Let Us Survive: An oral history of sex worker movements before and after FOSTA-SESTA
by The Hacking//Hustling Collective
Episode 1: Sex worker organizing before FOSTA-SESTA
Intro
M: I felt a sense of smallness, you know, with the scope of FOSTA SESTA. I was like, this is so fucking big, like, what the fuck are we gonna do?
TINA: The voice you just heard is M, from the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, or APAC.
MICKEY: We’ll hear more from M later in the episode.
TINA: Hi. My name is Tina Horn.
MICKEY: And I’m Mickey Mod.
TINA: We’re sex workers and media-makers. We actually met when we were doing sex work together in the Bay Area circa 2008 when we were both early in our careers. We’re also active in the sex worker justice movement.
MICKEY: Even though we have both worked in relatively privileged parts of the industry — adult film, professional domination, etc — we’ve experienced stigma, discrimination, and violence as a result of our work. We know first hand how our profession, Sex Worker, can become a political identity.
TINA: And the time we’ve been in the industry has been a particularly political one. Because we’re both professional storytellers, we’ve dedicated a lot of our movement building work to media-making, collaborating on platforms to feature other voices. The voices of sex workers who are changing the world every day. Which leads us to the show you’re listening to now.
MICKEY: Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology.
TINA: In collaboration with Hacking//Hustling, Mickey and I are here to present an oral history of a particular era of the sex worker justice movement.
MICKEY: This era covers the decade beginning around 2013, and brings us through to the present day, 2023. We’ll also be looking towards the future: of the industry, and of the movement.
TINA: Our particular focus is on the movement’s response to a United States federal law that was passed in 2018. That law is commonly referred to as FOSTA-SESTA.
MICKEY: FOSTA is the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.” SESTA stands for “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.” These were two bills from the House and Senate that received overwhelming bipartisan support on their speedy journey to becoming law. Together, they expanded liabilities for websites that host user-generated content. You’ll hear voices in this podcast referring to both the bills and the current law, alternately as FOSTA, as SESTA, as FOSTA-SESTA and as SESTA-FOSTA.
TINA: If that seems confusing, wait until we get into the supposed intentions of, and fallout from, these bills.
MARLA: SESTA-FOSTA was such a seismic shift in the landscape for sex workers. But every day in our personal lives, we’re dealing with seismic shifts all the time. We have these big moments as sex workers where we can all come together and agree that this was just an earthquake that we all experience. To different degrees, but we all experience it together.
MICKEY: That’s Marla Cruz. She worked in Dallas strip clubs starting in 2018. Now, she says being a full service escort in Los Angeles is safer for her than being in a club full of labor abuses from management and clients.
TINA: Marla got her start in activism standing up for reproductive justice in her home state of Texas. One experience changed her life forever.
MARLA: I was radicalized at a pretty young age. In 2011, the Texas legislature defunded Planned Parenthood in the state and I was 16 years old.
MICKEY: Marla lived in a rural Texas town of less than 25,000 people. She had been getting free birth control from her local Planned Parenthood because they offered sliding scale health services. Free free medical exams, free pap smears, breast exams, birth control. Services that were about to disappear.
MARLA: I remember the manager of Planned Parenthood, Diane. She was this short bobbed blonde woman with thick rimmed glasses. And usually when I saw her, she was wearing red lipstick. And I remember after my little checkup, you know, she sat me down at the counter, gave me a little brown bag of my birth control pills and explained to me that Planned Parenthood, that their clinic had just been defunded by the legislature. And she gave me a pamphlet of information of what had just happened and how their services were no longer going to be free for people like me, for low income, no income young women like myself because they had just lost their funding. She actually gave me three months worth of birth control pills. I usually got them a month at a time, but at that time she gave me three months of birth control pills, the little brown bag that she gave me. And I remember when the last thing she said to me was something along the lines of, maybe in the future things will be better.
TINA: In college, Marla became a clinic escort, shielding abortion care seekers from anti-choice protestors. There, she saw how police surveillance and cultural surveillance worked hand in hand: the anti-choice crowds would take pictures to publicly shame the clinic patients.
MARLA: And so the framework of reproductive justice is a framework that understands and takes these issues in a totality as opposed to taking it one institution at a time. It can kind of pull the lens back on these issues and see the bigger picture for what it is, which in this case is an issue of criminalization and surveillance, which sex workers know very intimately.
MICKEY: Marla and other folks we talked to have a lot to say about what the reproductive justice movement today can learn from the fights and strategies of sex worker movements over the past decade. We’ll come back to that.
TINA: The response to FOSTA-SESTA represents a sea change in American sex worker organizing. Supposedly, this bill was intended by its Congressional authors to change how the internet is regulated in order to make the country safer for victims of forced sexual labor.
MICKEY: We’ll talk plenty over the course of this series about how that was supposed to work, and why it hasn’t.
TINA: Right from the start, activists knew that if the bill became law, it would be devastating for sex workers. And that it would do nothing to protect victims of human trafficking. Sex workers, trafficking survivors, and our allies were motivated to organize for our rights in unprecedented ways. That organizing transformed the ways mainstream society and culture perceives topics related to sex work.
MICKEY: All that said, it’s important to note that FOSTA SESTA didn’t affect all sex workers in the same way.
TINA: Over the course of four episodes, you’ll hear voices of workers, survivors, activists, and allies from all over the United States. We did our best to represent folks providing services to different parts of the sex industry.
MICKEY: So you’ll be hearing from escorts, pro-doms, strippers, and pornographers. People who work in hotels and on the street, in clubs and on adult film sets. People who sell digital content online, and people who use the internet to market their services and organize their communities.
TINA: People whose political identity as sex workers intersects with their identities as queer people, as drug users, as lawyers and advocates, as experts in harm reduction and tech privacy, as parents, as doulas and bloggers and much more.
MICKEY: Here are some of their voices:
TINA: Here’s Chibundo Egwuatu, of “Honoring Individual Power and Strength” or HIPS, a harm reduction organization in DC:
CHIBUNDO: I was spending so much time on like anti-criminalization work and kind of saying like in sex workers, organizing and thought processes means that sex workers are important outside of their like, carceral capture, I guess, like outside of just being subjects for police violence and you know, honestly, societal violence and stuff, these people matter and they’re thinking, and they’re thinking in ways that y’all can’t, you know, like not saying that you’re physically unable to, but you’re not going to, so you might as well just say that you can’t. And they’re brilliant, and I’m really excited by that.
MICKEY: Here’s Jared Trujillo, of CUNY Law School and DecrimNY:
JARED: There might be different laws that criminalize a street-based sex worker versus an online sex worker versus a massage worker. Ultimately these laws come from a lack of the respect for bodily autonomy. They come from people that probably haven’t done the work. People who aren’t really thinking about what are the economic realities of people that do this work. It comes from all these laws, whether they be SESTA-FOSTA, laws that criminalize massage work, laws that criminalize street-based sex workers. Ultimately, all these laws come from the same ideological place.
TINA: Here’s Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work:
MELISSA: We know from SESTA-FOSTA that the language of protection is often disingenuous and hiding something.
MICKEY: Here’s Danielle Blunt, of Hacking//Hustling:
BLUNT: I think that we often conflate myriad of factors that go into the criminalization, the policing, the surveillance of sex work. And we point to FOSTA-SESTA as it being the one law that criminalizes sex work for whatever reason. I think because of the visibility that FOSTA-SESTA had. But sex work is criminalized.
TINA: Here’s Red, of Hacking//Hustling:
RED: SESTA-FOSTA changed everything. And when I say it changed everything, what I really mean is, that’s an oversimplification, what I really mean is organized, outraged sex workers changed everything, right? And so yeah, we were sitting on this powder keg. And I really do think that it was like one cigarette being flicked toward it too many and you know we all just went up.
MICKEY: Here’s zara raven, of Hacking//Hustling:
zara: So like some combination of the attacks on sex workers and the MeToo movement and the organizing that we were doing, some confluence of factors I think led to more and more people talking about sex work, more and more people talking about prison abolition, and I think FOSTA and SESTA was part of that, like, tsunami of factors that led to this moment. But to me and to I think most street-based sex workers, it wasn’t the most interesting or most important thing around that time, you know, a lot of the organizing was happening, not just on the street, not just through the street art, but like I was also uplifting it on social media, on Instagram. I think that for online sex workers, it was a big moment, and it impacted online sex workers more significantly. And also for folks at the margins, that was a moment for us to be like, hey, this is your moment of crisis, pay attention to us. Pay attention. You’re still sidelining us.
TINA: Here’s Caty Simon, of the Massachusetts-based mutual aid organization Whose Corner Is it Anyway:
CATY: The most marginalized of us are always the canaries in the coal mine. So if you are really serious about fighting for sex worker rights, fighting for resource communities, then you know that criminalization hits harder among those marginalized sex workers, among whom I would argue are low-income sex workers who use drugs. And if you believe that only people who fit your construct of respectability politics deserve housing, deserve rights, deserve to be able to determine their labor conditions, then I would argue you’re not that much of a leftist, and maybe you can go over to the sex worker libertarian side over there, but then I don’t really have much to say to you.
MICKEY: Here’s Elizabeth Ricks, the legal director of the Trans Life Care Program at Chicago House:
ELIZABETH: It was like the double hit of SESTA-FOSTA and then (COVID) Lockdown like in a two year span. And so I think that’s, that’s pretty scary for folks of like, what’s the next pivot? Not that sex working people aren’t unbelievably gifted at figuring it out, but also wouldn’t it be nice for folks to not have to do that and not have to always be strong and figure it out and just enjoy life a little bit? ‘Cause I think a lot of people assume that sex work doesn’t touch their lives, even though I think the majority of adults in America consume porn, especially in progressive activist movements. They don’t think of themselves as consuming sex worker product or, you know, love Cardi B. but don’t see themselves as consuming sex worker culture. And they just think it’s not near their life. Oh, it’s complicated.
TINA: All that and more is coming up on this four part podcast: Let Us Survive: an oral history of sex worker movements before and after FOSTA-SESTA. Episode One: “The sex worker justice movement before FOSTA-SESTA.”
Part One:
MICKEY: So — what do we mean when we use the term sex worker? Sex worker as defined by the Hacking Hustling collective is: A political, unifying, umbrella term for people who sell sex, or performances, materials, or services associated with sex acts, in exchange for resources. This includes, but is not limited to, exotic dancers slash strippers, internet-based cam workers, adult film actors/actresses/stars, pro-dommes, phone sex operators, GFE (Girl Friend Experience) workers, escorts, indoor, outdoor, full-service, and street-based workers.
TINA: Before we go any further, let’s talk about what sex workers use the Internet for.
CATY: I actually advertised in the back, in the literal Backpage of those regional alternative weeklies, the very thing that gave the creators of Backpage the idea. Because they had been owners of so many of those alternative weeklies.
MICKEY: That’s Caty Simon, the co-executive director and co-founding organizer of Whose Corner Is It Anyway in Western Massachusetts. And a co-editor of Tits and Sass, a seminal media site by and for sex workers.
TINA: Caty remembers what sex work was like in the years before the internet ruled nearly every aspect of everyone’s daily lives.
CATY: So I used to go to my regional alternative weeklies newspaper office when I was, you know,19, 20. And pay $150, so $225 for two weeks of advertisement, $150
for the week if I couldn’t manage to scrape up the $225 for fewer characters than a tweet, no pictures. And my phone number, you know, in the back of the Valley Advocate. And of course that meant I was outing myself to an entire newspaper office every week just to work a few cuts above the street. And so when Craigslist became a thing, I was like, you can just do this?
MICKEY: Craigslist. A website where you can sell a couch, find a roommate, or take a chance on a Missed Connection. Before FOSTA-SESTA, it was a place you could post or peruse ads for adult gigs or casual encounters.
TINA: That’s actually where I found my first real sex work income: typing the word “dominatrix” into the Adult Gigs section of San Francisco Craigslist in 2005.
MICKEY: After hours and hours of using it to pay my bills, Craigslist brought me to my first porn gig.
TINA: There used to be a lot more websites dedicated to facilitating connections between sex workers and clients. Starting in the late 1990s, the founders of sites like MyRedBook, RentBoy, Backpage, and more brought those newspaper classifieds that Caty was talking about into the digital age. This was a game changer for sex workers. In the first decade of the 21st century, these websites were, for the most part, accessible, affordable, and anonymous.
MICKEY: Like most 21st century gig economies, the Internet has become a space for sex workers to find clients, to market personas, and to sell content. And it’s very important to understand that many of those websites were also places for workers to build community.
TINA: We shared legal information and health resources. We also created an often life-saving culture of belonging through humor, art, and commiseration.
MICKEY: Some sex workers use the internet to market to clients, to communicate with them in advance of a session, to screen them for safety. Others sell entertainment content online: images, videos, livestreamed cam shows. For many workers, this meant less reliance on third party managers.
TINA: It also meant more time to get a read on clients before you were alone with them. And digitally mediated adult entertainment or companionship is safer sex in so many ways. For a while, online technology seemed like it offered the sex industry a place to communicate, further away from police violence and surveillance.
MICKEY: Here’s zara raven of Hacking//Hustling on some of the ways that technology affects sex worker safety, especially for those who don’t have regular access to a working phone, computer, or internet connection.
zara: I do want to be clear, a lot of the street-based workers that I’ve worked with did have ads too. So they use the Internet, but it was more minimal. Yeah, most of the experience of criminalization is happening in people’s day-to-day lives, when walking down the street, when trying to access public transit, when trying to hail a cab. And so I think the connection to technology is the same technology that’s used, the facial recognition technology in body cams, in those security cameras that were installed in subway stations. We have to be fighting against that as well. That’s what impacts street workers the most, and Black folks, poor Black people who are just trying to live their day-to-day lives the most.
TINA: Sex work can be dangerous work. But Lakeesha Harris, the executive director of Chicago Volunteer Doulas, says it’s not for the reasons conservatives like to claim.
LAKEESHA: It is not that the sex workers are the problem. It is the criminalization of them that is actually killing them, right? It is them being at risk and vulnerable to the system that is killing them, right? The police and the violence of the police and policing kills them, right? The need to hide and be ashamed and be in the shadows about their work kills them, right? It puts them at risk for clients, right? And they can’t say, “Oh I have this bad client or they can’t even put up a bad client list that shut down. We can’t share resources. We can’t gather for fear of it being called human trafficking. It’s a lot. There are a lot of reasons why Decrim should happen and those are only a few of them off the top of my head.
MICKEY: Elizabeth Ricks, the legal director for the Trans Life Care Program at Chicago House, outlines some of the arguments she makes to state legislatures in favor of decriminalizing sex work.
ELIZABETH: I feel like once you say that the World Health Organization and the UN AIDS Committee and Amnesty International support it, like they support full Decrim, that also can reframe whatever they’re seeing in their head. In Illinois, we’re also like part of this national getting to zero campaign, trying to reduce or completely eliminate HIV transmission by 2030. And a lot of our legislators are invested in that. And so looking at New Zealand and saying, they did full Decrim in an effort to reduce HIV transmission and it worked. That’s been a really helpful tool, just on a state level.
TINA: Sex workers fear violence, from clients, yes, and definitely from police. We fear the carceral system and all the ways it punishes us for trying to survive. We also fear stigma: estrangement from families, judgment from communities, isolation from fellow workers. We fear infrastructural discrimination, some of which is defined by the law, and other times tactically endorsed by the law: loss of child custody, housing, banking. We fear the paradox of being told we should “try to get another job,” and then being shut out of other jobs because of the dreaded “gap in the resume.”
MICKEY: And sex workers have been organizing to demand and expand labor rights for a long time. Activist Kate D’Adamo, a partner at Reframe Health and Justice, remembers the struggle to even define “sex worker” as a demographic of people in need of services and policy.
KATE: We were going to Congress and talking to legislators and literally just being like, this is what sex work is, this is how it shows up in policy. And we were also coming out of the era where you couldn’t say sex work on the Hill. And I was still getting that feedback from staff members. I was still having meetings where I would say, “I’m here to talk about sex work and the issues impacting sex workers.” And they would say, you’re talking about trafficking. And I would say, no, I’m talking about all of the issues that impact sex workers. And the meeting would be over with Democrats.
TINA: In the years leading up to FOSTA-SESTA, sex work activists started to notice a disturbing trend. The Internet spaces that had opened up so many possibilities were coming under increased scrutiny.
MICKEY: Here’s M, of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee or APAC. M points out that online social media platforms have long been insecure for sex workers.
M: I would say even before FOSTA, FOSTA was formally enacted, we had just waves and waves of folks being deplatformed, entire communities. And when an individual is deplatformed, where they lose say their account, it’s not able to be like reinstated in any way, this is also happening to many other community members. So not only is one individual say, losing access to their platform, their customers, their subscribers, what have you, the revenue stream, but also they’re losing contact with their community members. This mass erasure makes it much, much more difficult to organize because thinking about the adult industry, it can be by nature, it’s not like a typical like nine to five, you’re going to the same place every single day. We so often rely on the Internet to connect with one another, so much reliance on social media to not only again do our labor, right, create content for consumption, but also connect with our communities so we’re less isolated. It is so essential for our mental health as well as mobilizing against whorephobic legislation that showed up in a variety of different ways in the time that I was working
TINA: Sex workers have always had to deal with law enforcement raids: on clubs and massage parlors, on incalls and outcalls. It turned out, even digital spaces weren’t safe from surveillance and policing.
MICKEY: Sex workers were being kicked off social media platforms and payment processors. And entire websites we used every day to do business were being taken down and shuttered at an alarming rate.
TINA: In 2014, the website MyRedBook was seized by the FBI, the DOJ, and the IRS. Eric Omuro, the owner of My RedBook, eventually pleaded guilty to operating the site, to “using a facility of interstate commerce with the intent to facilitate prostitution.”
MICKEY: This was historically significant, because it was the first-ever federal conviction of a website operator for facilitation of prostitution.
TINA: I started working as a professional dominatrix in Oakland California in 2005. I remember MyRedBook as a free place to advertise to clients, as opposed to Eros Guide which charged for ads. The local fetish newspaper Spectator had just shuttered, and the idea of finding clients online seemed relatively new to the seasoned workers who were showing me the ropes.
MICKEY: Maybe even more important than the fact that it hosted free advertising, was the fact that MyRedBook and websites like it hosted free forums for workers to share information with one another. Explanations of legal rights, health information, Bad Date Lists, politics, finance, peer support counseling.
TINA: So what’s so bad for sex workers about a website like MyRedBook going down and its operators being sentenced to prison? A few things.
MICKEY: The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that MyRedBook and sites like it are “essential tools for First-Amendment-protected speech and association.”
TINA: Another issue with these federal seizures is concern that private information from users may now be in the hands of the feds, including IP addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.
MICKEY: And most importantly: we were losing a valuable resource. To add insult to injury, we were told it was in our best interest. Instead of asking us what rights and services we wanted, the feds wiped out one of our tools for surviving and thriving.
TINA: On August 25, 2015, I was about to hop on the NYC subway to head to work at my job in the marketing department of Rentboy.com when I got a phone call from my manager. “Don’t come to work,” he said. “The feds are here.” My blood ran cold. I didn’t know what this meant for me, for my fellow staff members, for the mostly queer workers who posted advertisements on the website. I had no idea in that moment that this event would radicalize me forever. It turned out that the Department of Homeland Security and the New York Police Department had raided our offices and arrested seven of my colleagues including the company’s CEO, Jeffrey Hurant. Hurant had founded the site in 1997, and was charged with promoting prostitution. It was only chance timing that meant I escaped the scrutiny of the investigation. My colleagues, good people trying to do their jobs, were not so lucky. People who are against sex work want workers to “exit the industry.” While I am very proud of my time as a sex worker, I was trying to transition out in order to focus more on my writing career. But I was having a hard time explaining that dreaded gap in my resume. Rentboy was the first company to give me a full time salaried job with benefits at a Manhattan office. My time as a sex worker was seen as an asset, an essential qualification rather than something to be ashamed of or lie about.
MICKEY: We were all heartened to see how many people were against the Rentboy raid. The Transgender Law Center along with many other orgs condemned the raid, stating, “the US federal government is not only jeopardizing countless people’s lives and only source of livelihood, but sending a clear and troubling message that the country is less invested in addressing systemic issues of racial, economic, and anti-LGBT injustice than in further criminalizing the individuals most marginalized by those systems.”
TINA: Demonstrators took to the streets outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn with signs reading “Decriminalize sex work” and “Stop the arrests” and “We see your sex panic.” Who was behind these arrests? Why were they increasingly targeting online hubs of communication? And why weren’t they asking the people most affected whether this is what we wanted?
Part Two
MICKEY: Remember, the “T” in both FOSTA and SESTA stands for trafficking. In the United States, the Federal Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 defines trafficking as ‘‘the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” But policing, surveillance, and even social stigma about human trafficking often does not make a meaningful distinction between forced labor and consensual labor. So attempts to punish abusive people in the sex industry usually results in all kinds of people being swept up into the carceral system and subsequently, cycles of poverty.
TINA: Here’s Elizabeth Ricks:
ELIZABETH: We had just had the Craigslist issue, which was spearheaded by the sheriff for my county, Tom Dart. It felt like very the crucible of the anti-trafficking movement on steroids of the Internet. Your child’s not gonna be stolen in a shopping mall. The narrative changed from that to: it’s all on the Internet. And watching that narrative play out, it’s a very simple message. They have their pictures of people chained to radiators and two lines about exploitation, and it’s very hard to stop that boulder. It seemed to be gaining momentum and the arguments against it. Like, well, if it passes, we’ll sue. Really complicated legal arguments. It just felt like it was inevitable, but we have to fight as hard as we can anyways. It can’t give up, but also the reality is like, better start prepping.
MICKEY: There isn’t a tidy difference between trafficking and sex work. For many people trading sex, there is a spectrum of consent, circumstance, and coercion. It’s helpful to think of it in terms of other forms of labor. If someone was being forced to work in a restaurant non-consensually without labor rights, you wouldn’t say that was the same thing as working as a waitress.
TINA: The waitress doesn’t need to enjoy every moment of every shift, or deeply believe every compliment she gives to every customer, to deserve labor rights: the right to report harassment without retaliation, the right to be paid on time, the right to quit.
MICKEY: You’ve probably, at some point in your life, worked a job you didn’t love because it was the best option available to meet your needs. Those are the conditions of consent under capitalism.
TINA: Here’s zara raven:
zara: I remember when it was being introduced that Tumblr shut down, banned adult content on its website in anticipation of the passage of FOSTA-SESTA. I remember Craigslist also shut down its personal section around that time, again in anticipation of the legislation, not because it passed, which is so interesting. So again it wasn’t even that the policy had changed, but that it was creating a climate where that creating pressure for change. At the time I was just like, oh yeah, this is the latest in a series of efforts by white feminists who seek to control and police the behavior of people of marginalized genders in the name of ending sex trafficking. So it was nothing new. And I think it was just a moment where, again, more people were talking about it, more people seemed to be paying attention. And I was really interested in and I continue to be interested in focusing on what really would keep sex workers and survivors safe, like really challenging that narrative that this is what’s needed to support trafficking survivors. Because on one hand, I think I’ve heard this argument of: Yeah, do this for trafficking survivors, but leave us alone, we’re sex workers. There’s that piece But I actually I don’t think that these are effective interventions to keep anyone safe. And so that was really the focus of my organizing at the time and it continues to be that: how do we really uplift? What keeps survivors safe and sex workers who are survivors?
MICKEY: Here’s Lakeesha Harris:
LAKEESHA: I just don’t understand how they can’t make that connection. The connection to bodily autonomy and the connection for what they’re fighting for. Like, what are you fighting for, really? Sex workers are fighting for bodily autonomy. Sex workers are fighting for consent, right? Are you fighting for consent? Are you fighting? Sex workers are also fighting against human trafficking. We’ve never wanted folks to be trafficked. We’ve never wanted enslavement. That’s actually what we keep saying over and over and over again. What you are doing is enslaving us by putting us into the criminal and legal systems. And I don’t understand how you don’t see that. So what I call these carceral feminists, because that’s what it is, is carceral feminism that keeps doing this over and over and over again. Criminalizing sex workers, and say that they are actually fighting for liberation for all people. You can’t have it both ways. If you want to moral police how people have sex, and then be like, oh, we’re fighting for liberation. No, no you’re not.
TINA: Like Lakesha says, there are some types of feminists who could be allies to sex workers, but instead advocate for more reliance on carceral system of policing and prison. And conflating forced labor with consensual sex work is strategic for many politicians.
MICKEY: Here’s Kate D’Adamo again, remembering the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015.
KATE: I also remember four years before FOSTA-SESTA, passed the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. And that was actually the first attempt to do what SESTA did. And one of the provisions in there, they had been going after Craigslist, Backpage for years. And what they were trying to do was get platforms encompassed into trafficking law. And so under the JVTA, they added advertising to the list. Because how trafficking is defined in criminal law is a list of verbs. The recruitment, harboring etc etc of people for the purposes of exploitation.
TINA: Chibundo Egwuatu believes that sex workers are easy targets for politicians to treat as moral symbols rather than people.
CHIBUNDO: Capitalism, colonialism, empire; it’s a pyramid scheme. And you need a lot of people at the bottom in order to get power, especially if you’re someone who needs mobility, needs to be creative about your mobility. So a lot of the folks I was thinking about, when I was talking earlier, these folks who were pretending not to see stuff, they were mostly people of color or people from poor backgrounds who really clawed tooth and nail, like got their way up to the position that they’re in. And they, I think, were visibly aware that there’s lower places to go, that there are more basements to be stuck in. And it’s like when they see some other people falling, they’re just like, I just don’t want that to be me. Of course, there are people who are already in positions of privilege and power who were also doing this work, but they were just less of who I was talking to earnestly about this because I was like, you don’t matter. You know, like your positioning is not going to change here necessarily. I want to work on the people I knew as allies.
Outro
MICKEY: That brings us to April 3, 2017, the day FOSTA-SESTA was introduced in the House of Representatives as bill package H.R. 1865 by Ann Wagner, a Republican from Missouri. We will go into greater detail next episode about what the bill changed when it became law. For now, here’s the big picture:
TINA: Before FOSTA-SESTA became law, owners of websites were immune from civil liability for the actions of their users. Lets’ say it’s 2010. You’re arrested for soliciting prostitution. The police who arrested you found you through ads you were posting on Twitter. Pre-FOSTA-SESTA, the owners and operators of Twitter weren’t liable for the actions of users who used that platform. Now, post-FOSTA-SESTA, the owner of Twitter, who just happens to be billionaire Elon Musk, is vulnerable to federal and state law enforcement, as well as civil lawsuits.
MICKEY: But the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world didn’t fight FOSTA. In fact, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer at the time, openly supported the bill! Even though in theory it made tech companies more vulnerable to criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits. They just restricted sexual content through their community guidelines and terms of service. Sexual content, be it discussions of queer identity, public health information, or sex work organizing: it all faces shadowbanning and other forms of mass deplatforming.
TINA: The stated reasoning behind this new law was that if website owners were responsible for what their users post, they would regulate them more strictly. We’ll get into it, but what did happen — which sex worker advocates predicted would happen — is that websites just deleted and deplatformed many forums for discussion of anything to do with human sexuality: consensual or not, labor or not. The fear of liability created an enormous chilling effect on internet free speech related to sex. When free sexual speech and expression is limited, everyone suffers: art suffers, education suffers, intimacy suffers. All the things that help sexual humans thrive.
MICKEY: But sex workers suffer first, and the hardest. It’s our livelihood on the line. It’s our survival.
CHIBUNDO: This is just like a digital Mann Act, isn’t it?
TINA: Chibundo is referring to the Mann Act, a US federal law passed in 1910, which made it a felony to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” In comparing FOSTA-SESTA to the Mann Act, Chibundo is referencing the way the older law was worded so broadly, that it was used to police consensual sex. Not to mention the fact that it’s super fucking racist. It was originally called the “White-Slave Traffic Act!”
MICKEY: Remember the Mann Act: that’s also going to be crucial in connecting reproductive justice to sex worker justice. We’ll get back to that later.
TINA: Here’s M from APAC:
M: Part of the intended effect of FOSTA-SESTA is rattling us. And I am rattled!
MICKEY: In future episodes, as we think about forming coalitions, we’ll also be discussing what the reproductive justice movement can learn from this roughly ten year period of sex worker labor activism and policy. We know that many people are finding themselves newly criminalized by the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that reversed the constitutional right to an abortion: criminalized for their jobs, criminalized for the services they need, criminalized for the causes they fight for. We believe that if a political struggle seems new to you, you need to be looking to the people who have already been doing the work. In the case of adult bodily autonomy and sexual freedom, those people are sex workers.
TINA: Remember Marla’s story from earlier in this episode? About Diane, the worker from Planned Parenthood who gave her three months of birth control? Diane, who told young Marla, maybe in the future things will be better? Here’s Marla again:
MARLA: And of course, here we are in 2023 and things are worse. Roe v. Wade’s been overturned. More clinics have closed more rapidly in the last few years than the previous decade in the whole state of Texas. I wish I could go back to Diane and tell her I’m sorry for all the ways that we didn’t anticipate how much worse things would get, how much ground we would lose in such a short period of time. You know, for my entire adult life, I’ve been in sex work. But at the same time in my entire adult life, we’ve just continuously lost ground on reproductive rights and reproductive services, especially for low-income people like I was. We have these big moments as sex workers where we can all come together and agree that this was just an earthquake that we all experienced. To different degrees, but we all experience it together. And then we have these moments as individuals where we experience all the other factors that make us unsafe, where we experience all the other times and all the other customers and clientele that decide that we’re not worthy of the safety that other people get in their work environment.
MICKEY: And here’s Lakeesha:
LAKEESHA: Remember, I am a second generation of three generations of sex workers. That means that I have children who are sex workers. So I worry about first my children who are sex workers and their safety. And how they would vet their clients and make their money, and how they must be feeling in this moment, defeated. They too might feel worried. And then also for my extended kin, an extended family in which I have been providing, been in community with. What they would be feeling. So; sadness, grief, and also the need to fight more, right? Like, what are we gonna do? Fight like hell, and continue to fight like hell.
TINA: That’s what you can expect next time on Let Us Survive , an oral history project from the Hacking//Hustling collective. In Episode 2, we’ll be exploring the early days of the FOSTA-SESTA bill: how the movement responded, what we had to fear, and what gave us hope.
MICKEY: To learn more about this project, other research by Hacking//Hustling, and more about the past, present, and future of sex worker movements, please visit HackingHustling.org.
TINA: These interviews were conducted in 2023. Some facts and perspectives may have evolved since then.
MICKEY: This podcast was hosted, produced, written, recorded, and edited by Tina Horn and Mickey Mod, with additional productional support from Christopher Holloway.