Let Us Survive: An oral history of sex worker movements before and after FOSTA-SESTA
by The Hacking//Hustling Collective
Episode 3: “We really hate to say we told you so.”
Intro
MICKEY: Here’s Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work:
MELISSA: Backpage was seized on a Friday. And that’s fucked up, right? It was also at a point in the month where people had put a lot of money on their accounts for their ads that month. That disappeared. I remember people sharing the screenshot of the Department of Justice. This website has been sealed. Super lo-es been snapshotted and screen shared. It’s like the Department of Justice didn’t even have a clean graphic to put up, is what I’m saying. It was shitty. It just looked shitty
TINA: Caty Simon, of the mutual aid organization Whose Corner Is it Anyway, also vividly remembers Friday April 6, 2018. In fact, we all do.
CATY: I remember the day the Backpage was seized. I had just finished three calls in a row. I was feeling pretty good about myself. “Oh yeah, I don’t need to work for one or two days now.” And somebody texted me in a panic, with the screenshot. And I was like, this can’t be real.
MICKEY: Backpage dot com was a website that had hosted classified ads since 2004. It was used by all kinds of people in the sex trades. And on Friday April 6, 2018, it was gone. In its place was insignia from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. And in red and black letters, the words: Backpage dot com has been seized.
TINA: The feds considered the Backpage seizure a huge win in the fight against human trafficking. Whether you agree with that or not, they didn’t need FOSTA-SESTA to do it.
MICKEY: During this period, any online discourse about sexuality was in ever more increasing danger of being lumped in with human trafficking.
TINA: Some platforms, like Craigslist and Tumblr, changed their terms of service preemptively out of an abundance of caution. Others, like MyRedBook and Rentboy, were shut down by law enforcement. Tech companies didn’t want to be seen as colluding with traffickers, and didn’t want to stand up for sex workers.
MICKEY: Here’s Danielle Blunt of Hacking/Hustling, on what she saw as a con-spicu-us silence from the tech industry when FOSTA-SESTA was just a bill.
BLUNT: When FOSTA-SESTA was being passed, I was attending a lot of tech conferences at the time. Tech was just completely silent. I would go to panels on content moderation, and just be completely shocked that no one was talking about FOSTA SESTA, and how it would amend Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. It’s like the content moderation bill, that we hadn’t seen something like it. The fact that everyone in tech was so silent about it was really, really shocking to me. I would kind of troll. I would ask questions at panels on content moderation and all the panelists would skirt my questions. I think because none of them felt comfortable being like, “Well, I’m not pro trafficking, so I can’t answer this question.” I really think that language of trafficking led to the utter and complete silence in tech. Initially it really was only sex workers that were the ones ringing the alarms. It was sex workers and internet freedom people who would understand this. I think even the people who would understand how bad this bill would play out — even if they didn’t give a fuck about sex workers, just for the internet — weren’t saying anything because of the language around trafficking. I think that was why it was able to be passed. I think it was like 97-2. It was a bipartisan bill, almost unanimous. Something I would really encourage people in tech to pay close attention to is, how these bills that are bad for people, that are bad for the internet, get passed under this fear-mongering language that people feel like they can’t talk about.
TINA: FOSTA SESTA supporters like to point to the shuttering of Backpage as a sign of the new federal law’s success. But Backpage was seized before FOSTA SESTA became law.
The eighty-six prostitution and finance related charges against Backpage were already criminal offenses. But the effects of losing Backpage were just like the effects of losing other online resources: it made the sex trade less safe, not more safe.
MICKEY: The Department of Homeland Security didn’t need FOSTA-SESTA in 2015 to raid Rentboy. They didn’t need it in 2014 for My Red Book. As a matter of fact, in 2023, FOSTA-SESTA has barely been officially used at all. But we’ll come back to that.
TINA: FOSTA-SESTA has positioned online platforms as potential villains in the fight against sex trafficking. But sex workers and trafficking survivors, some of whom may have overlapping experience throughout their lives, knew that platforms were just a neutral communication resource. Punishing the platforms would not keep us safe.
MICKEY: Here’s zara raven of Hacking Hustling.
zara: I do not remember anyone being like, “Mm, that website really harmed me.” It seemed so ridiculous, honestly…
TINA: I’m Tina Horn,
MICKEY: And I’m Mickey Mod.
TINA: We’re sex workers and media-makers. In collaboration with the Hacking Hustling collective, Mickey and I are here to present an oral history of a particular era of sex worker organizing. We’re covering the ten year period leading up to the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, the passing of that bill into American federal law, and the aftermath of that passing.
MICKEY: All that and more is coming up on this four part podcast: Let Us Survive.
TINA: This is Episode 3: “we really hate to say we told you so.”
Part One
MICKEY: The bill package known as FOSTA-SESTA passed the House of Representatives on February 27, 2018, and the Senate on March 21, 2018.
TINA: Kate D’Adamo had been organizing with Survivors Against SESTA in New York City, frantically building more community resources online.
MICKEY: Remember at the end of Episode 2, when Kate said “you have to organize with hope, even if you’re afraid you’re setting people up to fail?” Well, despite all of the grassroots campaigning by sex workers to speak out against the bill, FOSTA-SESTA still passed with major bipartisan support. Here’s Kate:
KATE: I want to tell the story, it’s important. When we think about success as exclusively whether the bill we push gets over the line, or the bill that we hate doesn’t, we are setting ourselves up for such heartbreak every time we do that.
TINA: Jared Trujillo, an associate professor of law at CUNY Law School, remembers the day the FOSTA-SESTA bill passed.
JARED: When SESTA-FOSTA had passed, I remember my first conversation being with someone that I was dating at the time, who I’m no longer dating, who said, “Well, at least Congress can do something bipartisan.” And I just remember being so upset by that and thinking; we had spoken about SESTA-FOSTA and I talked about how terrible it was and how could this be inevitable. And this person who generally had pretty decent politics, but thinking that this was, and it wasn’t even necessarily about sex trafficking for them or labor trafficking more general. I just remember that conversation so vividly because I was so upset by SESTA-FOSTA, that it almost took me aback that someone whose politics are pretty good and this person is just indicative of frankly other conversations that I had, you know around that April that you know, just really I guess gave me a really clear view of frankly how much of a fight it would be to ensure that other SESTA-FOSTA-esque wouldn’t pass. But also, if there would ever be any hope of repealing a law like SESTA-FOSTA. And so what I remember from more of the activist community was rage, but also not knowing exactly what to do with that rage.
MICKEY: Jared’s ex was not the only one who realized that the trick to passing bi-partisen legislation amending CDA two thirty was to do it under the guise of stopping trafficking or saving the children. Since FOSTA-SESTA we have seen other bills introduced and passed with similar language to stoke a similar moral panic.
TINA: Chibundo Egwuatu, of the harm reduction organization HIPS in DC, had a similar experience with friends in academia:
CHIBUNDO: I remember, especially after it finally got introduced into law, I was like, on a phone call with one of these dudes, he was in social work. And he’s like, “Oh, but it’s an unintended consequence.” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” We work with the same groups of people, you know, and I know that we have been reading sex workers talk and predict like fucking doom profits full on Cassandra mode, telling us what would happen. And we’re seeing all of that happen. I got into this thought process of this concept of unintended consequences and this concept of good intent from powerful sources, like the government, just like thinking about how did that happen?
MICKEY: So, why didn’t anyone in Congress listen to the sex workers speaking out against FOSTA-SESTA?
TINA: Jared and many others believe that FOSTA-SESTA passed for the same reason that Backpage was seized the same year: no one wants to be perceived as being pro-human trafficking.
JARED: So I think the biggest way that SESTA-FOSTA was a fuck up is that people just had this knee-jerk reaction to: this is anti-trafficking and anything that is anti-trafficking is a good thing. I don’t really think people even knew what SESTA-FOSTA was. I think there’s probably several members of Congress, and I’m sure there’s people on the other side of this as well, but I’m sure there are several members of Congress that just thought, “This is anti-trafficking. Anti-trafficking is good. I want to be re-elected, and I’m anti-trafficking. So I’m going to sign on. And the collateral consequences, they’re probably not all that bad.”
MICKEY: Elizabeth Ricks, the legal director of the Trans Life Care Program at Chicago House, agrees that plenty of legislators probably thought they were doing something good.
ELIZABETH: I think the fear of association with this is really strong. Whether people really believe that, you know, the story is about the inflated stats. Obviously trafficking happens, but we all know how inflated the stats are. Whether they’re invested in that space and are genuinely frightened, or whether they just don’t want that stink on them. I don’t know, but it’s a very effective tool. You don’t want to be that person. That’s probably why everybody except Rand Paul and Ron Wyden voted for SESTA-FOSTA. Because I do not believe that every single legislator who voted yes genuinely thought this is a great idea, and did not understand the sex worker arguments, and wasn’t compelled by the folks who’ve experienced trafficking who testified this is no good. This is just going to cause more harm. I can’t believe that no one who voted yes, didn’t hear that and think that makes sense. But nobody wants to be the person who is seen as enabling what’s perceived as sexual exploitation.
TINA: Here’s Melissa again with another reason Congresspeople may have voted for FOSTA-SESTA:
MELISSA: I would caution that it might not even have taken that much. because it was after all being sold as about the children. If you give them that, that’s an easy way for a legislator to say they support something, even if people important to them oppose it. How dare you not wanna protect the children, right?
MICKEY: Here’s M of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee on what the United States could do differently if they actually wanted to fight human trafficking:
M: I’m thinking like one of the first anti-immigration laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, was also whorephobic, because they didn’t want Chinese women coming across. They just wanted the male labor force. There are fucking roots of being in this country, of being so xenophobic and whorephobic at the same time. If the government actually gave a shit about ending trafficking, they would improve the quality of life in the US, they would be a safe refuge and actual asylum to refugees. I get that’s complicated when the US has a hand in destabilizing those governments that those people are fleeing from in the first place. So it’s complicated, right? Because the US as a government, as this corporation, benefits so much from the disenfranchisement of people, not only locally but globally, as it is a member of the global community. If the US actually wanted to reduce trafficking, it would have to not be this cesspool that marginalizes entire communities intentionally to benefit from the suffering, the institutionalized suffering of people. But I don’t think it’s actually very interested in that because it benefits from that. Because I would imagine that there would be less trafficking if people didn’t face housing insecurity or food insecurity or being worried about their documented or undocumented status or what have you. This isn’t just about the sex industries and the conflation there. Trafficking happens across all industries.
TINA: Once again, this is the problem with legislation like FOSTA-SESTA: it positions someone as the boogeyman while failing to address the systems that lead to violence and exploitation: of children, of adults, of everyone of every gender, online and in person. And this is not an unintended consequence of the legislation. It’s by design.
MICKEY: Here’s zara raven again:
zara: I think the state is doing what it always does, that it is. The state is weaponizing the pain and the trauma of survivors to abdicate its responsibility to keep people safe. I mean, I’m thinking about like even right now, the ongoing genocide in Palestine and US support for Israel and the ways that Jewish trauma is used to justify violence against Palestinian people. I think that’s the trend, right? That’s what the state does instead of actually giving us the things that we need to be safe. It says, well, what if we find somebody to blame? That’s not us. And I think that’s exactly what happened with FOSTA-SESTA. It was, well, what about these websites though? You know? And so the websites became the villains. That was sort of like, oh, if we take down these sites, then, and then it’s like, okay, but then what happens for survivors then these websites are down? Okay, where are survivors in this? What what did they get? How were they supported? Are they safe now? That’s always my question. Like where? Okay, where are they now? Rather than who did you take down? Who did you imprison? I’m really curious about the experiences of sex trafficking survivors. Because in my experience, and I think, I tend not to describe my own personal experience as trafficking, although the state, for anyone who entered the sex industry under the age of 18, even if they didn’t have a trafficker or third party exploiter, would say,(38:17.846)while that’s a sex trafficking survivor. And so even if I leaned on that, and also like the vast majority of young people in the sex industry don’t have a trafficker, 80%, according to at least one federally funded study, don’t have a trafficker. So it’s a lot of young people who are experiencing homelessness, who have been in the foster system and moving from home to home and…seeking support, running away from abusive homes, being thrown out because of their queer / trans identities, seeking safety, running away from violence, and ending up in the sex industry because it’s one of the best ways to access housing. And when you shut down these websites, it’s like, okay, are they housed now? What did they get? That’s always my question…
TINA: Here’s M again, with some ideas on how to actually be an ally to sex workers.
M: differentiating between sex working and sex trafficking and the different kind of multiple practices of identity and marginalization that inform turning to sex work and engaging in sex work as a means of like labor and survival, clarifying that exploitation exists in every industry, not just in the sex industries…there isn’t gonna be one unified way of supporting all sex workers. It’s like get really local. Like what are the needs of your local sex working community? Because a community that’s made up of like indoor workers that never really come into contact with law enforcement, their needs are going to be really different than folks who are more marginalized and have more risk of being racially profiled, gender profiled, right? As well as encountering law enforcement because they’re on their beat(25:33.402) oversimplifying like this is the one thing that you need to do to be an ally to sex workers. It’s like who are the sex workers in your area? Like what are their needs? What are their needs? Like I remember when I was working for APAC like the need that really came through is like we need more sex worker affirming mental health services. That is what the need is you know right now in that snapshot of time right? So really having the response to supporting sex workers being needs driven, needs that are self-identified by that community is the way to go. Rather than this like top-down savior sort of bullshit that really reinforces those tropes of sex workers, you know, not really having agency or control or intellect, you know, what have you. It’s like, no, actually. listen to the wisdoms of the sex workers and what they are needing so they can work more safely. So if they actually don’t want to participate in sex work, that they actually have options that aren’t so shitty that sex work makes way more sense than the shitty option.
Part Two
MICKEY: Here’s Blunt on the effects of FOSTA-SESTA:
BLUNT: I think that there is no possible way that you can look at the aftermath of FOSTA-SESTA and say that it made people safer. People died as a result of this legislation. People lost access to resources. People lost access to their communities. We lost community members because of this legislation, and that certainly doesn’t keep people safer. I think the things that keep people safer is decriminalization, is the ability to talk about your work, reducing stigma, increasing access to resources, healthcare, childcare, robust services that… Don’t tell people what they can and can’t do with their body. I mean, I think it’s really simple. When people lose access to resources, with their access to make money, they can lose access to their housing, they can lose access to childcare. It puts them increasingly precarious situations where they might be making different decisions than if they had access to more resources. When OnlyFans announced that they were stopping processing adult payments, I made different choices in my labor in a pandemic as an immunocompromised sex worker than I would have if I was able to stably make money online. And I think that people overlook the fact that when people have more access to choices, they’re able to make the choices that work for them, that support them, that keep them space, that get them the money that they need. You know, like especially in a pandemic when people were more reliant on online work, reducing, you know, like shadow banning as an act of violence, reducing someone’s visibility, deleting someone’s account. All of those things directly influence someone’s ability to make money. And when you need money, you’re going to make different choices in order to get that money. If you need to feed your kids, you’re gonna make different choices than if your kids were already being fed.
TINA: Here’s Jared, reflecting on what sex workers were afraid of in the immediate aftermath of FOSTA-SESTA becoming law. Losing the online platforms they used for marketing, for safety, and for creating content. And all of the cascading effects of that loss, on their lives and livelihood.
JARED: So I think people’s biggest fear was probably deplatforming. And a lot of those fears did frankly come to fruition, but people really feared different places for people, whether it be selling sex or really just even giving information for people. people were really afraid that those mediums and those websites would just disappear. People, I remember at the time, they didn’t even really know exactly what the criminalization would look like because there’s 50 different state attorneys general. And so they didn’t even really know what criminalization would look like. So there was a fear of deplatforming and there was also the fear of well, I’m just a content provider, or I’m just posting an ad, what does criminalization even look like for me? So I think that was a lot of people fear that. Again, also recognizing the shutting down of Backpage, the shutting down of RentBoy before that. At the time, I was working primarily with kids involved in the child welfare system and the family regulation system. And I think there was a lot of fear there of, you know, like, where are these, like, not kids necessarily, but where are these young people even going to be able to get information, specifically, like trans kids? If you if you’re a trans kid in a non supportive environment, or your gay kid in a non supportive environment, or whatever, are you still going to have access to all these websites to literally just find out information about what is your body doing? Why do I feel this way? Am I really alone? There was just a lot of fear that people would lose a lot of these resources, But people were really worried that they would lose access to tools that they used to be able to screen clients and keep themselves safe. There was a lot of fear, frankly, about sex worker organizing.
MICKEY: Here’s Elizabeth on how the new precarity of the internet led some sex workers to innovate in the tech world. Although that too felt like a constant uphill battle.
ELIZABETH: There was a lot of community conversation about building out different platforms and trying to explore having domains in other countries. Um, kind of, I guess, like safety planning in a way of if this happens, we need to have like a go bag, an electronic go bag of what to do. Um, and also start getting comfortable sort of divesting from platforms that are familiar. So a lot I saw, especially as like a very much not tech person, it was really interesting to hear these conversations happening and like learn from folks about what they were doing. Um, particularly cause I knew it would impact the communities I serve as an attorney, um, so trying to kind of keep up with that and I, you know, did the phone calls and trying to talk with people about why they should pay attention to this, who are in other activist spaces, or who are folks just in my network, so I know who are particularly concerned with sort of internet freedoms, and that this could impact lots of other spaces. It’s not just gonna be verification sites or review boards, it could spread. And it’s like, everyone was screaming, “This is gonna trickle down.” This is not just about advertising and screening, although that’s super crucial. But it enabled an idea of like third party liability for tech and that scares folks. I mean, people were shutting down sites before SESTA FOSTA was even like functional law.
TINA: Organizers knew what the dire results of mass deplatforming would be. You take away resources, you take away options. This is part of how criminalization and platform policing of marginalized communities contributes to cycles of poverty. Here’s Elizabeth again:
ELIZABETH: After SESTA FOSTA passed and like everything started shutting down prematurely, a lot of clients who had to who went back to doing outdoor work who had been doing indoor work and experienced increased violence. We had some folks go missing and in talking with their friends, you know, we learned that what had what happened was they then were like, well, my rent is due. I guess I need to go back outside and work outdoors. And I have clients who needed legal services that needed to be in person and just kept missing court dates because they had to take whatever work, like whenever work came, they had to take it because resources were low after it passed. And so they just couldn’t, live their lives because they were sort of, you have to wait around for money to show up and if money shows up, that’s the most important thing. So they weren’t getting the help that they needed. And like folks were just really scared. And I, it’s something I have shared with a lot like legislators and just other people at organizations who are curious about this is a client I had who got caught in a bust and the cop touched her inappropriately, just as they do to really prove the case, right? And I just have to keep saying like, no, like, this is just, it’s how she makes a living. That’s it. Like she needs housing and food just like we do. And it like just couldn’t click for the prosecutor that this is just like a person like anyone else doing a job except you’re making it a lot harder for this person to do their job. The touching and like all of the physical engagement that law enforcement does, I think that is what shocks people the most.
MICKEY: Here’s zara on the importance of resources.
zara: The fight for decrim continues. And I think those shifting attitudes.To me, that’s probably the most important part of those campaigns. The public advocacy to shift public attitudes, to address the stigma so that we can reduce violence against people who trade sex. I see that as crucial and ongoing work, and also a pathway for ensuring that people have more access to resources. decrim by 2019 was not the pie in the sky. It was access to housing for everybody. It was access to resource for everybody because the people who are trading sex by circumstance or because of their circumstances or because of like coercion or in exploitative situations, it was because they didn’t have other options, because they didn’t have resources. So if we want people to be trading sex by choice, we need to make sure that everybody has access to resources.
TINA: The organization Survivors Against SESTA along with other community members documented scores of tech sites that shut down or drastically changed their terms of service in the wake of the passing of the FOSTA SESTA bill.
MICKEY: Now the thing you have to pay attention to here is this: the authors of FOSTA-SESTA said they needed to amend Section 230 in order to prevent human trafficking from happening on the Internet. But again, they didn’t use FOSTA-SESTA to prosecute Backpage. And Craigslist didn’t remove its Adult Gigs/missed connections section because someone slapped them with a civil lawsuit. They did it because they didn’t want to deal with potentially being slapped with a suit, or potentially being raided by the feds.
TINA: The ability of adults to communicate and express themselves about sexuality online was instantly chilled by the passing of the FOSTA SESTA bill. It wasn’t even a law yet when it started to have exactly the negative effect sex workers said it would.
MICKEY: Here’s Jared:
JARED: The biggest issue, frankly, with SESTA-FOSTA for so long was the chilling effect, the idea that people didn’t really know how far the law would go. They didn’t really know what state attorneys general might go after versus what they wouldn’t. And so you saw several websites that just shut down, several websites that enabled people to be able to trade sex more safely, several places where people were able to screen clients…
TINA: On March 22, 2018, Craigslist shut down their Personals sections. To this day, a message still appears on that website:
MICKEY: “US Congress recently passed HR 1865, ‘FOSTA’, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we have regretfully taken craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!”
TINA: We are also very happy for all the folks who found each other through classified ads: but you can’t help but notice Craigslist is not wishing any happiness to the sex workers who used their services for years.
MICKEY: When Lakeesha Harris, of Chicago Volunteer Doulas, found out the Craigslist Adult section was no more, her reaction was deeply personal.
LAKEESHA: So from what I understand and know to be true, because during my time as a sex worker, I have used Craigslist for advertisement. It’s a way of vetting people. You can advertise. It was a way of safely advertising. And you can get a sense of who the person was that you were possibly engaging with, kind of like have several interactions with them and be like, hey, you know, just like send me your picture, send me this, send me this information. It’s a way of tracking a little bit, like who that was. So it’s a way of vetting. Also, it’s not street based. So you get into a little bit more contention when you are a gender nonconforming or trans person, especially if you’re a Black person of targeting by cops and sometimes community members when you are doing street-based sex works. That’s what it is, you know? So you’re a little bit more open to the environment, right? And targeted for violence in that way. Thirdly, you’re a gender nonconforming person, hey don’t have the security. clubs it’s not I mean,it’s just heteronormative miss it’s in the clubs that’s what’s in the clubs you don’t have the environment and the security that reigns supreme of what’s in the clubs and that is what I know to be true this the closer in proximity that you are to whiteness and skinniness uh you’re gonna get the money in the clubs you’re gonna get access to the clubs first and foremost and you’ll get more safety right and as a queer person cisgender I had more access to the clubs than my gender non-conforming queer friends and so what i was able to do was provide housing security and internet. So when they were in Chicago or in New Orleans, I could at least allow them the safety and security to vet folks online. Right?
TINA: Lakeesha’s story is another reminder of the way queer and trans and Black liberation is connected to sex worker liberation. This is why FOSTA-SESTA is particularly devastating to people who are already marginalized. The online classified tools that FOSTA-SESTA decimated; those were tools used by people who couldn’t get hired at clubs because of colorism, because of heteronormative expectations of what a worker would look like. As we heard from Marla Cruz in Episode 2, the clubs can also be dangerous places. But the point is having options.
MICKEY: Here’s Caty, on the FOSTA-SESTA fallout in her community. With no Backpage, and no Craigslist, and no certainty how they might be punished for using their online safety tools, sex workers had fewer options.
CATY: But for those of us who did work online or have a side hustle online, it was devastating. I’ve written about this in several different places, but I always use the example of two Whose Corner members who were living and escorting together before FOSTA-SESTA, before the Backpage seizure. They were not doing great, but they were making enough to keep a motel roof over their heads. They had money to support their habits. They had money to support a car. You know, right after FOSA-SESTA, right after the Backpage seizure, within two weeks, they were not able to keep up their motel room. So they were forced to return to their hometown to stay with some relatives. They were notorious to the police in this tiny town. So they were arrested within a day or two of being there. One of them went away for a long bid in jail. The other lost her car and had to go back to an abusive ex-boyfriend so that he could drive her to calls. So, you know, within two weeks from, you know, sustainability to being trafficked. And I mean, and that story is like a very blunt and clear illustration of it, but there were so many iterations of that story.
TINA: So many iterations of that story. People working to survive, struggling against precarity. Predatory clients and third party managers who knew situations were becoming more desperate. Workers looking for clients on the street instead of vetting them over email and with community bad date boards.
MICKEY: Elizabeth worries that FOSTA-SESTA sets a new standard for digital platforms being restricted or shut down. The new law was just the latest example of the fear of sex being weaponized, and how the policing of sex can spread.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I think the framework for SESTA-FOSTA will be and is being applied elsewhere, which is take a thing that legislators, especially on the far right, although we know SESTA-FOSTA was strong bipartisan support, take something that they don’t like or gives them the squicks or feels like it could impact people like not voting for Republicans. And then they find a fear to attach it to, you know, the Chinese government’s buying on America or trafficking or, you know, whatever. I mean, I think trafficking and quote unquote terrorism are the two sort of hot buttons that they play with. Create third party liability for companies that don’t want liability or to be labeled as… enabling bad acts and restrictions then pass. Like it’s a recipe for how, like what do we, what costume do we put on this thing that we don’t like? And then we write a law where people are liable and they play ball with us. Like they don’t keep pushing. Because they don’t want to get fined or they don’t want to be seen as engaging in something harmful. And I think it can be used for lots of things that lots of people want to engage in. I mean, lots of people, I think used Craigslist like adult ads just for hooking up. I mean, at least in the spaces that I occupy, a lot of people at when all of that went down, were still using Craigslist to find hookups or, you know, or partnerships like for romance, sex, whatever. And that I think was a little bit of a, oh, this could impact more, because it shut all of it shut down. Wasn’t just erotic services. But yeah, the recipe that they used for SESTA-FOSTA could be applied to lots of other things. Again, like TikTok, which is you know, a tool for sex and working people, but also just it seemed, especially the younger folks, I know everybody loves TikTok. Where are you gonna learn your dance craze? It’s also, I think, not lost on Republicans that people who are just becoming of age to vote, you know, like people, especially like 18 to 25. majority vote Democrat and they use TikTok to talk about the issues, you know, lobby for candidates and organize. And there’s a lot happening on that app in America around democratic and progressive politics that gets people to the polls that maybe wouldn’t have voted in the first place.
TINA: Over and over again we heard from experts that the effects of FOSTA-SESTA were not actually a decrease in violence, or a decrease in forced labor. For many people, FOSTA-SESTA increased the conditions that made them vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation. The FOSTA-SESTA fallout was also a massive chilling of free speech online. And grief. Lots of grief. Here’s M again:
M: I know personally for me still to this day, I really struggle with being, with taking up space on the online, on online spaces because there’s this threat constantly of just like, well you may be deplatformed, you may lose it all. Like I’ve lost like two accounts, you know, had things taken down and what have you. I have, I’ve lost contact with community members and there’s this sense of like… I know I have this felt sense of reaching across this nebulous void to try to find my chosen family and only hoping that they do too, but it’s so hard when you’re both shadowbanned. So I feel like the last five years has been swimming through a lot of grief, a lot of difficulty, a lot of trying to find my footing. um, being an adult performer, so much of us is online. So much of this sense of like, even though I know it is like my performer self, but in some ways, like a sense of self is like taking up a space. And what happens when you just get blipped away and disappeared, there’s something so, so violating and being disappeared in a bunch of different ways. It’s so difficult. It’s so difficult. It definitely has like financial ramifications. Absolutely. You know, and that is also a part of like mental health.
Outro
MICKEY: On April 11, 2018, FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law by then-United States President Donald Trump. By then, the Internet was already transformed. And so was sex worker organizing.
TINA: There was a lot of rage, tragedy, and fear going around. But Kate has some cautious silver linings to share: the reason every phone call matters. Before the vote on FOSTA-SESTA in Congress, Kate was talking to a contact in the House of Representatives, who told her their office had already taken a stance on the bill. But then…
KATE: So in the organizing around FOSTA-SESTA, we convinced no one on the Senate side to change their vote…(On the House side, we had a little bit more time. And so we did more…And so they were like, look, we got our marching orders. It is really hard. It is. You are asking us to do something that is just not really an option is to reverse our stance, go… Maybe an hour later, if that, the staffer called back and was like, I just double checked. Oddly enough, the head of the committee has not, has said we do not have a recommendation. We have not taken a stance on this bill. And let me do what I can to get as many no votes as possible. And so that staffer personally emailed and called and walked to other offices to say, please vote no on this bill, it’s coming down. I know it’s gonna be a hard, a difficult no vote. And so, you know, there’s…435 seats in the House. We got like 12 Democratic Nos. But they were all gonna be Yeses until we had those conversations. And we had a staffer literally walking up and down like having meetings on this bill at the last fucking second on a really hard vote. And I don’t want to ever pretend like that’s nothing or it wasn’t important. I think it’s incredibly important to understand the level of growth that we have had over the last couple years. And also, I think it’s really important to understand… you know, I don’t even want to call it a starting point because it’s based on so much years and years and years of work. But like, yeah, this is the starting point for what this stuff looks like. It is a couple of people just like marching up and down that hallway because they understand and just begging people to do something difficult. And a couple of people did. And I am sad that that gets erased when we talk about this because that is a fucking win.
MICKEY: Kate has also noticed that staffers in Congress, who didn’t even understand what sex work was, are now realizing: this is a group affected by these policies. A group that they should be talking to.
KATE: After FOSTA and this is actually something that I am excited to get into, um, that shifted just the number of people that had heard about sex work and I think for the first time understood or were coming to understand that when we said, no, we’re talking about the issues impacting sex workers and that isn’t the same as just trafficking, that’s part of it. But there’s a difference. I think it hit home for people who may have been hearing that. And it made everyone hear the term sex work and realize that this was an issue, this was a thing. And especially for the folks that worked on SESTA, there was a very significant realization that they thought they had heard from everyone. and that there were victims on one side and the tech industry on the other. And those were the two relevant conversations. And there was this like tiny little sex work conversation that might have been poking in, but no one really gave space to. And then I think especially with the amount of response, both publicly from sex workers, but also the level of media coverage and the way that it had been covered. I heard more and more that there was this feeling of, not just with staffers, but with organizations too, who all of a sudden were like, we thought we’d heard all the things from the experts. And the only people who were… not the only people who were not listened to, but we weren’t listening to the people who were affected and we weren’t listening to the people who were right about what happened. And I think that hit home after FOSTA-SESTA. It was just an apical shift.
TINA: The organizing effort around FOSTA-SESTA changed that: now staffers know the term “sex work.” But we shouldn’t have to be put in a situation to say “I told you so” in order to be taken seriously.
MICKEY: Just to play devil’s advocate, we asked Kate if wins like the ones she was describing, make it at all worth it in some way: does that progress balance out the hardship?
KATE: I think that that erases the fact that we were put into a circumstance where that was the outcome, and that was the only outcome available in terms of taking us seriously. I think that when someone says, well, it was worth it, that erases every opportunity that someone had to listen before them, and it erases the fact that we were unfunded. Having meetings with Congress, making phone calls, yelling, building the survivors against SESTA website. And that at any point in time, that violence did not have to be true for people to take us seriously. Actually, the people who were working on SESTA could have said, you know, you have a point, let’s listen to you or you’re an affected stakeholder, let’s listen to you. The tech companies could have…been anything but horrific at any point in time. Someone could have invested in policy work and said, we need advocates, we need funding for a lobby day beforehand. If someone says, well, then it was worth it, it erases every opportunity for that to not have been the case. And so was it worth it? I don’t fucking know, but you put us in a position to where that was the outcome. And we made the best of the outcome. And so us, and when I say us as a movement, I, you know, that has all the asterisks of like movement. At any point in time, those circumstances could have been changed and us making… us being resilient is not an erasure of the acts of violence that have been committed.
TINA: Here’s Red, of Hacking Hustling:
RED: That’s how I think we see the real potential of working class solidarity and organizing because you go to those places that you know and you outfit them for that moment, right? So we saw them become explosively organized. We saw the efforts ramped up. We saw new ones formed because people were talking to each other who had never talked to each other. to each other before, specifically because of the Survivors against SESTA community calls and national and local organizing efforts. So people who had never spoken before, who were based in New York, who were new to organizing, were now on the phone with like Women with a Vision folks from the South, right? Talking about stuff. And these folks had been in struggle for decades. Now they’re talking to people down in New Orleans. Now they’re talking to people out in the Bay Area. Now they’re talking to people in Philly and everyone is talking to each other about what they’re feeling, what they’re afraid of, what they’re doing. Okay, what are you doing? How could we adapt that for our locality? Right? And we’re learning from each other. We are talking to each other and we are… that’s what real movement making is, right? And mutual aid was just… it became such a…such a bread and butter kind of like necessary thing to expand in that moment because people were immediately out of work, right, or their work had plummeted because clients were freaked out too, right? And so we had to rethink how to labor in that moment, how to organize in that moment, how to share information in that moment.
MICKEY: In the wake of FOSTA-SESTA, the need to decriminalize sex work, to remove bad laws and prevent new ones from being passed, was more urgent than ever. Here’s M on why decriminalization means liberation:
M: So, you know, as someone who is not white, is not cis, is not straight, you know, I’m really sensitive to just how people’s identities are criminalized. I don’t even think that I’m choosing, like, yes, sure, I’m choosing to do a certain type of labor, but it goes even beyond that. Just people’s identities that they can’t not be are criminalized. So it’s so interwoven with decriminalizing sex work, because for me, sex work has been a way of so many individuals resisting capitalism, actually finding work that is accommodating to their disabilities, to their neurodivergence, and also pathways to liberation, like financially. And socially, I know for me personally, I would not have had the financial independence and community support to get out of a decades-long abusive relationship had it not been for sex work. Had I not had like a part of my life where I could be so autonomous and be able to have so much control and power very explicitly negotiated with the folks I’m working with to find my own sense of autonomy to get out of that. So decriminalization would again, disrupt this pipeline to incarcerating individuals, particularly those deemed as undesirable by white supremacist standards, as well as really reduce the chokehold shame has on Western society. Because shame is used as such a tool of power and coercion and preserving really, really outdated ideas that serve a very, very small portion of the population.
TINA: In our next and final episode, we’ll be discussing what has gone down in the five years of FOSTA-SESTA being law. What has it meant for sex worker organizing? For intersecting movements? We’ll also take a close look at another major political crisis: the catastrophic changes to reproductive rights in the United States. What can the reproductive justice movement learn from sex worker activism? And how can we build solidarity in order to all get free together?
MICKEY: That’s what you can expect next time on Let Us Survive, an oral history project from the Hacking//Hustling collective. To learn more about this project, other research by Hacking Hustling, and more about the past present and future of sex worker organizing, please visit HackingHustling dot 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.