 It might be the oldest profession, but prostitution and other forms of sex work are also among the most prohibited and heavily regulated around the world. At the latest reason to speak easy, a monthly live event in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking, I talked with Caitlin Bailey, the founder and head of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation and sexual freedom. Bailey and Old Pros seek not just to decriminalize sex work, but to de-stigmatize it too, arguing that sex workers across the centuries have not only provided a much-in-demand service, but helped to push the boundaries of freedom and liberty. Caitlin, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So let's get started by talking about what is Old Pros? Yeah. Old Pros is a nonprofit media organization, and we are focused on creating the conditions to change the social and legal status of sex workers. And we believe that by changing the story, we can change laws and policies. Okay. So it's magical thinking. A little bit. Yes. You know, policy, flowing downstream of culture and narrative change, you know, it's... What are your activities? Well, we produce a ton of content. So we produce the oldest profession podcast where we, you know, partner with professional historians and do a deep dive on different sex workers from history. This has been a really powerful tool for reminding folks, especially legislators, that sex workers have always been contributing members of communities. I have a one-woman show, Horside View, that is a, you know, 75-minute lecture covering 10,000 years of history from a sex worker's perspective. We've produced a ton of one-pagers and talking points that we widely distribute amongst allied organizations. And we host events. We had our first live event last night, the Old Pros show. And I'm thrilled to announce that we sold out. That's great. You've sold out? You mean you sold all the tickets? Yeah, we sold all the tickets. Yes. Although I guess prostitutes, like, like rock, or they're not rock stars. They don't mind selling out. Well, I mean, yes. Right? That's the point. I don't know for sure. But, you know, some people do that to avoid selling out. That's right. Okay. So let's talk about the Old Pros or the oldest profession podcast. When you say you talk about history, you know, who was the most recent guest and what were you talking about? Sure. So we cover Old Pros from history. So we don't have guests yet, but we hope to do that next season. We talk mostly about dead people. But we covered Lizzie Lape, who was this incredible prolific madam in Ohio. She ran a network and she was really one of the first generations, a member of the first generation of women to be able to keep their property after a divorce. And so she was able to build her empire as an entrepreneur and a sex worker. This 19th century? Yeah. This is early 19th century. She was born, she was a young child in the beginning of the Civil War. So yeah. Late 19th century. Was prostitution legal then? Or? It's complicated. The network wasn't criminalized in this country until the Progressive Era. We criminalized prostitution, alcohol, and abortion actually all at the same time. Because each leads to the next, right? Yes. That was the theory of many. It's not a bad theory. Yeah. Sorry. To do it, because abortion and contraception is almost as old as the oldest profession, it's actually, it is interesting. They do go together. Sex workers have been sharing knowledge about how to both encourage and limit pregnancy for literally all of human history. When we talk about sex work, can you, because I know this will come up, there's a, you know, when we talk about drug legalization, we talk about mostly about legalization, not decriminalization. When we talk about sex work, decriminalization and legalization are different and distinct things. Can you just lay that out? Absolutely. The big difference between, you know, drugs and sex workers is that, you know, sex workers are service providers. We're not commodities. So, you know, we can't be governed and regulated in the same way. And so what we found with legalization, it actually really reduces the negotiating power of providers and doesn't lead to good results. Nevada, I think, is the best example. It's the only state in the country with legal regulated prostitution, and it has the highest arrest rate per capita for prostitution-related offenses. So can you walk through that, though? In Nevada, there's, what, one or two counties that allow? Yeah. There are a few rural counties. The rule is that any county with more than 700,000 residents is barred from having a legally licensed brothel. So it is impossible to work legally where the highest demand is. But the other problem is that in order to work as a legally licensed prostitute in Nevada, you have to register with the sheriff's department. You have to put yourself on a stigmatized list. This becomes subpoenable for the rest of your life. You can imagine how this comes up in child custody cases. You also have to work at a brothel. You know, you pay room and board, you're giving the house 50%, and they don't really provide a lot of services. Brothels are not legally allowed to advertise. So, you know, it's really kind of a silly situation, and more importantly, as a legally licensed prostitute in Nevada, when your shift ends, you can't just go to a bar or go to the movies or go out about town. Your freedom of movement is limited because you are a legally licensed prostitute, because all of these laws were created with the idea of containing and controlling sex workers and protecting the local communities from them. When did prostitution make up? 1970s. At that point, it was seen probably, though, as a leap forward for progressive or liberal or tolerance or something, right? Well, it's interesting. I mean, Nevada has a very interesting history. Nobody was paying attention to the law criminalizing prostitution before its legalization. And so, its legalization actually created a state-enforced monopoly that benefited sort of a small number of license holders, and really to the exclusion not just of other brothel, you know, operators, but also of independent sex workers. And it has no real effect on prostitution, right? I mean, it has effects, but it doesn't stop it in the counties with more than 700,000 people in Las Vegas. Nothing we've ever done has stopped the oldest profession. Yeah. Well, and again, that's an interesting parallel with drug prohibition. You know, you can prohibit everything, and it doesn't mean you stop the behavior. So what is decriminalization, and how is it distinct from legalization? Sure. Decriminalization means removing criminal penalties from adult consensual sex work, right? And so, you know, this means that nobody is arrested, evicted, fired, or loses custody of their children just for engaging in this work, right? It doesn't legalize rape. It doesn't legalize kidnapping. It doesn't legalize any of the harms around exploitation. It makes it easier, actually, for victims of these crimes to report crimes committed against them because they themselves are no longer in violation of the law. Legalization, however, creates a legal or regulatory process that people have to go through in order to engage in prostitution legally. So it creates a barrier to access. It inevitably creates a two-tiered system. And what we've found is that it doesn't do much to reduce, you know, threats of violence against the most vulnerable. It's important to create a system where if somebody wakes up on a random day and just decides to engage in prostitution, and something bad happens to them, that they're able to report that crime that they committed, even if they didn't fill out a license, even if they didn't do the right paperwork. In a decriminalization scheme, would that allow for local regulation, or where are you coming from as an organization? What kind of laws that do support? Our first priority as an organization is to stop the arrests, right? That's the most immediate harm. We've seen, you know, a lot of creative solutions. I think there are more creative solutions possible once you remove that threat of criminal penalty. I'm really impressed with the way that New Zealand has handled this. They decriminalized adult consensual prostitution in 2003, and they have, you know, local ordinances determining, you know, what is and isn't allowed in terms of public advertising. They have some really great regulations around, you know, the difference between a sole proprietor and a business, and at what point, you know, like business rules that apply to all businesses with employees. And they've done a lot of great work on the civil level increasing the negotiating power of providers for like condoms, et cetera, without creating, you know, a criminal system that punishes people for. Why did they do that? I think they just, you know, don't have the same hangups that we do around sex, you know, that the decriminalization, you know, when I think of sexual liberation, I'm not thinking of New Zealand. I think that's fair. But they don't have the same kind of, you know, puritanical background that we do. And during the AIDS epidemic in the 1970s and 1980s, they got a group of experts together and asked the question, how can we reduce HIV AIDS? And they came back with, well, we should definitely stop arresting people for having and using condoms, which is how prostitution was being enforced. And that, you know, led them down a path of asking themselves, how can we make our communities safer and healthier? And they came away with, well, we should remove the criminal penalties around adult prostitution. And it really has reduced violence and STIs. Wow. You mentioned New Zealand doesn't have the puritanical background that the US has, but New Zealand's the only country on the planet that has decriminalized prostitution. So it's not simply puritanical, you know, it's not 17th century religious doctrine that is keeping every country from legalizing prostitution. What do you see or decriminalizing it? What do you see as the main impetus to keep the oldest profession always kind of in the black or gray market? I mean, it's obviously a very old stigma, right, against, you know, sex workers, whores, you know, I trace this sort of back. Journalists. Right. Politicians. You know, I think I initially traced this back to sort of our transition from, you know, worshiping fertility goddesses essentially to a paternalistic god and the, you know, the devaluation of women's contribution. And so the sacred whore, right, the archetypal whore is a part of that denigration and we lose, you know, a lot of those stories. But I think the global suppression of prostitution can really trace its history back to the, you know, the early 20th century and World War One and World War Two, where as a part of our, you know, national policy, the, you know, the British did it with the Contagious Diseases Acts. We did it with the Draft Act and what would come to be known as the American Plan, but we deputized law enforcement to arrest not prostitutes, promiscuous women within a five mile radius of military bases trying to protect our soldiers from STIs. This was not an effective policy, you know, for its stated objective. However, we, we really globalize that because American bases and British bases, both of which had very similar policies, exported that policy all over the world. It's also tied in similar to the gag rule, right, with information about abortion. We've conflated human trafficking and adult consensual sex work for so long it's woven into our global policies. So, you know, nongovernment organizations can't get funding if they even talk about decriminalizing sex work. Could you talk about human trafficking? Because this is a story that we hear all the time that we are living through the worst moment in human trafficking. The human trafficking is everywhere. Is that wrong? Yes. It's obviously hard to get good numbers about a criminalized and stigmatized class, but, you know, according to the state department's own numbers, if you're looking at violent exploitation, the sex industry does not make the top five industries that are, you know, most responsible for the violent exploitation of vulnerable labor, it's domestic labor, it's agriculture, it's mining, it's textiles. We absolutely have a problem with exploited labor in this country. The problem is that we've made prostitution a symbol of that exploitation rather than dealing with the exploitation itself. And so by raising the negotiating power of victims, which one way to do that is to remove criminal penalties against them, would be a great way of addressing some of these root problems. But, you know, instead, we would rather focus on a scapegoat. Why is, you know, prostitution the scapegoat? That narrative really starts with the, you know, the white slave panic of the early 19th century. You know, this is sort of early 20s. Yes, excuse me, early 1900s, 20th century. It's interesting, you know, it's sort of leading up to women's suffrage. We get this moral panic around women having the freedom of movement. We've, you know, we've made the transition sort of from like demonization and witchcraft and the medieval period to sort of like disease, vectors of disease in the wake of the scientific revolution. But, you know, this begins really an unholy alliance between Christian conservatives on the one hand who are very interested in removing pornography from public places, ending access to contraception and abortion and cracking down on prostitution as a symbol of all this evil and the early feminist and temperance movement, you know, which sort of conflated prostitution, which, you know, there are a lot of horror stories that come out of a society where women don't have property rights. The, you know, their experience in sex work, you know, when you live in a society, if you, you know, if you had sex on one date, you are ruined for the rest of your life and must live in a brothel that does create ingredients for a deeply exploitative situation. But this is when you start to see the shuddering of brothels. You know, 1910 is the I'm sorry to nerd out a little bit. I can hear my I'm correcting myself in my head. The first anti-prostitution policy in the US is actually our first anti-immigration law. And that's the Page Act, which prevents people from immigrating to this country for the purposes of prostitution. And that is still one of the things if you, if you were a prostitute, you're not allowed to legally immigrate here. Correct. And that's getting really scary with facial recognition technology. As we're, you know, scraping ads, you do not have to be arrested for engaging in sex work to be denied and create a border as a known prostitute, which I think is something that we should all sit with and take very seriously. But anyway, so the Page Act introduces the language of immigrating here for immoral purposes. And then that is repeated in 1910 with the Man Act, otherwise known as the white slave law, which makes it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. And much like our anti-trafficking laws today, this was sold to the American people as a way of cracking down on white slavery, on saving, rescuing sex slaves that were being kidnapped left and right. That didn't happen. We did not rescue any sex slaves, but we did prosecute a lot of interracial relationships and we did disrupt a lot of chorus girls on their way to their next gig. You know, you mentioned the Women's Christian Temperate Union, which was one of the major forces behind prohibition, which was also a progressive capital P progressive outfit. These days, we think of people, you know, if you're religious, you're right-wing and you are, you know, anti-sex. And if you're a progressive, you are comfortable with, you know, 57 flavors of sexuality, blah, blah, blah. But in the contemporary description is wrong. But can you talk a little bit about how these, you know, back in the day, how did these forces sit with one another? Because there was also fear of immigration, fear of urbanization for the first time in the 20th century. More people were living in cities rather than the countryside. Alcohol prohibition was a big part of this because European, you know, the immigrants who were coming from Europe tended to be from Central Europe and Southern Europe. They were either Catholic or Jewish, but they drank. Yep. You know, where did that all kind of coalesce into this progressive movement that is kind of like an anti-sex movement? It is an anti-sex movement. And I think that you're absolutely right that a lot of it is centered on xenophobia, right? We see that with the Page Act, right? We see that with a lot of the prohibitionist language. We see that with the even the way that, you know, on the one hand, you know, sex workers from, you know, China or the Easter coming and infecting and corrupting our cities. And also on the other hand, the traffickers, right, like always an immigrant, right, who's coming and representing an existential threat. And we do see a lot of anxiety around sexual behavior at this time, you know, the bicycle is invented and that gives women just an unprecedented freedom of movement that like upsets dads across the country. The automobile is, you know, shortly followed and there's a massive, you know, migration, right from the country into cities where you have access to bars and music and in nightlife that often gets conflated and is also deeply connected to sex work. So how you started old pros in 2020 in 2020, which was a weird year to start in the fall of 2020. Yes, it was. So, you know, we're going through a global pandemic. And I guess you're like, well, I got nothing else to do. So I'll start a sex worker right. It's, yeah, my trajectory, I come to this work by way of stand-up comedy, right? I was a stand-up comic for, you know, over a decade traveling the country, being very happy, trading, you know, beer for stories. And I started the oldest profession podcast in my capacity as a stand-up comic. I, you know, was excited to finally use my degree and it was something that I had a natural interest in. What was your degree? History. Yeah. And so, you know, and I wrote my senior thesis on the economic structure of brothels from, you know, leading up to women's suffrage. And so it's always been an area of interest in mind. I have done sex work a few times in my life, but I started it as a comic, you know, I was reading, reading Wikipedia and mouthing off and then Cesta Foster passed. And so. Can you unpack that? Absolutely. Explain the the acronym. Sure. Yes. So in in April of 2018, Donald Trump signed one of the most popular bipartisan pieces of legislation called Cesta Foster, which stands for Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. This was sold again to the American people as a way of saving vulnerable children from sexual exploitation. Amy Schumer did, you know, several commercials about it. You know, my mom was convinced that this was a moral imperative. And our the solution was to remove the places that sex workers had been using to schedule and screen our clients for decades. This is when Backpage is seized by the FBI. This is when Craigslist Erotic Services goes away. And I saw sort of the immediate detrimental impact that that was having on my peers. And I can say with authority and there have been many follow up studies. This law didn't make anyone safer. It pushed sex work further underground. Law enforcement has come out in many places talking about how much more difficult it is to find victims of exploitation and to prosecute them. You know, Backpage has a long and well documented history, especially thanks to the incredible journalism of Elizabeth Nolan Brown. At Reason. Yes, at Reason. Backpage.com was a online classified ad program that did a lot on sex work. And things. Can you explain a little bit how places like Backpage or how did the internet enable safer sex work? Yeah, I think that's a great point. So I, you know, I like to sort of go back through the history of sex work, because I think it's important to understand sort of the different, you know, forces at play. Sex work is fundamentally a sales job, right? You have a service and you're looking for customers or clients to to come in and participate in the services that you're selling. And so procuring clients is an important part of our job. And so, you know, before sex work was criminalized, the overwhelming majority of sex work is happening and mostly women owned and controlled brothels, right? There was a place in town that would develop a reputation and you as a sex worker would, you know, go there and participate in a system. You could share knowledge, you know, there's a lot of good that came out of that. Madams were among the largest land owners and were hugely responsible for settling in the West. When you shutter the brothels, when you criminalize sex work, when you criminalize promiscuity, you make it impossible for sex workers to procure their own clients. This is where you need a third party manager and because of the criminalization of sex work, you need a man to navigate public spaces in order to reduce your risk of being arrested. So this is when the, you know, the pimp or the mail manager or the taxi driver or the concierge gets involved in sex work. And so what the internet did is it allowed sex workers to post their own ads and schedule and screen their own clients without having to put themselves in public spaces. So it reduced the risk either of potentially violent clients but it really reduced the risk of arrest which has always been, you know, since criminalization, that's our number one. It is kind of, you know, in the 80s and 90s as the internet came online, people talked about disintermediation, that that's what one of the power of the internet was, it was gonna get rid of middlemen and customer and, you know, our seller and buyer could deal directly. And it's interesting to think that sex work is one of the purest cases of disintermediation. Yeah, I mean, sex workers have been at the forefront of so many technological innovations, especially in communication and finance. You know, we really are cutting edge. There's a great book that just came out called How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex that documents and credits sex workers with building and popularizing much of the early internet. So are you excited about the metaverse then? That's the next stage? Or once when they get the legs down, they can work on genitals or something? Yeah, it's, I know that there's already sex work happening on the metaverse, but it's, I'm retired. What is the, well, let's talk a little bit about your experiences, you know, because this is something, you know, there's a prurient dimension to it, of course, but also, you know, how did you get into sex work and why did you do that? Sure, I came to sex work from a place of rebellion. You know, I am not a go along to get along person. I came of age during George W. Bush's second administration and abstinence only education. I remember sitting through demonstrations at my public school where religious leaders would come in and give us misinformation about our body and engaging in sex work felt like a way to both push back against that misinformation and also to sort of like reclaim my own body. And it felt, and it was also a great way to do the amount of sex that I wanted to do without developing a reputation at my school because no one could afford me. You grew up in North Carolina? Yes, yeah. Yeah, and then I came to sex work a second time in my life to subsidize my early career in comedy, which pays in exposure and would be, I think, a better example of exploitation. Yeah. Do you, one question, I get this a lot in libertarian circles is that people who participate in sex work either are traumatized and that's why they go into it or they are traumatized by engaging in it. Is that sociologically, is that accurate or? I think you're gonna make a better case for that with comedy, honestly. You know, I think that, yeah, sex workers are, I think we're a self-selected group of entrepreneurs. I think that sex work has subsidized more education and artistic careers and startups than all of the grants and all of the world combined. I know sex work as the oldest profession has always been many things to many people and it's difficult to make sort of broad statements. I think that all labor exists on a spectrum of choice, circumstance and coercion, but the criminalized nature of sex work and living with the stigma of that and navigating the world and your personal relationships from a place of being a member of a criminalized class I think can certainly have an effect, but no, I don't think that trauma is overrepresented. I think we unfortunately live in a society where there's a lot of trauma. Part of old pro's mission is not just to decriminalize but to de-stigmatize sex work. You're married, I don't know if your husband is in the audience or you might be watching, but he knows about your past. Yeah, my husband has for sure Googled me. Yeah, it's not a secret. And what goes into de-stigmatizing sex work both on a kind of social or societal level, but then also on a personal level because many people have hangups about their partner's sex lives, whether they were giving it away for free or charging top dollar. We certainly have a lot of opinions about who other people have sex with, but yeah, no, I believe that it's important to de-stigmatize sex work in general and prostitution in particular, because I think that sex workers have so much wisdom to add to the communities that we're already in. And this stigma ends up silencing us. We have so much to contribute to conversations around consent, around sexual health, around mental health and addiction, but we're not allowed to bring our full lived experience to these conversations because of the stigma. How do you de-stigmatize? I think that you tell the story of sex workers. So many incredible people have engaged in this work. The greatest pirate to ever live was a sex worker. The first woman to run for president was a sex worker. I mean, I'm biased, but I think we're amazing. And I think if more people knew the contributions, the material, social contributions that sex workers have made, we could sort of claim our legacy and bring that knowledge and wisdom into the rest of our lives. Is there, you mentioned sex work and prostitution. What is the distinction that you're holding? Sure, sex work is a really big, broad umbrella term that includes all erotic labor, both criminalized and not criminalized, right? So whether you're talking about in-person prostitution, only fans work, stripping, foot fetish model. I'm trying to build a big coalition. I want to include Hooters, Waitresses. Anyone exchanging erotic labor for money or something of value is a sex worker. Prostitution is a more specific category of sex work that refers to mostly criminalized, in-person, full-service sex work. Is sex work overwhelmingly women? That is certainly the perception. The few studies that have been done, and again, I want to caveat this with, it is very hard to get good numbers on a stigmatized and criminalized class, have found that most providers, somewhere in the range of 70%, self-identify as women and 30%, self-identify as men, but that like 95% of the clients are men. So that seems to be the breakdown. And they've found interesting actually when you're talking about youth prostitution, when you're talking about under the age of 18, it's actually about a 50-50 split because you're often seeing people who are leaving an abusive home and that abuse doesn't discriminate based on gender. In terms of, sex work seems to be having a moment. And obviously it's always been there and things like that, but because of the internet, because of things like OnlyFans and during the pandemic, the idea of camming or being a cam girl, everybody was doing it, right? Is it accurate that is sex work on the rise? I don't think that we are seeing more people today engage in prostitution than at any other point in human history. For one thing, women have more access to other employment options. So I think that you've seen other moments where there's been an increase. I do think that you are seeing increase invisibility and I don't think that that necessarily translates into reduced stigma or decriminalization. I know a lot of OnlyFans models, people engaged in perfectly legal sex work where they never engage physically with another person who have lost scholarships and kicked out of school, lost their day gig or been denied housing because they became known to their potential employer or faculty advisor or landlord. Yeah, we've discussed a bunch of those stories at reason, including a couple of times people who were cops when we were cops. And I guess actually going back a bit, Norma Jean Omadovar, who had a member of the LAPD who was a call girl and I've read a memoir called From Cop to Call Girl, made into a TV movie. She's quite a trip. She's amazing. She's also a one woman archivist. She's sort of been single-handedly keeping the history of the more recent sex worker rights movement. So we are all indebted to Norma Jean. Talk a little bit, speaking of kind of the, you mentioned in passing that madams or prostitute sex workers kind of helped settle the West. That is, you see that vaguely in shows like Gunsmoke. I mean, Miss Kitty is a saloon owner, but it's kind of laundered version of a madame. How did that work? And when did that story start disappearing? Yeah, so madams, there were a lot of weird laws around alcohol and saloons and some of it was broken down on gender and I don't wanna get too into the specifics, but there were a couple of loopholes that really allowed women to become business owners and as madams they became big business owners. And what you see over and over again is that these brothels really become city centers. They're where people go to drink. They're where people go to party. They incubate jazz just as an example. And so these madams, right, they invest in public infrastructure. Luke Ram, who funds the Seattle Public Schools. Lizzie Leip was known to give a lot of money away to charities. You see these stories about madams investing in water and basic resources because they're, so they're bringing some of the first women out to the frontier camps. In the West, I mean, women are a scarce commodity, right? These are labor camps out West. You're talking about like, when you're talking about white people, you're talking about like a 70 to one ratio. So when a madame comes to town, it's not really safe to bring your wife. So she's setting up and doing big business and the women that work there, there's a lot of purchasing power that comes with that. And one of the reasons that I think it was Wisconsin was one of the first states in the union to give women the right to vote. They had a lot of sex workers who were major property owners and it felt weird that they weren't able to fully participate in civic life. Yeah, and I've read that Wyoming did that. Yes, Wyoming, yes. I mixed those up. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was Wyoming, but to pull women out there. I mean, it was like, yeah, you can vote. I think now maybe it would be, you can live in Wyoming and you don't have to vote or something, but let's talk a little bit about Horizai View. Sure. You don't want to talk more about my husband because he's kind of great. Oh yeah, okay. Well, let's talk about that. In terms of de-stigmatization. Sure. So like on a societal level, the strategy is let's tell the stories, let's recover the past and let's deal with the benefits and costs of criminalizing sex work at a personal level. But there's also, yeah, I think the power of proximity is very powerful. I met my husband in high school. We were on the same debate team. We led very different lives for almost two decades after that and reconnected, but he absolutely knows about my work. He's come to see me perform many times. He's a big supporter of the decriminalization and de-stigmatization of sex work. And we are also in a monogamous sort of, I mean, not, I mean, I guess. Conventional marriage. Yeah, conventional and conventional marriage. And we go to places as a couple. It is typical at a reason event where people stutter and are kind of afraid to say I'm in a completely conventional relationship. Yeah, well, it's like, well, it's not that conventional. It's pretty conventional. Sometimes he does the cooking or, yeah, right? Yeah, it's, yeah, no, for sure. But we got married in late 2019 and it's been great to have a partner and to talk about these issues and to have a strategist. How old are you? I am a great question. I am 36. Okay. So among the various questions of like sex work seems to be more visible than ever, even if it's not increasing, people talk about the sex recession, particularly among younger people. Baby boomers apparently have more sex than Gen X who have more sex than millennials, et cetera. I like to, when people talk about a sex recession, I believe that it's, when you are not having sex, it's a recession. When I am not having sex, it's a depression. But what is, I mean, do these things ring true to you? There's an interesting paradox going on where sex is more visible than ever and it seems to be happening less. I just think it's fascinating to see the sex panic go in reverse. When I was growing up, the concern was that the kids were having too much sex and so it's interesting to see the moral panic reverse that the older generation is concerned about the next generation not having enough sex. But the important thing is that we are talking about sex. Right, exactly. Yeah, it seems interesting. It's like, I think that the older generations of, these moral panics are not new. And so, I think the kids are gonna figure it out. There's also that kind of concurring question or fear that we're not reproducing it. Again, like, I think that, how do I, I have strong opinions about this, because I think that so much of this call comes from, sort of a romanticized notion about the way things used to be. And I think that there are definitely things that we could do to make, having children in this society more attractive. I don't think that like- Like having other people raise your kids. That would be super helpful, right? Yeah, like just a funding- Bringing back cheap domestic labor. There are other solutions, but I don't think that like limiting, I always see this call sort of immediately followed by limiting access to contraception or abortion. And I think it's really important that we resist the temptation to turn women into not people. I think that we really, really need to stay focused on us as like active agents in our own lives. And although all of our choices impact all of us, I don't know that controlling, whether you're encouraging or discouraging the fertility of women is like a smart- But again, this is kind of a paradox where women have more autonomy over their bodies now than ever in human history, right? And culturally too, I mean, not just kind of technologically. And there's always a backlash against that. And before we talk about Horizai view, could you talk a bit about, you mentioned, you know, Faust Assesta and things like that, but this coalition of kind of right-wing, typically conservatives of a religious bent. And then there is a group of feminists who are very anti-porn, tend to be anti-sex work. They either see it as the excrements of capitalism or it is patriarchal, ultimately because 95% of the costumes are men, et cetera. So can you talk a little bit about when did that coalition begin and then how did it morph into an anti-porn panic and now an anti-trafficking panic? Yeah, I mean, this coalition really dates back to the Seneca Falls Convention and the sort of first early as feminists. So that's like 1848 and that's the first big women's right. This is Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, you know, putting their heads together. And creating a version of the declaration of women's rights absolutely. The Declaration of Independence. Yes, the most, you know, the spiciest take was that women should vote. It was considered a pipe dream at that point, which I think is interesting, but they were very interested and also motivated to distance themselves from sex workers, which I think is, you know, fascinating and tragic because as I said, sex workers were some of the biggest landowners. They were some of the biggest property owners. They were running businesses. You know, a woman that I mentioned earlier, Victoria Woodhall was one of the first brokerage, she had one of the first brokerage firms on Wall Street and was a sex worker. And she was also the first woman to address Congress on the issue of suffrage, but she was shunned by early feminist thinkers because they didn't want to be associated with whores. And you see early feminists really coalescing around bar culture, right? Around drinking, around brothels, around pornography. And again, you know, you see this repeated in the porn wars with, you know, Gloria Steinem, you know, Catherine McKinnon, conflating and using prostitution as a symbol of violence against women rather than addressing actual violence against women, which I think is interesting because, you know, if you're looking for the primary culprit, you know, domestic violence is the number one place that women are most vulnerable. It's not in paid sex. That's not where most of this violence is happening. How does that, you know, a lot of second-wave feminism, late 60s, early 70s, though, is also very anti-marriage. Gloria Steinem was famously against marriage until she embraced it later in life, but what, you know, so what's the role of sex? Like, is it just, you know, that certain types of feminists just are uncomfortable with sex or...? I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. I think, you know, it is important to put the history of prostitution and the feminist backlash against it in its proper context. There were lots of people engaged in sex work who didn't want to be because they lived in a society that was demonizing sex so much, right? That if you slipped up one time or you, you know, had a child out of wedlock, you really were sort of exiled from your home and your community and we know that vulnerable people and desperate people do desperate things. And so, you know, I also sort of understand the early feminist characterization of alcohol, right? You know, prohibition starts as an anti-domestic violence, right? And so, you know, I think understanding that is important, but this focus on criminalization as a solution and this willingness to find allies and collaborate with, you know, Christian conservatives that really don't, you know, embrace the idea that women should be fully autonomous and make choices in their own lives and really, you know, sicken the power of the state on women who are making different choices than you and the name of expanding women's choices has always felt not right. And it always is the woman who ends up paying, right? Or the sex worker who is female, right? Yeah, yes, paying the cost, yes. Absolutely, the social cost of sexual impropriety has always sat with that. Because, you know, and I'm not saying it's a good idea, but like, you know, anti-John laws or where Johns would be arrested, et cetera, that never seems to happen. And you mentioned Elizabeth Nolan-Brown as a senior editor at Reason has a great heuristic of every time you read a story about the biggest sex trafficking ring has been broken up, bookmark it and come back to it in a month or two. And the follow-up stories will show nobody has been arrested for trafficking. It's always women being charged with prostitution. Correct, yes. Yeah, we see that over and over again. And I also want to say that even in places that have, you know, implemented what's called end demand laws or the Nordic model or sometimes, you know, the feminist or equality model which makes me, you know, wanna throw up in my mouth. Everywhere that these laws have been implemented, violence against sex workers goes up. So you're absolutely right. In this country, you know, all of these stings, we, you know, we're installing surveillance cameras and massage parlors and we're, you know, raiding immigrants and we're paying police officers to, you know, to put their bodies on the line and go get hand jobs and then arrest people. I mean, that's, it's- It's literally that, yeah. Yeah. And- It's like they serve, you know, they also serve who's standard weight, right? You know, it's- It's infuriating. And the more you look into it, the matter you get, but even in places that are actually arresting and pursuing, you know, criminal penalties against people that purchase sexual services, it doesn't have the intended effect because you, again, I keep coming back to negotiating power because I think it's so fundamental. But, you know, when I was working as a sex worker, one of my, the screening practices that I was able to engage in was I asked potential clients to send me their real name and two industry references. In a world that is criminalizing sex workers, no reasonable rational person is going to send me their legal name and evidence of them committing a crime. So now I'm in the position where I can't tell the difference between a reasonable, nervous client and a predator posing as a client. And this is exactly what we see. We also see stigma against sex work go up. There's a horrific case that came out of Sweden of a woman who had her children taken away from her because the court decided that although the work that she was engaged in was not criminal, it was evidence of self-harm. So they gave her children to her partner who was an abuser and ended up murdering them in front of her. Wow. Let's talk about Horses Eye View. Yeah, sure. Who, you know, let's talk about three of your favorite. Horses in history. Yeah, I think it's easier to start in Greece. But yeah, we do cover the 10,000 years. It is my position that this. 10,000 years, that takes us back to what? Is that in Egypt or something? I, Mesopotamia, you know, it's really, yeah, so it's maybe 8,000. But it's my position that this predates us as a species. Do you know about the Yale study that happened? I think I'm about to. I love this. So Yale spent, I don't know, maybe a million dollars. Do you know that Yale is a school filled with Horses? Yeah. So many kais. Yeah. Well, they had these captive monkeys and one of the zoologists or whoever does these studies introduced the concept of money into this captive colony of monkeys. And so they were able to go to like a little monkey store and get grapes or other things that monkeys liked. And as soon as the concept clicked, as soon as the monkeys made the connection between the coins and the grapes that they liked, the first thing that happened is that a boy monkey gave a girl monkey a token and then they had sex. It's the first thing that happened. But coming back a little bit earlier, one of my favorite old pros is Freini. She was a very powerful courtesan in ancient Greece, sort of at the height of their empire. And although she made most of her money entertaining the wealthy citizens of Athens a few times a year, the city state would hire her to perform sacred rites. So she would dive naked into the Aegean Sea to reenact the birth of Aphrodite. And you know, citizens would gather and be like, oh, that makes sense that our tax dollars would go to that and sort of other things that makes perfect sense. Yeah, that's, I don't think the N.E.A. is gonna be trying that for me soon. But she became very famous in her time and exerted a lot of social power. She was sort of notorious. She would discriminate against clients and change her prices based on how she felt about them, which is a bold move. It's a power move. It is a power move. Well, one king approached her publicly and it's written about, there's like, it's great documentation of people's diaries noting this event. He asked her at a party, you know, it shames me that you would charge so much. And she responded with, if I took a cent less, it would be I who was shamed, which I love. Wow. Well, she- This brings to mind Donald Trump, right? And his various- I think he definitely would have paid less had he paid up front, which is so often true. Yeah, so it is cash on the barrel head. You get a discount. I mean, yeah. The patriarchs of Athens were unhappy with the amount of power that Freini had. And so they charged her with blasphemy for impersonating the goddess, which to remind you is what they'd hired her to do. And so, yeah, she hires a very famous orator who strips her naked in front of this all-male jury and says, how can you look at this body and not see that she is divine? Let me guess, it ends in a hung jury. Okay. You mentioned in passing the idea of the sacred whore as like an old, you know, kind of pre-Christian, perhaps, talk about, you know, I was raised Catholic and I was raised in the 20th century. So people talked a lot about the virgin whore complex where women can either be virginal or whores. Occasionally they could also be mothers and then they usually become desexed, et cetera. But how did the sacred whore turn into that kind of virgin whore complex? Yeah, it's what the Catholic Church does to women is really disheartening. It's interesting to take a church, right, that was made popular by one of the most, you know, popular female preachers, Mary Magdalene was an incredible leader in the early Christian church and a pope in the, you know, 500s decides that she was a sex worker, right? By conflating her with another Mary in the Bible to his defense, there are a lot of them. But he sort of decides that she's a whore and that becomes doctrine for really over a thousand years and that is used to justify, you know, not just sort of removing her gospel, but also limiting the ability of women to speak or become church leaders. And I think the categories that were available to theologians at the time where that women were stupid or they were evil, right? You're either a daughter of Lilith and a conniving snake woman or you are susceptible to the, you know, snake oil salesmen out of naivete, either way, you know, civilization. You may be controlled. Correct, yeah, or led. And so, you know, the categorization, they were really interested in categorizing women and it's how the Catholic church becomes the largest brothel owner in history for a period of 400 years, justifying that by saying this group of women. They did not teach me about that. It's modern day high school in Middletown, New Jersey. It's interesting how they found ways to fund the church. They were literally, where did they own those brothels? A lot of nun arrays were operated as brothels. That's not just a throwaway line and Hamlet, but there's, yeah, it's a series of laws, right? So the Catholic church doubles down on celibacy, right? And like loving partnership around the 1300s. And around the same time, they start passing all of these like sort of banana pants laws around sex, right? Like, so if you have sex before marriage, you're probably going to hell, but like it's not extra hell like per event. So like once you're there, lean in, seen a prostitute or a sex worker is like kind of a minor sin, but it's not nearly so bad as either raping or seducing a good woman, right? No distinction was made. And so because of this primrose path of bad logic, you end up with priests and more than a few popes, actually owning and operating brothels, and they justify this as protecting good women, right? By creating an outlet of the already damned. Wow. So who's another sex worker from history that you really liked? Yeah, Victoria, we can get Veronica Franco became a famous poet and a well-renowned editor at a time and in a place where women of her class were not allowed to read or access libraries. So this is sort of the early publishing in Venice, which is a center of publishing. She becomes a courtesan and the confidant of men in publishing and she is able to publish. And there's a lot of really great work about her story, but she really became a sex worker because of her love of reading. She was initially a wife and married into one of the Venetian classes or whatever, but she found the restrictions on her freedom of movement to be too much. And so she chose the life of a courtesan. She is another example, much like Freini. She is charged with witchcraft, not once, but twice by the inquisition and is able to defend herself, but it costs her everything. So she was this celebrated figure in Venice, but ends up sort of dying a fever in the poorest red light district after spending everything that she had defending herself against witchcraft. Wow. Yeah. A 20th century figure that... Victoria Woodhall, right? The first woman to run for president for sure. She's a hoot. Yeah, she's a free love advocate and a spiritualist. What did free love mean? Free love essentially meant that women should have sex because they want to, so it was... It's a bad idea. It's a radical idea. Very destabilizing to any kind of society. It does seem to have an impact, for sure. She herself was divorced from a doctor who was sort of a non-functioning alcoholic. She begins a relationship with a gentleman later in life who is a free love advocate. They do have a bit of an open marriage and she, one of her claims to fame, in addition to running for president and starting a newsletter and doing this brokerage firm, is she exposes the hypocrisy of a love triangle with one of the most famous ministers at the time and one of the most famous feminists. And so she publishes... Can you name them? Is it... Tilton and Harriet Beecher's Toe's Brother, which I'm... Like Lyman Beecher or something like that. Let's not defame them by accident. But yeah, it's amazing, right? Because that is always part of the power when you speak as a horror is that you can show hypocrisy, right? And it's really this, this is the way that she's destroyed, right? So she calls out this famous minister in her newspaper and then Anthony Comstock at the time uses this to file an obscenity charge against her. And she is actually, she has to flee the country and this is the way that Anthony Comstock who would later go on to criminalize contraception and abortion and drive many sex therapists and educators to suicide, he makes his career on publicly destroying Victoria Woodhall. Is there a moment, I think about this partly, I guess because I'm Catholic and because I was raised in the 20th century, but a figure like Madonna, the singer, kind of blew apart the virgin horror complex in society. I mean, there's, if you look at literary history, people, great post-war 20th century American novelists, people like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, there are only virgins and whores in their books. And kind of like after Madonna, it seems like the slate of characters or the slate of subject positions that women can occupy in real life and in popular culture and in high culture has really expanded. Does that sound right to you? I hope that's true. I would like very much for that to be true. I feel like I see some troubling trends in the way that we talk about sex, the way that we continue to demonize sex. I think that we are certainly living through another moral sex panic. And I know too well how the policing of prostitution can have a huge impact on the sexual freedom of women, freedom of movement, freedom of expression. So I know that we have come back from this level of freedom before. Yeah, and it's interesting you had mentioned the case in Sweden and the Nordic model. You know, again, if you're of a certain age, you grew up knowing that people in Sweden and Norway weren't sexually hung up, but they're actually incredibly repressed societies in all sorts of ways. Yeah, and this demonization of clients and the conflation of clients with predators has led to a lot of really, really bad policy. And I think it really comes down to listening to victims. Before we get to questions, can you kind of sketch out what are the types of reforms that are in place now or that you, old pros, is pushing that well, both from a kind of cultural level, but also a legal level? Like what's in play that's exciting and who is backing sex work reform? Sure, I think that sex work, what old pros focuses on is narrative change, right? So we're very interested in reminding folks, especially people in power, that we are already living in a society with sex workers, right? Sex workers are already contributing members of our communities. There's been a lot of exciting legislative pushes recently. There was a ballot initiative in Burlington, Vermont that actually won 64% to remove some old language criminalizing sex work. Now, city ordinance does not Trump state law. Sex work was not decriminalized, but it showed that voters are really ready to reconsider their position on this. I think public policy polling found in 2018 that 44% of the electorate is ready to decriminalize sex work, 55% in DC. There've also been very brave sex workers all across the country that have been self-organizing for decades that have succeeded in changing laws in New Hampshire, in Rhode Island. There's a huge push in Oregon and Washington state. And a lot of these conversations start with harm reduction, right? Patience bill of rights, ending the kind of mandatory reporting that prevents sex workers from being able to report crimes against us. So being able to report crimes against us, being able to tell our medical providers the truth about our work without risking criminal penalty, I think is a really good first step. Also making it easier to remove criminal penalties, right? Once you've been, it's interesting to me that we say that we want to discourage the oldest profession by criminalizing it, but the fastest and most effective way of trapping somebody in prostitution is arresting them for it. It's interesting that harm reduction, which is also a movement growing in drug legalization circles of saying, whatever you think about the morality or anything, it's just, is a policy creating more problems than it's solving or whatever. So it seems like when it comes to prohibition, we're in a moment where harm reduction is being discussed more and more seriously across a variety of vices. Yeah, I hope so. And I know that sex workers have a lot to contribute to that. I think you're absolutely right. We can save a lot of lives by focusing on just what it is, harm reduction. But when we focus on coercive control, we focus on punishing or trying to end a behavior that we've decided as a moral bad, then I do think that more often than not, we cause more harm than good. You've talked a little bit about how in the past, the coalitions that criminalize prostitution weren't necessarily what you'd expect or pornography. Right now, is sex work reform, is it a conservative issue, a liberal issue? Is there any, does it map onto contemporary politics in any meaningful way? Sure, I mean, for me, sitting as a comedian and a sex worker rights advocate, it very much is like a pox on both your houses, right? Republicans and Democrats both have like dumb ideas about how to police prostitution. Conservative Republicans are often coming at it from a place of punishment and criminalization. And then, you know, progressives are often coming at it from a place of end demand or even regulation, right? Like mandatory SDI tests, workplace protections that end up sort of forcing people into a regulated system or structure. And we've already talked about the harms of that, yeah. All right, let's open it up for questions. If you would like to ask a question, could you stand up and stand under the microphone a few steps back and please ask a question. Ask a question or tell a very good story. But ask a question. Max, your insight, could you elaborate a bit more on your objection to the idea of no criminal penalties at all for those who sell sex, but severe criminal penalties for those who buy sex. And as you know, since I counted, you attended the sole form debate on this, that idea was fairly successfully defended at the sole form. So what is your objection to that idea? Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the question and it's a great one. And my primary objection is that everywhere that we've seen that policy implemented, it increases violence against sex workers. So it fails at achieving its stated intent. And it does so by conflating clients with predators, reducing the negotiating power of providers and creating an apparatus that makes it harder for us to do our work. Making it harder for us to get money or places to engage in sex work has never made sex workers safer. So yeah, I think that's my primary objection is the results of the law. Next question. To your knowledge, has there been any significant variation over time or across cultures between the delineations between prostitution versus normal sexual interactions, acceptable sexual interactions? For the monkeys, for instance. Yeah, thank you, that's a great question. And I think what I've found in studying mostly Western history is that the conflation between promiscuity or a sex outside of marriage with prostitution is very old. And that when we see laws that criminalize prostitution, you often see a crackdown in literally public women. We see that a lot with the enforcement of loitering for the purposes of prostitution, which has always meant being in public and making the wrong kind of eye contact with a cop. Thank you. Thank you. So actually there's a follow up to what she was asking about the whole kind of infrastructure, the whole economy of sex work. So I mean, so there's a lot of demonization of all sides and all parts of this supply chain, if you will, of sex work and all this form. So what do you think is what should be done about this whole debate about, for example, people who are engaged in providing various services, housing, transportation, all these things that are easily turned into pimping, sex trafficking and so on. Can you say a bit about what you think should be done about those issues? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really great question. I think that we have- We have had only great questions. That's true. Really great questions. It's interesting, we've been sold a false narrative about victims and villains in this work. And so it's the false narrative that drives these end demand policies is that anyone engaging in this work is a victim and anyone facilitating or participating as a buyer is a villain. And I think that fundamental false narrative is something that we have to unpack. And you're absolutely right. Sex workers need service providers in order to do their job. They hire schedulers, they hire screeners, they hire drivers, they pay people to clean up. And many of these people face severe legal penalties and are charged as procurers or pimps or facilitating, living off the proceeds of prostitution. And this kind of criminalization of all of the things around prostitution leads to a lot of isolation and a lot of really bad outcomes. And so the reality is that if you remove criminal penalties from the act of adult consensual sex work, then you empower people who have been hit by their manager, who are being abused by their boyfriend, who are being exploited by a third party to report the crime committed against them or take action to self-advocate. But the criminal penalties do nothing except reduce the negotiating power of the most vulnerable. Thank you. Hi, thank you so much. I'm wondering if you could speak about porn a little bit more. Sure. I think a lot of people who would agree with the kind of local madame at the saloon see the sort of scale of the porn industry as a difference not only of degree but of kind. And the arguments are not only the kind of Andrea Dworkin arguments about porn. They're documentaries like Hot Girl Wanted where people look at this industry and even people who might be sympathetic to your argument and sort of see something amiss here. And I'd love your thoughts about it. Yeah, I think, again, thank you. That's an insightful question. And I think that the best critiques of the porn industry are coming from porn performers. And I think what you've seen is sort of a monopolization or a concentration of power amongst a few distributors where the performers or the content creators are not able to command the kind of income or living wage. And I think that a lot of this is facilitated by discrimination of sex workers across platforms. So OnlyFans is a good example of a platform that allows sex workers to build individual relationships with their clients and command a lot of that income. But many of the porn distributors are distributing porn where somebody was paid a few bucks a long time ago. They buy the rights and there's too much free porn on the internet, I think is the answer. So I do not take a moral position against porn, but I think that porn performers and content creators have a lot of smart ideas about the kinds of laws that they would like to see changed. And I would like to create a society where we can listen to them. Thank you. Yeah. So my question is based in my lived experience as a queer person of color who also has experience in sex work. And I was thinking as you were speaking through different histories, especially around the early 20th century, I was thinking about as you were using the word women, you were really talking about white women. Correct. And my question is, how are you using your platform to hold space for the history and impact of policy on people of color and also non-binary and trans sex workers? Thank you so much for that question. I think it's really important for us to speak from our own experience. And I do come to this conversation as a cis white citizen and I bring all of my privilege into all of the jobs that I've ever done, including sex work. At old pros, we seek to hire lots of different kinds of people. We try to interview and elevate lots of different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of experience. If you go through the library of our content, I think that you'll see that we have elevated a lot of those stories. But I come to this conversation as a very privileged white woman and speak primarily from that experience. Could you talk a little bit about the Man Act? And you mentioned this, I think, in passing, but a lot of the fear was that black men were transporting white women across state borders. And you would always, if you're in Ohio, you go to Indiana and have sex, right? But I mean, what was going on there? And is that fear, is it still a lie, but in a different kind of wrapper or something? For sure. So much of our prostitution policy and moral panic in general is grounded in racism, right? It was called the Man Act. It was known as the white slave law. And so much of it was directed. This is sort of a few decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, right? So you're looking at sort of the first free black generation. And there's a lot of anxiety around white women really having consensual sexual relationships with black and immigrant men. And this is sold, right? As like, this is a rape story. But we didn't legalize interracial marriage in this country until, I think, the mid 1960s. The final law was struck down in those Supreme Court in 67. But we didn't criminalize marital rape until the 1990s. So if limiting rape is what we were trying to do, then that's not what we did. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Thank you for this conversation. My question is on the path toward decriminalization. And I know that DSW and normal have a lot aligned when it comes to decrim. A lot of cannabis decrim came from medical use. And I know that sexual proxies is a path toward decrim in sex work. I was wondering if there's also a path in considering that a lot of sex workers or people that come to sex work are coming from spaces of disability and how that could be considered a potential path toward decrim. For sure. Thanks. Yeah. At Old Pros, we just did our disability one page. I'm very proud of that. Thank you. Disabled people both sell and purchase sexual services. I think it's a really important conversation to have. Sex work famously allows you to set your own schedule and provides a lot of flexibility and accessibility that more traditional employment doesn't. And of course, people with disabilities also purchase sexual services. And that's an important conversation to have. Going back to the priestess prostitutes of ancient yore, healing and sexual energy have a long and shared history. And I know many, many people who come to this work as healers. Could you talk a little bit about the kind of medicalized sex work? Because this is a growing field. Is it legal in places where people who are either disabled or for whatever reason, I mean, purchase sex for medical reasons? There's sex surrogacy. There is sex therapy. There is Tantra, which is like a whole world of sex therapy. And the criminalization is confusing. There was a famous case recently, a woman named Tracy Elise, who is still serving time in Arizona for having run a Tantric school, essentially. And so it really depends on the state and it depends on the prosecutor. What I will say is that most wealthy white people, regardless of what they're doing is criminalized, are not facing the same kind of criminal penalties. Right. Yeah. Next question. Speaking of moral panics, I feel like one moral panic that hasn't been addressed tonight is kind of the freak out surrounding drag queens surrounding trans people as well, which is very relevant. I mean, it seems like Matt Walsh is trending on Twitter every single day. So I just would broadly am interested in your thoughts on that, where it's going. Sure. I mean, the LGBT movement and the sex worker rights movement have always been interconnected. You know, the Marsha P. Johnson was, you know, through the shot glass heard around the world and sex workers have always been in clear spaces and vice versa. And I think that, you know, the demonization of the LGBT community and the demonization of sex workers follow very similar paths. And I think we're wrong about who the predators are in both cases. You know, it's not this sort of imagined demonized version of a drag queen that's likely to, you know, sexually assault a child, right? It's coaches, it's ministers, it's people already in our community. And I think it is our fundamental unwillingness to sort of look at that and look at the real source of where violence is coming from that sort of drives us to try to find these scapegoats, you know, outside of our community. And I see exactly what you mean, and it makes me very nervous too. I will point out a reason the pushback on drag queen story hours in public libraries is generally that they're in public libraries. We would prefer, you know, Barnes & Noble or a private bookstore would be much better for us. Those are good libertarians. Yes? Thank you both so much for sharing with us your own relationship to sex and how that plays into your sex work. But I'm wondering how you think about us being in a sex-negative conflicted culture, which kind of has deep roots in western culture. Yeah. If you can speak to that. Yeah. It kind of plays into all of what we're talking about. I'm happy to. You know, we're certainly, you know, sitting in a society that has a long simmering hatred and discouragement of specifically female sexual pleasure, right? And so, you know, the demonization and criminalization of promiscuity, the demonization of the sacred whore, and I think it's interesting, you know, in 6,000 years encouraging men to make their brides bleed on their wedding night and then had the audacity to complain about how hard it is to make women come. And I think that if we had a different cultural narrative around that, that would be hugely helpful. And I do think that, you know, that I'm very biased on this, but I think that sort of, you know, re-inviting the sacred whore back into our concept of humanity is really important. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting in many places around the world. The criminalization of like sex toys is more aggressively policed than prostitution itself. So you're absolutely right. There's a very old conflation and hang up there. We all have a lot to get over. If I may speak up for Western civilization. Sure. Because now briefly and on this question of pleasure, which is fascinating because, you know, now we are all supposed to be good at everything, right? You know, we're good at work and then we come home and we make great cocktails and meals and everybody's, you know, a star in the sack. And we feel pleasure more than ever. And yet it seems it's so performative. I mean, can we really take pleasure in sex when we have to be great at it? I mean, whether we have to be great at it or whether it's commodified, right? And it's like, you know, there are questions to be raised about authenticity and emotional labor. Or you fake it till you make it, right? Yeah. Does your waitress really like you? Yeah. But it's also true that in the West, I mean, you know, in this question of female sexual pleasure and how that can be destabilizing compared to, you know, certain, when we look at say Catholicism versus Islam, I don't know. It seems like the Catholics have a pretty good story. I don't know. I mean, yeah. No, I know. Yeah. Well, is there a part of the world that is, you know, that is actually liberated? Or is this something that's deeper, that's written on us before culture emerges? I don't think that. I do think that this is culturally imposed. But I think that, you know, Catholicism and Islam, which is, you know, another place that... And it's the Abrahamic religions. Yes. The Abrahamic religions, exactly, have, you know, consumed a lot of territory. And in so doing, bulldozed past and into a lot of cultures that had a radically different relationship with pleasure and sex and bodies and prostitution. Next question. Thank you. The question I have is, I think you alluded a couple of times to the contributions that sex workers and everybody has made to society. I think that sounds a little bit strange to people because it's so much in the shadows that I think the problem is that people don't see it. Maybe just the people like us who look for it. I mean, I'm an accountant. I see from the inside the contributions that people make and the taxes that they make. I'll thank you. I'll bet you that one in a hundred people think that sex workers pay the income taxes. So, I mean, what do we do to kind of change that narrative? Thank you for your question. And thank you for the work that you do helping sex workers do their taxes. It's very important. It's the Lord's work. It's a mess. But yeah, I think, you know, I came out a long time ago in 2015. I found myself in an abusive relationship with a Catholic. So, you know, I might be biased. Irish Catholic because I like cliches. But, you know, he really used a leverage. Just something that wasn't a priest or a club. No, no, no. Finance. He was really using my my history as a sex worker as a vulnerability point to keep me in what had become a very violent relationship, right? Because he knew that I or he presumed that I did not want to be to be outed. And so I sort of took that option away from him by writing publicly about my story. And I've found a lot of safety and security and choosing to live my life as an out sex worker. And I think that, you know, going back into the archives and pulling these stories from history and you're absolutely right. I mean, the oldest profession is literally everywhere. Everywhere you look, you find old prose. We are integral to all of civilization. And I think reminding people of that, allowing them to sort of stand tall in their legacy, I hope creates the conditions for people to come out to their own community. And I think similar to the LGBT movement, what's true is that everyone in this room already knows and probably likes, maybe even loves a sex worker. That's great. Last question. So I've heard you talk a lot today about sort of the external culture around sex work and how we're proceeding from that. I'm assuming, I'm not going to make judgments about the room, but I'm taking a look around and guessing at least half of people here are not sex workers. Sure. So I've had a history myself. I don't know if you can tell by the outfit. Thank you. I'm curious to know what you think about the internal culture of the parts that are finger quotes working in sex work, because as someone who's been there and seen it, and I'm assuming a lot of people in this room have not, it's not exactly like that's all sunshine or rainbows either. Sure. There's a lot of really toxic elements that have been normalized because of the isolation. Correct. So I'm just curious if you have any reflections on that. Yeah. I mean, I think that sex work can be very isolating. I think, again, going back to this idea that sex work is a really broad umbrella term, right? I know a lot of folks show up to a strip club. A lot of people make content alone in their room. A lot of folks see a small group of folks that trade clients and harm reduction information. And so I think it's very localized, but you're absolutely right. The criminalization, the stigma, the need to live a double life, what is asked of such a stigmatized community has isolated and vulnerable people are just that vulnerable. And is it one solution is to really just be more open or transparent about it? I mean, you never want to force transparency on people, but within the sex work community, if people are talking more openly, there's fewer secrets to hide? What I have found, and again, I come to this conversation as a very privileged person, but I found a lot of safety in community and surrounding myself with people that already knew and accepted and had done whatever processing they needed to to absorb the fact that I sold sex for money or at one point had done that. And so I also know lots of people who have lost their kids, who have been fired, who have faced legal repercussions and been further isolated and further vulnerable and pushed into deeply exploitative situations after coming out to their community. So it's never something that I would counsel an individual person, especially someone that I didn't know to do or to take that risk. But I do believe that on the collective, the more of us who are able to come out, we do find each other. When you tell your story, people tell you theirs. And I've never been in a room where no one had done sex work. Can I just ask one follow-up? Of course. Because I kind of want to push on an element there because I feel like we're talking about that in a microcosmic sense. I'm talking more macrocosmic. I'm talking to people who are like, I'm top 01 on OnlyFans, and I'm all over Twitter, and I'm all over your social media. And I've gamed this system, but it also offends me that you're trying to take my crown from me. There is a culture of infighting in the industry to a degree, especially the content. I don't know what that means in other industries, but I'm curious if that specifically. I'm talking about the side that the system has incentivized by making us fight each other to some degree and those elements that have caused... Do you know what I'm talking about here? I do know what you're talking about, but I've also been a stand-up comic for a decade. And I'm just like, I don't know how much of this is unique to sex work or just the nature of competition. Yeah. Of course. One trope that seems almost as old as prostitution itself is the hooker with a heart of gold. Is there a novel? Is there a movie, a play, or a work of fiction that you think best captures the complexity and reality of sex work? Absolutely. I think trading spaces did it the best. I'm sorry. Trading places. Trading places. I'm so sorry. I was going to say trading spaces. Yeah. That's where you do your neighbors... Hilarious. Yeah. That would be... It's a whole different show. Yeah. That would totally on the air, I think. Trading places is with Dan Akroy, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Eddie Murphy. And Jamie Lee Curtis, I think, plays a hooker with a heart of gold. Absolutely. But it's... Yes. It's also kind of complicated. It is complicated. And what I love about her is that she takes this gig without a lot of information, and it ends up being sort of a moral thing. It wasn't like, hey, here's $100 to ruin this guy's life. It was like, here's $100 to kiss this guy. And that begins a cascade. But I think it's her position as a sex worker that sort of allows her to see his vulnerability and see the situation that he's in and also make the calculated decision to help him with the presumed payoff of the end. There's a lot going on in trading places. Yeah. That's great. Okay. We're going to leave it there. Caitlin Bailey of Old Pros. Thank you. Thanks so much for talking. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.