ROBIN HUSTLE

Childhood, Consent, and Commercial Sex

2012-01-28T19:11:00.000-08:00

Childhood, Consent, and Commercial Sex was written for the debut issue of the Land Line, a quarterly journal edited by Fiona Cook, Grant Reynolds, and myself, produced by a stunning collective of amateur publishers in Chicago. For more on the paper, check out THE LAND LINE or tell me where you live and I'll tell you where to find a copy.

“The public may be readily convinced there is a ‘problem,’but almost any strategy for its control is vulnerable to attack on the groundseither that it punishes innocence or encourages sin. In these uncertaincircumstances, not only the adoption of ‘reforms’ but the readiness of groupsand individuals to propose them—to get in the ownership game at all—areespecially likely to be influenced by political and ideological considerationsthat go beyond the reforms’ intrinsic merits.”

Constance A. Nathanson, DangerousPassage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence (Temple University Press, 1991)

Child sex slaves. Trafficked children. Prostitutedgirls. Innumerable young girls—100,000 to 300,000 in the UnitedStates—controlled by ruthless pimps, desperate for salvation.[1]These are the stories we’ve been hearing about adolescent prostitutes frommoral crusaders and anti-prostitution feminists, who have once again set asidetheir differences to save the children. With ex-power-couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore asspokesmodels, I mean celebrity activists, and every federal agency from the FBIto Homeland Security financing the cause and getting in on the action, therescue and reform industry is doing just fine in these difficult times.

Thelatest target of the rescue industry’s wrath is Backpage.com, a site owned byVillage Voice Media that picked up the market for affordable escort classifiedsafter Craigslist’s erotic services section was effectively shut down. (Note toworking “girls:” unless your idea of a good trick involves a night in theclink, I suggest you place your ads elsewhere for a while.) As ReverendKatherine Henderson of the Auburn Theological Society said on New York PublicRadio’s On the Media, for anti-prostitution activists “one child soldfor sex on a classified ad site is too many.” So never mind that the vastmajority of advertisers on Backpage are adults, and that Village Voice Media hascommitted to screening adult services ads.
One child. It’s aphrase we can expect to hear a lot more often, because the more we find outabout youth prostitutes, the less credible “100,000 to 300,000 children”sounds. The Voice was the first majornews organization to sound the alarm on the alarmists, and representatives sayit could fold without revenue from Backpage. “The Truth Behind Sex Trafficking,”a Voice investigative series, hasexposed several flaws in the much-cited data around adolescent prostitution.Apparently “100,000 to 300,000 children” is actually an estimate of the number of youth the University of Pennsylvania deemedat risk for entrance into sex work.

Who’sat risk? Any reported runaway, even if they turned up the next day. Any transgenderyouth living in the United States. Any juveniles living in border towns alongMexico or Canada. With “risks” like these, it’s a wonder there are any childrensafe at all.
Similarly, a study sponsoredby the Women’s Funding Network that demonstrated a sharp increase in the numberof youth prostitutes in the U.S. was shown to have been conducted by theSchapiro Group, a PR firm which used highly unscientific methods and distorteddata to elicit a media response.[2]The hysteria that the rescue and reform industry leaves in its wake precludesquestions of how many adolescent prostitutes there really are, as well as whothey are, and what they want and need. Even prostitutes’ rights activists areloathe to question the premise of the exploited child prostitute, prefacingeverything we say with disclaimers that we’re talking about consenting adults,not trafficked women, certainly not children.[3]This silence requires that we ignore the intricacies of the issues at stake.

The recent release of a2008 study by anthropologists at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice finallymakes an informed look at the lives of adolescent prostitutes possible. RicCurtis and his team assessed the “size, characteristics, and needs” of adolescentprostitutes (18 and under) in New York City. They initially assumed they’d findmore youth prostitutes in the city than previous data indicated, tailoringtheir methods to encourage access to pimped girls.[4]But what they found out didn’t reflect their assumptions atall.

There are approximately 3,946 youthprostitutes in the city, considerably less than previously thought. The meanage of the adolescents surveyed was 17.2. In all, 94% were 16 or older (overthe age of consent in thirty-one states). The average age of initiation intoprostitution is about 15 for male and female workers, 16 for trans workers, andmost entered the field through friends (47%) or after being approached by aclient (23.1%), not through pimps (8.1%). The experience of this 18-year-oldwoman interviewed for the study is fairly representative:

I was hangin’ around a lotand ended up walkin’ down 10th Street one day and ran into some friends whowere doing it. And they told me it’s not that bad, and so, that’s how ithappened. (Curtis 52)[5]

The sample youth were 48% female, 45% male, and 8%trans. Less than 10% worked through a market facilitator (pimp, manager, oragency). Considering that the team decided to shift their focus towardexclusively contacting pimped girls midway through the study, the number of pimpedyouth may actually be considerably less than the reported 10%. Is aself-employed sixteen-year-old female an exploited child? What about aself-employed eighteen-year-old male? Can these adolescents consent to unpaidsex? What about paid sex?

The definition of “child” is notinflexible, nor is the definition of “consent.” Adolescencewas identified as a phase distinct from childhood by psychologist G. StanleyHall in the 1890s, but the understanding of that distinction has always beendependent on current cultural perspectives on gender, sexuality, and work. Themutability of this distinction is often erased entirely by reformers whoconsider all sex workers under the age of eighteen to be children. Childrencannot, by U.S. law, give or deny consent. Consentis immaterial. Batting words around without consensus on or even discussionof their definitions is irresponsible and dangerous, especially when thesewords are being used to identify and categorize young people. Control ofadolescent sexuality, especially when that sexuality is laced with dollarbills, has been rife with methodological and ideological contention since thelate nineteenth century, when it firstbecame a considerable “public problem.”[6]The Curtis study, and what adolescent prostitutes say about their own lives,should be analyzed with these historical contentions in mind.

The Western conception ofchildhood as a period of innocence and asexuality didn’t exist prior to thenineteenth century. Jeffrey Weeks writes that until this time, “children weredressed as miniature adults, complete with all the external manifestations ofmasculinity and femininity; exposed to the social aspects of adult sexualityearlier than modern children, they probably had much less difficulty copingwith their own biological changes.” (Weeks 45) As the period between the onsetof puberty and marriage grew longer and young people became more independent,this phase of life became viewed as highly problematic. At the turn of thecentury, adolescent women were leaving home for work, not only as domestics inprivate homes near their families but in factories, in cities, unescorted. Fearof a growing immigrant population and fear of American women living and workingoutside of the home gave rise to the white slavery panic and the Social Puritymovement. White slave hysteria, in the form of investigative committees,anti-vice organizations, popular films, and trashy novels captured the Americanimagination with claims of hundreds of thousands of young white women held insex slavery by swarthy immigrants and black men.

The Social Purity movement,the first to make strange bedfellows of feminists and Christian moralizers,pooled disparate perspectives on temperance, eugenics, gender, immigration, andworking class morality to make reforms for the protection of young girls. TheWoman’s Christian Temperance Union led the way with the idea that young (white)women were asexual, but that unprotected innocence could be easily corrupted, forgingthe campaign to raise the age of consent in 1889. Throughout the Progressiveera, this protectionist ideology shifted in and out of focus with one thatconsidered young women operating outside of established sexual norms to bedelinquents rather than victims.

Delinquents could, however,be reformed, and a vast industry shot up to fill the need. The prevailing viewof adolescent sexuality today is that adolescents are not sexually innocent,but they should be. The ABC approach to sex ed —in order of “effectiveness:” Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom—deemedby the Bush administration to be the only acceptable form of sex ed in foreign countriesreceiving HIV/AIDS prevention funding has come to dominate classrooms in theU.S. as well. The backlash against sex ed in the form of abstinence-basededucation has been so overwhelming that only nineteen states require programsthat cover contraception. Constance Nathanson writes that “the norms (of sexualpropriety) define adolescent women as children; they define the period betweenwomen’s puberty and marriage as one of asexuality at best and invisiblesexuality at worst.” (Nathanson 4) From white slaves to welfare queens,problematizing adolescent sexuality is a hearty national pastime.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child defines all personsunder the age of eighteen as children, “unless, under the law applicable to thechild, majority is attained earlier”.[7] Although the United Statesparticipated in the drafting of the convention, it is one of only two nationsthat have not ratified it, because to do so might guarantee access to safe sexeducation to young people: signatory countries “shall take appropriate measuresto developpreventive health care, guidance for parents and family planning education andservices.” Childhood today could be defined by anumber of different markers in the U.S.: by child labor laws, by the age onecan be tried as an adult, and by the age of consent. All three of these markersvary considerably state to state.

Child labor laws were established in the U.S. in 1938 by the FairLabor Standards Act. Currently, fourteen is generally considered the age achild can start working, though some jobs (working in private homes, performingin films) are legal at an earlier age. A young person deemed ineligible for aparticular job in Ohio might be old enough to take it in Indiana. Most stateslimit the hours a person under sixteen can work. Minors can’t take jobs deemed“hazardous” by the Secretary of Labor, but there are exceptions to all therules if the child is working for their parents. As a rule of thumb, minors areto be kept out of “oppressive child labor,” which by my standards would excludeyouth from flipping burgers at minimum wage. If wage labor is inherentlyoppressive, everyone’s out of a job. But alright, let’s try to simplify thingsand say that by labor law, a 14-year-old is no longer a child, but not quite anadult. And at 16, she’s somewhat less a child, somewhat more an adult.

The first juvenile court inthe U.S. was established in Chicago in 1899, its primary purpose “to assess theconditions in a youth’s life that had led to delinquency.” (Odem 111) Reformersworked to bring a maternal approach to the criminal justice system, stepping inwhere working class families fell short of the (reformers’) mark. Today everystate has a juvenile court system, but increasingly juveniles are filtered intothe adult system. Most states consider a defendant to be a juvenile—under theage of criminal responsibility—if they are under the age of seventeen or eighteen.In some states, juvenile status is entirely dependent on the charges. In NorthCarolina, you’re only a juvenile until you turn sixteen.

Following the campaigns by feminist reformers at the turnof the century, most states determined that the age at which one is capable ofdeciding consent is sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. In Illinois, a teenager iscapable of deciding to have sex when she’s seventeen, but if her family movesto California she’s incapable until she turns eighteen. The precocious teens ofVermont and Mississippi are ready to roll at sixteen. Of course, all this comeswith a number of caveats regarding the age of the person the teen is having sexwith: is he an elder minor? is she an adult in a position of authority? If two 15-year-oldswho share a birthday have sex, they are both, from a legal perspective, rapistsand rape victims. No matter what state you live in, consent is immaterialbefore the age of sixteen.

The legaldefinition of childhood changes if the adolescent is trying to get a job,defend herself in court, or have sex, and each of these depends on what stateshe lives in. So for an illustration, let’s focus in on New York: all NewYorkers under seventeen are subject to child labor laws. The minimum age for“street trades” (um, shining shoes or selling newspapers) is fourteen. A childmust be sixteen to work on a factory floor, but she can do clerical work in afactory starting at age fourteen, so long as there’s a partition at least sevenfeet high between the office and the factory floor. New York tries defendantsage sixteen and over as adults, maintaining the lowest age of criminalresponsibility in the country (along with North Carolina). The age of consentin New York is seventeen. So a sixteen-year-old in New York can get a job, withrestrictions, will be tried as an adult if he finds himself in court, and is astatutory rapist if he has “consensual” sex with a fifteen-year-old, but isincapable of giving consent himself.

I’m harping on this confusionbecause it’s alright to be confused about the definition of childhood. Thelegal system, in any state, maintains no singular definition of childhood, andour incredibly varied conceptions of morality and choice are incapable ofpinpointing the age at which a child becomes an adult. The Aristotelian viewof children as incomplete adults frames modern conceptions of childhood, butdoes not demark the point at which “completion” of the human organism isachieved; Piaget’s phases of cognitive development and the life stagesrecognized by the Sereer in West Africa may indicate culturally relevantmoments in the process of attaining adult status, but neither stakes a claim toage sixteen, or fourteen, or eighteen as the turning point for maturation. The tangle of legislation engulfing adolescence reflectsthe distinct place adolescence holds as a problematic part of life subject tocontrol by numerous systems of authority.

While the locus of control overadolescent sexuality shifts between professionals and the family, it is rarelyin the hands of youth themselves. This is particularly troubling in regard toconsent, which is given by the state ratherthan by the individuals involved. The notion of consent can be difficult forteenagers, and for the rest of us: If I give him a blowjob when I don’t feellike it because I don’t want to disappoint him, is it consensual? If I have sexwith my husband because he’s had a rough week, but so have I and would prefernot to, is it consensual? If I have sex with my friend when we’re both blackoutdrunk, is it consensual? Giving adolescents the tools to understand consent ontheir own terms prepares them for the realities of adult sexuality, whereconsent is often less than perfectly clear. They are denied these tools whentheir consent is deemed immaterial.

When the exchange of money for sexis involved, the muddle of youth sexuality deepens. The U.N. Convention on theRights of the Child defines any sexual matter involving “children” asexploitative when pecuniary exchange occurs. To anti-prostitution feminists, allprostitution is inherently exploitative; no adult woman is capable ofconsenting to the exchange of sex for money. Poverty and gender limit thechoices of poor women, and yes, children, too. Catherine MacKinnon is the highpriestess of this philosophy, which describes the inherent limitations ofchoice in a capitalist patriarchal society; it’s a healthy perspective untilthe point that it denies women the ability to make choices at all. From ananti-prostitution feminist perspective, a prostitute is a woman who is toodamaged, weak, and degraded (by experience or by the culture we live in) tochoose her own profession. In his essay “It’s Different for Boys,”[8] Julian Marlowe writes:

Whenever concern isexpressed in the media for male prostitutes, it’s inevitably in the context ofa child prostitution ring. The word “child” is intended to portray innocence,when in fact male prostitutes are usually adolescents above the age of consent.In contrast, women of any age are treated as childlike victims, even ifthey entered prostitution well into adulthood. It would appear that age confersmaturity and autonomy upon male, but not female, prostitutes, who are rarelyrepresented as anything but exploited. (Nagle 141)[9]

Recognizinga double standard in the approach to adolescent sexuality is one thing, anddeciding what to do about it is another. Sexual double standards were a drivingconcern behind the turn of the century movement to raise the age of consent.That young men could run around inseminating young women and avoid the burdensof parenthood while corrupted girls suffered the indignity of the loss of theirpurity drove reformers to ensure equal responsibility of males throughstatutory rape law. Raising the age of consent would protect girls by givingthem recourse after their unwitting seduction by unscrupulous men.

Inits actual implementation, however, age of consent law was never in the handsof young women. In exploring statutory rape case files in Los Angeles from 1910to 1920, Mary Odem notes that 77% of the cases brought to court involved youngcouples in consensual relationships; the charges were brought by the parents ofyoung women, not young women themselves. And contrary to the idea of seductionby strange men in public places, of the 23% of cases that involvednon-consensual sex, 43% involved male relatives, and 27% involved neighbors orfamily friends. (Odem 39). Today, one-fifth to one-half of American womenexperience sexual abuse or assault in their lifetimes, and the scenario remainsthe same: sexual abuse is most often found close to home. Rape culture is asstrong as ever, and the sexual double standard hasn’t gone anywhere. Femaleadolescent sexuality is still under attack, but “boys will be boys.”

Thedouble standard applied to adolescent sexuality remains a concern for reformersworking within the CSEC framework. The authors of the John Jay study recognizethe disparity between our picture of CSEC as a female problem and theirresearch showing that half of youth sex workers are male, and propose thatrelevant agencies (shelters, law enforcement, etc.) shift the focus of theiractivities toward greater inclusion of male adolescent prostitutes. Increasing accessto social services for all young people who want them must be a priority, but adjustingthe double standard to problematize the choices of young men with the samegusto that we do for young women is counterproductive. From theperspective of the social services industry, young men engaging in sex work arechildren incapable of giving consent, and any pecuniary exchange for sexinvolving children is inherently exploitative. If we consider childhood andadolescence to be distinct phases of life, and acknowledge that adolescents arecapable of making choices that children are not, the idea of exploitationbecomes blurrier.

Insome ways, an adolescent prostitute can benefit from being considered a child.When child prostitution is considered a public problem, it brings funding toshelters and health services for at-risk youth. And by eliminating the burdenof choice, it also provides a partial release from the stigma of prostitution.From a young person’s perspective, being treated as an exploited child hascertain perks that are unavailable if she is being treated as a delinquent. Shemight be filtered into the family court system rather than the criminal courtsystem, or have her criminal charges dropped in exchange for testimony againsther agent. But the attention paid to adolescent prostitutes does them more harmthan good. Defined as exploited children, they are stripped of agency in theirown lives, denied the ability to make safer choices in their work, and areincreasingly subjected to unwanted, often dangerous, contact with lawenforcement.

Prostitutes’rights activists have long argued that sex workers have the right to choose whowe work for, whether for ourselves, through agencies, as a collective, orthrough another individual. Like workers in all other forms of labor, the rightto choose our working conditions and organize collectively is essential to thewell-being of prostitutes. Priscilla Alexander writes that prostitutes “wantthe right to form professional associations or to organize unions when theywork for others—actions that current law defines as illegal pimping, pandering,procuring, or ‘encouraging someone to work as a prostitute,’ and which theabolitionists define as coercion.” (Nagle 93) The criminalization ofprostitution gives power to exploitative managers and pimps; the need tocircumvent law enforcement and the desire for protection from dangerous clients(having no recourse to law enforcement ourselves) is often precisely whatdrives prostitutes to work for manipulative managers who promise protection inexchange for an indecent percentage of the earnings. Sites like Backpage, andCraigslist in the past, offer youth prostitutes an affordable and easy way tobe more discriminating about which clients they see while working forthemselves. An adolescent male interviewed for the John Jay study pointed outthe benefits of advertising online:

I go on Adam4Adam orMan4Now. I have a profile. I have my pictures, you know, showing my penis. If Idon’t feel threatened, then I give ‘em my Instant Message screen name. And thenwe continue the conversation. I tell them I sell my time ‘cause sex is part ofthe package. In the street it’s too hot with the police. They try to arrest everybody.Frankly, I don’t want to be in jail for doing that. (Curtis 58)

Escorts who advertise onlineare able to charge higher rates and better screen their clients; organizationsfighting “child prostitution” have made these websites high priorities for lawenforcement, sending youth back to the streets where they have less controlover their work.

Foradult and adolescent prostitutes alike, the greatest sources of danger andexploitation are police officers, not pimps or clients. Sex workers of color,as well as female and transgender workers, are disproportionately targeted bylaw enforcement. Between 1997 and 2006, prostitution defendants in New YorkCity aged sixteen to eighteen were 70% black, 16% Latino, and 12% white; 77%female, 15% male, and 8% trans. (Young men have higher arrest rates for othercharges, like drug possession and loitering; young men of color aredisproportionately arrested under these charges.) These arrest statistics arehighly inconsistent with the demographics of the sample youth in the John Jaystudy, who were 29% black, 23% Latino, 23% white; 48% female, 45% male, and 8%trans.

Visibilityis key to this discrimination. As one trans youth reported, her experienceswith law enforcement weren’t limited to her working hours:[10]

But I wasn’t even prostitutin’ that night. I was walkin’from a park, and I went to the store to buy cigarettes. And I walked from thestore to the train -- and the next thing you know, the transsexual police [my emphasis] pulls up on the side a me andcharged me with loiterin’ [for purposes of prostitution]. (Curtis 90)

Experienceswith law enforcement don’t just mean a night or two in jail: these experiencesare often violent, coercive, and abusive. Reformers want to “help” adolescentprostitutes by further criminalizing their activity, encouraging lawenforcement to conduct sting operations (which are inherently exploitative asthey rely on entrapment) and clear the strolls that provide a network ofcontact, information, and support between sex workers. From a nineteen-year-oldblack woman:

Police raped me a couple atimes in Queens. The last time that happened was a couple a months ago. But youdon’t tell anybody, you just deal wit it.

An eighteen-year-old trans woman:

One cop said, “You’re lucky I’m off duty but you’regonna suck my dick or I’m a take you in.

An eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican woman:

The DT who arrested me gaveme his number after I went through booking. Then after my court appearance, hepulled me into a corner and was like tonguing me down. (Curtis 90)

These experiences are not isolated. Sex workers arefrequently raped and assaulted when they encounter law enforcement. The JohnJay researchers conclude that police officers would benefit from a greaterunderstanding of CSEC issues and should be trained to connect youth with socialservice agencies. No amount of inter-agency sensitivity training couldeliminate the kind of horror youth routinely experience at the hands of police;the criminalization of prostitution gives officers free range to abuse sexworkers.[11]

Curtis andhis team asked interviewees “if they would like to leave the life… if given theopportunity,” and the majority of the sample said they would. The flagrant biasof this question in an otherwise levelheaded study is disappointing. Pollstersask doctors, plumbers, and data entry workers about their level of jobsatisfaction, and if researchers had asked the same of these youth we mightbe looking at very different data. Few jobs are ideal, and we all work withwhat we’ve got. The youth consistently expressed frustration at the lack ofother living wage work available to them. This feeling is true for many teenagers,as well as many adults when unemployment levels are as high as they are now.For these youth, spotty job histories and low levels of education make“legitimate” employment particularly difficult. “Child” or not, an arrestrecord for prostitution hardly helps an adolescent sex worker get a straightjob. Many of the problems that adolescent sex workers experience come from thecriminalization of prostitution rather than the work itself:[12]

My dreams? I wanna be ableto have a stable home, being legit. You know, no worries with the police comin’and bust in my house. No worries about me getting caught doing what I’m doin’.I wanna be educated, ‘cause I’m smart. But now, I just have to do what I gottado. I don’t have time now. (Curtis 102)

Theauthors of the John Jay study conclude that adolescent sex workers deludethemselves into believing they have agency in their own lives: “There was ashared and dangerous narrative here: one that denied their victimization.” (Curtis117) Most of these adolescents have little to no contact with their families;they rely on their work and peer networks to support themselves under difficultcircumstances. They choose to do thework they do for the freedom it affords them in making their own decisionsabout their lives. Like all adolescents, they struggle with their plans for thefuture, self-acceptance, and the formation of healthy peer networks. Theyacknowledge the precariousness of their working lives and do their best tolearn from their experiences. As onesixteen-year-old woman put it:

Life is life, and you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s likeeverybody can’t be a doctor, a teacher or have rich parents take care of us.And it’s gonna teach us, like -- when we get older, we’re gonna be stronger,‘cause we know life experience and stuff like that. And we’re goin’ to knowwhat to do in certain situations because of what we’ve been through when wewere younger. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive. (Curtis 102)

But from a CSEC framework,adolescent sex workers are exploited children, incapable of making their owndecisions, denied access to consent. This framework mimics the system ofcontrol within the family, precisely the dynamic so many of these youth aretrying to leave behind. As the Curtis study demonstrates, youth prostitutes arecapable of voicing their needs and desires: stable, long-term housing, livingwage jobs, physical and emotional safety, flexible education, and most of all,the freedom to live their lives as they see fit. This freedom cannot be handedto them by a social service agency. Rescue and reform professionals have spentmore than a century trying to decide if sexually unorthodox adolescents arechild victims or juvenile delinquents, ignoring the possibility that they’rejust teenagers. Like wage laborers in every other industry, some adolescentprostitutes face exploitative working conditions, but the true victimizers of these youth are reformerswho deny them agency. A victim is asacrificial offering—when the rescue industry offers up the consent ofadolescent prostitutes, it is in the service of maintaining their own status asthe keepers of public problems.

[1]Throughout this article, I refer to “adolescentprostitutes” or “youth sex workers” rather than “prostituted children” or thecategory “commercial sexual exploitation of children” (CSEC) for reasons I hopewill be clear. The primary differences in these sets of identifiers are the useof active rather than passive language, and discrimination between adolescentsand children.

The Land Line is clearly not an academic publication; the use of detailedfootnotes is an unusual choice. As the rhetoric of child prostitution reachesfever pitch, largely thanks to misinterpreted or flawed research and mediahype, I feel that it’s important to be transparent about my sources. Researchis reliable not when its conclusions align with the ideology of its authors orreaders, but when its methods are sound and its findings can be replicated byother research. Given the wealth of secondary source material on turn of thecentury social reform movements and the policing of public problems, I’vechosen to provide references to the books I rely on for historical matters.

[2]Archive for the Voice series on trafficking:
http://www.villagevoice.com/sex-trafficking/

[3]I’ve written previously about the connectionbetween trafficking in women, a current public problem created in response tothe rising population of migrant women workers, and white slavery, a turn ofthe century public problem created in response to a growing immigrantpopulation and an increasingly mobile female workforce in the United States.While anti-prostitution activists rail against the trafficking of women intosexual slavery, in reality most of the women lumped into this category aremigrants engaging in prostitution by choice. Many of these workers incur debtto cover the necessities of undocumented migration, but few are being“trafficked” against their will. The primary source of exploitation under thesecircumstances is not a vast international network of pimps and smugglers butthe criminalization of migrants and sex workers. Adolescent prostitution hasarisen as a public problem as an extension of the current traffickingdiscourse, as well as for reasons of its own. My 2006 essay on trafficking and whiteslavery from The Skeleton News can be read at robinhustle.blogspot.com

Black and white hands reaching across a pink triangle

2011-11-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

for Ulrike Müller's Herstory Inventory project
http://um.encore.at/

2011-11-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

Submit to The Land Line

2011-10-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Brilliant friends,
The Land Line is a new quarterly journal with wild dreams and schemes, and we're seeking submissions for our first issue. We're looking for work that's raunchy, flamboyant, interdisciplinary, and intellectually rigorous. The journal is a kaleidoscope of research-based essays butting up against nonlinear comics, cultural criticism leaking into poetry. We want to hear about the film you're working on or the community organizing you're doing, but we also want writing that goes beyond your field and expertise. The essay you couldn't publish anywhere else because it's too sleazy for academia, too long for most magazines, too obscure for your local weekly.

Here's some of what you can expect in our debut issue:
-Sheridan Lefanu and sleep paralysis
-Independent contractors; labor organizing and performance by exotic dancers and televised wrestlers
-History and new developments of crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities
-Ask a Virg-ho, sex advice from a sex worker
-First installment of a column about names, self-naming and name-sharing

The journal is put together by a loose collective of staunch amateurs, distributed for free, and free of ads. We do layout by hand and print on newsprint, black and white, tabloid format. We're all feeling giddy about the first issue of The Land Line and hope you'll be a part of the project. Deadline is November 25th, but we'd love to hear about what you're working on as soon as possible so we can start piecing things together and, you know, get even more excited.

Yours,
Robin Hustle, prose editor
Edie Fake and Grant Reynolds, comics editors
Fionnuala Cook, poetry editor
and all of us at The Land Line

Curdled Milk and Two Eggs Sunny Side Up at Brainframe 2

2011-10-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

I read Curdled Milk and Two Eggs Sunny Side Up at Brainframe 2, curated by Lyra Hill. Video by Jenna Caravello. I'm not being bashful, just realistic: I suggest you skip ahead to TESSU at around 2:55.

Robin Hustle reads at Brain Frame #2 from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.

Brain Frame 2 with Lyra Hill, Edie Fake, and Otto Splotch

2011-08-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

Brain Frame is a series of comics readings and it is very funny. You can see videos from Brain Frame 1 here: Brain Frame

Links to everyone else: Otto Splotch, Edie Fake, Lyra Hill, Mike Lopez, Ben Bertin

Thursday, September 22 at 8 p.m.

1542 N. Milwaukee, second floor

2011-08-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

No-Man's Land

Bloodsport

Links and Hair

Light On Spark

Links for Sharks

Watery Eyes

Wash and Dry Nights

Bronze Medal

Fuck Hound

Thrice Tailored

You Came and You Pillaged

The Pool

The Mouth Pool

Pillow Sin

The Sext Pool

Hedge Daughter

And Her Son Villain

Humdrum Work

Whittled Idiom

Out and In

Middle-of-the-Road

Breast Binge

Angel's Food

Avon Lady

Sticky Kill

The Mold Toast

Mouth Spore

Chicken of the Woods

Smack of the Lards

Pure Aged Pork

Hide-and-Go-Seek

Whippersnapper Spunk

Guard's Fool Punk

Heifers and Narcs

Golems Scare

Malevolent Guile

Rogue Sir, Hark

Grass Fails

My Kin Lie Dark

Rage Dark

Lobo Visage

Chafed Clam

Pulled Man

Top-Down

Crash/Burn

Porcelain Crown

Fata Morgana

Sirocco Dawn

I'll be reading this piece and others at Woman Made Gallery on Sunday, August 14th at 2 p.m. The event is an installment of Megan Milks' Uncalled-for Reading Series and features Mairead Case, Dalice Malice, and Jami Sailor.

Underground review in the Chicago Reader

2011-07-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

Bert Stabler reviews Underground
Underground is on view at Woman Made Gallery until mid-August and features work by Edie Fake, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Megan Diddie, Sanya Glisic, and myself.

Society of the Scandal: Randall L. Tobias and Hand Jobs EXPOSED

2011-06-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Written for The Skeleton News in June 2007 and reprinted in Power of the Impotent. Feel free to extrapolate my thoughts on the Weiner photo.

Randall L. Tobias, deputy secretary of state and AIDS czar, resigned in late April following the exposure of his habit of hiring women from an upscale DC escort service to come over to his condo and provide massages (that is, hand jobs). Tobias, a former pharmaceutical mogul, was hired by President Bush in 2003 to oversee all U.S. foreign funding. His main duties were to distribute fifteen billion dollars allocated to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and act as a mouthpiece for the program and its abstinence-based approach to prevention. Ironically, PEPFAR requires that NGOs sign an anti-prostitution pledge to receive funding for HIV/AIDS prevention. Groups run by sex workers, or that work directly with sex workers to gain healthier, safer working conditions have been denied U.S. funding under the plan. The "ABC" approach to prevention – Abstinence, Be faithful, and Condoms, in order of "effectiveness" – has been enforced internationally by Tobias as the only appropriate form of sex education, despite the lack of data supporting the effectiveness of abstinence-based programs. PEPFAR has taken us a decade backwards in AIDS prevention and prostitutes' rights throughout the world, and lo, its spokesman, a married sixty-five year old, is hiring hookers.

Sure, it's hard to respond to this news without a smug eye-roll at the hypocrisy of politicians, but in doing so we fall into the shallow pit of scandal. The event of an exposure, as microcosmic and temporal as the opening of a camera shutter. We are not concerned with the fact that Tobias was hiring prostitutes; we expect as much from a man in his position. Scandal is the revelation of what we already know, an indiscretion revealed, and it feeds our collective forgetfulness by valuing exposure over comprehension. We can laugh, and cringe, when Tobias is caught with his pants down disregarding his own international policies, but doing so leaves us hanging on the act of getting caught. Don't get caught.

There are sustainable truths in Tobias' predicament. Prostitution happens and a demand for it exists, even though we tell men they're very bad if they pay for sex. Despite the lofty ideals of abstinence education, most people, young or old, married or not, have a funny inclination toward having sex with one another. And as Tobias himself demonstrated, hand jobs are a terrific form of safer sex.

But none of these truths is newsworthy. Journalism rides bareback on the well-formed muscles of scandal because we enjoy the titillation an exposé provides. We might do ourselves a favor by asking better questions, ignoring the scandals, and seeking higher forms of titillation: say, inviting someone over for a massage.

Curdled Milk

2011-05-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

Curdled Milk (2011) is available at Quimby's Bookstore and at www.quimbys.com. It will be on view in Underground at Woman Made Gallery, 685 N. Milwaukee, July 8 through August 18.

Love of Woman for Woman Should Increase Terror

2011-05-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

Love of Woman for Woman Should Increase Terror, 2010

Drawings from Mirror Tricks and Leftovers Again?!

2011-05-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Untitled, 2006

Civilized Man, 2009

Feral Man, 2008

Pissing in the Cave, 2007

Touching Pair, 2006

Prostitution-Free Zones in Chicago?

2011-04-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

28th Ward Alderman-elect Jason Ervin is proposing legislation that would create "Prostitution-Free Zones" in Chicago, making it a criminal offense for convicted prostitutes to occupy public sidewalks and parks. Ervin's website says that "the proposal aims to tackle the safety concerns for children and residents and the unsightly attraction caused by prostitution and prostitution-related loitering in areas around the city." This is an absurd and discriminatory proposal, modeled on such gems as the city's gang-loitering ordinance (which effectively makes it illegal for young men of color to occupy public places) and sex-offender free zones (that result in encampments of homeless former sex-offenders under bridges when there's nowhere left to live). If you are a Chicago resident, please take a minute to write to your alderman using the letter below or one of your own.

Use this letter if you are a resident of another ward :

(find your alderman at http://www.chicityclerk.com/citycouncil/alderman/find.html)

April 15th, 2011

Re: Prostitution-Free Zones

Dear Alderman FILL IN THE BLANK,

As a resident of your ward, I am deeply disappointed with the city council proposal to ban convicted prostitutes from public areas of our city. Creating "prostitution-free zones" is a violation of the human rights of targeted individuals, and a wrong-headed approach to the problems associated with prostitution.

Laws that calls for selective enforcement, like Chicago's gang-loitering ordinance, are often discriminatory in their enforcement. Young people of color are unjustly targeted. African-American women are already disproportionately prosecuted for prostitution in our city, and women perceivedto be prostitutes would be subject to increased police harassment under this legislation. The streets and parks of Chicago belong to all its citizens, and become safer when we work together for community improvement.

The ability to obtain other forms of work and the chance to receive student loans are limited for convicted prostitutes. An alderman concerned about the prevalence of prostitution in his ward should work to create job and educational opportunities for former prostitutes, not limit their presence in public space. Prostitutes are members of our community, and you should address their safety and opportunities for growth, not their "unsightliness."

It is easier to target convicted prostitutes than it is to address the problem of violence and the shortage of viable employment in our city. It is my hope that you will not use prostitutes as scapegoats in "tough on crime" measures as alderman. Thank you for reconsidering your approach to this issue.

YOUR NAME AND CONTACT INFORMATION HERE

Use this letter if you are a resident of the 28th ward:

April 15th, 2011

Re: Prostitution-Free Zones

Dear Alderman-Elect Jason Ervin,

As a resident of your ward, I am deeply disappointed with your proposal to ban convicted prostitutes from public areas of our city. Creating "prostitution-free zones" is a violation of the human rights of targeted individuals, and a wrong-headed approach to the problems associated with prostitution.

It is easier to target convicted prostitutes than it is to address the problem of violence and the lack of viable employment in our ward. It is my hope that you will discontinue your use of prostitutes as scapegoats in future "tough on crime" measures as alderman. Thank you for reconsidering your approach to this issue.

YOUR NAME AND CONTACT INFORMATION HERE

Curdled Milk

2011-03-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

Curdled Milk, a series of drawings reinterpreting text from Emile Zola's Nana, is now in print. It's available from me, through Quimby's, and on Saturday, March 26th at the Chicago Zine Fest, http://chicagozinefest.org/ at 1104 S. Wabash, 10 a.m. to 5.

Chair

2011-02-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

pen on paper, 2006

Mirror Tricks 2

2011-02-17T15:42:00.000-08:00

Mirror Tricks 2, accompanied by drawings, was published in $PREAD Magazine and as a zine in 2006. It has been presented as a silent overhead projector show in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Oakland, San Francisco, and Olympia.

"You’ve got secret peep-holes in every wall. Every partition, every mirror, is rigged. In one place, you can hear the sighs, in another the echo of the moans. You don’t need me to tell you that brothel tricks are mainly mirror tricks…"

Jean Genet, The Balcony

Tom believes in equality he dominates me / then I dominate him. Suck my cock, whorrrrre. harrrder slutttt, // spank spank spank / Dominant voice is high, nasal. He is diabetic, enormous. anonymous alcoholic. Always reminds me he doesn’t mean what he says, then. Respects me. Shows favorite transsexual porn hired a transsexual But she couldn’t keep it up // Suck nipples. One hand holds cock at base or it gets lost (is trying to lose weight so I live to see my daughter get married //) other holds hair so Tom can see me suck. Now my turn, bend over, Tom // wants to watch in Super 8 motel mirror I stretch legs around body, struggle to balance, two hands pull cheeks apart Now I’ll fuck you, Tom / I’m pounding you with my big black cock / my whole cock is in your ass // Tells me wife won’t use vibrator he bought her, uses it on me. Tells me marriage is only for raising children but no, marriage is for men like Tom to live / to pay to make me come / I orgasm because she can’t

Calls me Violet for a night out with friends drunk in limousine Met Violet at the bar // George drives a limousine. In session calls me by “real name” we have the same desk his desk has all its drawers. Oversized new townhouse in poor neighborhood Won’t my friends be jealous when property value goes up // uses every minute of his time, sweat drips into eyes. between orgasms wears my cock over his to fuck me / for two years asks for discount

A prostitute teaches class. She is working / riding class. The ruling can fuck her. Can take her, children, papers away. A prostitute is class(y)

I’m black is that alright? // Andy picks me up in the Mission, morning, slick black car to townhouse in the hills / Your ad makes you look more refined. Uh, sorry? // (Out of money for a week haven’t left neighborhood / night before rushed to massage incall wanted me to suck his cock no condom. took back my money, fifty for my trouble.) How about a little discount stay for a couple hours. for 250. Blemishes, what, hickeys? thought you said you had cute feet how will I get you in with that outfit // pull black knit shawl over bare legs I don’t bargain on my, okay, an hour and a half for three // No, what’s fifty bucks, must be old photos I’ll take you home // Took them two days ago. okay 250. // And lick my asshole // Floor, bed, table, covered, papers, clothes. coke. He’s been up all night pours me whiskey over ice. Suck on toes he sucks mine. Rim. fucks me, comes, wants to cuddle. answers phone invites a friend You’ll love Chris spends thousands at the clubs // Need to go home friends will wonder about me // Just suck him when he gets here don’t say anything He’ll pay you after // You just give him my number I’m leaving soon // Fucks me again, Chris lets himself in, while Andy fucks, makes me another drink. Andy knows lots of men with money, can set you up // Chris drives me home

A prostitute dresses the feast turns herself out. Layer cake, roast, cocktail dress. A john does not dress himself, overeats. A prostitute does not swallow

Stock exchange after hours. Do you like to party? // no but you can. Bill is too high thinks my rate is higher. don’t correct him. Private office no windows, sit on the couch together, bikini poster girls touch themselves on the wall. Would you like some champagne? I’ve been naughty I’m dirty. clean me // Trickle champagne over Bill’s head, down chest he rubs his nipples his cock. Drink from the bottle drool champagne down his back. Take a break, snorts coke off my ass, we drink. I’m still so dirty I need a shower // Sorry Bill but that’ll cost you extra, // Bill lies on carpeted floor sticky with champagne Crouch over his face I aim for his mouth. Piss in his mouth Now Bill is clean enough to fuck me, bends me over desk porn on computer fucks for ten seconds comes and I leave.

who will clean Bill’s floor tomorrow

A prostitute comes and goes. She comes from Nepal, the Ukraine, the West Side, goes to India, Germany, downtown. Comes with fake visa, husband, expectantly, with hunger. She comes for her children, her mother, her self, for you. She comes across danger, willingly. Or passes through, or lives in. How does a prostitute come? (You) Ask without fear. but listen with. A prostitute is prone to abjection because she rides, straddles. (you) try but a prostitute will always cross borders

Talk about feminism and he sucks your toes // Leila recommends me to him I am eighteen and he will be easy, one of my first. A lawyer across street from City Hall, secretary I never see answers phone sign in at security desk years later voice on cab radio, coming home from a trick: eviction lawyer. Barry seeks feminists but this is not what he wants / he wants to wear my bra over hairy chest, to see his cock between my legs to feel my finger in his ass. I’m an anal virgin // tells every girl, again, has hired every. Women have so much power when they penetrate men, don’t they? All women should learn to be as powerful as you // I’ll show you what it feels like to be a woman // tell him of penetrating men in women’s bathrooms, training them to be better men / A man’s feminism,

Mornings I care for children, children who sing Where is Thumbkin? Here I am how are you today, Sir? very fine I thank you, run away, run away eat foods carefully sliced for small fingers read books again and again until they know every word. A boy tries to differentiate women, calls me Mommy to find out what will happen. I am not your Mommy she is at work. I am - - - // Tries again and again. Children repeat, want to know rules and how they break / don’t know there is no rule for how rules break might never find this out. Mommy comes home and I can leave, sleep / no, rent a week overdue and the eviction lawyer calls:

How do you feel about incest? // Now Barry calls me Mommy. Still strokes his own cock as if it were mine / asks of my radical feminist training sessions. but now also “nurses” Wouldn’t you like to lactate? // tongues my clit fucks me. calls again and again on my way to see him. Calls to ask Are you feeling maternal today? // Oh yes Barry and I will teach you to be your Mommy’s good boy //

My mother / is a feminist, might not know I am a prostitute / was solicited by men for walking down the street, the stroll, she lived on. Afraid prostitutes make all women for sale to men. (Tell her) (Because) a prostitute is not for sale / a prostitute shows no woman is for sale. The danger of the prostitute is permanent / for all women / when all women are in danger of (permanently) becoming prostitutes. A woman is contained by threat of pollution A working prostitute is contained by arrest Any known prostitute is contained by the stench of her record (A man performs prostitution, as john, as hustler. but is not permanent. Men may try anything once, fuck any. May move between and remove / without (provoking) fear)

(You) Ask me about the strangest sex. Ask me how much money. Ask me if I experience pleasure. Ask me what my other lovers think. Ask me about fear. Ask me about the condition of my genitals. Ask me about family. Ask me how many. Ask me to come for you.

A Cleaning Job at the Board of Trade

2011-02-17T15:26:00.000-08:00

pen on paper, 2006

White Slavery of the 21st Century

2011-02-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Written for The Skeleton News, December 2006, and reprinted in Power of the Impotent in 2008.

The sex industry is an international crime syndicate exploiting hundreds of thousands of women and children, according to the recent proliferation of sensational reporting, popular books, and made-for-TV movies, along with governmental concern and a growing body of legislation. The Department of Health and Human Services has plastered major cities with posters urging us to “look beneath the surface” of the tearful, vacant-eyed, and seductive non-white women (and girls) pictured to see them for who they really are: victims of human trafficking. In early October 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a steamy four-part “Diary of a Sex Slave,” accompanied by a feature article on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to curb trafficking by shutting down the city’s massage parlors and implementing a moratorium on new massage parlor licenses (modeled on New York City’s 1994 shutdowns). Last year, the Chicago Sun-Times published an article, “Sex and Sorrow: The Modern Slave Trade,” about Eastern European women engaging in forced prostitution, with images of an attractive woman hanging from fishhooks borrowed from a Latvian campaign. The 90’s and our current decade have also seen the formation of numerous NGOs dedicated to helping trafficked women, and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations now maintains an Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. These groups estimate that 50,000 women and children are brought to the U.S. for “sexual slavery” each year, a number culled together from an estimate of the total number of migrant workers who enter the country with the help of an extralegal party.

There is cause for concern: women (and men, and young people) have indeed being coerced into working off debts, through prostitution, toward those who have helped them emigrate. However, there are many more women (and men, and young people) who are working off debts in clothing factories, in the agricultural industries, as domestics in private homes. This is an abhorrent and exploitative practice, but as the severity of anti-immigration laws increases, more migrants are dependent on smugglers and paper-producers. Victims of debt slavery are hindered, not helped, by the discourse and legislation against "trafficking," and young people engaging in prostitution need to have social services and other employment options available to them rather than being told they are victimized children.

The new concern for migrant women engaging in prostitution, referred to (regardless of consent in many cases) as “trafficked women,” is not what it appears to be, nor is it new. It has not been addressed as part of the exploitation of migrant workers (which has barely been addressed at all), but has been largely mythologized and used to punish all sex workers and migrant women. While trafficking appears to be a new concern, receiving media and governmental attention in the last two decades, much of this mythology was born a century ago. To gain an understanding of the current trafficking discourse, it is necessary to look at its early 20^th century predecessor, “white slavery.”

Between 1890 and 1920, American cities grew tremendously with the influx of migrant workers, many of whom were indigenous to the United States. Rural Southern blacks moved en masse to Northern cities during the Great Migration, primarily to the industrial centers of Chicago, Detroit, and New York City. Young people from agricultural regions and small towns were eager to experience the supposed grandeur of a nearby urban center, and sought work to support themselves and their families at home. The first decade of the 20^th century had the highest rate of immigration in the history of the U.S.; emigration of “undesirable” Europeans and others was on the rise. Many of the new migrants were veterans of revolution and working-class uprisings; most were impoverished workers. Germans, Italians, Poles, French, Russians, and Jews of all nationalities were viewed by Americans as dangerous, non-white criminals, intent on destroying all morality through radical activity and strange sexual positions. And women, native-born and immigrant alike, were entering the workforce like never before.

With the growth of cities came the inevitable growth of prostitution, and with this came moralizing backlash and lascivious intrigue. Novels, films, and “true accounts” featuring fallen women enjoyed incredible popularity. During its opening week in New York City, over 30,000 people watched the film Traffic in Souls, and 156 books addressing prostitution were published between 1910 and 1914 alone. The producers of this popular media were the producers of the “white slave.” Often a helpless, innocent country girl entering the big city with high hopes, she found herself duped by a swarthy man and forced into prostitution (from which she would eventually be rescued by a handsome Christian man or a crusader against the sex industry). She might also be lured in her home town, with promises of marriage or work on the stage; on occasion, she was a fresh-faced, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant. Women working in department stores or the theater were at great risk for abduction, women working in factories were likely to be tempted by the life of ease and luxury presented by a procurer, and indeed any woman in a dance hall, in attendance at a variety show, or alone in an ice cream parlor might easily be drugged and kidnapped into sex slavery. Clifford G. Roe, an attorney and leader in the crusades against white slavery, claimed in his widely read book The Great War on White Slavery, or Fighting for the Protection of Our Girls that white slavery originated with the Jews, was perfected by the French, and was now an international crime syndicate primarily run by Jews, French, Negroes, and Italians (along with Chinese in San Francisco). Estimates of just how many girls were “enslaved” in the U.S. varied greatly, from 5,000 to 65,000. From women’s organizations to the Klu Klux Klan, America was desperate to save its young women from a life of suffering as sex slaves.

In truth, there were few such sex slaves, if any. When offered a choice between working twelve hour days in a factory for barely enough money to room in a tenement, or living and working with other women in a brothel where she could choose (in most cases) how many clients to see each day, and what acts to engage in with them, it seems some working-class women chose the latter. In one of the most amusing reports of a 1910 sex slave sting operation, Investigator George Miller of the Rockefeller Commission on White Slavery “bought” (that is, paid a finder’s fee for) two girls from a black madam named Belle Moore, claiming he was opening a brothel in Seattle. In his reports, he describes them as seeming younger than fifteen, emphasizes that “these are white girls,” and passionately writes of one of them crying because she couldn’t take her teddy bear with her. When these “girls” arrived in court they were found – to the surprise of reporters and the public – to be in their mid-twenties, one previously married, and quite seasoned as prostitutes. The New York Times, which prior to the trial ran frequent articles addressing the crisis of white slavery, noted that one of the prostitutes “throughout her testimony swung a patent-leather toe in the neighborhood of the stenographer’s left ear.” Both informed the jury that they had been given a choice to move to the Seattle brothel. The media made quite a fuss over the whole scandal, and many major newspapers, notably the New York Times, stopped running articles about white slavery after the trial, declaring it (by 1914) a moralistic hoax invented by anti-vice crusaders. Despite the exhaustive and well-financed efforts of the Rockefeller Commission, no “white slaves” had been identified or “rescued”.

Unfortunately, this could not extract white slavery from the tantalized minds of a people, nor did it stop the crusades. Aside from the brothel busts that put many a working woman out of work, the rhetoric surrounding white slavery had lasting negative effects on women’s lives. The Mann Act, or White Slave Traffic Act, was sponsored in 1909 by Congressman James R. Mann (and probably authored by Chicago crusader Ernest A. Bell). It had great support from the purity organizations of its time and many leading politicians, and remained relatively unaltered until 1986 (see postscript for its current incarnation). The act criminalized the transport of women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” and in the year it was ratified, over 2,000 people were arrested under it. Though the act was passed specifically to protect women from white slavery, the vagueness of “immoral purposes” suited it for use against non-coerced prostitutes, traveling women and their companions, and couples who might engage in non-marital sex. No proof of immorality was required, and if a man had considered having sex with his companion, he was in violation of the Act. Not surprisingly, in spite of the Act’s intention of punishing would-be traffickers, it was used to arrest and charge the women it was “protecting,” making it a moralizing arm of the state which effectively limited the ability of all women to travel for work or pleasure.

The rhetoric and legislation surrounding white slavery, however well-intentioned it might have seemed, did not represent true concern for the lives of women. It developed at a time of rapid urbanization, mass waves of immigration, and a growing number of women in the workforce as a tool to reinforce ideas about race, sex, and sexuality. Its mythmaking was effective as such, and bolstered American fears of “undesirable” immigrants, racial “mixing”, and independent women. We might turn a smug, postmodern eye on the white slavery panic, were it not for the current trafficking hysteria that is its mirror image.

Globalization in recent decades, urged along by so-called free trade agreements and World Bank loans to poor countries, has drastically widened the disparities between the first world and developing nations. Emigration is on the rise, most notably among women, who make up an unprecedented half of the world’s migrants today. As in the early 20^th century, migrant laborers have been welcomed into the U.S. as workers willing to work for low wages under poor working conditions, while being told they are unwelcome, illegal, un-American. We are happy to hire Filipina nannies for less than minimum wage, but don’t want them caring for their own children (if they have been able to emigrate together) with the aid of welfare or food stamps. Likewise, Latvian and Vietnamese prostitutes are hired in scores by men who expect a cheaper service, or who think these women, because of their ethnicity, immigrant status, or finances might be easily pressured into unsafe sex. Non-white prostitutes are in demand not only because of first-world eroticization of the “exotic,” but for the same reason all migrants are desirable: their real or perceived vulnerability as workers.

Rather than address the very real needs of migrant prostitutes, or any prostitutes for that matter, we mythologize and criminalize their existence in the service of other ends. When a prostitute is rhetorically transformed from a migrant worker to a “trafficked woman” she loses all agency in her life. This mythologizing is harmful to all women, all sex workers, including the women it purports to help.

In 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was passed. In order to receive assistance, including a temporary ‘T-Visa’ and four-month access to public aid, a migrant worker must prove independently that they are victims of a “severe form of trafficking” and cooperate with law enforcement (an open-ended clause which could mean assisting in escort agency busts or the prosecution of their own “traffickers”). The TVPA does not provide for long-term work visas, citizenship, protection against debt collectors, the costs of repatriation, or back-wage payments. Few traffickers have been prosecuted under the Act (mainly in other industries), but many migrants have been detained, investigated, and deported.

Disturbingly, in the 2002 annual report on trafficking the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations broadened the definition of trafficking to include all forms of prostitution, not only forced or exploitative prostitution, and identified a need for total prevention of prostitution as necessary to the effort to combat trafficking. This new definition of trafficking, reminiscent of the 1920s-‘30s reification of ‘white slavery’ as any form of prostitution after its original use had fallen flat, has allowed a dangerous rhetoric to blossom. Anti-prostitution feminists have long claimed that all prostitution is coercive, that a prostitute cannot give consent, and have had a strong role in creating this legislative definition. With its use, any organization that supports the decriminalization of prostitution or advocates for the rights of sex workers is deemed to support trafficking in women, and is ineligible for U.S. funding.

Organizations led by current and former sex workers throughout the world have proven most effective in combating exploitative work environments for prostitutes, and in HIV prevention. The World Health Organization has for decades supported the decriminalization of prostitution, declaring it a necessary step in fighting AIDS. Redefining trafficking to include all prostitution allowed the 2003 passage of the President’s Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has stripped NGOs seen to be “promoting prostitution or the legalization of prostitution” of their funding. Many of the most promising and competent sex workers’ organizations worldwide support healthier, happier working conditions for prostitutes, making this a tragic loss for HIV/AIDS prevention and prostitutes’ rights. SIDA-3, an HIV prevention project for sex workers in Burkina-Faso, recently reported such drastic drops in condom availability since the implementation of PEPFAR that women are “washing and drying… condoms after use and hanging them on the line to dry,” a completely ineffective and desperate attempt at safe sex by women with few other options. The mythology of the trafficked women has resulted in an international crisis for prostitutes.

Rather than inventing the needs of mythic victims, and victimizing all migrant women workers and prostitutes, we must begin to confront the real needs of real women. Prostitutes can, and do, speak for themselves and fight for their rights, but their lives are in great danger when lawmakers and crusaders victimize them and strip them of their agency. If all workers, indigenous and migrant, machinists and prostitutes, are to have healthy work environments and living wages, it is imperative that we look beneath moralizing first-world rhetoric and begin to listen to workers themselves.

Postscript, January 2008:

The William Wilberforce Trafficking Protection Reauthorization Act [H.R. 3887] is making its way through the House (passed) and Senate (scheduled for debate). Anti-prostitution NGOs involved in the 2000 passage of TVPA have since derided it as ineffective, as it has supplanted more archaic legislation like the Mann Act which they consider useful for its complete lack of division between coercive and non-coercive prostitution. Following this lead, H.R. 3887 includes a modernized version of the Mann Act which will be devastating to prostitutes throughout the country.

The inclusion of the updated Mann Act makes all prostitution that affects interstate commerce a federal crime. What seems to be a minor rephrasing of the Act – from “travel in interstate or foreign commerce” to having an “affect” on this commerce – is a 21^st century reflection of the internet as a world without state and national borders. This application of interstate commerce as inclusive of online commerce means that all prostitution by migrant workers or citizens that involves the internet is a federal crime. The vast majority of prostitution in the United States involves online advertising and communication. The Department of Justice is being asked to work with local vice squads to arrest prostitutes (and owners of popular sites like Craigslist) on federal prostitution charges.

With each reauthorization, the TVPA has become increasingly punitive of prostitutes themselves, feigning less its supposed intentions of protecting women from exploitation. Further criminalizing migrant and sex industry workers, forcing them further underground, will serve only those who exploit them.

Two Eggs Sunnyside Up

2011-02-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

Originally produced as a radio piece for a program of dream-based audio by Mairead Case for Neighborhood Public Radio at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Printed in Leftovers Again?!.

“IT MUST INCREASE BUT I MUST DECREASE.”

-André Gide

A prisoner sits in a cell with her sole companion Two Eggs Sunnyside Up. Oh Two Eggs Sunnyside Up, my sole companion, without you I’d be nothing nobody dead // Lovingly adorns her companion in hot sauce. licks tenderly his edges. Swirls her tongue in his golden center / coos. oh Two, two two two Eggs, //

(A LOVE SONG TO TWO EGGS SUNNYSIDE UP)

Never run never run never run never run dearest

Your whites are the rafts that keep me afloat

Your yolks the suns that bind me to the spinning earth

And your crisp brown skin is the parchment on which every love story is written.

Two Eggs Sunnyside Up, my gaze penetrates your golden eyes

I suckle at your golden teat

My tongue throbs against your tender membrane

Until my lips drip with your rich… creamy… uohhhhhhhhhhh…

Two Eggs Sunnyside Up, wear your finest bib of hot sauce

I’ll wear all I have

Never run, my dearest

Together we’re the toast of… this place.

After making love, in a fashion, to Two Eggs Sunnyside Up, she curls up with her tenderly nibbled companion and soundly sleeps. LITTLE DOES OUR PRISONER KNOW THAT EVERY NIGHT WHILE SHE SLEEPS THE WARDEN REMOVES HER GENTLY LICKED COMPANION TWO EGGS SUNNYSIDE UP FROM HER CELL, REPLACING HIM WITH TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT EGGS. AS FAR AS SHE’S CONCERNED TWO EGGS SUNNYSIDE UP REGENERATES NIGHTLY IN HIS SLEEP JUST AS SHE DOES. FOR THAT MATTER A CAT COMES IN ON OCCASION AND UNCEREMONIOUSLY EATS THE LEFTOVERS OF TWO EGGS SUNNYSIDE UP AND SHE’S NEVER EVEN SEEN THIS CAT. She’s never even seen the warden, poor bitch.

One day she wakes to an unknown woman standing in her cell holding Two Eggs Sunnyside Up and before she can open her confused, ugly trap to defend her lover’s honor the woman speaks:

ou on’t now ho m, oor itch, ut ow ou’ll now oo ell. ou ave een y risoner ince efore he eginning f ime nd ’m ick f ooking ggs or ou hat ou on’t ven at. ngrateful itch. or his eason ive ou hoice, nd ake t uickly efore hoose or ou: ither ou wallow hese ggs r ’m oing o eed ou at eat rom ow ntil t uns ut hich ill robably e n ouple ays nd hen ou’ll tarve. ct ow r ie, itch. //

Unfortunately, the warden speaks an obscure highbrow dialect, eliminating the first letter of every word spoken, and the prisoner has no idea she is being asked to make the most important decision of her utterly unimportant life.

The Queen and The Plague: Colony Collapse Disorder

2011-02-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

This essay was written in March 2007 for The Skeleton News and reprinted in my zine Power of the Impotent. In the spring of 2010, 33% of American honeybees were found dead in their hives; Colony Collapse Disorder has been on the rise since it was first recognized in late 2006. Its cause remains unknown, and while many have raised concerns about the relationship between CCD and genetically modified organisms, little research has addressed the subject.

There can be no doubting that they understand each other; and indeed it were surely impossible for a republic so considerable, wherein the labors are so varied and so marvelously combined, to subsist amid the silence and spiritual isolation of so many thousand creatures. They must be able, therefore, to give expression to thoughts and feelings, by means either of a phonetic vocabulary or more probably some kind of tactile language or magnetic intuition, corresponding perhaps to senses and properties of matter wholly unknown to ourselves. And such intuition well might lodge in the mysterious antennae – containing, in the case of the workers, according to Cheshire’s calculation, twelve thousand tactile hairs and five thousand “smell-hollows,” wherewith they probe and fathom the darkness. For the mutual understanding of the bees is not confined to their habitual labors; the extraordinary also has a name and place in their language; as is proved by the manner in which news, good or bad, normal or supernatural, will at once be spread in the hive; the loss or return of the mother, for instance, the entrance of an enemy, the intrusion of a strange queen, the approach of a band of marauders, the discovery of treasure, etc. And so characteristic is their attitude, so essentially different their murmur at each of these special events, that the experienced apiarist can without difficulty tell what is troubling the crowd that moves distractedly to and fro in the shadow.

—Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, 1901

This spring, honeybee-keepers opening their hives after the winter hibernation found them empty. A troubling epidemic is attacking the honeybees of North America. Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] has swept through at least twenty-two states and parts of Canada, leaving up to 80% of local hives dead in its path. While colony illnesses are not uncommon, and something similar to CCD has been observed in past years, the current wave of the epidemic is the most devastating blow the honeybee has received. The bees themselves seem aware of the gravity of this threat, and exhibit unusual behavior while ill, and in their actions toward infected colonies.

Bees are social insects, each with a precise role, and it is chilling to observe the profound alterations made on these roles by the disorder. In an ordinary infected colony, bees are found dead directly outside the hive, carried out by the living. A healthy colony immediately takes action to invade a diseased one, stealing their resources or evicting the residing colony from their hive. Moths, wasps, and other insects will take advantage of an ailing hive with similar invasions. In a hive with CCD, the dead bees are mysteriously absent, indicating that they have flown away from the hive to die, and invasion by any species is rare. This is particularly astonishing as the infected hives exhibit a complete absence of adult bees, and are being maintained by young adults who would not otherwise be suited for the workforce or hive defense. Other insects seem aware that something dangerous is lurking within these disordered hives, and are refraining from their usual invasions.

The role of the queen is exclusively reproductive; she mates regularly with the male drones of her hive to generate workers, drones, and new queens, until she dies or is killed by the worker bees to be replaced by one of her daughters. She is genetically tied to all the colony, and the pheromones by which bees recognize and communicate with one another can be traced to her. In a healthy colony, the queen leaves the hive only for her mating flights. In a CCD hive, she is uncharacteristically present outside the hive, in a desperate, futile attempt to communicate with her missing colony.

Malnutrition, one of the few disorders known to so drastically alter the social structure of honeybees, was immediately dismissed as the cause of CCD. Devastated hives are found with their food stores intact, and living bees are reluctant to eat the food available to them. This may indicate that the disorder inhibits their desire to eat, or could suggest some acknowledged dangers within the food itself.

Researchers are have explored many potential causes of CCD but have found nothing conclusive. Varroa and Acarapis woodi mites, parasites which have devastated bee colonies in recent years by introducing viruses to the hive, are under investigation. Antibiotics, herbicides, pesticides and other apicultural and agricultural toxins are also being researched, but are extremely difficult to trace as most commercial colonies are moved between states frequently for pollination and are exposed to many unknown substances.

Compelling research by scientists at Penn State University suggests the possibility of an immunosuppressive virus (carried by mites or plants), similar to HIV, which would account for the similarities between CCD symptoms and those of malnutrition. The emergence of such a virus would be indicative of the danger of human intervention in natural processes and raise many new concerns around the genetic modification of plants. Genetic engineering is most commonly used to splice pesticides and antibiotics directly into the genes of plants, which gives microorganisms a great advantage.

In the 1940s, geneticist Barbara McClintock discovered that genes could reposition themselves on strands of DNA, producing changes in the appearance of an organism. Her research with maize chromosomes in the 40s and 50s was the first step toward modern genetics, and eventually the production of genetically modified organisms [GMOs]. Her findings helped Joshua Ledenberg, a decade later, discover the ability of microbes to mutate, advantageously re-sequencing their DNA to produce immunity against antibiotics. While antibiotics, pesticides and the like have made important contributions to public health, their misuse has been of great advantage to microbes. When in the early 1960s it seemed malaria might be completely defeated, overuse of the pesticide DDT allowed pesticide-resistant mosquitoes to appear throughout the world, and fifteen years later malaria incidence was 2.5 times higher. Agricultural misuse carries the greatest responsibility: 70% of antibiotics are used for non-therapeutic purposes, such as accelerated livestock growth. Also accountable are medical misdiagnoses and overeager prescribing (i.e. prescribing antibiotics to treat viral infections) and patient error (not finishing and improperly disposing of prescriptions). These factors have led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and diseases from ear infections to TB, which seemed easily treatable at one time, are increasingly difficult to combat. And while vaccines hold much promise in protection against viruses they are relatively ineffective if less than 80% of a population is immunized. New or frequently mutating viruses including HIV have shown us that microbes have distinct evolutionary advantages over humans, and our tinkerings help them at least as much as they help us.

Monoculture, or the elimination of agricultural diversity in favor of thousand-acre cash crop growth of single plant species, is the driving force behind our “need” for GMOs containing genetically implanted pesticides and antibiotics. Interestingly enough, crops embedded with pesticides and antibiotics don’t reduce the need for additional application of these materials, thus exponentially multiplying their use. And the very process by which we modify genes adds to the trouble: in the creation of GMOs, antibiotic resistant marker genes are combined with “genes of interest,” facilitating the acceptance of the modified genes. These genes are harmless within the plant, but provide microbes with an opportunity for mutation. The FDA is currently “encouraging” biotech companies to phase out the use of antibiotic resistant genes, but with little pressure or fiscal incentive.

Improper use of antibiotics, pesticides, and vaccines is the primary factor in the emergence of new or brilliantly mutated microorganisms that have devastated human populations in recent decades; perhaps a previously unknown microorganism is responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder. Research into the drawbacks of GMOs is burdened by the economic power wielded by the companies that produce them, and much important work has been cut in its tracks. If CCD continues to appear throughout the country it will be impossible for agribusiness to ignore this line of questioning. Bee mortality is not only the concern of apiculturists: apples, strawberries, cucumbers, almonds, pumpkins, pears, raspberries, and many other crops are almost completely dependent on honeybees for pollination, and bees add over $14 billion to annual agricultural profits.

Researching and preventing CCD is necessary for the survival of both honeybees and agribusiness. An epidemic of this scale must be stopped expediently if we do not want to witness the total devastation of an important insect species. We cannot stop this bee epidemic, or future ones like it, if we are unwilling to stand up to biotech corporations for the right to understand the potential hazards of genetically modified crops. A complete and unhindered line of questioning is necessary to determine the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder before ruling out GMOs as a factor. If we are thorough in our explorations, we might answer some vital questions about the risks of pesticide use, antibiotics, and genetically modified organisms, which pose threats as great to ourselves as they do to the honeybees.

The Weave Extends

2011-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

pen on paper, 2010

Cooking with the Experts

2011-02-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

He sees fire, somewhere around the cave // How’d it get there? // lightning or whatever, okay so it’s HOT or maybe he doesn’t know that yet. but it’s big alright, and this guy, don’t know if he walks on two feet yet, or still is crawling smelling all the parts. Well he sees this big hot cock, fire, this is all happening really early, see. Probably he isn’t crawling any more, he’s hiding his cock and now here’s this fire. Whips it out, you know, to compare. Definitely this one’s bigger and hotter so he’s gotta LICK it, right, lick it good and he knows how to do it. And he’s pissed about the whole thing too so he pees, right there on it and it’s gone // He pees that much? I thought this fire was big // He does, well maybe it’s not gone but it’s limper anyway. Gets off on the whole thing. This other guy comes along, this guy’s been working out or something and finds the fire // The same fire or // uh, this fire is smaller, a different one and this guy, really built, gets a stick and puts it in the fire / he’s not into fire. Tough guy and his hot stick go home, some cave, THIS GREAT CULTURAL VICTORY WAS THUS A REWARD FOR REFRAINING FROM GRATIFICATION OF AN INSTINCT and he gives the thing to his woman to look at. TEND. // …? // ‘cause she can’t pee straight. // … // BECAUSE SHE CAN’T PEE STRAIGHT

THE NEXT DISCORD IS CAUSED BY WOMEN, WHO SOON BECOME ANTITHETICAL TO THE CULTURAL TRENDS AND SPREAD AROUND THEM… …LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE BY THEIR APPEAL FOR… …SEXUAL LIFE… …HARDER TASKS… (Trickle champagne over… …rubs his nipples his cock. Drink from… …drool… …I need a shower… …aim for his mouth... …who will clean Bill’s floor tomorrow // ) …WOMAN FINDS HERSELF THUS FORCED INTO THE BACKGROUND BY THE CLAIMS OF CULTURE AND SHE ADOPTS AN INIMICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS IT. //

LEFTOVERS AGAIN?!

KITCHEN WARS:

pre-emptive appropriation, strike v. homosexual rivalry //

can’t make in omelet without…// v. soup & salad

women’s suffrage v. learning how to pee straight --------------------------------

to wilt to dry to blanche to knead to brush to curdle to cream to drizzle to simmer to taste:

Plants formerly considered weeds at best, eaten for centuries by scavenger/gatherer types have at last made their way to the FINEST SUPERMARKETS. Bitter. ARUGULA and DANDELION // rustic organic // bitter. Lick in butter, wilt slightly, likewise there is no such thing as AVANT GARDE in the contemporary kitchen. every green has been sold before you get a lick at it. PORNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT MESSAGING is the bun in the oven of the poor few, impoverished few, who resist.

.resist who ,few impoverished ,few poor the of oven the in bun the is MESSAGING CONTEXT PORNOGRAPHIC .it at lick a get you before sold been has green every .kitchen contemporary the in GARDE AVANT as thing such no is there likewise ,slightly wilt ,butter in Lick .bitter // organic rustic // DANDELION and ARUGULA .Bitter .SUPERMARKETS FINEST the to way their made last at have types gatherer/scavenger by centuries for eaten ,best at weeds considered formerly Plants

Written for The Skeleton News in February, 2008; reprinted in Leftovers Again?!, May 2009.

Fluent in French, Russian, and Greek

2011-02-13T17:57:00.000-08:00

pen on paper, 2006

Egypt on Strike, from April 2007

2011-02-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

This essay was originally written for The Skeleton News and reprinted in my zine Power of the Impotent. There were massive strikes across Egypt from 2006-2007 that expose some of the underlying issues in the protests in the country today. Of particular interest is the continued use of the Muslim Brotherhood, by the West and Mubarak, to distract from real working class dissent.

EGYPT ON STRIKE!

In 1991, the International Monetary Fund gave Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak a $371 million loan in exchange for opening the country to free-market policies, which resulted in mass lay-offs in the public sector industries and the sale of numerous public companies to private investors. In 2004, the American Chamber of Commerce reported that Egypt was still not open enough to free-trade capitalism, noting that “a flexible labor market attracts investors” and encouraging Egypt to eliminate wage regulations (that is, minimum wage requirements) and job security laws. On December 26, 2006 Mubarak announced that he intended to make thirty-four changes to the constitution, removing any remaining trace of socialist principles instituted by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 60s. A drastic proposal, considering that under current legislation all union activity is closely monitored by the government, strikes are illegal, and factory workers earn, on average, less than $2 a day. In January, Investment Minister Mahmoud Moheildin announced that one hundred state-owned companies would be sold to private investors, a move which will result in thousands more workers laid off and significant pay cuts for many.

Mubarak’s trigger-happy approach to workers’ rights and zealous pandering to Western interests is not unnoticed by Egypt’s working class, nor are the arbitrary firings of their fellow workers, pay cuts, insufficient medical care, and unfulfilled promises of bonuses and raises (Recently-privatized factories told workers they would receive 45-day bonuses, but they were then denied this pay or told it was only a “loan” in many.). For the past three months, wildcat strikes have broken out throughout the country, with tens of thousands of workers demanding their rights, in all sectors of industry. Textile, cement, poultry, and sugar factory workers, teachers, hospital workers, garbage collectors and street cleaners, subway and rail operators, riot police have walked off the job, joined in protests, and gone on strike. The Land Center for Human Rights reports that between mid-2006 and February 13, 2007 there have been 115 workers’ protests in Egypt, including over thirty-one strikes. The government and factory management quickly blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the strikes, but workers have adamantly denied this charge. The Brotherhood has never had a strong tie to the working class; Kafr el-Dawwar worker Khalid Ali told Dan Morrison of the SF Chronicle that “when the ruling party has a bad dream, they wake up and blame the Muslim Brothers. You know why we’re striking? Conditions have reached a dismal level.” Although most of the strikes have been spontaneous and independent – that is to say, this is not technically a “general strike” – their contagious nature and the unity demonstrated by workers of such disparate sectors has struck genuine fear in the ruling party, and in many cases, the government and “unions” have capitulated to workers’ demands.

All unions in Egypt are government-approved, and officials are “elected” to them under fishy, to say the least, conditions. They are controlled by the General Federation of Trade Unions [GFTU], made up primarily of members of the ruling National Democratic Party, and consistently side with management in labor disputes. While strikers have been making demands specific to their places of work, they have been united in calling for the impeachment of GFTU members and the creation of independent, worker-run unions. In December, 27,000 textile workers at the country’s largest public sector factory, Ghazl el-Mahalla, went on strike demanding the 45-day bonus owed to them. After five days, management capitulated, agreeing to pay up, but the workers pressed on to demand impeachment of the Factory Union Committee [FUC]. On February 14, 2007, a compromise was offered by the GFTU and management: workers would be allowed to establish a Representatives’ Committee to complement the FUC, through which they would have equal clout in all factory decision-making. Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy reports that the compromise was initially accepted by the Workers’ Coordination Committee (established for the strikes) and many socialist activists involved, but workers chose to reject the compromise, insisting on the complete overhaul of the FUC. A strike leader told el-Hamalawy that “news of the compromise had reached Mahalla already… as (the labor leaders) were heading back from Cairo in the buses. The workers at the factory said ahha (Egyptian colloquial for ‘screw this shit’ –HH). When they arrived in the factory, each went to his floor shop and told the rest what happened, there were angry shouts. The proposal was rejected.” 11,700 workers struck and occupied the Kafr el-Dawwar textile factory; they were locked inside the factory by State Security, who denied them access to food and prevented journalists from entering. The workers refused to break strike, were thrown bread by rope from outside supporters, and ultimately won nearly all of their demands: a raise in their meal allowance, payment of a 21-day bonus, an end to promotion freezes, and improved health and safety provisions. They also won payment for the days they were on strike. Egypt’s workers are not just asking for what is owed them with these strikes; they are demanding a complete upheaval of the country’s approach to labor.

While the Western media has been uncritically spitting out news of Mubarak’s plans to hand his position over to his son Gamal, it has completely ignored this extraordinary working class uprising; the only coverage thus far in the U.S. was a February article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Three months ago American investors were licking their lips at the thought of unregulated trade in Egypt, but they must now be shaking in their well-heeled shoes at the thought of what the nation’s workers are capable of. If what we are now witnessing in Egypt continues full force, it could inspire an increased resistance to free-market capitalism and exploitation not just in the Middle East, but in all countries facing the devastating impact to workers’ rights that such policies bring. The U.S. labor movement, with bureaucratic, ineffective unions of its own, should also take note of this struggle. American workers have for years been woefully passive as companies relocate overseas and union officials wring their hands and shrug; they play into xenophobia and racism, blaming fellow workers in other countries rather than the institutions responsible. The American working class can learn a valuable lesson through solidarity with Egypt’s striking workers: neither the government nor the unions will protect your rights; you must unite and demand them. Ahha! We will not compromise.

SIGNIFICANT STRIKES, DECEMBER 2006 - MARCH 2007

Artificial Silk Factory and El-Beda Factory, 9,000 strike.

Demand unpaid 45-day bonus.

Cairo Poultry Company, 3,000 strike

Strike over unpaid bonuses, lack of compensation for bird flu risk.

Ghazl Shebeen el-Koum Textile Factory 3,000 occupy factory, 4,000 strike.

Strike for 45-day bonus. 4,000 workers employed by factory; not a single strike-breaker.

Ghazl el-Mahalla Spinning and Weaving Co., 27,000 strike.

Demand, and receive, 45-day bonus. Call for impeachment of union officials; reject “compromise” plan. Incite many of the strikes that follow.

Ghazl Meit Ghamr Textile Factory, 1,900 strike.

Call for an end to “witch-hunting” of organizers after seventeen workers are fired. Demand re-election of Factory Union Committee, non-renewal of contracts with “consultants” who have failed to improve working conditions, improved medical care.

Helwan and Tora cement plants, 3,000 occupy company headquarters.

Demand 45-day bonus.

Kafr el-Dawwar textile factory, 11,700 occupy factory.

Strike for share of revenue from privatization, improved medical care, end to promotion freeze, 45-day bonus. Union official refers to strikers as “terrorists”! State Security attempted to starve workers out of factory; workers did not back down and bread was thrown by ropes from outside supporters. Won raise of meal allowance from LE32 to LE45 monthly (back-paid 7 months), 21-day bonus, end to promotion freeze, pay for days on strike, new company ambulance and overview of health and safety provisions.

Misr Shebin al-Kom Spinning and Weaving Co., 3,000 occupy factory; 42,000 strike.

Strike for promised 140-day bonus, prior to privatization by IndoRama. 100 workers on hunger strike.

Samanoud Textile Factory, 13,000 strike.

Demand increase of monthly food allowance to LE43, demand bonus. Management capitulates after just two hours.

Three Nile Delta textile factories, 21,000 strike.

Strike for better pay and promotions.

EGYPT O

21st century

2011-01-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

It'll take me a while to get everything set up here, but eventually this site will be an archive of essays and drawings, and new work as I go along. For now, here are a few photos from Bless This Mess at Gallery 400.

The show is up until March 12th, 2011, with work by Lee Relvas, Jail Flanagan, Edie Fake, and myself.

Gallery 400 is at 400 S. Peoria. Edie and Lee will perform on March 2nd, and there are lectures between now and then by Eileen Myles, A.A. Bronson, and others.

And here's one from Hey, We're All Beginners Here! (with Mike Wolf, Salem Collo-Julin, Sarah Kavage, and others) at Roots and Culture in August 2010.