These are the notes for a presentation I made as a member of a panel at The New School In New York City on November 11, 1998. The panel was titled "Policing Desire in the Naked City" and concerned the zoning regulation passed in October of 1998, which was designed to restrict strip joints and adult media stores from operating within 500 feet of churches, schools, residences, and each other. The intention of the city council was to close those establishments which violated the regulation. I had been following the progress of the regulation through appeals courts and had been attending protests organized through Sex Panic, NY.
The other panelists were Harold Price Fahringer, Amber Hollibaugh, Terry Williams, and Jonathan Capeheart. The panel was moderated by the editor of Out Magazine.
I am here to say three things: 1) that workers involved in the production and performance of sexually explicit media are routinely discriminated against in our society in the way that many ethnic groups and people with alternative sexualities are discriminated against; 2) that the prejudices against these workers are based on the incorrect assumption that erotic media has the negative secondary effects so often attributed to it and to the establishments which provide it; and 3) that discrimination against those involved in the production and performance of erotic media indicates a level of low tolerance for other stigmatized groups, while it lowers the quality of life for all.
I would like to define a few terms from Sociology 101. The first is "master status." This is the status by which a person is primarily identified. In our society it is customary to identify a person by his or her form of employment. If one person asks another, "What are you?" or "What do you do?" the person will generally respond by stating their occupation. The obvious importance of a master status indicates that prejudices against one's employment can create enormous problems. A prejudice is here defined as a rigid generalization about a category of people. Discrimination is the practice of treating various categories of people unequally and is often the result of a prejudice, although it may also occur from rational preferences. In this presentation I will be referring to discrimination based on prejudice, which is also known as bigotry.
When a person is a sex worker, this often constitutes his or her master status. I am using the term "sex worker" here to describe anyone involved in the adult entertainment industry (a term which has itself recently come under some definitional scrutiny, via Judge Stephen Crane). This includes not only the most visible workers, the performers themselves, but the owners, managers, bartenders, bouncers, DJs, waitresses, vendors, photographers, producers, printers, distributors, and so on. This definition is operational only for the purpose of my presentation, as sex workers are more often generally defined as those participating visibly in erotic performance-strippers, porn actresses, dominatrices, and so on.
Sex worker status is unique in that it is an achieved, that is, a chosen status, as long as it is known only to the sex worker and his or her co-workers. However, once it becomes known to those outside the industry, it becomes an ascribed, or involuntary status, in the sense that it creates an indelible stigma against the worker in the perception of the prejudiced observer. The prejudice may include assumptions that the sex worker is unreliable, uneducated, sexually abused, drug-addicted, mentally ill, morally corrupt, ethically bankrupt, criminally inclined, and so on.
I am going to describe three different instances of discrimination for you. You should be able to determine the validity of these examples from prejudices you have observed, or from feelings you yourself may have about how you would respond as the person in the situation who has the power to discriminate.
The first instance of discrimination is that of a stripper who had a flawless credit history and had been working at the same bar continuously for five years. Yet her loan applications for an automobile, entailing loan payments of $160 a month and comprehensive insurance payments of about $70 per month, were rejected on the grounds that her employment was unstable. She decided it was easier to get a co-signer than to dispute the rejections.
A bartender who had worked at a strip joint found himself unable to get employment for which he was eminently qualified when he applied at bars which did not feature erotic entertainment. When he got a friend from another lesser-known bar which was NOT a strip joint to claim that he was his former employer, he found his application accepted at several bars at once.
A stripper who owned her own home and car, was active in the PTA, and worked day shift lost custody of her child to her unemployed ex-husband. She got a different kind of job, appealed the case, and won. Then she went back to stripping to pay her debts to her lawyer.
These are all true stories of discrimination and bigotry. (I am not, at this point, describing the prejudices some sex workers in need of law enforcement often experience.) Sex workers are perceived as socially and morally dysfunctional, so much so that they are often considered a detriment to their own communities. Sex workers are not adjacent to a community-they are part of the community in which they live, work, shop, and raise their children. When a sex worker's job is compromised, the quality of his or her life is compromised. For a sex worker to lose his or her job is no different than for you to lose yours. If you support this regulation, you must at least feel some sympathy for the tens of thousands of people whose jobs are threatened. How could you not, knowing what a job means to a person?
The prejudice against workers in the erotic entertainment industry stems from a social bias against the industry itself. Pornography is blamed for everything from rape to a decline in property values in the neighborhoods where it is sold. Neither Nixon's 1970 Committee on Obscenity and Pornography nor the 1986 Meese Commission, both of which were created for the specific purpose of finding causal relationships between pornography and violence, were able to find evidence of such. Both commissions were heavily biased in their intentions to find these causal relationships and still were unable to do so-another waste of taxpayers' money. As for property values, it remains to be seen whether the owners of such businesses frequently find it easier to be granted leases in neighborhoods which are, shall we say, less elite to begin with. In the case of this particular zoning regulation, it was not proven that the presence of these businesses was lowering property values (which do not seem to be dropping in New York, anyway), nor that it was preventing them from rising. At any rate, the fluctuation of property values is unpredictable at best, as many real estate agents can (but probably won't) attest when their expert opinions are proven wrong by actual selling prices. "There goes the neighborhood" is hardly a fit sentiment upon which to base legislation.
Obviously, then, the demonizing and scapegoating of pornography and erotic entertainment for all of society's ills is based on prejudice, not proof. Actual historic precedent indicates that the quality of life, with particular emphasis on the enjoyment of personal safety and civil liberties, is often higher when sexually explicit media is allowed to circulate than the quality of life when such media is proscribed. During periods of intensive censorship it is invariably true that women, ethnic groups, religious groups not of the predominant faith, and gays experience open persecution and a decline in quality of life. Intolerance of sexually explicit media has coincided with the refusal to allow women to vote (as in the United States during Comstock's reign), the criminalization of abortion and homosexuality (as under Mussolini's reign in Italy in the 1920s), and enforced segregation of ethnic groups (everywhere). In more extreme cases of sexual repression, as under the current Taliban regime in Afghanistan, there is no pornography industry at all, and women in the society are forced to wear veils whenever they leave their homes, while homosexuals are subject to the death penalty. I say this not to suggest that pornography is conducive to civil rights or a less sexist society, but to point out that discrimination against it tends to be indicative of a general intolerance of civil liberties and tolerance of diversity.
The difficulty of writing anti-pornography and anti-erotic-entertainment legislation without infringing upon constitutional and civil rights has been exposed repeatedly. This may very well be because censorship of sexually explicit material is in fact unconstitutional and a defiance of civil liberties. Intolerance of sexual expression always reflects intolerance of alternative lifestyles and minorities.
That equal opportunity for ethnic groups and sexual minorities is a positive factor in the quality of human life can hardly be disputed. If sex workers are counted as a minority-and because they number in the hundreds of thousands across the United States alone, they are not a small enough minority to be simply dismissed-- it can be seen that the prejudices and discrimination against them represented in this legislation contribute to no one's quality of life.
Remember, intolerance breeds hate crimes. And you don't have to be a fag or a dyke or a whore to be the victim of a hate crime; all you have to do is appear to be one. If you support this regulation, take a good look at us-we are the people your children don't dare resemble. Is segregating yourselves from us worth the price?
Definitions of sociological terms from Society: The Basics, by John J. Macionis, 2nd Edition.
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