[music]

Speaker 1: Yo, I don't think we should talk about this.

Speaker 2: Oh, come on. Why not?

Speaker 1: People might misunderstand what we're trying to say.

Speaker 2: You know, but that's a part of life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's been more than 30 years since hip hop group, Salt-N-Pepa invited us to talk about sex.

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Salt-N-Pepa: [singing] Let's talk about sex, baby

Let's talk about you and me

Let's talk about all the good things

And the bad things that may be

Let's talk about sex

Melissa Harris-Perry: Recent headlines suggest the country has RSVP'd with a resounding--

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 4: October 16th, The Guardian. Sex discrimination. Why banks shun workers and adult entertainment.

Speaker 3: October 17th, New York Times. This is what will make sex work in New York safer.

Speaker 4: October 24th, Newsweek. I'm a 54-year-old sex worker. I'm in the top 1% of only fans earners.

Speaker 3: October 29th, The Denver Post. It feels like your life doesn't matter. How anti-prostitution laws may make sex workers less safe.

Speaker 4: October 30th, The Economist. How to bring sex work out of the shadows.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and today on The Takeaway, we're taking a Deep Dive on sex work.

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As always, I'm joined by my friend and Deep Dive co-host, Dorian Warren.

Dorian Warren: Hey, Melissa. So good to join you on The Takeaway to tackle the complex issues surrounding what is sometimes described as the world's oldest profession.

Melissa Gira Grant: My name is Melissa Gira Grant and I'm a staff writer at The New Republic. I'm also the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

Dorian Warren: A former sex worker and journalist, Melissa Gira Grant has been writing about the intersections of labor, politics, and sex for more than a decade. She walked us through a brief history of how sex work became criminal activity in America. She began in a surprising place.

Melissa Gira Grant: One of the first pieces of anti-immigration legislation that we got the United States comes out of this panic that women are immigrating to the United States specifically from China and later other parts of East Asia.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The history of criminalizing sex work, it actually begins with the Immigration Act of 1907. See, the law barred immigration by those with "physical or mental defects, those suffering from tuberculosis, unaccompanied minors," and by women entering for, "immoral purposes".

Melissa Gira Grant: Many times, these are migrants who are economic migrants, people who are coming to the US for the same reason that anybody was immigrating to the US in this period, to find a better life for themselves. When it was women who were doing that migrating, particularly when it was Chinese women doing that migrating, they were seen as de facto prostitutes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, Dorian. Check this out because it gets deeper. Public angst about movement across international borders being prompted by these immoral purposes. Well, that was swiftly followed by panic about crossing state lines for the same reason. Just three years after the troubling Immigration Act, Congress passed the 1910 Mann Act, which makes it a federal crime to transport a woman across state lines for "prostitution, debauchery, or any other immoral purpose".

Dorian Warren: Now, sports historians might recognize the Mann Act as the statute that allowed federal investigators to pursue and prosecute Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson back in 1912. Just two years after its passage, Johnson was dating a young white woman named Lucille Cameron. Many white Americans already despaired at Johnson's dominance over white fighters in the boxing ring. For them, his sexual connection to white women was simply intolerable. Here is Keith David narrating Johnson's story in the PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Keith David: When her mother, Mrs. F Cameron-Falconet came to Chicago and went to the police charging Johnson with abducting her daughter., the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation agreed to take the case. "Jack Johnson has hypnotic powers," Mrs. Cameron-Falconet assured the press, "and he has exercised them on my little girl. I would rather see my daughter spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum than see her the plaything of a [sound cut]."

Melissa Harris-Perry: I know that that language is startling but Melissa Gira Grant reminded us that these racial anxieties are connected to the historic criminalization of sex work.

Melissa Gira Grant: The Mann Act comes out of this moment in the era between reconstruction and the dominance of Jim Crow, where there's this panic about particular bodies crossing state lines for immoral purposes is how it gets talked about. I think it's really fascinating that we get this thing called white slavery that there's a national panic about so close on the heels of emancipation. What I mean by white slavery is forced prostitution. You even see news articles from the time referring to this as worse than enslavement because it's seen as somehow tainting your soul.

I believe it and I'm not alone in believing this but the white slavery panic was actually about controlling women's economic independence. What actually happened is we get laws that end up criminalizing, for example, interracial couples. We get laws criminalizing and targeting people for "adultery". It's enforced in a much broader way than even the moral panic animated it.

Dorian Warren: Well, Melissa Gira Grant has located the history of criminalizing sex work in turn of the century anti-immigration sentiment, post-reconstruction Jim Crow, racial anxieties, and resistance to women's independent wage-earning. Melissa, that's kind of like the trifecta of systems of exclusion and domination.

Melissa Gira Grant: Listen, Dorian, intersectionality is not new, my brother. These messy intersections of nativism, sexism, and racism, they're all tied up in a public discourse about morality, chastity, and, of course, both sexual and racial purity.

Dorian Warren: That's a lot right there. Let's walk through it slowly so we don't get lost here. Throughout the 19th century, sex work or prostitution, as it was called, was allowable under federal law, permitting or restricting it was up to the states. In fact, many Western states tended to be more permissive, either in law, in practice, or both. Most famously, their San Francisco's Red Light District, born at the height of the gold rush in 1849 when 49ers came to the Golden State seeking their fortunes. Gambling, theft, and yes, the sex trade were all part of the neighborhood's bustling and unregulated economy.

Melissa Gira Grant: Right, but then the early 20th century, it brought big changes. The National Good Government Reform Movement known as progressivism, succeeded in making sweeping social, political, and policy reforms, and they were happening under the banner of morality, maternal protection, and temperance. If you're thinking back to high school, AP US History, yes, this is the same progressive movement that will ultimately bring America into the crime-filled age of alcohol prohibition with passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919.

Dorian Warren: That's the year my grandmother was born, 1919. Before booze, progressives targeted prostitution. First, the anti-immigration law in 1907, then the Mann Act in 1910, and then in 1913, San Francisco passed the Red Light District Abatement Act, which allowed the city to seize all fixtures and property in any building where "acts of lewdness or prostitution took place".

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, Dorian, pause, because right here, it's about to get super interesting. Now, I'm sure you've heard the phrase sex work is work.

Dorian Warren: Yes, it's called the world's oldest profession, Melissa. Not the world's oldest crime.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, right. That's fair. We can actually locate this insight of truly thinking about sex work as work in what happens after the passage of this 1913 law in San Francisco because sex workers did not remain silent about the imminent threat to their livelihoods. Just weeks after the act was passed, a sex worker who was writing under the pen name, Alice Smith, published a rather extraordinary serial memoir in the San Francisco Bulletin.

For six days a week for two months, Alice told the story of her life as a sex worker. In response, the Bulletin received more than 4,000 letters, including more than 100 of them from other sex workers. Let's listen to what one of the letters said.

Speaker 5: You like to save us. Pray, why do you not save the factory girl who works from 8 to 12 hours a day for a mere pittance? She ruins herself as quickly, I mean, in body as we do.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Dorian, you hear that explicit connection to factory labor? It's both critique and solidarity.

Dorian Warren: Absolutely. In 1917, when the city planned a Valentine's Day eviction of all brothels, San Francisco sex workers were not having it, Melissa. Like some of the other American laborers would do throughout the 20th century, they staged a mass action. About 300 sex workers marched on the church of a particularly vocal anti-vise reformer, the Reverend Paul Smith, they took over his pulpit, and they made their case. One of the organizers, Reggie Gamble said these words.

Reggie Gamble: We women find it impossible to exist on the wages of $6 or $7 a week that are paid to women in San Francisco. Most of the girls here present came from the poor, these girls would be better off in houses of prostitution than they would be as individuals because at least they get what little protection could be afforded them by the house. You can't trust in God when shoes are $10 a pair and wages are $6 a week.

Dorian Warren: No doubt, this is a very clearly articulated claim about economic freedom, fair wages, and labor protections.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It really is, but in most places across the country, the sex workers were unsuccessful in their appeals to be understood primarily as laborers. Instead, the sexual and racial politics of the early 20th century, cast sex work as a criminal act and an abusive action. Dorian, the congressional committee that crafted the 1910 Mann Act, it explicitly stated that no woman or girl would enter sex work unless she was drugged or held captive. Even though we can hear directly from sex workers in California just a few years later, that the only thing they were held captive by was economic necessity. Here, again, is Melissa Gira Grant.

Melissa Gira Grant: It's a really difficult thing to start to disentangle the ways that people understand what sex work is and the ways that people understand what sex trafficking is. It's difficult not because sex trafficking is something that's hard to talk about. It's difficult because where we stand right now in the United States is on the other end of 20 years of misinformation campaigns that wildly misrepresent who is most likely to be trafficked into the sex trade, and that repeat some of those same moral panics that we saw from the early part of the 20th century.

Just to take it out of the realm of sex trafficking for a second, I think might be clarifying, we know domestic workers are often in trafficking situations, particularly domestic workers who are undocumented. They're working in someone's private household, and they are fearful of going to law enforcement for good reason because they're undocumented. That puts them in a situation where their employers have a lot of power and control over them, where they may not have recourse if their wages are being stolen, or if they're being physically or even sexually abused in their working situation.

It's no different for sex work, except we treated it in a separate way that there's this totally alien category over here of sex trafficking.

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LaLa B Holston-Zannell: When we talk about sex work, sex work is just any person that wants to use their body for any kind of pay for a transaction. Sex work is anything where folks are using their body to trade certain things. You can either be a purchaser of sex, or you can be a person who is selling sex.

Dorian Warren: This is LaLa or more specifically--

LaLa B Holston-Zannell: LaLa B Holston-Zannell. My pronouns are Goddess, Queen, Sister, and I am the Trans Justice Campaign Manager at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Dorian Warren: LaLa brought our conversation about criminalizing sex work out of the early 20th century and into the present.

LaLa B Holston-Zannell: Yes, I think it's real work, or I like to say, these are like erotic healers. It's a way of healing because people try to discredit intimacy in touch. We're not realistically honest about our desires or even honest to talk about that. I enjoy sex work. I'm not going to lie and say it's something that's also bad, it's a job. It's something that you're passionate about or you enjoy doing, so you enjoy creating fantasies, you enjoy making people happy, you enjoy massage, you enjoy the erotic arts. It's an art.

There is also a tunnel and I'm also honest and condescend about that there are a lot of folks, particularly folks who are marginalized, folks who are undocumented, folks who are LGBTQ, folks are trans women of color, who are forced to doing that because it's survival sex.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, LaLa is making an important point. If sex work is work, then we can expect sex workers to have the same complex relationships to their jobs that most of us have with our work. Listen, I'm a college professor and I host a radio show. I love both of my jobs, but let's be honest, if I hit the $25 million big lotto, my bosses should definitely expect my retirement notice in very short order because, as much as I love my work, and I strive to be really good at it, it is also what I do in order to ensure that my family and I can survive and thrive.

Cecilia Gentili: I think that exchanging sex and exchanging ideas of being sexual should be a job, like any other exchange of effort for anything that we do, exchange and most likely like money should be the same. The problem is that sex comes with this consistent historical stigma that paints that as something unholy or no good that adds to the idea that people may have wrongly that exchanging sex is not a good thing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is the Cecilia Gentili. She's the principal consultant and founder of Trans Equity Consulting, and she echoes LaLa's sentiments about sex work as both a choice and as a reality for survival.

Cecilia Gentili: Yes, I was a sex worker for about 30 years. I started engaging in sex work at age 17, almost 18 when I came out as trans. It was the '80s, middle of Argentina, we were just coming out of a dictatorship. It was no internet at the time, so it was hard. It was hard for me to find a job. When I came out as trans, all the people that I met, and I hang out with were other trans people, and they were all sex workers, so I ended up doing sex work.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Cecilia recently wrote an editorial for The New York Times, calling for the full decriminalization of sex work in New York.

Cecilia Gentili: Every sex worker that I know, once decriminalization of sex work from both sides is two beers in Albany. One, decriminalize sex work from both sides of the exchange. Meaning, it decriminalized for me who is selling sex or the idea of being sexual, and it could decriminalize also the buyer. The other beer, it decriminalize only half of it, 50% of this equation. It decriminalize only the person selling that would still make the person buying a criminal, and for that, everybody buying sex would be committing a crime.

If you think how could this help sex workers, how could criminalizing all the people that are going to buy what you're selling would help you? Imagine, Melissa, if listening to your show would be a crime, would that be good for you or would that be bad for you?

Melissa Harris-Perry: [chuckles] Right. It may, in fact, be a crime in some states to listen to my tv show.

[chuckles]

Dorian Warren: Melissa, I am glad that it's not a crime to listen to The Takeaway. Think about that imbalance, though, for a moment, because we can spend an hour discussing sex work without any fear of arrest or incarceration, but those who actually engage in sex work are always laboring with that fear. Here, again, is LaLa.

LaLa B Holston-Zannell: I should have the right to do this with my body, I should have the right who could tell me, I enjoy being a sex worker, I just want to be able to make sure I'm able to protect my health, and be able to go to police if I have been in harms of violence, and I want the police to protect me and not coerce me to have sex with them. I want to be able to have access to my own income and make a living wage like everyone else. Sex workers are never a part of those decision conversations, and people are assuming more police is the answer or while I'm helping you out by stopping you from able to do sex work because it's a bad thing, you're still determining what's bad for someone else because it's something that you don't get understand, but also, you don't lean to those communities to try to understand them because everyone just looks at it as like, that's something you should be doing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian, I hear Lala resisting the paternalistic assumptions that have characterized the criminalization of sex work since the early 1900s. She's insisting that workers themselves understand the labor protections they need and that making their work illegal does not meet those needs. Cecilia took the point even further.

Cecilia Gentili: We want people who consensually exchange sex not to be surveyed or not to be harassed, not to be arrested, not to be treated poorly by law enforcement, but at the same time, if trafficking cases happen to be I am a person who wants people not to be traffic and to end all kinds of trafficking situations, but that would be much easier if sex work was not a crime because who knows who's being trafficked, all the sex workers, right? All the sex workers don't go to the police because it is a history of mistrust.

If this could be a rebuild, if this could be seen with another lens, we will have possibilities to really report thoroughly cases of trafficking and the same thing for clients. Our clients could be the best reporters if we don't criminalize them.

Dorian Warren: There was something more as well. Something perhaps even more foundational, more human, even then the realities of economic survival or the strategic possibilities of addressing abuse through decriminalization. Here is Lala.

LaLa B Holston-Zannell: Sex work saved me. Sex work was the space where I could find who I was, play with my femininity, figure out what type of woman I like, figure out even that type of sex I enjoy, figuring out fantasy and play, and just all these things that sex wasn't just about one thing but it was about interests in me, seeing, touch and role play, like all these things that say whole world that had, I listened to society or lived up to society's norms, I probably would not be who I am today.

Sex work was that avenue where I learned myself, where I sound of the trans people, where I said, "You know what? That's how I felt inside. Because at that time, the world had nothing to show me that it's okay to feel how I felt." That community has held me on their shoulders, has protected me, have taught me, gave me my first hormone shot. That's helped me about how to get my name changed and all these things. I learnt how to find myself in my community with and doing sex work and also that it is work.

I need to understand how to talk to my clients, and how to build a reputation, and how to look for the signs when maybe a client could be a little too aggressive where things happen. Also, learning about how to talk about consent, and negotiate consent, and all those things that I wasn't getting at home. I will always be a sex worker. I'm just maybe not on the market or looking, but I will always pay homage and respect because that is where I came from. That's who made me who I am.

To honor me and love all of my brilliance, you have to admire my sex worker bringers because I learned how to budget, hustle, manage, style, and learn different ways all from sex work, which I still use that to translate in my organizing in my policy work, in my movement work. It is all interchangeable.

Yasmin Vafa: My name is Yasmin Vafa and I'm a Human Rights Attorney and Executive Director of Rights 4 Girls.

Dorian Warren: Yasmin, talk with us about another important issue that could be affected by proposals to decriminalize sex work.

Yasmin Vafa: Across the country. We basically have human trafficking statutes that recognize that children involved in the commercial sex trade ought to be considered victims of child exploitation, victims of child sexual abuse, and human trafficking. Unfortunately, because we still have so many girls and gender expansive youth of color overrepresented in the commercial sex trade, so many of these kids have been caught up in the juvenile legal system.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What Yasmin is describing here is the abuse to prison pipeline.

Yasmin Vafa: Nationally, when we looked at the data, it was over 70% of girls behind bars reported past histories of physical and sexual abuse, but in some jurisdictions, it was even higher. When we looked at those high rates of trauma together with the most common offenses for girls, it became really clear that they were actually being punished and criminalized because of the abuse.

Dorian Warren: It makes sense that these advocates support decriminalization of sex work, but their proposal is different than what we heard from Lala and Cecelia.

Yasmin Vafa: We supported rights for girls because of our work with survivors is what's known as partial decriminalization. It would decriminalize the act of selling sex, recognizing that we do not punish individuals for acts of survival, but it maintains all of the legal prohibitions against acts of pimping, sex buying, and brothels as a means to help shrink the size of the overall industry. It's largely in recognition of the fact that sex trafficking exists in our society because the demand for commercial sex already outpaces the supply.

Even though it's illegal to buy sex virtually everywhere in the US, there are enough individuals, perfectly content to break the law to do that, that we don't have enough willing consenting adults to satisfy that demand. That's why sex trafficking exists.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wait. Dorian, I need to hear that last part again.

Yasmin Vafa: Even though it's illegal to buy sex virtually everywhere in the US, there are enough individuals, perfectly content to break the law to do that, that we don't have enough willing consenting adults to satisfy that demand. That's why sex trafficking exists.

Melissa Harris-Perry: No. I'm not at all clear where I stand on the proposal to fully decriminalize sex work, but there is something about this supply-demand formulation that Yasmin's offering here that really troubles me. I just don't think it's reasonable to conflate rape, abuse, control, and pedophilia in the same market as adults seeking consensual sex. Even if that consensual sex is transactional. Now, I'm still sorting through how I feel about the notion that sex work is work, but I am pretty darn clear that rape is not sex. Rape is violence. It just uses sex as its tool to enact that violence.

Dorian Warren: I think it's definitely important to distinguish sexual violence from sex work, from sex trafficking, as a tool of exploitation, Melissa, and refocusing on the latter two. Sex work and sex trafficking takes us into strategic debates among advocates around the path forward and whatever the disagreements and analyses of the problem, and of course, possible solutions, Yasmin did identify key areas of alignment between those who support partial decriminalization and those supporting full decriminalization.

Yasmin Vafa: Where both sides of this debate really agree is the immediate and urgent need to decriminalize individuals in the sex trade. The immediate decriminalization of the sale of sex, as well as clearing and vacating adult prostitution records for individuals who have been bogged down and trapped because of those records. I think that's a key area of alignment.

T Ortiz Walker Pettigrew: I was a youth who grew up in foster care for pretty much the first 18 years of my life. Throughout that time, from the ages of 10 to 17, I was a victim of sexual exploitation and trafficking here domestically in the United States, throughout the states of California, Nevada, Oregon, and of course, your state Washington.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening there to the voice of T Ortiz Walker Pettigrew. Now, T was testifying before the house ways and means committee back in 2014. As a survivor of sex trafficking, T wanted lawmakers to understand the ways that existing systems like foster care make children more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Yasmin Vafa, Executive Director of Rights 4 Girls told us about her work with T on the No Such Thing as a Child Prostitute campaign.

Yasmin Vafa: This is a campaign that we launched in partnership with a child sex trafficking survivor named T Ortiz, who was a young girl, who was basically born into the foster care system. Through her work and advocacy with our organization, just voiced her frustration at the injustice that all over the country, children who were survivors of child sex trafficking were being criminalized for prostitution offenses, despite the fact that they were too young to consent to sex and despite the fact that federal law and most state laws define them as victims of human trafficking. We launched this campaign to really interrogate the oxymoron of the phrase, child prostitute, child sex worker, and to really change not just our language, but our laws to correct this injustice that was happening everywhere.

Dorian Warren: Melissa, one of the key initiatives to change these laws is HR2858 Sara's Law, also known as the Unfair Sentencing Act of 2021. It was first introduced in the house back in April, and is currently still in committee. The bill effectively ends life sentences for minors in the federal system, and it creates new protections for child sex victims who commit acts of violence against their abusers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just to make this real for folks, let's talk about the case of Cyntoia Brown because it's an example of why legislation like Sara's Law is needed. Now in 2004, at the very young age of 16, Cyntoia Brown killed 43-year old real estate agent, Johnny Allen. Let's be clear. Allen is 43-year old man had solicited this girl for sex and taken her back to his home. Cyntoia claimed she killed Allen in self-defense after he became violent and reached for what she thought was a gun. Despite her claims, she was sentenced to life in prison.

That meant she would face serving 51 years before becoming eligible for parole. Cyntoia's case became national news when celebrities like LeBron James, Kim Kardashian West, and Rihanna threw their support behind getting her released. On January 7th, 2019, then Governor Bill Haslam, granted Cyntoia full commutation to parole, and she was released on August 8th of that same year, after serving 15 years in prison.

Yasmin Vafa: The body of literature that I think we've helped ignite through the abuse of prison for pipeline report and advocacy to shed light on the fact that so many survivors are just spending decades behind bars for what are really acts of self-protection when they were failed by everyone else in society. A very high percentage of adults in the sex trade, regardless of how they identify first enter the industry as children. Under the law, they're considered child sex trafficking victims at some point.

Recognizing that harm, recognizing that childhood trauma is integral and being able to promote more protective and supportive policies to get them the resources and supports that they need so that they don't end up victims of the abuse to prison pipeline.

Dorian Warren: Sex trafficking, incarceration, those that survive at that intersection of systems of abuse and unfreedom are the metaphorical minors canaries, Melissa. They alert us to the dangers of marginalization. Vafa told us a problem-solving approach to policy that centers minors canaries.

Yasmin Vafa: We create and promote public policies that center our most marginalized because when we meet their needs, it follows that most everyone else's needs in society are met. The most marginalized people in the sex trade are children, are individuals who are there through force coercion, and through means of survival. Centering policies to meet their needs is at the forefront of our advocacy and our goals.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Centering the needs of the most vulnerable is an important practice in advocacy. At the same time, we have to remember the ways we're shaped by our biases about what is most dangerous, and how those biases might keep us from acting in other areas of vulnerability. Here's Melissa Gira Grant.

Melissa Gira Grant: I think that if we could start to understand human trafficking more broadly, including trafficking into the sex trade or trafficking into domestic work, or we see people who've been trafficked into the teaching and nursing, what's the common thread in these professions and these experiences? It's often women, women who are doing work that is either service work or intimate work. I think to the extent that we can start to understand that this is actually an economic justice issue and a social justice issue and a labor rights issue, it would really change the way that we approach this, and it would change the kinds of solutions that people are offering.

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Vivian: Are you my pimp now? You think you can just pass me around to your friends, I'm not some little toy.

Edward: No, you're not my toy. I know you're not my toy. I hate to point out the obvious, but you are, in fact, a hooker and you are my employee.

Vivian: You don't owe me, I just saw it. I say who, I say when, I say who.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian Warren and I are just in here watching a little Julia Robert circa 1990 in the smash sex work, Pretty Woman. Now Dorian, I got to say, this movie is problematic for a lot of reasons. I'm down with the fact that Edward acknowledges Vivian is his employee and that Vivian is laying down on the terms of her labor contract.

Dorian Warren: Melissa, so it's good to see and hear you finding some progressive analysis in Pretty Woman. If we are going to go ahead and take the film seriously, then it's worth noting that this is also the only moment when Vivian indicates feeling any shame about her profession. To be clear, she's a consenting adult, she's making labor choices that meet her financial needs, but it's not until she begins to feel unable to control the terms of her labor that she feels hurt, and yes, angry.

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RJ Thompson: My name is RJ Thompson. I use he, him pronouns. I'm the Managing Director of the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, RJ talked with us about stigma, sex, and policy.

RJ Thompson: I believe that the stigma exists because of a deeply puritanical culture that we have in the United States around sex and sexuality. In general, we've realized that our mission to defend the human rights of sex workers and to decriminalize sex work has everything to do with destigmatizing sex and sexuality more generally and more broadly in the culture.

Dorian Warren: Melissa, in a society that often presumes sex work is inherently coercive because, of course, no good person would choose to do this work as work, RJ gave us a very useful analytic framework.

RJ Thompson: Sex work is on a spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion. I would argue that all labor is on a spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion. When you think about the jobs that you've held in life, I often ask people to think, "Why have you done the work that you've done?" Sometimes it's circumstantial because of pay, sometimes it's because you love it and want to do it, and sometimes you have family coercion, and pressure, societal coercion of pressure. This is not unique to the sex trades.

You have to understand that all forms of labor are nuanced and complex, and that there are layers of privilege and that there are as many experiences in every labor sector as there are workers. We cannot paint people as a monolithic group or these two extremes of the happy hooker narrative or the victim that needs to be saved.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The happy hooker or the helpless victim. I can see why both tropes are insufficient for understanding sex work and how this binary can limit the range of policies that we discuss as possible interventions.

RJ Thompson: There's a very deep savior mentality, unfortunately, in the anti-trafficking movement that goes back to second-wave feminism, and before that, a white savior complex that thinks that they know better for people which as progressive feminists, we don't agree with. We believe in bodily autonomy, choice, self-determination, and that people are not victims.

Dorian Warren: Melissa, another limitation of our thinking was revealed in this conversation because, so far, we have largely assumed that sex workers are women, both cis and transgender. We asked RJ about where men fit into this broader story of sex work.

RJ Thompson: Men in the sex trades are invisibilized intentionally or just not thought about. The image of a sex worker is very narrowly tailored, very specific, and very stereotypical. Usually, the image in people's mind of a sex worker is often a street-based sex worker, usually a cisgender woman, and that's reinforced through media stereotypes from movies like Pretty Woman and other things, but men in the sex trades, both cisgender and transgender men are numerous. We know that just anecdotally from one platform where we advertise as male sex workers that there are hundreds of thousands of male sex workers working in the United States, just on that one platform.

Our organization has feminist values, but we also recognize that it's important that we lift up the voices and experiences of people across the sex trades of different gender racial class and religious backgrounds, and identities to have a full picture of the sex trades, and also to understand that while men are sometimes among the more privileged sex workers, that's not always true, and especially young men of color in the sex trades experience, wage theft, sexual harassment, and violence as their female and non-binary counterparts too.

Dorian Warren: For RJ, the connection between social stigma and labor exploitation, it's clear.

RJ Thompson: Advocates often say that ending the demand for sex workers is the only thing that will curb or eradicate human trafficking, but they never say that about farm labor, domestic labor, restaurant labor, construction labor, or any other labor sector where human trafficking not only exists but is more prevalent than in the sex trades. Why is that? Because they're against sex work from a moralistic point of view, rather than only interested in eradicating trafficking. There is absolutely nothing that is going to stop sex work, it is existed in all times, places, and cultures around the world in some way, shape, or form.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with the sex trades, there is something inherently wrong with exploitative labor, which again, exists in many labor sectors, if not all, and we want to make sure that people are protected from exploitation. At the end of the day, if you believe that adults should have the right to do what they want with their labor, and with their bodies, and with their time, as long as they're not harming anyone, then you should be for the decriminalization of adult consensual sex work.

Speaker 6: [singing] Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll, yes

Speaker 7: Do we get your attention? Good. You're really not going to vote? You know it's more than just the president on the ballot, right? Check it.

Speaker 8: A district attorney decides who to prosecute.

Speaker 9: Including whether or not to go after dirty cops.

Speaker 6: [singing] Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll

Get your booty to the poll, yes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian, there are so many things to love about this creative fun-filled information pack PSA, but in the context of this Deep Dive conversation, I just wanted us to revisit it because it's just a hint of the largely untapped power of sex work and sex workers, maybe to engage new communities in our civic society.

Dorian Warren: Well, Melissa, if we emphasize the worker part of sex workers, it leads you to the fact that all workers and yes, sex workers too, have agency that when they organize together in civil society, they have the potentially transformative power to change lives and law. I'm obsessed about New Zealand, I'm struck by just this organizing sex workers did in New Zealand more than two decades ago, to push their country to become the first in the world to fully decriminalize sex work in 2003.

Since the passage of the prostitution reformat that year, there's quite a bit of empirical evidence to suggest that sex workers feel more agency and more power on the job that they feel safer, but what's fascinating to me about the New Zealand model, is its combination of an approach to decriminalization to full decriminalization, paired with a robust social safety net, which of course, has been critical in a time of COVID and it points us in several directions toward the future. Melissa, what might the future of sex work look like?

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Melissa Harris-Perry: More than 100 years after the first legislative actions criminalizing sex work, I got to say, it's hard to know in the US whether we're going to replicate our past or whether we're going to bring about new legal, economic, and social realities for sex work and workers, but we are in a dynamic moment of change and possibility. Look, earlier this year, New York and Seattle both repealed anti-loitering laws that were really used to harass and arrest sex workers and especially trans sex workers.

Dorian Warren: There are decriminalization bills working their way through both in New York and the Massachusetts State legislatures, and Rhode Island initiated a study this summer to review that state's laws affecting sex work.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian, both New Hampshire and Vermont have new legislation that at least partly decriminalizes sex work in some situations, but it's also true that as of today, the sale and purchase of sex is illegal in every state, except for a few highly regulated counties in Nevada. In some ways, it's hard to imagine that full decriminalization is on the near horizon.

Dorian Warren: Yes, that's interesting, and that's why technology and digital communication and the realities of the so-called realities of the virtual world, will undoubtedly continue to shape the future of sex work.

Elexus Jionde: My name is Elexus Jionde, also known as Lexual. I'm an unconventional history teacher, writer, pinup, and just general online media personality.

Dorian Warren: Elexus talk with us about the ways digital sex work allows for new economic models and new participants but continues to experience many of the same challenges.

Elexus Jionde: I remember I went to the strip club in January of 2020, I was having a conversation with this girl who was a stripper and I was only fans girl, and she just couldn't believe I did only fan. She was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you're okay with having your nudes on the internet." I was like, "Girl, I can't have men touching me all day every day just because I don't like ashy hands." Like it's not something I could see myself doing, the same way she couldn't see herself filming herself to be online for all time.

There's a difference and potential dangers, there's a difference in comfort levels for each one, but there are very big differences between the types of sex work, though they all continue to be marginalized.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian, Elexus encouraged us to unlink our assumptions about sex work and our concerns about sex trafficking in the digital space.

Elexus Jionde: That happens outside of the industry, not just in the sex worker world. I think that's an issue that needs to be addressed on a wider scale, but also these people who are saying this, need to also understand that, for instance, Facebook, which is not a sex worker site, that is a site where half of the content that I post to Twitter would be deleted if I posted it on Facebook because they have such strict rules against what is allowed, including like a little peek of a decolletage.

They definitely have the highest rate of child sex abuse media being passed around their servers in the messages, and that is not a sex worker-friendly site by any means.

Dorian Warren: It's worth noting that many of the activists, organizers, and sex workers we spoke with, shared visions of a future where sex workers would be afforded basic labor protections and assured access to a robust social safety net. Remember, Cecilia Gentili with whom we spoke earlier, well, she's already begun to work towards what she sees as a safer and fairer future.

Cecilia Gentili: We did extreme research and focus groups with sex workers of all genders; cisgender, transgender, masculine, feminine, straight, gay, the more that we could, we really look at their needs and we created this clinic that is called COIN that addresses their needs. If you need a doctor, if you need a primary care provider, COIN would offer just that for free. If you have health insurance, and you want to use it, and you have a co-payment, the co-payment would be absorbed by COIN.

If you don't have health insurance, and you don't have money to pay, a COIN will take all that payment away, and the same thing with mental health providers, you get to see a therapist or psychiatrist. The same thing happens with all your medicines and we are making a difference. If it's something that I'm proud of in my life, is that.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Dorian, I love hearing Cecilia's pride in the work that she's doing. I just want to thank you again for taking time out of your busy work and home life to spend some time Deep Diving with me.

Dorian Warren: Absolutely, Melissa, anytime. In fact, let's do it again next week.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, that is only a day. Now, as we wrap this week's Deep Dive, we want to close out on the words of Elexus Jionde, and she makes it plain what it means to say sex work is work.

Elexus Jionde: I'd like to reiterate for anybody listening, that me being pro-sex work is not an attack on your morals. It's not an attack on your religion. It's not an attack on your children or anybody in your life, who you think will be harmed by consenting adults trading sex for money.

Instead, I want this to serve as maybe a rallying call or maybe just a wake up for you, especially if you work a job that you don't exactly like, you work a job that you're in it more for the money than for the passion, that if today, they said you're going to take a 50% pay cut, you know you would not go back to that job the next day. If that's you, and you're listening to this conversation, I want you to think about the ways that your own industry exploits you. I want you to think about the ways you would improve your industry despite those exploitations, what ways would you make it safer for you, for your future children or children you have now, or anybody you know. How would you make it safer? Would that include providing free health care, free/affordable housing, a universal basic income? Would it require decarceration of people who are just trying to survive? Think about all of those things before you get angry at me for challenging your view of the world because we're all in this together as workers.

Many of us are not Jeff Bezos, we are not paying less than thousand dollars tax for billions of earnings. I want you to think more like a proletariat. Think more like you're a part of my class with me, and how can we make things better together.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, folks, that's it for today. I want to thank all of our guests for making today's Deep Dive possible. Cecilia Gentili, Melissa Gira Grant, LaLa B Holston-Zannell, the Goddess, Queen, Sister, RJ Thompson, Yasmin Vafa, and Elexus Jionde. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway.

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