By: Kaytlin Bailey | From the June 2023 Issue of Reclaim
Sex workers have both epitomized and defied the historic restrictions on women’s entrepreneurial spirit. For much of our history, prostitution was one of the few paths available to entrepreneurial women who weren’t born into wealth. And today, prostitution funds more students, artists, and entrepreneurs than all of the available grants combined. But prostitution has become a symbol of exploitation and the ongoing criminalization of prostitution has derailed the lives of countless women.
During the expansive Guided Age, brothel owners were some of the wealthiest women in the west, many of whom invested in school systems and public health projects. New Orleans was explicitly settled by French prostitutes, and sex workers have always been a critical part of every port town, new settlement, and city in the United States. Brothel owners, many of them unmarried women, were some of the largest land owners, public figures, and advocates for women’s rights decades before women won the right to vote.
Women such as Ah Toy in San Francisco, LuLu White in New Orleans, Lou Graham in San Francisco, and the Everleigh Sisters in Chicago were able to build fortunes and businesses that provided a path for other women to leave abusive homes and forge independent lives before married women had property rights. Despite these crucial contributions from sex workers, efforts to contain and control the oldest profession have limited women’s ability to fully participate in public life, and divided feminists for over a century.
The first federal anti-prostitution law in the United States is also the first anti-immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, which explicitly banned Asian women from immigrating to the U.S. for “immoral purposes.” This law predates the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), but was part of the same vitriolically racist and xenophobic panic of the age.
The U.S. criminalized prostitution during the Progressive Era, swept up in the same moralizing exuberance that led to the criminalization of alcohol, abortion, and pornography. These laws were sold to the American people as a way of protecting vulnerable women from exploitation, but they did no such thing.
The first federal law to apply to citizens, the Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White Slave Law, made it a crime to transport women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Much like the anti-trafficking laws of today, the Mann Act did not deter prostitution, nor did it result in the rescue of any sex slaves. Instead, the law was overwhelmingly applied to prosecute consensual interracial relationships, extramarital affairs, and inconvenienced many chorus girls on the way to their next gig. The Mann Act made it more likely that women traveling alone would face questions and possibly be detained.
Concerns about venereal disease, coupled with the moral panic about women’s increased mobility and participation in public life, culminated in what became known as the American Plan, which made both prostitution and “promiscuity” anywhere within five miles of a military base a criminal offense.
These laws were enacted in 1917 during America’s involvement in WWI and remained on the books into the 1970s. Thousands of women were sent to locked hospitals and penitentiaries because a police officer thought they might be a “loose woman.” This history is important because it reveals the actual purpose of prostitution laws: to curtail women’s ability to accumulate property and fully participate in public life.
Sex workers have been pushing back against these laws for over a hundred years. On January 25, 1917, over three hundred sex workers in San Francisco marched on Reverend Paul Smith’s sermon and begged him to call off his crusade against their livelihood. Smith built a career on hyperbolic attacks on white slavery and claimed that by closing the brothels he could “save” women from a life of sin.
The impacted women pointed out, rather politely, that shutting down the places where they lived and worked would not in fact help. They instead suggested that if the Reverend wanted to see fewer women doing desperate things for money, then society should consider raising wages for women in other sectors. Those sex workers lost that fight and the brothels of San Francisco were closed on February 14, 1917 in the name of protecting women.
A similar pattern repeated itself across the country until the sex industry was pushed out of the predominantly women-owned-and-operated brothels and into the street. Because of the criminalized nature of their jobs, sex workers had to rely on men to procure customers. This is when cab drivers, concierges, and a figure who would come to be known as a “pimp” got involved—to try to protect sex workers from being arrested. The police remain sex worker’s primary predators, literally hunting them with taxpayer dollars in the name of patriarchal protection.
Before the first anti-prostitution laws, and decades before women won the right to vote, Victoria Woodhull ran for president. She was the first woman to address Congress on the issue of suffrage and the first woman to open up her own brokerage firm on Wall Street—and she was shunned by her feminist contemporaries because she was considered to be a sex worker.
Feminism as a movement has derailed itself many times by conflating adult consensual prostitution with violence against women. From Susan B. Anthony in the 1870s, to Gloria Steinem in the 1970s, and up to today, feminist thinkers have lost sight of the fact that laws that police prostitution inherently police where women go, whom they associate with, what they’re wearing, and how they express themselves. This reality remains true even when policies try to explicitly target male customers.
End Demand laws make it illegal to buy or facilitate the sale of sexual services. Based on the same assumptions underlying the Mann Act, “end demand” assumes all prostitution is inherently exploitative, and seeks to eradicate the trade altogether by targeting demand. Often framed as a strategy to promote gender equality and combat trafficking through eradicating sex work in practice, these laws make sex work more dangerous. The End Demand approach relies more on ideology than sound evidence and is more focused on punishing men who pay for sexual services than on protecting sex workers’ safety and rights. Everywhere these policies have been implemented, violence against sex workers goes up.
Sex work is fundamentally a sales job. Criminalizing clients reduces the negotiating power of providers. With End Demand policies in place, sex workers are unable to distinguish between reasonably cautious people who do not want to send in the necessary screening information for fear of being arrested themselves, and predators who pose as nervous clients. This results in a dynamic where sex workers are pressured to take more risks themselves, and to do more for less to appease criminalized clients.
End Demand laws make it illegal to rent to sex workers, for sex workers to work together for safety, or to provide support services such as security, scheduling, or even housework services. These laws disproportionately expose sex workers, not clients, to discrimination from landlords, and undermine sex workers’ ability to secure housing, own property, and access banking, loans, and other financial services. In places where these laws have been implemented, sex workers report being refused access to hotels and denied entry to other businesses. End Demand laws increase the likelihood that sex workers will lose custody of their children, be evicted from their homes, have their property seized, and if they are an immigrant, face deportation.
There is no evidence to suggest that these laws reduce demand for sexual services, or decrease trafficking. In fact, End Demand legislation makes it harder to identify victims of trafficking, deterring both clients and sex workers who are well-positioned to report exploitation from doing so. This approach directs resources away from trafficking victims in other labor sectors like agriculture, mines, food service, or domestic labor, to focus on surveilling sex workers and punishing both clients and providers of sexual services. Despite their stated intentions, efforts to eradicate prostitution have not led to more robust services for vulnerable women seeking medical or social services.
Efforts to regulate sex work are often grounded in efforts to contain and control sex workers. Licensed brothels, mandatory STI testing, registries, and red light districts all corral sex workers onto stigmatized lists where they become more vulnerable to discrimination and abuse.
For example, Nevada is the only state in the United States with legal, regulated prostitution—but it has the highest arrest rate per capita for prostitution-related offenses. In order to work legally in Nevada, you must first be hired by one of the few legally licensed brothels. These brothels are predominantly owned by politically connected men who have the social and financial capital to procure a license. There are no legal brothels in Las Vegas or Reno, where the highest demand is, so it is impossible to work legally in the cities where it would be the most profitable.
Once you have been hired to work in a brothel, you must submit to a mandatory STI test, then register with the local Sheriff as a legally licensed prostitute. If you are not eligible to work in the U.S., or if you have been convicted of a crime (including prostitution), then you will not be issued a license. This license is subpoenable for the rest of your life, and comes up often in child custody cases. As a legally licensed prostitute, you are not allowed to leave the brothel to go out to dinner or go to a movie theater without supervision, because the towns these brothels operate in do not want sex workers “infecting” their communities.
This creates a dynamic that reduces the negotiating power of sex workers within the brothel, as they have to follow a dizzying array of state and county laws as well as other house rules, and makes them vulnerable to abuse outside of the brothel as a “known prostitute.”
Sex workers are reluctant to put themselves on stigmatized lists. The overwhelming majority of sex work in Nevada happens outside of these legally licensed brothels, who are incentivized to push law enforcement to crack down on their criminalized competition. Legalization and regulatory efforts create new laws to regulate prostitution. But these regulatory efforts do not help workers. Instead, they create a monopoly that only benefits brothel owners.
Libertarian women are familiar with the innumerable laws enforced in the name of protecting adult women from their own choices. Bad policies impact access to banking, financial services, lines of credit, and housing. Involuntary commitments, forced lobotomies, sterilizations, and imprisonment have all been justified in the name of paternalistic care for the bodies and child-like minds of women.
The relentless ongoing campaign to limit access to birth control, abortion, and medically accurate information about contraception, consent, and harm reduction has created a crisis for women. Powerful people on both the left and the right are united in their efforts to limit access to erotic services, from porn to prostitution, claiming that the oldest profession is an inherently degrading and exploitative form of labor. But these laws do not provide any protection; they are a form of coercive control.
Authoritarians on both the right and left have turned sex work into a symbol of exploitation, a scapegoat, and an excuse to funnel more resources into surveilling adults’ private sexual choices. But, by turning prostitution into a symbol, we blind ourselves to the realities of both sex work and labor exploitation in other sectors, creating the conditions that perpetuate and compound all the harms of criminalization and exploitation both in and out of the sex trade. 89% of the federal anti-trafficking budget meant to combat violence and exploitation across all labor sectors has been diverted to arrest consensual adults engaged in consensual sex work.
The detrimental impact of criminalizing prostitution cannot be overstated. This is an issue that impacts millions of people—70,000 people are arrested for prostitution-related offenses every year. Millions more people engage in erotic services and are not arrested—but, because of their criminalized and stigmatized status, cannot report crimes committed against them, and cannot push back against abusive partners, landlords, or employers. People are expelled from universities, fired from jobs, and lose custody of their children for engaging in work that is older than money. Women will never be free in a country that continues to police the private sexual choices of its citizens.
Amnesty International, The World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and UNAIDS all agree that the decriminalization of sex work is the only policy that reduces violence. This issue is at a tipping point with active campaigns to decriminalize in 11 states, including DC. Just last year, New York, California, and the city of Seattle, Washington stopped arresting people for “loitering for the purposes of prostitution.” Americans in other parts of the nation are ready to follow suit: according to Public Policy Polling, 44% of voters want to end the criminalization of the oldest profession.
Sex workers are already members of our communities. They are our neighbors, friends, and family members. By decriminalizing sex work, we can create a future where no one is arrested, evicted, fired, or loses custody of their children just for engaging in consensual sexual activities with other adults. Sex workers have so much to contribute to conversations about negotiated consent, privacy, internet safety, human intimacy, addiction, and mental health.
Listen to sex workers: stop the arrests.
— Kaytlin Bailey is the Founder & Executive Director of Old Pros, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, and the writer/performer of the one woman show Whore’s Eye View.
