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• 1 2022-06-15T14:07:02-07:00 The Sex Wars and Sex Work Criminalization 19 image_header 2022-06-28T13:10:33-07:00 The “feminist” anti-porn movement takes up the call of the religious right to “protect the children” from exposure to the dangers of pornography. Fear of the loss of innocence or corruption of young people’s concept of sexuality motivates some to oppose calls for increased internet and porn literacy. In Anti-Porn: The Resurgence of Anti-Pornography Feminism, Julia Long complicates an earlier criticism of the socially constructed notion that depicts “children as passive, innocent victims of an all-powerful media,” and argues that “Researchers and policymakers need to recognise children as ‘competent, self-aware media consumers’ who demonstrate reflexivity and self-consciousness about being a child, and an awareness of the ‘ethics of relationships’” (Long 127, 2012; Bragg 132, 2009). Long asserts that girls and women are hyper-sexualized, and therefore interpellated as sexual objects in media differently than people with other genders. She also critically questions “how many of us – children or adults – are unfailingly ‘competent, self-aware media consumers’ under patriarchal capitalism: social norms, trends, and behaviour in the context of a market-driven economy would plainly suggest otherwise” (Long 128, 2012). This question supports the necessity of including pornography as a part of media literacy as argued by Tarrant in Pornography and Pedagogy: Teaching Media Literacy: “It is crucial to provide critical media literacy, increased access to sexual information, and greater conversation about gender, race, consent, and power. This promotes sexual pleasure and productive solutions to sexual harm” (Tarrant 426, 2015). This call for digital literacy is key to my project as it argues the criminalization of sex work and digital gatekeeping produced by biased algorithms hurts everyone, including people whose identities seem to be opposed to one another or unrelated, such as sex workers and teens and young adults receiving peer-led sex education on TikTok.
  
   In Trade Associations, Industry Legitimacy, and Corporate Responsibility in Pornography, Georgina Voss illustrates how moral panics around the pornification of culture have led to pornography becoming “associated in the public eye with an array of illegal and deviant activities including child exploitation, human trafficking, and drug addiction” (Voss 191, 2015). Fear of child abuse and human trafficking has historically been encouraged by policymakers that seize the opportunity to use these issues as a rationalization for increased criminalization of sex work and sex workers. This manifests online in several ways, but currently, among the most significant and harmful are the House-bill ‘Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act’ (FOSTA) and the Senate bill ‘Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act’ (SESTA) which are “part of a widespread legislative strategy known as End Demand legislation. The idea is simple: end the demand for all erotic services to mitigate human trafficking into the sex industry” (Jackson & Heineman 74, 2018). Laws like FOSTA and SESTA criminalize operating ‘an interactive computer service’ with ‘the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person’ thus holding companies responsible for the content created by their users (Campbell, Rosie, et al., 2018). The article Risking Safety and Rights: Online Sex Work, Crimes and ‘Blended Safety Repertoires’ provides quantitative data that demonstrates the ramifications for sex workers living in the United States or operating online on platforms with US jurisdiction since FOSTA was enacted in 2019. Sex workers’ livelihood and safety have been disrupted by the policy changes that have limited or completely prohibited sex workers’ access to networking, which allows them to form a community of peers, an essential avenue for sharing information and screening clients for personal and community safety. 
  
  An initial impact survey of n  = 260 sex workers who had worked online, was carried out by a sex worker rights organization in the USA (COYORE-RI 2018) and found 30 percent (n  = 78) of participants reported having stopped screening clients, or having lowered their safety standards, 60 percent (n  = 156) reported having taken sessions with less safe clients, out of financial desperation. (Campbell, Rosie, et al., 2018). 
  
  FOSTA-SESTA creates a loophole in its predecessor the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), particularly section 230 which previously allowed the internet to thrive off of user-generated content without legal implications for their host websites. Safiya Noble describes Section 230 as a policy created under the pretense of protecting children from online pornography, while also allowing for full freedom of expression for internet users. It does this by exempting companies and organizations such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Verizon, and AT&T from being held accountable for user-generated content (Noble, 2018). By making companies responsible for content uploaded to their platforms, SESTA-FOSTA pressures companies into further participating in the surveillance and criminalization of sex workers in order to protect their profits. Policies like FOSTA-SESTA make the internet an increasingly hostile place for sex workers to work and organize, pushing sex workers into situations where they may choose, or be forced to engage in in-person forms of sex work in order to survive. Sex worker organizer and co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, Danielle Blunt highlights that although SESTA and FOSTA were proposed as ways to protect people from online sex trafficking, what they actually have done is exacerbate challenges people already face when sex working online. Losing access to online spaces to work or advertise pushes people to do more work in real life which makes them more vulnerable to labor exploitation and human trafficking than if they were able to work online (Sage, 2020). The autonomy that increased accessibility to the internet once gave sex workers to be their own employers, background check clients, maintain anonymity, and set other work and safety boundaries, is being revoked by attacks on online freedom of speech taking place.
  
  FOSTA-SESTA is the digital continuation of what I have mentioned as the long history of legislation targeting and harming sex workers despite its constructed savior narrative. ‘Save the children,’ ‘Save victims of human sex trafficking,’ ‘Protect women,’ and similar sentiments are used to attract support across political lines. Anti-pornography and sex trafficking policies are where antipornography feminists and conservative, Christian, and Catholic people’s interests align (Bracewell, 2019; Mac and Smith, 2020). In the mid-1980s, antipornography feminists and Sex-radical feminists were in the midst of a cultural stand-off debating topics including pornography, prostitution, and kink. “Despite pleas for both sides to come together to ‘create a movement that speaks as powerfully in favor of sexual pleasure as it does against sexual danger,’ the sex wars raged for decades, resisting any definitive resolution” (Bracewell 63, 2019; Vance, 1984). The religious right and antipornography feminists touted the dangers of porn, exclaiming that voluntary sex work is an oxymoron in itself, arguing that pornography put women’s physical, civil, and economic well-being at risk (Bracewell, 2019, Smith & Mac, 2020). Research that tackles the sex wars tend to only mention women’s safety and well-being, excluding men, trans men and women, two-spirit and non-binary folks who also participate in sex work. Conservative moral panics reinforce a heteropatriarchal expectation that sex workers are women who are being coerced or otherwise trafficked into working in sexually exploitative conditions. Such a narrative supports policies that call for protecting women and children while erasing other sex workers and their equally valid and complex lives. Despite evidence that most human trafficking does not involve sexual exploitation, but rather sex trafficking only reflects 19% of human trafficking cases compared to much higher amounts of trafficking that forced immigrants into agricultural or domestic labor (Jackson & Heineman, 2018). 
  
  The concept that women must be protected above others is infantilizing and denies adult women autonomy over their right to consent as the state and internet platforms decide to intervene. Women and children are often both characterized as needing to be protected and cared for by a patriarchal figure be it a father, husband, the police, or the state. With that, both (white) women and children are characterized as inherently innocent making it easy to both render them victims and restrict their autonomy by weaponizing safety as a means of protecting innocence. Further, as mentioned above, the intervention of algorithms takes consent out of the hands of the user and places it in the hands of AI and its pre-programmed and actively learned conceptions of morality.  In Sex Work Criminalization Is Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Ine Vanwesenbeeck writes about how the commodification of love, desire, and sexuality is considered less than “authentic” love, according to sex work neo-abolitionist morality. Despite the prevalence and commonality of ‘transactional sex’ as Vanwesenbeeck illustrates, “Some sort of exchange is actually altogether quite common in many sexual interactions. Sex may be exchanged for intimacy, safety, love, partner appreciation, and relational security, keeping the peace, and averting wrath and abuse” (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).
  
  A neo-abolitionist in this context is someone who believes that anti-trafficking legislation drawing from the Nordic model, which criminalizes clients purchasing services rather than sex workers for selling, will lead to the eventual abolition of sex work. Vanwesenbeeck characterizes sex work neo-abolitionism as a revival in anti-sex-trafficking discourses within discussions of sex work. This revival flattens sex work to be synonymous with trafficking, and in turn justifies punitive justice carried out vis-a-vis anti-sex-trafficking policy enacted by the state (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).  Sex-work neo-abolitionism can be seen as the continuation of the sex-negative position in the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s. Antipornography radical feminists have theorized that sex work and by definition, pornography, is in itself inherently violent towards women because of the assumption that it upholds and reproduces patriarchal violence. The idea that sex work is inherently patriarchal and therefore necessarily violent toward women has fueled sex-work neo-abolitionist policies (Dworkin, 1989; Mac & Smith, 2020; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017). 
  
  Such a reductionist stance belittles the strides made by feminist pornographers and other folks in the industry who prioritize the safety of those involved in the production, practicing consent, safe sex, and celebrating sexual expression. There is pornography for just about everything. It is a genre that does not discriminate based on a socially constructed moral panic; indeed, holding a nuanced understanding of sex work that can account for the agency of sex workers, enables people in the sex industry to be critical of the specific conditions that can make sex work dangerous and/or exploitative. The phrase “sex work is work,” comes to mind, de-exceptionalizing and destigmatizing sex work would allow for candid discussions about workplace safety, comfort, disagreement and exploitation that can take place in other industries. In Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, Dr. Heather Berg brings up how porn workers’ critiques of the industry challenge liberal feminist discourse of enthusiastic consent. Some feminists have argued that if sex is not enthusiastically desired “for its own sake” (such as sex in exchange for money or any of the various other reasons people have sex), it is not consensual. Berg writes, “Sex can be instrumental, tedious, and even physically uncomfortable and still consensual.” performer Siouxsie Q adds, “‘Performing in porn is a job… and I certainly don’t need every scene to be the hottest event of my life.’ There are products to be made, and performers are working” (Berg, 2021). I want to echo Lorelei Lee, Co-Founder of the Disabled Sex Workers’ Coalition, sex work is work, but more importantly, sex workers are people (babylon, et al., 2021). Beyond recognizing the labor involved in sex work as equally valuable to other forms of labor, we should be fighting to recognize people, including sex workers, as valuable regardless of their ability to work or their productivity. The call sex work is work asks us to de-exceptionalize sex work becuase all workers under capitalism are vulnerable to labor exploitation. However, this flattens the way that trading sex is an exceptional job, and why many people have left traditional nine-to-five jobs because sex work can allow people to have flexible work hours, work from home, and be their own boss. These factors can be necessary when navigating disability, being a caretaker for other family members, or for many other reasons. Transgender people, fat people, disabled people, and people of color are gatekept from many mainstream jobs because of assumptions about their ability, competence, motivation, or deviance that justifies discriminatory hiring practices.
  
  Debates around sex work continue to be concerned with sex as a symbol rather than the material impact of policy on the lives of women and other people who do sex work. This is called out in Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes, where the authors examine how the ‘prostitute’ is a symbol in the debate rather than being treated as a role embodied by people whose positions in society vastly differ. Binary viewpoints of whether the existence of the sex industry is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women necessarily objectify the people at the center of the debate. These binary viewpoints exclude sex workers from the conversation other than being deployed as a rhetorical tool by pro-sex feminists to whom, as the authors highlight, “Defending porn often meant defending watching it, rather than performing in it” (Mac & Smith, 2020). The Sex Worker is framed as a concept rather than as a person with a corporeal existence that transcends the fabled dark corners of the internet. The creation of the symbolic Sex Worker has a material impact on people participating in erotic labor in any number of ways and for any number of reasons. Algorithms, such as ones used for SNS content moderation, also function to categorically objectify people in order to assess their desirability or threat to the platform. Rather than interpreting sex worker users as people first who use the relevant platform in similar if not the same ways as average users, algorithms that conduct rigorous anti-sex content moderation reduce the human user to their assumed association to the sex industry. Not only does this disrupt sex workers' ability to participate in social media for work or pleasure, but it also creates barriers to popular sex education by censoring educational content thus having a material negative impact on young people’s access to comprehensive sex education.
   
• 1 2022-06-15T14:01:18-07:00 CHAPTER 4. TOWARD A NUANCED DEFINITION OF SAFETY 11 image_header 2022-06-24T15:57:32-07:00 In trying to comprehend TikTok’s mysterious algorithm and content moderation procedures, I became more interested in calls for data justice made by feminist scholars before me. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism discuss the role of data science and data justice in co-liberation work. D’Ignazio and Klein base their definition of co-liberation on community organizer and poet, Tawana Petty who defines co-liberation through its relationship to anti-racism in the United States. Petty states “‘We need whites to firmly believe that their liberation, their humanity is also dependent upon the destruction of racism and the dismantling of white supremacy.’” D’Ignazio and Klein add, “The same goes for gender – men are often not even thought to have a gender, let alone prompted to think about how unequal gender relations seep into our institutions and artifacts and harm all of us” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020). I further apply the concept of co-liberation to sex workers and other stigmatized laborers. The decriminalization, destigmatization, and liberation of those in the sex industry are essential to the pursuit of a liberatory digital future. I believe that through cyberfeminism, or rather, a movement towards design justice, there is an opportunity for discussing what co-liberation that includes both sex workers and children could look like. These categories of identity are seen as being in opposition to one another with sex workers posited as either victims of violence or perpetrators of moral corruption and children as pure, vulnerable, and asexual. However, as mentioned in an earlier chapter about moral panics, children and sex workers similarly face discrimination based on paternalistic ideas that they do not know what is best for themselves and their bodies. Their liberation is therefore interdependent. Children’s access to sex education, including knowledge of LGBTQ+ identities, is disrupted by whorephobic moral panics. Sex workers' safety, ability to work, organize, and survive are disrupted by the state’s desire to exercise power through the regulation of children's lives, consumption, and beliefs that ultimately erases entire categories of people because of assumptions about young people’s ability to understand and safely navigate conversations about identity, trauma, and sexuality. 
  
  The architecture of the internet, big data, and algorithms is something that is currently incomprehensible to most people; for many users, the internet simply works or it does not. In a data-driven world, it is a powerful tool of control that data is largely inaccessible, and often when information about what a particular data set is comprised of and capable of is requested by women, or generally people outside of the tech industry, there is often a sense of dismissal with responses like “you wouldn’t get it” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020; O'Neil, 2018). Data has become a god-like authority that has lacked critical interrogation on a mass scale. As people who are often the first to feel the impact of new internet policies, sex workers are among the first to discuss critical flaws and encoded biases present in software and policies designed in the interest of capitalistic progress rather than with the desire of maintaining users’ privacy and creating opportunities for community and love to flourish in the digital world (Blunt and Stardust, 2021; Garcia, 2021).  Data Feminism calls for a disruption of the authoritative power big tech holds by seeking who does and does not have access to power and how that dynamic can be transformed through data by remaking a data-driven world. Some of the ways that this looks in action are through algorithmic accountability research and audits of existing algorithms. While interventions like these are sometimes criticized as being a retroactive measure that still allows the flawed systems to exist in the public sphere rather than a movement to design algorithms that seek co-liberation from the get-go. Auditing algorithms and addressing racism, sexism, ableism, classism, queer/transphobia, and whorephobia embedded in tech is but a band-aid solution. 
  
  Encoded biases get blamed on what Data Feminism refers to as types of “Privilege Hazards.” A privilege hazard refers to how people with more privilege are able to easily ignore and neglect issues that may seem obvious to marginalized people but do not have to be considered by people with privilege. Many of the people working in tech design are and have historically been cisgender, heterosexual, white men whose ease with which they traverse the world is invisible to them. They may assume that everyone experiences the world in the same way regardless of positionality.  “They lack the lived experience –the undeniable data of lived experience – that reminds them every day that their bodies, their sexuality, and/or their race depart from a desired norm” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2019).  This privilege hazard is a good way to understand what leads to encoded bias, but it is also a cop-out that does not hold privileged programmers accountable for the impact of their work. It is an excuse that erases the role of capitalism, colonialism, and racism in informing the development of the tech industry and that has led to tech being an industry dominated by people with the most access privilege.
  
   It consistently falls on people most negatively impacted by the privilege hazard to call it out and take action to disrupt its effects on society. When it comes to addressing algorithmic violence and other digital forms of violence perpetrated online, unsurprisingly sex workers, sex worker organizers, and scholars are among folks at the forefront of the movement for a liberated digital future. Sex Worker organizers have long pointed out the flaws of the tech industry and its current trajectory likening encoded whorephobia and digital violence to gentrification. The gentrification of the internet is a common point of discussion in online sex work history and ongoing organizing. In “The Cybernetic Sex Worker,” Gabriella Garcia, founder of the coalition “Decoding Stigma,” highlights how the elimination of sex workers from the internet is pitched to the public as “‘cleaning up’ the internet for the safety of its users.” She goes on to explain, “Gentrification is often sold to the public as making the streets ‘safe’ but the question is, for whom? Schulman duly notes that neighborhood ‘safety’ comes at the expense of its original inhabitants, for whom the neighborhood is now dangerous” (Garcia, 2021). Garcia here is referring to Sara Schulman's work The Gentrification of the Mind (2013), which explores New York City’s response to ‘White flight’ and how the city worked to re-attract those who fled out of fear and hatred of difference. The internet was once a safe place for pornography and for sex workers. In the panel “Sexual Gentrification: an Internet Sex Workers Built,” hosted by Hacking//Hustling, Sinnamon Love, Daisy Ducati, and Melissa Gira Grant discuss previous sites that allowed for anonymity and autonomy for sex workers such as Craigslist and Backpage that is no longer possible. Craigslist previously had a webpage called “erotic services” which was changed to “adult services” in 2010 before being completely removed in 2018 due to the enactment of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), the same year that the U.S. Department of Justice seized Backpage after the passing of the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) (Kennedy, 2018). It was in response to both of these actions, and the signing into law of FOSTA-SESTA that the sex worker collective Hacking//Hustling was formed as “an autonomous, peer-led, community-run, collective with on-the-ground, embodied knowledge of the social impacts of poor policy design” (Blunt and Stardust, 2021).  
  
  Hacking//Hustling came to be through a conversation between Danielle Blunt and Melissa Gira Grant after an emergency community organizing meeting in response to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seizing Backpage through the passing of FOSTA-SESTA after a number of other websites pre-emptively closed their doors to sex work out of fear of punishment. Despite being the most impacted by attacks on digital rights, sex workers are consistently left out of conversations within tech. Due to the lack of knowledge and care about the impacts of SESTA and FOSTA in the tech community, and more specifically the digital rights community, Blunt and Grant organized the eponymous sex worker led tech conference “Hacking and Hustling.” The event hosted panels of sex workers and allies about sex workers’ digital rights, privacy, and safety, as well as digital hygiene and tech related hard reduction workshops led by t4tech (Sage, 2018).
  
  The collective’s core organizers are prison abolitionists and disabled sex workers who seek community safety through the end of structural whore stigma (whorephobia), policing, prisons, and surveillance capitalism, and the creation of a safer, more liberated world. Blunt emphasizes,

  The main vision of Hacking//Hustling is to abolish carceral technologies and build the capacity for sex workers and survivors to create new technologies, relationships, and community to increase safety. Our work explodes the definition of technology to include harm reduction models, such as: community-based research; mutual aid; organizing; art; and any/all tools sex workers and survivors develop to mitigate state, workplace, and interpersonal violence and thrive (Blunt and Stardust, 2021).

  
  Hacking//Hustling continues to model its vision of safety through its community research reports, harm-reduction tool kits, and events that are all accessible for free online. 
  
   The movement for decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work is a part of a larger movement for the full abolition of the prison industrial complex. In their book, Revolting Prostitutes, Molly Smith and Juno Mac declare that for sex workers the “solution” to sex work “includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarized border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers” (Smith & Mac, 2020). Sex workers and their allies continue to call for full decriminalization of sex work, including sex work being de-exceptionalized: treating sex work as being as dangerous and exploitative as any other profession and no different. 
  
  Not only are sex workers criminalized and stigmatized, but the label of ‘sex worker’ (or other, more derogatory, terms) in itself is wielded as a criminal marker bestowed frequently on transgender women and women of color, who have not participated in sex work (Ritchie, 2017; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017; Smith & Mac, 2021). Through sex work criminalization, something as simple as walking home can result in police harassment and vagrancy charges for those assumed to be sex workers. “Associations between gender nonconformity and involvement in the sex trade are so prevalent that pervasive profiling of trans women has been dubbed ‘walking while trans’” (Ritchie, 2017). Profiling based on the assumption that those being targeted have intent to engage in sex work reveals how sex-trade-related charges can be selectively implemented to criminalize folks based on transphobic and/or racist biases held by police, who have been given the power to wield the law. 
  
  One of the ways sex work has been associated with moral deviance and crime is through the construction of criminal bodies by targetting those who disrupt white cis-heteropatriarchal expectations of gender, including people of color, queer people, trans people, and disabled people. This amplifies the need for a broader coalitional liberation project that opposes carceral logics and embodies the urgency of full abolition. “Slaves, captives, or prisoners, and those fighting for their freedom, cannot wait for a new world order to be free of incarceration or bondage. They cannot wait until the right conditions emerge and the desired future begins” (Ben-Moshe, 2020).  Liat Ben-Moshe describes how a white liberal version of feminism that called for an end of patriarchal violence against the ‘universal woman’ has contributed to the construction of the ‘prison nation’ of the United States. Liberation for the ‘universal woman’ meant only the liberation for the upper/middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white woman (Ben-Moshe, 2020). This excludes any woman who deviates from these categories, including sex workers, who are perceived as morally compromised in addition to other biases experienced from their multi-faceted identities. 
  
  As Andrea Ritchie reminds us, “The policing of prostitution is also a primary site of extortion of sex and sexual violence by police officers,” with studies demonstrating, “that police represent the largest slice of the pie chart depicting sources of violence reported by young women in the sex trades, while violence by individuals (clients, “pimps,” and others) make up much smaller slivers” (Ritchie, 2017). These claims are supported by many other accounts of sex workers sharing their experiences of being threatened by officers and offered special treatment or freedom in exchange for sexual favors. Despite this reality, carceral feminists and sex work neo-abolitionists believe that the way to abolish the commercial sex trade and in turn, sex trafficking, is through criminal law which puts more power in the hands of the police (Mac & Juno 2020, Ritchie, 2017, and Vanwesenbeeck, 2017). Vanwesenbeeck characterizes the sex work neo-abolitionism movement as the recent revival of the aforementioned sex wars. The neo-abolitionist stance on the sex trade equates sex trafficking and sex work, which reifies the assumption that all sex workers are victims and all sex work is violent (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).