Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  While underage prostitution remains an intractable problem here and abroad, the reality is that a majority of sex workers in developed countries begin working in the profession when they are eighteen or older. A 2010 study of 557 street and indoor prostitutes working in three Dutch cities found that the median age of entry was twenty-seven for non-drug-using workers, twenty-five for drug users, and twenty-four for transgender workers.9

  Similarly, while research indicates that streetwalkers are more likely to begin selling sex when they are underage, many of the women who do indoor sex work in North America begin working in the trade when they are eighteen or older. One survey of thirty-nine off-street prostitutes in British Columbia, conducted in 2006, found that the average age of entry for these women was twenty-two; the majority had started working between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four.10

  Jillian, the Jewish activist from western Massachusetts, is one of many escorts who began working when she was of legal age. And she defies the conventional stereotype in other ways as well. She was not sexually molested or physically abused as a child, and she began doing sex work by choice just shy of her twenty-first birthday. She says she likes sex work for several reasons: it gives her the economic independence she needs to pursue community activism, it allows her to set her own hours, and it makes her feel powerful and in control. As she writes in her online journal, “I love being the most beautiful woman in the world for that one hour. I love the performance art. I love the anonymity. I love the world beginning again in the confines of that room populated by only two strangers.”11

  On a hot August afternoon, Jillian arrives at the Yellow Sofa café in Northampton for our second meeting, sweaty and red in the face. She has walked a half-mile from her house, dressed all in black: black pants, low-cut short-sleeved black shirt, and a big black hat. Her witch-black hair is plastered to her forehead. She apologizes for being late and orders an iced latte. As we settle in at a table near the back of the café and begin to talk, Jillian keeps putting on her oversized black glasses and taking them off. But she settles down as the conversation turns to her work and why she does it. She says that by the time she decided to do sex work, she had already slept with a “fair number of people” — both female and male — and realized she was bisexual.

  “I’m not ashamed of my sexuality,” she says. “I’ve found that it’s easier for me to let go in my personal sex life because of [what I do].” With her clients, Jillian slips on a wild, sensual, anything goes persona — for an hour, a half-hour, or however long she is with them. She tells her clients, mostly married middle-class men, that she won’t laugh at anything they desire, that “we’re going to play with it, we’re going to have fun with it; in this room, it’s going to be fulfilled.” And for that allotted period of time, Jillian is sex incarnate, the most beautiful woman in the world, as she herself once wrote, “a Mata Hari” of the twenty-first century.

  Indoor sex workers like Jillian are much less likely than street workers to have experienced sexual or physical abuse as children.12 This is particularly true in countries where prostitution has been legalized. A survey of 127 street and indoor prostitutes in the Netherlands, where adult consensual prostitution has been legal in certain venues since 2000, found that only 16 percent had experienced sexual abuse prior to the age of sixteen.13

  Even more surprising, a Dutch researcher who conducted an in-depth study of 187 prostitutes in the Netherlands in the early 1990s found striking variations in well-being among the women she surveyed. (To determine well-being, the researcher, Ine Vanwesenbeeck, considered psychosomatic complaints, work-related physical complaints, and problems with depression, anxiety, and social insecurity, as well as job satisfaction.) The survivors of childhood sexual abuse who worked as prostitutes did much worse physically and emotionally than other women on these measures. Thus, about one quarter of Vanwesenbeeck’s total sample (which included the victims of child molestation) fared worse than a control sample of non-prostitute women. However, approximately half of the prostitutes surveyed were doing better than expected, Vanwesenbeeck found, “only slightly less well than the average non-prostitute.” And in a poke to conventional wisdom, more than one quarter fared “quite well” or “even better than the average non-prostitute.”14

  Vanwesenbeeck’s study is not the only research that reveals huge variations in how sex workers feel about themselves and their work. A 2001 study of twenty-nine prostitutes in New Zealand (twenty-seven worked as call girls or escorts or in massage parlors and two worked the streets) found no differences in physical health, self-esteem or mental health, as compared with an age-matched sample of non-prostitute women.15

  The difference in how sex workers fare seems to depend on several factors: their childhood experiences, working conditions, whether they are drug users or not, and how choosy they can be with clients. Vanwesenbeeck, for example, found that because streetwalkers and window prostitutes in the Netherlands usually work in isolation, they are particularly vulnerable to physical and sexual assault and harassment. Not surprisingly, streetwalkers are also more likely to have been abused as children. A 1984 study found a 60 percent rate of child sexual abuse among street workers in San Francisco.16

  Such childhood trauma, coupled with difficult working conditions, is predictably associated with depression, anxiety, and lower job satisfaction. Studies in other countries have found similar disparities in the experiences of indoor sex workers as compared with those who work the street. A British study comparing 115 streetwalkers with 125 women who worked in saunas or as call girls found that the street workers were more likely than the indoor workers to be robbed (37 vs. 10 percent); beaten (27 vs. 1 percent); punched, slapped, or kicked (47 vs. 14 percent); and raped (22 vs. 2 percent).17

  The problem of violence for street workers is intertwined with the fact that they are much more likely than indoor workers to use drugs.18 In a New Zealand study, done by researchers at the University of Otago, Christchurch School of Medicine, three-quarters of streetwalkers reported using drugs while working as compared with one-third of indoor workers.19 In many cases, drug use preceded their involvement in commercial sex. For these streetwalkers, prostitution is a means of securing the funds needed to feed an already established drug addiction. Desperate to score their next fix, addicted workers are often not as careful to screen out dangerous clients or practice safe sex.20

  That was the case with Kisha, a transsexual sex worker whom I met at the drop-in center of Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a nonprofit organization that does outreach to streetwalkers in Washington, D.C. HIPS sends out several mobile vans three nights a week, and workers in those vans travel fifty miles per night within city limits, handing out free condoms, coffee, and hot chocolate and arranging free HIV testing, counseling, and referrals for other health-care services to streetwalkers. Funded by the District of Columbia Department of Health and numerous private donors, HIPS dispenses 750,000 condoms a year and, since its inception in 1993, has helped hundreds of streetwalkers get off drugs and off the streets.

  Kisha, a name she uses professionally, is one of those sex workers. Now in her thirties, Kisha is an articulate African American male-to-female transsexual with a feminine body and a pretty face. A native of Washington, D.C., she says that she began doing sex work after getting hooked on crack. “I started sex work to feed my habit,” says Kisha in an interview at the HIPS drop-in center on Rhode Island Avenue in northeast Washington. But as a childhood victim of sexual abuse, she adds, “I was really doing sex work at ten, for a shoe, a few dollars. It was a way to survive.” Kisha is now clean and off the streets; she still does sex work — on her own terms, she says — and she also works for HIPS, reaching out to men and women who are still on the streets.

  Other studies have found that some sex workers turn to drug and alcohol as a way to cope with the work they do.21 Tasha, for example, started using drugs to numb her emotions while doing sex work. A handsome African American transsexual,
Tasha (her professional name) left home when she was sixteen, knowing that her family would not accept who she was — a woman trapped inside a man’s body. Young and on her own, she became intrigued by the lifestyle.

  “Once I saw the strip [malls] and the girls strolling and the makeup and the clothes, I knew that’s where I wanted to be,” she says. Now thirty-four, Tasha is wearing a frilly off-white blouse pulled tight across her breasts and a black leather jacket. She has a long, carefully groomed black wig and a scar under her nose. Her liquid black eyes seem haunted. “I didn’t have any money, so I went to Macy’s and took a wig off the mannequins,” she recalls. “And it worked. I felt so good, and the men just pulled up and the money came in.”

  At first, Tasha says, her life was one big party. She was living in an apartment with six other “girls,” and they would sleep all day and get gussied up at night and go out on the stroll. Tasha, who has known she was different from a young age, wanted desperately to fit in, and so she started doing what her new friends were doing: smoking weed. “Everything was moving so fast,” she says. But then she began using harder drugs to numb her emotions while on the stroll. “I had to get high on something, you don’t know who you’re going to touch, it was man after man,” she says. “I had to do something because I couldn’t do it [sober].”

  Tasha started smoking crack, and that, she says, is when “I really got stuck.” Desperate to pay for her next fix, Tasha became careless about whom she would “date” and what she told the johns about herself. She says she was raped on numerous occasions, and once she was stabbed six times while giving a man a blow job.

  “I was on drugs, on New Jersey Avenue, and there were two guys, a man and a boy. And I’m on my knees doing the job, and the boy comes and stabbed me six times. I’m walking and the blood and I’m screaming, and I was walking down the street to the fire station and holding the wound in,” she says, pressing on the side of her stomach to demonstrate how she tried to keep from bleeding out. She survived that attack, only to be shot twice by another client, who she thinks went berserk when he discovered she wasn’t a woman. “I was saying, ‘Here, come here,’ in a high voice, and then I went back to my regular voice once I got him in the web. He figured it out, and before I knew it, he had shot me in my thigh and I was lying on the ground, and then he shot me in my chest,” she says. “The bullet is still in my back.”

  In 2009, Tasha was arrested for robbing another john while high on drugs. She did three years in jail for armed robbery, and when released on probation, she went back onto the streets. But then she discovered HIPS and, with the help of its outreach workers, began to, as she puts it, “get stable.” “They were there [on the street] with condoms and hot chocolate,” she says. “And they had a bad-date list [of johns known to be violent], so I knew these were people who actually cared.”

  Until she came off the streets, Tasha says, drugs and sex work were her whole life. And indeed, researchers have found that street workers, because of their circumstances, are less able than indoor workers to separate their private lives from their sex work.22 While some psychologists argue that such separation of self is inherently damaging, others see consensual sex work as not that different from the kind of role play or acting done by other service workers who work with demanding customers (for example, nurses, waitresses, flight attendants, even Walmart clerks). Such researchers argue that a separation of one’s core self from the role one is playing is a necessary strategy for managing emotions while working.23

  Even more surprising, a number of studies have found that escorts and brothel workers often develop higher self-esteem after they begin doing sex work. The 25 percent of prostitutes who fared even better than the average woman in Ine Vanwesenbeeck’s study were self-employed and able to determine their own working conditions. They served fewer customers because they were able to charge more per customer. A 1986 study by sociologist Diana Prince found that 97 percent of call girls (another term for escorts) reported an increase in self-esteem after they began working in commercial sex, as compared with 50 percent of brothel workers and only 8 percent of streetwalkers. According to Prince, call girls expressed positive views of their work, and brothel workers were generally satisfied with their lot.24 Similarly, a 1979 study of indoor prostitutes, most of whom worked in bars in a midwestern city in the United States, found that three-quarters of them felt that their life had improved after entering prostitution. None said it was worse than before.25

  In the Netherlands, three-quarters of indoor workers report that they enjoy their work, according to a 2004 study.26 And an Australian study the same year found that half of call girls and brothel workers felt that their work was a “major source of satisfaction in their lives,” while seven out of ten of those surveyed said they would “definitely choose” this work if they had to do it over again.27 (Prostitution was decriminalized in several regions of Australia in the 1990s.)

  Male sex workers (who typically serve gay customers) report even higher levels of satisfaction. A significant segment of the male prostitute population surveyed in a 2007 study reported enhanced self-esteem. And another study found that for transgender sex workers in Brazil, prostitution was the only sphere of life that enhanced their self-image. Being sex workers, they said, gave them a sense of personal worth and self-confidence.28

  While many sex workers, whether working on the street or indoors, do not perceive themselves as victims, they are acutely aware of the stigma involved in doing sex work. The perception by the general public that sex work is immoral, dirty, or tainted and that no self-respecting woman or man would do such work explains why even high-priced escorts do not tell family members, sometimes even their partners or close friends, what they do. Many sex workers, both those who walk the streets and those who work indoors, say the stigma involved in what they do, and the secrecy required, is the most demoralizing aspect of their jobs. “The hardest and most frustrating aspect of this work is that I can’t be honest with people I care about,” says Maddy Colette, the high-end escort from North Carolina whom I met at the Desiree Alliance conference. “Living a double life is hard.”

  Kimora, a twenty-eight-year-old African American transsexual (male to female) who used to walk the streets in Washington, D.C., agrees. “Society is really judgmental,” she says in an interview at HIPS. “You say to someone, ‘I used to be a sex worker,’ and they look at you with judgment, without letting you explain this is what you were going through at the time in your life.”

  Western cultures view prostitutes through a particularly harsh lens, in large part because the Judeo-Christian religious ethic has long sanctified marriage and vilified prostitution. The late sociologist Kingsley Davis provided a more socioeconomic explanation for this centuries-old stigma in his landmark 1933 paper “The Sociology of Prostitution.” Davis noted that “the basic element of what we call prostitution — the employment of sex for non-sexual ends . . .” applies to all institutions in which sex is involved, including courtship and marriage. “Prostitution therefore resembles, from one point of view, behavior found in our most respectable institutions,” he noted. The stark difference in the way these institutions are viewed lies in the social functions they serve. Since the most important function, from the point of view of a civilized society, is reproduction (producing the next generation), Davis argued that marriage is held in the highest esteem because “it is the chief cultural arrangement through which erotic expression” is linked to reproduction. But when sex is exchanged for money, the buyer clearly has pleasure and not reproduction in mind. “To tie intercourse to sheer physical pleasure is to divorce it both from reproduction and from the sentimental primary type of relation which it symbolizes,” Davis notes.29 In other words, the paid sexual relationship is inimical to our most sacred institutions (marriage and reproduction) and thus must be condemned as a social evil.30

  What Davis neglected to mention is the patriarchal or chauvinist frame through which this condemnation takes place. In patr
iarchal societies, women who behave sexually outside the norm of marriage are marked as deviant, while men who are equally promiscuous avoid blame. Sex workers are thus considered the most deviant of all (more on this in Chapter 10).

  While some feminists believe that women should be able to choose how they express their sexuality (even to the point of selling sex), other contemporary feminists have reframed prostitution as an inherent evil because they believe it objectifies and oppresses women. Donna Hughes, a women’s studies professor at the University of Rhode Island whose online profile identifies her as a leading researcher on human trafficking, writes, “Men who purchase sex acts do not respect women, nor do they want to respect women.”31

  Andrea Dworkin, the late feminist, argued that when men turn to prostitutes, they are expressing a “pure hatred” for women. “It is a contempt so deep, so deep, that a whole human life is reduced to a few sexual orifices, and he can do anything he wants,” she wrote in Life and Death, a 2002 collection of her essays and speeches.32 (In the 1980s, Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, employed similar rhetoric in their battle against pornography.)

  Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who founded the nonprofit organization, Prostitution Research & Education, also argues that prostitution “dehumanizes, commodifies and fetishizes women.”33 In a 2013 article Farley published comparing prostitution to slavery, she writes, “In prostitution, johns and pimps transform certain women and girls into objects for sexual use. . . . Women who have survived prostitution say that the experience is profoundly degrading and that it is as if one becomes ‘something for him to empty himself into, acting as a kind of human toilet.’ ”34