: Now, the legislatures, both state and more so in this case the federal level, have somewhat recently enacted very broad sex work regulation, all under the guise of protecting women. And so you have a bunch of legislators, all with little or no knowledge, even any insights of the type you have just explained to us, even without ever hearing the other point of view, they obviously for some perceived political advantage, they have enacted pretty broad, very sweeping legislation that—talk about unanticipated consequences, talk about collateral damage—these pieces of legislation do that. We would like to think our legislator is sent to think through, have hearings, and draft legislation that’s focused and designed to fix a clear problem. These items of legislation are the opposite.
And we have legislation such as FOSTA—not F-O-S-T-E-R, F-O-S-T-A, an acronym, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. How do they come up with these titles? If a consumer product seller would use that label on their product, they’d be in prison, they’d be in solitary, because it is so misleading. So as by way solely of example, because I would like our audience who probably has had no reason to and therefore has not become aware of or thought about this type of legislation. And Cathy, if we talk about the legislation, we will explain so much of what we as a country get wrong. So tell us the brief story of legislation—we may discuss SESTA as well, but let’s talk about FOSTA—what the goal was, what the problem was that was attempted to be fixed, how they attempted to fix it, and how wrong they got and who are the victims. Now, sorry, tall order. I can break up that question into subparts, but first, what is FOSTA and what was the harm they were intending to focus on? We’ll just do that and then we’ll go to the other pieces.
Defining Sex Trafficking [16:16]
Cathy Reisenwitz: Okay, great. So we are in the midst of a moral panic around sex trafficking in the United States. There are multiple organizations with evangelical roots and evangelical funding whose whole mission is to quote-unquote “raise awareness” about sex trafficking. And so what they do is they raise millions—
Bob Zadek: What is sex—help us understand, because that phrase appears all the time. It’s like a blind label that gets tacked like fascism. What is sex trafficking as you use the phrase, so the audience can follow your explanation?
Cathy Reisenwitz: Thank you, yeah. So sex trafficking officially is when you coerce someone into sex work and generally speaking, like move them or help them move across countries or across states in order to do sex work that they are not consenting to. Unfortunately, in the United States, the government at the state or federal level in most cases does not differentiate between adult consensual sex work and sex trafficking. So any instance of sex work in the eyes of the law can be considered sex trafficking.
And when you look at the news reporting on sex trafficking arrests and sex trafficking stings, in every case I’ve examined, what you find is either adult consenting sex workers who have been labeled human trafficking victims, sex trafficking victims, and in the cases where sex trafficking does occur, where somebody really is coerced into doing sex work they don’t want to do, in every case I’m aware of, it’s either an instance of domestic violence—so someone’s partner is forcing them into sex work—and/or it’s an issue of immigration status where someone has a shaky immigration status and they are in many cases not forced, but coerced into doing sex work they wouldn’t otherwise do, that they wouldn’t do if they had a solid immigration status. So that’s the definition of sex trafficking.
Bob Zadek: In other words, women are per se incapable—they are incapable of having consented to this activity because somebody else decided it is somehow unpleasant or whatever negative label you want to put on it. So they create a presumption that cannot be overcome. It’s a presumption that’s irreversible, that a human being cannot consent to offer sex for money. Therefore, the activity itself had to have been coerced because it couldn’t have been consented to because nobody in their right mind would consent. In other words, Cathy, a woman doesn’t have the capacity to consent. So built right into what you said is this sexist statement: women lack the emotional or intellectual capacity to consent. Okay, so sex trafficking is enabling somebody to—I’m going to use my words—enabling somebody to perform the activity of sex for money. And if you’re helping them, their desire to do so had to have been coerced by you, the helper. It could not have been consented to. Okay, so right away we have built-in profound biases, ignorance, superstition driving the statute. So now we have—that’s the motivation for the statute. So how does the statute fix this non-existent problem?
The Consequences of Platform Liability [20:41]
Cathy Reisenwitz: Well, where I was going with the evangelical organizations is that they want to end all commercial sex in the United States, including pornography, online pornography. And so they’ve ginned up this moral panic about human trafficking in the US. They do things like create tip lines where you can call in and say, “Oh, I found an instance of human trafficking.” But these cases aren’t confirmed. So anytime somebody sees like an adult consenting sex worker outside, they call that in and say it’s sex trafficking. Cindy McCain, who is a huge proponent of this moral panic, reported an interracial family as an instance of sex trafficking because they were in an airport and they were interracial. So, and the same instance can result in multiple tips.
So these organizations are putting out press releases and documentaries saying millions and millions of people in Texas alone are human trafficking victims, sex trafficking victims, based on data that’s worse than worthless. That the best estimates indicate that sex trafficking in the United States is very rare and again, a result of domestic violence and immigration status when it happens. So anyway, there’s also—because they want to end commercial sex and online pornography, they have ginned up a moral panic around sex trafficking happening online. So the idea is that when people are advertising their escorting services online, every instance of that is actually an instance of sex trafficking and the pimp is writing the ad and forcing the woman to service the client.
And so they wanted to take all places where a sex worker could advertise her services and force them offline. And so they created a piece of legislation that made online platforms liable for any sex trafficking that might happen on those platforms. So if it turned out that someone was advertising their sexual services on Craigslist, but it was actually an instance of human trafficking, which, you know, does happen, did happen—but in every instance, not every instance, but we have documented proof from the government, from the Justice Department itself, that for instance Backpage, which was a place where sex workers would advertise, Backpage would find instances where they thought that human trafficking was happening and proactively alert the Justice Department. In addition, online platforms send millions and millions of instances of child sexual abuse material to the Justice Department, where the Justice Department takes zero action already.
But anyway, so these legislators decided based on the testimony of these evangelicals and again, not hearing anything from sex workers, not hearing anything from the people who would actually be impacted by this, “We are going to make these platforms liable for any sex trafficking that might happen.” Well, platforms don’t have the time and energy to make sure that every instance of sexual material that comes across their platform is fully consensual. They can’t investigate every single thing. And so what they did was they just booted all sexual content off their platforms. So in the wake of SESTA-FOSTA, which passed in 2018, Google started removing—
Bob Zadek: Let me just mention, let me just mention, you have used the phrase “SESTA” just so the audience understands it, to the people other than you and I understand what SESTA—SESTA is an acronym for the legislation Cathy is talking about. The full name is Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. That’s—so when Cathy says SESTA, it’s that body of legislation that Cathy is talking about that transfers liability onto otherwise neutral and immune platforms who are just providers of a platform and that’s all. That’s SESTA as Cathy has used the phrase. Sorry, Cathy, I just wanted to welcome others inside the Beltway for that phrase.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Thank you. Yeah, I’m using SESTA-FOSTA interchangeably for the piece of legislation that passed. But so yeah, platforms started just booting all sexual content. So people lost their private Google Drive files, sex educators’ education materials were taken offline, you know, people started getting banned for—the platforms took down their personal sections. But most importantly, I think, sex workers lost the places where they could advertise and they lost the places where they could exchange safety information and “bad date lists,” which means that sex workers didn’t have access to know—they couldn’t screen their clients before they saw them. And they couldn’t find clients and negotiate with clients over the internet, which means they had to find clients and negotiate with clients in person, which is—both of those things are far more dangerous than doing it online.
And so we saw rates of sex workers being murdered and sex workers taking their own lives rose significantly after the passage of SESTA-FOSTA. Nearly all sex workers saw their incomes decline, they saw their quality of life decline. Sex work became more dangerous. And before SESTA-FOSTA passed, law enforcement told Congress, “This is going to make it more difficult to find trafficking victims because we work with platforms right now. Platforms, when they send us tips because they see something fishy, we go investigate and that’s how we find sex traffickers. This will make it harder for us.” And indeed, after SESTA-FOSTA passed, by all indications, sex trafficking rose and law enforcement had a harder time. And so not only was it totally unnecessary because platforms were already compliant, because platforms were already responsible for submitting any kind of sexual illegality to the federal government—and they already were, and the federal government was already not doing anything with that information. It didn’t fund the investigation or prosecution of sex trafficking or child sexual abuse material at all. And so it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. It made the problem it was supposed to solve worse. It curtailed free speech rights. It limited the ability of competitors to these platforms—like it puts a huge onus on these platforms, which makes it more difficult for competitors to arise. And it led to the deaths of sex workers.
Bob Zadek: So we have—first we start with a non-problem. Then we go and fix the non-problem with a statute which is a major problem, far more than the non-existent problem it was trying to fix. As a result of which, life becomes more dangerous for sex workers. And I suppose there is an ignorant subset of the population which would say, “Fine,” an additional unadvertised benefit, but shame on them, obviously. So we have sex workers’ lives become more dangerous, and all these sex workers want to do is enter into a voluntary, mutually beneficial, uncoerced exchange of consenting adults. That’s all they want to do. And federal legislation has made their life cheaper and more hazardous and more expensive and less pleasant with less control to fix a non-existent superstition about sex trafficking.
Rebranding Moral Panics: From Satanism to Trafficking [23:38]
Cathy Reisenwitz: I want to be clear. Sex trafficking absolutely is a problem. It absolutely does exist. And where it exists, it’s a horrible thing. Nobody should have to do any kind of work they’re not fully consenting to. Absolutely. Sex trafficking is a problem. It’s simply: A, not a problem in the United States on the scale that’s being widely claimed; and two, doesn’t fit the definitions that people are using to define it; and three, is not going to be solved by stigmatization and criminalization. It will only be made worse. All of the evidence indicates that to limit human trafficking, sex trafficking specifically, the most efficacious way to reduce the instances of human trafficking is to decriminalize sex work, provide material support, and streamline immigration. And so it is a problem, it’s just these are not the solutions.
Bob Zadek: The environment you are describing with the superstition and hysteria—I think you used that word—moral panic. I flashback to, I guess it was the 90s, when we went through perhaps a decade of fear that nursery schools and daycare centers were engaging in satanistic practices and they were harming, permanently harming young children. Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote passionately about that for a decade in the Wall Street Journal. Families were put in prison for a very long time under the flimsiest of evidence that they were engaging in satanic practices. And then it like went away. It like disappeared from the earth. Also, if you want to go back in time, let’s flashback to, shall we say, Salem, Massachusetts. Superstition drives policy, harms innocent lives, and then it goes away. It leaves in its wake a lot of destroyed lives.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Moral panics never go away, they just rebrand. And absolutely the sex trafficking moral panic is a rebranding of the satanic panic of the 90s. And what’s infuriating about both of these moral panics is that the problem is very real in that sexual abuse of minors is absolutely rampant in the United States. There are a shit ton of kids getting sexually abused in the United States. But the vast, vast majority of that sexual abuse is happening at the hands of family members. And then after that, it’s coaches and pastors and teachers and people who are close to the children, who have access to the children, who are in positions of authority over the children. It is not happening—there are no confirmed instances of ritualistic satanic sexual abuse in daycares. Like that was not happening. And so we’re ignoring the real sources of a real threat to kids’ safety, which is the family and the home and the people that are close to the children, and focusing on this scapegoat where we’re afraid of the fact that women are entering the workforce en masse, which necessitates the use of daycare. And so, burn the daycare operators, right?
And now we have a situation where domestic violence, whether it involves sex work or not, is very common. It’s very rampant. People abusing workers who have shaky immigration statuses—it’s very common, whether it involves sex or not. You go to Amazon, they’re misusing people who are on H-1B1 visas constantly. And you do have instances of people being coerced into sex work, but it’s not random dudes in vans kidnapping white women in Target parking lots, right? Like the moral panic around it doesn’t look at all like the reality of the situation. And so we have all this panic around the scapegoat of “the other” when we need to be looking at: what are the systems in place that make it dangerous to be a sex worker in the United States? And it’s stigmatization and criminalization of sex work, not stranger danger.
Decriminalization vs. Legalization [27:15]
Bob Zadek: Are there states, Cathy, that do a markedly better job than others in general in the relationship between the criminal justice system and sex work writ broadly? Are there some other states we could look to to learn their experience and whether they are right or the more restrictive states are right?
Cathy Reisenwitz: There are definitely countries that do a better job. So for example, New Zealand—
Bob Zadek: That was going to be my next question. So okay, we can jump to countries, that’s fine. That would have been my follow-up question. But please, share with us your thoughts about countries that do a better job than we do.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Yeah. New Zealand is one. I think there are two others that have decriminalized sex work. I’m sorry, I can’t remember off the top of my head. But in every place that has tried decriminalizing sex work, to my knowledge, again, rates of violence against sex workers have gone down, rates of violence against clients have gone down, rates of STIs have gone down, rates of human trafficking have gone down, and the working environments are also less exploitative.
For the United States, sex work is generally regulated at the city level—at least full-service in-person sex work is generally regulated at the city level. And the laws don’t generally vary that much, but what does vary a lot is prosecutors, prosecutions. So prosecutors have a ton of leeway and discretion in who they prosecute and for what crimes. And they also—police will direct their energy accordingly if they know the prosecutor isn’t going to prioritize these prosecutions, then they will often harass sex workers less. And so cities like certainly San Francisco—and there are others—the prosecutors, at least the last prosecutor, not San Francisco’s current prosecutor, but San Francisco’s last prosecutor went on record and said, “I am not prosecuting adult consensual sex work offenses.” And we have seen where police are able to and encouraged to work with sex workers instead of harassing and arresting them, that’s one of the best ways to find and rescue true human trafficking victims because sex workers will often know who’s being coerced and who is doing it voluntarily. And so it just works a lot better for police to work with sex workers than against them if you’re actually trying to reduce instances of human trafficking.
The Political “War on Sex” [29:37]
Bob Zadek: There has been a clear trend, a healthy trend towards decriminalizing drug use. We all follow that. The states have rebelled against Washington in a huge victory for federalism. Us libertarians are cheering for that. And we have the states saying, irrespective of the fact that it’s a federal crime, it’s not a state crime, so feds, you stop at the border. We’re going to allow marijuana use or whatever the statute says. Is there any kind of a trend of a similar nature or the opposite direction involving the decriminalization, maybe legalization, maybe ultimately licensing—I think Nevada has licensing. So is there a trend or is it too early to even be that hopeful?
Cathy Reisenwitz: I’m quite hopeful. So in 2020, for the first time, a majority of United States voters said that they favored decriminalizing sex work. And we’ve seen legislation proposed in multiple cities to decriminalize sex work. Scott Wiener in California proposed legislation to decriminalize sex work at the state level. And there, I believe, Portland had a decrim measure. I think there was a statute in Michigan that was proposed. And so definitely like the—there’s an organization called Decriminalize Sex Work that’s actively working to decriminalize sex work. And I definitely think that there’s hope.
And I want to take a second to differentiate between legalization and decriminalization. So sex workers by and large support decriminalization over legalization. And the reason is because when you have legalization, generally speaking, it’s highly regulated in who gets a license and you’re forced to work in a brothel. There are generally not very many brothels to choose from. And so it ends up being more exploitative than it would otherwise be because you have such limited options. A lot of the regulation put on the brothels are really to keep incumbents out. They’re very corporatist. They’re not really associated with health and safety. And because—one of the worst parts of legalization is that it leaves open a black market. And so if you want to do sex work but you don’t want to work for a brothel, you still have to deal with all of the harms of criminalization. And again, if you have a situation where you’ve got a large black market for sex work, that again makes it more difficult to find and rescue human trafficking, sex trafficking victims. And so a better model for making life better for everyone is decriminalization over legalization.
Bob Zadek: I hadn’t thought of that distinction until you mentioned it. So thank you so much, I learned something important just now. Lights went off in my brain. I now can be a more intelligent advocate for decriminalization. I always imagined that decriminalization was a step in the continuum and ultimately the Holy Grail was legalization, but you have just now dissuaded me. So I’ll just ask you, it’s going to be election time, who to vote for as well, because now you’ve become my teacher on this subject. Now, does one political party—they’re really marketing machines, but I’ll call them political parties—does one political party get it right more often than the other? And the reason I’m asking is it occurred to me in preparing for the show that this was kind of a bipartisan error. No party has the high ground. Can you help us sort that out? Now, it’s very difficult because neither party has an underlying philosophy. They just try to put together the right position on enough issues to get 50.1% of the popular vote. And so they have no core, no lodestar of beliefs. But so it’s a hard question. But have you detected one party seeming to get it right more than the other and perhaps you can give an example or two?
Cathy Reisenwitz: That’s a good question. I would say that we—as the war on drugs ramps down, I believe that we are ramping up the war on sex. And by “we,” I mean Republicans for the most part. When I see 16 states have declared porn a public health emergency, these are not blue states. When I hear a politician talking about new laws and new funding for stings for sex trafficking, they don’t tend to be Democrats, they tend to be Republicans. It was the Utah legislature that passed a law that every device sold in the state has to have a porn filter installed and turned on by default. We can get into the technicalities around that law, but literally happened. So I would say Republicans are definitely worse on the war on sex than Democrats are.
But Democrats are not good. So SESTA-FOSTA was introduced, I believe, by Kamala Harris, definitely championed by Kamala Harris. A lot of Democrats on board with SESTA-FOSTA. And Democrats definitely participate in the sex trafficking moral panicking. But of the legislators who are submitting the sex work decriminalization bills, like all of them are Democrats as far as I can tell. So I would say they are both terrible and the Republicans are worse.
Financial De-banking and Operation Choke Point [32:46]
Bob Zadek: I think also when it comes to sex trafficking, the hysteria goes global because the UN is also—has given a lot of at least lip service. They don’t have an enforcement arm as such, but the UN is a frequent offender, I think, and contributor to that hysteria. All of these organizations do wrap themselves in some moral superiority that’s always a very comfortable starting point without any focus on, as the errors of FOSTA and SESTA, about the downside of their position. It’s just—it seems makes them feel good for them and live worse for lots of other people.
Now, what caused me to invite you, besides I’ve been following your writings to be on the show now, is what got my attention. And as we wind down a bit, what caught my attention is one of the—on this subject—great recent Great Satans is Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo as an institution—and this did not seem to be governmental action, this was Wells Fargo’s action—but Wells Fargo did something on this subject which struck me as being both indefensible, mean-spirited, and senseless. And I’m talking about the rebirth of a subject we spoke about several years ago when it was very much in the news called Operation Choke Point. We may revisit that subject in a second, but tell us what Wells Fargo has done and see if the audience agrees with me with my kind of angry label on their action.
Cathy Reisenwitz: Yeah. So Wells Fargo dropped the accounts of several legal sex workers and just said, “We’re not going to serve you anymore. You don’t have access to your bank account. We don’t like you.” And this is part of a huge, widespread, consistent pattern within the financial services industry to exclude and discriminate against even legal sex workers. And so what you have are people losing their bank accounts. You have Visa and Mastercard dropping Pornhub, saying, “We’re not going to serve Pornhub.” And it’s based on their own moral squeakiness of deciding, “We don’t like sex workers, we don’t like the sex industry, and so we’re just not going to serve you.” And it’s extremely harmful to all sex workers, but especially the most marginalized, right? They’re going to have the hardest time recovering from this hit. And so again, it makes no one safer. It makes people worse off. It hits the marginalized the hardest, all so they can feel morally pure.
Bob Zadek: And this is revisiting, I mentioned Operation Choke Point. This activity, this heinous banking activity, first came to light about, oh, four or five years ago. I did a show on this. The operation was called Operation Choke Point. And government was seeking to put out of business lawful activities that government, federal government, just didn’t approve of. Think of a gun shop. A gun shop obeying all the laws, all the licenses, being careful in its record-keeping, selling a lawful product. Government didn’t like it. So government encouraged banks to close the accounts of gun shops. Well, if you don’t have a bank account and a credit card agreement, you can’t function. So a lawful business that somebody in government didn’t like—now, how did they do it? They declared that for a bank to have a gun shop as a customer, that was an unsafe and unsound banking practice. Sound pretty general? Sure does to me. But they declared that that activity threatened the institutional reputation—get this—of a bank, as if Wells Fargo has a positive institutional reputation to begin with. It tarnished their reputation and it encouraged Wells Fargo in this case: get rid of legal sex workers and the country will love you and forgive all your transgressions.
So it was that topic that was in the news perhaps 10 days ago. And it was stealthy. Wells Fargo didn’t really have a press release, it just came out. And it’s that practice of the obscene overreach of government, in this case on an underrepresented in terms of voting power, a not-favored group in many of the public’s eyes. The banks just picked on them and beat them to the ground.
So Cathy, I want to close with thanking you because you’ve given us an optimistic view, believe it or not, because you have told us that in your informed opinion—and when you’re informed on something, it’s really being informed—that the trend is—the trend is to move towards the decriminalization of sex work, albeit quite slowly. But if you want to look for a trend, there it is. So there is hope that one elected official’s morality will not be forced on the rest of us and deny consenting adults from engaging in a mutually beneficial, uncoerced exchange. And that’s what this topic and that’s what this show is all about. Cathy, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time. Your insights are wonderful. You taught me a lot in just this mere hour. So thank you so much. And I do hope the next time a bank does something nasty to a sex worker or anybody else in this country from a governmental or institutional standpoint, you’ll come back to help us fight for their rights. So thank you so much, Cathy, for giving us your time. And thank you to my friends out there for giving Cathy and I an hour of your valuable time. We hope you have found it worthwhile. Thank you so much.