Gloria Steinem’s opposition to sex work dated back to the 1980s, when she had led a major movement within American feminism condemning pornography and prostitution as the most extreme manifestations of male exploitation, amounting to “commercial rape.” “Prostitution involves body invasion and so it is not like any other work,” she wrote. “So how can you call it sex work? Prostitution is the only word you should use.”
From all that I had seen, read, and studied over the decades regarding sex work by women, men, and trans women, I disagreed with Steinem’s absolutist position. It denied a wealth of empirical evidence as well as the expressed views and decisions of adults regarding their best interests within the particular circumstances they faced or even how they wished to live their lives. Opponents of reproductive rights have long employed similar strategies against women, and homophobes against gays and transgenders.
Tellingly, in the late 1990s, Western feminist prohibitionists allied with evangelical groups in an effort to erase the traditional legal distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution by cracking down on all of it as sex trafficking and “modern-day slavery,” which would expand and stiffen criminal punishment. In contrast, developing-country antitrafficking feminists and human rights campaigners, such as the numerous nongovernmental groups that established the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women in 1994, have steadily emphasized the need for decriminalizing sex work and other aspects of sex workers’ rights so as not to stigmatize or suppress sex work.
While Steinem and other feminist prohibitionists have recently claimed that they are proponents of the so-called Nordic model—clients are punished with jail terms and monetary fines, and sex workers are, at least in theory, not overtly punished—they have actually unreservedly allied with efforts that promote the US model (including the plethora of worldwide efforts driven by the US government), in which both clients and sex workers themselves face jail terms. Knowing full well her own government’s unflinching insistence on criminalizing sex workers both domestically and abroad, Steinem bizarrely claimed, in a 2016 letter in the New York Times, “There is no one this side of the Taliban who isn’t trying to get rid of archaic laws that arrest and imprison prostituted people.” Distant barbarians are always convenient whipping boys.
Nor have feminist prohibitionists done anything noteworthy to combat the jail terms and other punishments inflicted each year on tens of thousands of American women, trans women, and men convicted of selling sex, an omission so glaring that it can only be interpreted as being driven by condemnation of those individuals. This spotlights the tense and even antagonistic relationship between some Western feminists and sex workers that has persisted across eras and continents, reflecting an invidious undercurrent in feminism about “decent” versus “indecent” women.
I was struck, too, by how the inflammatory language used by Steinem and other prohibitionists was so similar to the tactics employed by antiabortionists. Steinem’s description of sex work as “commercial rape” was cut from the same cloth as Congressman Chris Smith calling abortion “child slaughter.” In no other part of the world that I knew well—whether Western Europe or India (at least until recently)—were such rabid denunciations and staking out of fanatical positions considered an acceptable part of public debate as in the United States.
But what troubled me most was that Steinem would insist that a position that she had reached vis-à-vis women in Western industrialized countries represented the only possible solution in a setting as different as India or other developing countries. Those worlds were simply not comparable. Most Indians, men and women alike, still struggled to survive against terrible deprivation and were battered by one economic dislocation after another as the country was opened up to globalization. India was not going to become the United States—let alone a Nordic welfare state—anytime soon, perhaps not even in fifty years. Surely Steinem’s focus—like mine—should unwaveringly be on the best interests of sex workers in the here and now, not in an imaginary utopian India?
Instead, on a visit to India, Steinem railed at the sex-work collectives—all they had “done is to enhance the ability of the sex industry to attract millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation for the distribution on [sic] condoms,” she charged, and “created a big new source of income for brothel owners, pimps and traffickers who are called ‘peer educators.’ ” In rubbishing the explicit choices and demands of the hundreds of thousands of impoverished women running these collectives, Steinem showed that “imperial feminism” still flourished long after the ending of the British Raj.
I wondered to myself what explained the chasm between the views of Steinem and those of other American feminists whom I admired, particularly those who placed debates about sex work within a broader context of social injustice and the harsh actual conditions prevailing in much of the world. “The stigma traditionally attached to prostitution is based on a collage of beliefs most of which are not rationally defensible, and which should be especially vehemently rejected by feminists,” the University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote. “. . . [T]he correct response to this problem seems to be . . . not to rule off limits an option that may be the only livelihood for many poor women and to further stigmatize women who already make their living this way.” (At another point, Nussbaum commented sharply, “The idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted vile things who must be punished.”) Noting that it is a “dead end to consider prostitution in isolation from other realities of working life,” she urged feminists to “talk more about getting loans, learning to read, and so forth if they want to be relevant to the choices that are actually faced by working women, and to the programs that are actually doing a lot to improve such women’s options.”
Doubtless one factor is that Steinem, Kristof, and other celebrity sex-work prohibitionists avoided grappling with any of the realities of sex work in low-income countries that challenged their views. They instead valorized local prohibitionists as authoritative interlocutors, even though those figures merely played to their preconceived views in a self-serving, symbiotic relationship. In Cambodia, that role was played by Somaly Mam, and in India it was and continues to be played by Ruchira Gupta, a former journalist who, in 2002, founded the prohibitionist group Apne Aap Women Worldwide. With Kristof and Steinem’s backing, Gupta, who has lived largely in the United States for the past twenty-plus years, was soon feted by exactly the same circles as those who were hero-worshipping Somaly Mam—ranging from the Bush administration and evangelical groups to the Clinton Global Initiative and the Buffett-financed NoVo Foundation.
Gupta, like Mam, sensationalizes the scale of sex trafficking. In a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gupta claimed that in India “the average age for beginning sex work is between 9 and 10.” (Mam, in a similar vein, thereafter claimed that girls as young as three were being sold in Cambodia’s brothels, an accusation that even other hard-line prohibitionist groups criticized her for.) I emailed Gupta repeatedly to ask for the source and robustness of that statistic, but neither she nor her colleagues ever replied. Still, Steinem and others repeated the canard endlessly. A similar canard that the average age of entry into sex work in the United States is “between twelve and thirteen” continues to be aired by them, though it has been debunked by leading scholars.
Among the other dubious claims made by Gupta are that in the industrialized countries where sex work is either decriminalized or legalized, the sex workers’ “children are held hostage so that they will do different kinds of sex with the customers rather than just the regular,” and “the sex industry has been able to get away with bringing in little girls with impunity . . . [I]n front is a legal documented forty-year-old person and behind, if you give a little bit more of extra money, you get the little girl at the back.” It speaks volumes that, none of the claims made
about the gargantuan scale of sex trafficking into the United States has withstood scrutiny—in practice, US officials have year after year found just a few hundred cases of trafficking into the country, and those mainly for agricultural labor, not the fifty thousand to one hundred thousand sex-trafficking victims that the CIA and Justice Department hyperbolically projected when congressman Chris Smith and other prohibitionists were ramming through the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act. (This inconvenient counterfact didn’t stop Kristof from claiming in a 2015 New York Times column that “some 100,000 minors are trafficked into the sex trade each year in America.”) The prohibitionists’ reliance on sensationalistic claims—much like their use of inflamed language and angry vituperation against critics—inescapably suggests that they know their arguments are hollow and will not prevail in an honest, fact-checked debate.
Much as with Mam, the celebrities invested in Gupta have not seemed to ask questions about the quality and impact of her work, though Gupta has been dogged by controversy. In 2010, two Harvard undergraduates, Niharika S. Jain and Tara Suri, who had raised $20,000 for Gupta’s Apne Aap group—inspired by Kristof’s adulatory praise for her—and then spent several weeks volunteering at a Delhi site where Gupta had long promised to deliver “holistic income generation programmes, education for children and . . . a residential hostel for the children to prevent trafficking and second generation prostitution,” wrote an excoriating article in the Harvard Crimson, saying that “Apne Aap had nearly no presence there” and that “the women are completely disillusioned and continue to work in the sex trade.” Writing that they were “devastated by this farce of an initiative,” they insisted that Gupta return the funds they had raised.
Though Gupta’s lawyer threatened to sue the Harvard Crimson for publishing an “article replete with false, defamatory statements,” even sharper criticisms surfaced just three years later when a group of former American and European interns and Indian staff members of Apne Aap wrote to Apne Aap’s board and major donors criticizing Gupta’s leadership of the organization.
The exhaustive seven-page report from the interns was a barrage of criticisms—all the more poignant because it came from individuals who shared Gupta’s prohibitionist views. Reiterating the concerns of the Harvard undergraduates, the former interns pointed to the “large gap we saw between AAWW’s vision of providing prostituted women with alternative livelihoods and its actual operations,” accusing Gupta and the organization of “inflated” and “highly misleading” claims about the numbers of beneficiaries.
Their criticisms also focused on “top-down mispresentation” and exploitation in Apne Aap’s public relations strategy. At an event in Delhi, girls from a community where Apne Aap works were presented as “inter-generationally prostituted girls, wherein this was not the case,” they noted, calling it “another PR tactic in very poor taste as it completely exploited the girls for their unawareness and vulnerability.” And Apne Aap’s portrayal of entire neighborhoods as “red-light districts,” when “intergenerational prostitution” is in fact limited to only some of those households, had angered these communities, leading to several girls and women being beaten by their families and a damaging rupture with the organization’s field staff. Criticizing Apne Aap for claiming to have closed down dozens of brothels, the interns noted that while “the term ‘brothel’ connotes a large house with many prostituted women,” these “are home-based brothels in Bihar with perhaps one prostituted woman per brothel.”
Gupta dismissed the Harvard undergraduates and the interns as being young and inexperienced. But key aspects of their assessment were borne out by one of India’s leading public health and gender experts, Dr. Ravi Verma, the Asia regional director of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), who visited Apne Aap’s longest-running project site in Bihar, at Gupta’s invitation, in the very same year as the Harvard students. Verma told me he was dismayed by what he had seen. On the first day of his visit, several of the women castigated Gupta for misrepresenting them as being “hereditary prostitutes” when they were landless agricultural laborers and had been lured to the project by Gupta’s promises of government-provided housing. Another pleaded piteously with Gupta to be allowed to see her young daughter, whom Gupta had placed years earlier in a boarding school, barring the mother from visits. Verma said he saw no evidence that even the women who sold sex were controlled by others, as Gupta claimed and Kristof had vividly reported from the area—rather, as is commonly the pattern in rural India, selling sex was one of several things the women did to earn for their families. He told me acerbically that Gupta’s work is “entirely focused on catering to international donors.”
In the wake of the protest letters by the former interns and staff, it emerged that Gupta, in true Lords of Poverty excess, had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the rent for Apne Aap’s Delhi office in the city’s most exclusive area, as well as an upscale guesthouse. Not only is this sum a staggering fortune in India, if it had been merely invested in mutual funds—returns on which reach 15 percent annually in India—that alone would have ensured that a great number of the women and girls Gupta claims to protect could have been economically independent, with no need for the further infusions of hundreds of thousands of dollars that Gupta has sought out and received. (After a 2016 New York Times Magazine article reported on these expenses, Apne Aap barred access to financial reports on its global website—while continuing to actively solicit donations—a practice that I have never seen elsewhere in all my decades of work in development.)
Kristof, Steinem, Ashley Judd, and other Western celebrity prohibitionists turned an equally blind eye to whether Gupta’s policy positions were substantiated and meritorious. Indeed, more often than not they held her up as the sole voice of authoritative advice on India, rather than carefully canvassing insights from a range of expert and local sources. That invariably resulted in their urging policy approaches that were outlandish and destructive and helped neither sex workers nor genuine victims of sex trafficking.
Thus Kristof urged that India utilize sweeping police raids in red-light areas, saying that raids had caused a major decline in the fortunes of Mumbai’s criminal-controlled central red-light areas. Gupta appeared to be his sole source of information. But the truth is that the decline in sex work in these localities has been driven by a constellation of systemic factors, most of all intense gentrification pressures in an area that commands some of the world’s highest real estate prices as well as the dispersal of the blue-collar clientele to far-flung neighborhoods as the area’s textile mills and other industries closed or relocated. And in urging expanded raids, Kristof seemed to be unaware of the advice of leading human rights experts, including the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, who have repeatedly condemned indiscriminate raids for intensifying police brutality against sex workers, sanctioning invasive medical examinations and enforced incarceration of sex workers, and other grave human rights abuses.
Another of Gupta’s main policy recommendations, modeled on laws prevailing in several US states, is that clients of sex workers—even when there is no evidence of trafficking—be punished with up to five years of rigorous imprisonment, many times the length sought by the Ministry of Women & Child Development in the contested amendments to the antiprostitution law, a surefire recipe for arming the notoriously corrupt police with a potent tool for targeting impoverished and powerless men. Though India’s criminal justice system does not come close to the United States’ for injustice and brutality, it is a travesty nonetheless, which should have held Gupta back from urging laws that would multiply human rights abuses and set India on the path to being a prison state like the US.
For countless reasons, I had long disliked the mainstream of American do-gooding. There were the obscenely wasteful galas. There was the know-it-all smugness and self-congratulatory PR of the celebrities, “experts,” and philanthropists. There was the peculiar inability to think of low-income countri
es in conventional terms, as societies much like the US, with similar, chronic challenges that needed to be addressed by political, economic and social change. There was invariably instead the caricatured portrayal of these nations as overpopulated, malarial, failed states teeming with piteous women and children exploited by fiendish men and evil rulers. There was the inexplicable myopia on display that though the do-gooders had visibly failed in remedying the US’s gargantuan domestic injustices they could solve intractable problems in remote countries they barely understood. There was their imperialistic habit of foisting American notions on other societies, however obscurantist and damaging these views. And running through all this was the do-gooders’ blindness to their own and their country’s complicity in creating and perpetuating the world’s miseries, the causes ranging all the way from the US’ ingrained trigger-happy militarism and consumerist entitlement to the propulsive rise of predatory capitalism.
Just as off-putting was the vacuous faith in American exceptionalism that propelled Nicholas Kristof and many others—in such depressing contrast to the perceptive worldview of earlier American thinkers from James Baldwin to Howard Zinn, who saw that the US was so often on the wrong side of justice and history. Despite the US’ record of failure and harm at home and abroad today’s elite do-gooders somehow still believed that the United States had a unique commitment to advancing social justice and that progress seen anywhere in developing countries was somehow owed to the example or magnanimity of the United States. The “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole called this juggernaut.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 32
