Listen, everyone should care about Stormy Daniels. She is a witty and charming adult industry performer, who has long been embroiled in a serious legal scandal with a sitting president whom we'd all like to oust. However, we also need to care about her—and other sex workers—even when they aren't politically convenient to us.
Everyone should take issue with the police state attempting to intimidate and silence her with arrest, and not just because we want Daniels to speak out about crimes committed by the Trump campaign team. We need to care because law enforcement often uses arrests and bullying tactics against sex workers as a means of silencing them, and taking away their measures of safety.
Sex work is a broad industry, encapsulating many different types of careers—most of which are legal in the United States. Strippers, phone sex operators, performers in pornographic films, kink service providers (dominatrices being the most commonly known kind), and escorts all fall under this umbrella, along with many others. Many sex workers hold a variety of these jobs, or combine them with other mundane part- or full-time positions.
Society's entire relationship with sex work is a hypocritical one. We create the demand for this specialized labor, only to then demonize and denigrate anyone who specializes in that field. This is especially true in communities that are already marginalized. We’ve created employment conditions where transgender people face rates of unemployment that are three times higher than the average U.S. worker (even higher if you are both trans and a person of color). In one- half of the U.S., it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on gender identity, and in the rest it is incredibly challenging to legally prove an intent to discriminate. With such limited opportunities in the non-sex job market, sex work is often a means of survival for trans people who have been excluded or ejected from other work environments. Sex work offers a means of income that isn't guarded by prejudiced hiring managers, or dependent on expensive credentials from institutions that are also free to discriminate.
We have created these working conditions as a society, so it’s our fault that these people cannot gain or keep "traditional" jobs. Yet, if you've ever watched TV in the past 30 years, odds are you've seen a transgender sex worker serving as one of two plot devices: a transphobic joke or a corpse.
This is not an argument that all sex workers find their work rewarding and empowering, and we shouldn’t make that demand of any other laborer in today's society. Sex work is work—but it’s labor that has been unfairly maligned and entirely associated with illegal trafficking, while other fields that benefit from trafficked labor go entirely unregulated and ignored. All the same, sex work is work—work that requires specialized emotional and physical labor, for which America has a steady demand for, and deeply ingrained stigma against.
There is also a contradiction among Democrats regarding sex workers. Sex workers are often celebrated as political pawns or tools when they provide political cannon fodder, such as when a right-wing Bible-thumper is caught with a male escort. In the case of Stormy Daniels, she is right in the middle of a legal scandal that means trouble for President Trump, from multiple angles. At the same time that Democrats are celebrating Stormy and her involvement in this case, they continue to punish her, and all of her colleagues, just for being sex workers. Democrats in Congress take victory laps on legislation and legal actions that leave sex workers without work or access to the safety measures protecting them from violent clients.
The FOSTA-SESTA package (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, respectively) was signed into law this April, after breezing through the Senate, opposed only by Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rand Paul of Kentucky. On its surface, it's an easy piece of legislation to support. Sex trafficking is a black-and-white issue. Forcing someone into the sex trade using physical threat, blackmail, or any other type of coercion is morally bankrupt. Evil, even. Defining and policing sex trafficking, however, is a much more complicated issue.
Over a span of two decades, the Christian right has reached across the aisle and found ready partners among liberal feminists in a common goal: abolishing all forms of prostitution, as an ostensible necessity to battling sex trafficking. Early stages of this fight focused in on the language of laws against human trafficking, specifically the phrase "forced prostitution." The argument: all forms of sex work are inherently forced and oppressive to the women (their focus) who undertake them. Conservative thinkers spotted an issue that had long been divisive among feminists and turned it into a humanitarian undertaking. These coalitions even appropriate the language of previous human rights struggles, labeling themselves as “abolitionists.”
The reality is that consensual sex workers had built up communities—like Backpage—and whisper networks designed to minimize the risk and exploitation they face. While FOSTA-SESTA has been described as a tool for battling sex trafficking in online spaces, sex worker advocates insist its reach goes far beyond that, making it a federal crime to post a solicitation ad online. Charges could even be levied at workers who use such sites to exchange life-saving information, such as "bad date lists"—private warnings among sex workers about clients who are known to scam, push boundaries, physically abuse, or even rape their service providers. These legal threats only serve to make trafficking victims that much harder to reach for social workers, outreach organizations, and legitimate rescue attempts.
Like any other kind of abuse, trafficking thrives when victims can be isolated. Without free Internet forums, sex workers of all kinds will lose access to resources that can help them to both survive and thrive.
Websites that have been shut down in the wake of FOSTA-SESTA (ranging from Backpage to Craigslist personals to certain subreddits) were once places where sex workers could post free or cheap ads, and organize for their own safety. The loss of these sites means sex workers no longer have the ready means to screen clients, and frequently have to turn to street work. Street work means screening clients on the fly, relying on their own instincts or word of mouth. Being unable to offer in-calls (wherein the sex worker hosts the client, often at a hotel) also means being far more vulnerable to arrest and mistreatment by the police.
Stormy Daniels isn't the only sex worker facing law enforcement intimidation in strip clubs, either. In January, New Orleans police and other agencies raided eight strip clubs, under the guise of battling human trafficking. Miraculously, no arrests on human trafficking charges were made. Hundreds of performers lost their primary income source, though, and were openly humiliated by officers.
Those who resisted were handcuffed and many described being ridiculed, degraded, and molested by cops. In response to stripper’s protests of the conduct of all-male officers during the raids, they laughed and replied “You lost your right to decency when you became a stripper.” This sentiment is not new to us, as it’s the response we get from many people in our lives.
Raids like these have long been law enforcement’s favored method to "rescue" trafficked persons. Nearly a decade before our country’s current conflicts with the agency, ICE was conducting human trafficking raids, and if those "rescued" didn't immediately identify themselves as trafficked, they could face prostitution charges and deportation. Even the law enforcement officers involved in these raids acknowledge that those arrested were shocked and overwhelmed, unlikely to be in a space to cooperate with investigators after such a traumatic event.
While we cheer Stormy Daniels from the sidelines, we must not leave other sex workers out of our politics. Let us remember that precious few sex workers live the life that Daniels does, with political connections, publicity, money, and infrastructure that keep her safe. Even with all these privileges, she is still harassed by police. The sex workers who don't have her connections are just as worthy of dignity and respect by our community. Our care and concern for Stormy Daniels, and other sex workers, shouldn't begin and end with their usefulness in taking down our political opponents.
If you want to learn more about the fight against FOSTA-SESTA by sex trafficking survivors themselves, check out the works of Survivors Against SESTA.