By Josh DuBose
July 17, 2018
LOS ANGELES – Adult film performer Siouxsie Q. James’s style, a mash-up of the all-American pinup girl and classic dominatrix – call it Betty Boop turned Goth Mistress – stands in contrast to her effervescent personality and friendly laugh. She’s also dedicated to fighting for the rights of sex workers.
“I’m making soup while we talk sex-workers rights. I hope you don’t mind,” she says on the phone from her San Fernando Valley apartment, in Los Angeles.
The valley, in local parlance, is a sprawling 260 square mile area of Los Angeles. It’s the pornography capitol of the country, at home in a state with the greatest number of human trafficking cases in the nation and a city that lays claim to the highest number of reported child sex trafficking cases than any other.
James primarily stars in adult films these days, but got her start in the business of sex at the Lusty Lady Theater, a unionized peep show in San Francisco. She also worked as a prostitute before moving to Los Angeles. Originally from Northern California, James will only say she’s a late 20’s, 30-something college graduate. But she considers herself a third-generation feminist on her mother and grandmother’s side and a labor organizer on her father’s.
As a board member on the Adult Performer’s Protection Committee, James and her fellow advocates are speaking out against anti-human trafficking legislation they feel exposes sex workers, both consensual and nonconsensual, to even greater danger from johns, pimps, traffickers and law enforcement. There’s very little support, however, for protecting people who work in a shadowy industry that, in the majority of cases, is illegal.
“In the United States where sex work is actively criminalized and brings a big stigma with it, sex-workers have an incredibly difficult time accessing justice or reporting [trafficking] crimes they’ve witnessed. SESTA made it worse,” James says.
The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 (SESTA), signed by President Trump in April, allows law enforcement to charge websites, such as Craigslist, MyRedbook and Backpage, sites where prostitutes, pimps and traffickers could buy ads to promote their services, with the facilitation of prostitution.
Previous to SESTA, websites that hosted “adult” classifieds relied on section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which protected them from third-party speech on their platforms. The argument being that a website couldn’t be held responsible for ads customers paid for and posted on their sites. That liability shield is now gone.
Craigslist took action before SESTA passed. The company pulled its “adult services” classifieds in 2010 and their “personals” section in March 2018. In 2014, authorities were able shutdown MyRedbook, the site James used to advertise her services, after an investigation revealed money laundering and interstate racketeering, according to the federal indictment. The owner of MyRedbook was sentenced to 13 months in prison. In April of this year, just weeks before SESTA was signed into law, federal authorities shutdown Backpage and charged the owners, as well as five of their employees, with several crimes, including the facilitation of prostitution.
Anti-trafficking advocates and politicos on both sides of the aisle lauded the passage of SESTA, believing the bill makes it more difficult for human traffickers to do their business. James disagrees.
“What people don’t understand is that consensual sex-workers are now the most vulnerable people to trafficking,” she says. “I’m looking at [SESTA] like, ‘Alright, Siouxsie Q., where am I going to get clients? Do I have to get a pimp now? Really, America?'”
She explains that for prostitutes, Backpage, MyRedbook and Craigslist made the job of traffickers and pimps less important because sex-workers were able to advertise their services directly to customers and keep all the money they earned.
The internet also offered what James describes as time, space and scrutiny, which gave sex-workers the ability to screen potential clients for safety concerns. Some high-end prostitution websites, according to James, kept blacklists that members could access to see whether or not a potential john had been violent in the past or refused to pay. James says she would sometimes ask a new customer for references from other girls on a particular site or, if all else failed, pay for an online background check on the individual.
“This is all informal stuff. These are survival techniques in a world that wants us dead. So it’s not and has never been a failsafe, but it’s all we have,” says James.
Another issue that James and critics of SESTA point out is that taking down sites that host ads for the illicit sale of sex makes it more difficult for law enforcement officials to monitor and arrest the worst offenders – child sex traffickers – as easily as before.
“If we hope to locate individuals using advertisements to sell [victims] to clients, then shutting down Backpage is going to be harmful to trafficking prevention because that’s one way that police and others could locate traffickers,” says Barbara Brents, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland, Brents explains that under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, a victim of human trafficking is anyone induced to perform labor or a sex act through force, fraud or coercion. Based on that definition and the available research, says Brents, the proportion of trafficked victims in the commercial sex industry is relatively small, though Brents adds that no one can really define “small” because there’s not a national registry of sex-workers. Additionally, proponents of SESTA tend to assume there’s coercion, whether physical, emotional or economic, in all prostitution and sex work. Brents doesn’t share that assumption.
“When you ask the majority of men and women in sex-work, they say they’re doing this by choice,” she says. “The unfortunate thing is that for people with the least resources, sex-work seems to be among the only reasonable alternatives. The way to solve that problem is not to get rid of prostitution, the only way they have to earn money, but to make that safer and better.”
If there’s any common ground between sex-workers rights advocates and their pro-SESTA opponents, it’s that victims of trafficking and prostitutes shouldn’t be criminalized. That’s where the agreement ends, however, because neither side approaches the issue with the same outcome in mind.
Shea Rhodes, the founder and director of the Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, doesn’t see a way to make the commercial sex industry safer or better without the continued exploitation of women and children. Rhodes, by her own admission, is a lawyer and not a researcher, though she has worked with and advocated for hundreds of trafficking survivors. Her argument for stopping the sale of commercial sex gets at the core of two long-held societal mores: prostitution is the oldest profession and a victimless crime.
“I would say prostitution is the oldest oppression and the reason why everybody knows of those two sayings is because the patriarchy, those people who have spewed this propaganda based on what they believe is their entitlement to sex. We need to stand up and say human beings are not a commodity to be purchased for men’s sexual pleasure. It’s dangerous. It’s violent. There are lasting physical and mental consequences,” Rhodes says.
It makes little sense to Rhodes and her allies to engage in harm-reduction measures, such as allowing prostitutes to use Backpage or other websites to screen clients. They feel that the only solution is harm-elimination. SESTA, which Rhodes lobbied extensively for, is a good first step because it goes after the buyers and sellers – johns and pimps – instead of criminalizing the sex-worker or victims of trafficking.
“I don’t believe that policies should be formulated and dictated based on a very limited percentage of the population. We need policies to protect the marginalized, those that don’t have a voice and that’s what this new law is accomplishing,” she says.
Rhodes’s organization promotes the Nordic Model approach to prostitution, which decrim
inalizes workers in the commercial sex industry and goes after the consumers of these services in an effort to drive down demand. While consenting adult sex-workers, like James, take issue with this approach, some human trafficking specialists in law enforcement endorse it.
“Criminalizing the consumer – the driving force of this exploitative model – as we have criminalized traffickers is something we need to do in the U.S. to tackle this problem. We also need to provide robust exit services for those who sell sex and continue to fight corporatized sex-trafficking, both at the street level and online,” says Marian Hatcher, the senior project manager and human trafficking coordinator at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, in Chicago.
Hatcher doesn’t believe that websites, such as Backpage or MyRedbook, offered any protection to sex-workers because prostitution, whether it’s “indoors” or “outdoors,” is inherently violent, she says. Hatcher also doesn’t believe the assertion that SESTA will make it more difficult for law enforcement to arrest human traffickers.
“The illegal trafficking and prostitution market requires visibility for it to be found by buyers and cannot thrive if it goes to the dark web where consumers can’t find it,” she says.
Despite their disagreements, both factions express an understanding that their opponents are working in good faith, that they’re well-meaning even if they’ll forever be two opposing magnetic fields.
Both sides also acknowledged the irony of SESTA being signed into law by a president embroiled in a high profile scandal with adult film performer Stephanie Clifford, who performs under the name Stormy Daniels. Trump is also accused of sexual harassment by at least 19 other women and has the worst track-record regarding the treatment of women than any other president in modern history.
From her valley apartment, James continues to tackle issues of safety and stigma in the sex-industry on her podcast, The Whore Cast, and is committed to bringing endless optimism and hope to the fight for sex-workers rights. Though she calls SESTA the biggest hit of her career and says it’s a dark time to be a sex-worker in America, James confesses that she has it better than a lot of other people in the sex-industry.
“I acknowledge that I come to sex work from a place of incredible privilege. I’m very blessed in that capacity, but the social algebra still applies. In this line of work, I can’t go to the police for protection. Even if I could, I’m going to have a much easier time than a transgender woman of color who works the streets, who is more likely to be trafficked,” she says. “It’s a very scary time and something has to shift. We need to move towards decriminalization. People are dying.”