A Kiss on the Wrist

I read the book Mayflower Madam a lot of years ago. It's subtitle is "The Secret Life of Sydney Biddle Barrows."

Eventually, she was busted and charged with running a prostitution ring. So one of the first things she and her lawyer did was announced they would like to call all the LAWYERS who were clients of theirs as witnesses and ask them if they had hired prostitutes from her escort service and paid for sex or if they had hired companionship by the hour as she claimed and which is perfectly legal.

The judge in the case quickly realized that if they called a long list of New York lawyers to testify and those lawyers lawyered up, this one case could freeze up the entire New York City legal system for months and have repercussions for years. So they slapped her with some kind of minimal fine and got her the HELL out of there without really trying her.

This was dubbed a "Kiss on the wrist" instead of a slap on the wrist in local articles. It's an obscure legal term you have probably not heard before.

I'm for the decriminalization of prostitution. While trying to sort my personal baggage from being molested as a kid, I read a lot of books and articles about things like prostitution and infidelity in my teens and twenties and I did my best to find things based on high quality studies or firsthand experience.

Dolores French's autobiography "Working: My life as a prostitute." is another such work. 

She was a political activist* before choosing to "get more of a life" after an accident had her life flashing before her eyes and as a consequence ultimately deciding to become a sex worker at age 27 if I recall correctly. She continued to be politically active and turned those skills towards the rights of sex workers.

If you want to know what I mean by decriminalization, please get her book and read it. I've seen the words decriminalization and legalization used to mean different things in different online discussions. 

My recollection is that she basically wanted no laws against prostitution. She felt that legalization would be worse than what we have currently because it involves a lot of bureaucratic BS where the working girls get tested, tightly controlled and so forth worse than what typically happens currently in our system that actively aids and abets human traffickers because a woman who is the trafficked slave of a pimp cannot seek assistance from the police without admitting SHE is breaking the law.

Sydney Biddle Barrows was fired from a fashion job because she had more ethics than her new boss who began buying garbage to take kickbacks. Barrows was naive and confronted her boss instead of finding a means to report it to someone above her.

She then worked the phones for a call girl service and was appalled by the behavior of her boss who was obnoxious to clients and workers alike. She said something to a friend about "I could do a better job than him by just doing the opposite of everything he does." and ultimately decided that wasn't mere snark, quit and started her own call girl service.

Prostitution is frequently called a victimless crime. Barrows and her lawyer gaming the system with this ploy and garnering "a kiss on the wrist" is almost certainly rooted in the fact that no one really cares if well-paid men pay for sex.

If it had been a serious crime, the courts likely would have responded to this tactic some other way. The existence of this obscure legal term is evidence that our laws don't really reflect our values. When push comes to shove, you can politely tell the courts to piss off and they will.

Not because they have no other choice. But because whatever the law says, society doesn't really feel that strongly that someone paying for sex is being "bad."

I'm not a legal expert. Lots of laws are poorly written and have perverse incentives.

People frequently suggest that laws against prostitution are intended to protect women. In practice, they create problems for women.

Sex is a difficult thing to make good laws about. People don't really want to have those conversations. This discomfort is likely a strong factor in the relevant laws routinely being terrible at accomplishing what people claim they are trying to accomplish.

I'm a survivor of incest twice over. I really don't talk much about sex per se. I never have.

I don't talk a lot of sexual positions or what people do in bed. But I do talk a lot about social dynamics involved in sexual relationships and this fact substantially contributes to me being banished to social cyberia online.

I make people intensely uncomfortable with talking about things like money related to sexual relationships and career impacts of heteronormative culture. I get open hatred from people who typically frame it as me talking about SEX like I'm running an extreme hard porn site showing explicit films of all the Verboten sex acts.

Because I say things like "And I thought about moving to Texas to be near my sorta boyfriend and there were no colleges nearby that really served my needs and I decided if we aren't married, I'm not moving for a man and I'm never living with a man outside of marriage."

I'm a former homemaker. I was financially dependent on my husband. I had significant challenges in trying to figure out how to leave my marriage because he essentially owned me as chattel property and I had no real choice but to think a lot about money and logistics related to romantic relationships because being a Good Woman TM and playing by all the old fashioned rules of good wife and mom meant I was in no position to adequately support myself.

I have strong opinions about women being FOOLS to live with a man without being married and do the women's work in the relationship while having no rights to his income that she is defacto helping to build.

And people tend to not like hearing what I have to say.

Women currently typically get most of their income via marriage or whatever boyfriend they are living with. Most couples seem to largely view that as him paying for sex while discounting her contribution to his career and the value of all the women's work she does.

Women who want to imagine "I have a JOB, so I'm LIBERATED!" tend to absolutely HATE me with a fury because I handed off the cooking to my son when I got divorced and got a corporate job. Most women, no matter what their job title or income, are still doing the women's work at home.

I don't think it's possible to make progress on women's rights without finding some means to update our laws and attitudes about "paying for sex" and the raft load of heteronormative assumptions that make that idea so triggering for so many people.

Footnote 

* Political activist may not be the best term. She had a job she hated working on political campaigns. She was good at it, but wasn't happy.