Donna Hughes Advocates the Abuse of Sex Workers

When I began writing this article, I was going to title it, “Donna Hughes is a Cunt.”  But it took me forever to begin using the “c word,” and when I did, I used it as empowerment for my own sexuality as a woman.  To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never used it pejoratively, and as much as I’d like to do so in this case, I just can’t bring myself to denigrate such an awesome word by attaching it to someone like Hughes.

No, I needed a more appropriate word to describe her – one that captured the true essence of what she’s all about.  And I think I found the prefect way to describe her.  You see, Hughes is a strong advocate for the abuse of sex workers.  That’s right, she is an active proponent of abusing other human beings.  Allow me to explain.

For the past 30 years or so, there’s been a loophole in the prostitution laws in Rhode Island.  When the legislature rewrote the laws back in the late 1970s, they forgot to make it a crime to engage in prostitution in private.  They made it illegal to do street work or operate a brothel, but forgot to explicitly state that it was illegal to sell sex in the privacy of your own home or that of someone else.  So for the past three decades, it’s been legal for someone to prostitute themselves in private.  Most people weren’t even aware of this until just a short time ago, a testament to just how few problems prostitution behind closed doors has actually caused.

Back in April of this year, however, masseuse Julissa Brisman was killed in a suburb of Boston.  There’s some disagreement about whether or not Brisman was actually selling sex, but let’s assume she was, since that was typical of the women who advertised in the Erotic Services section of Craigslist as she had done.  Brisman’s attacker attempted to rob another sex worker (a stripper) in Rhode Island’s capital of Providence as well a day or two later.  These two incidents bolstered the rhetoric about prostituted women being endangered and exploited.  So, despite it already being illegal to kill or rob people (which, presumably, includes sex workers) in Rhode Island, clearly, someone’s got to save the hookers from being harmed.

Enter Donna Hughes.  She insists, in order to “protect women” from being trafficked, exploited, abused, robbed, killed, and all manner of other harms, the state must make all forms of prostitution illegal.  This, despite the fact there are already a wide variety of laws that could be used to prosecute people who traffic in humans, coerce others into prostitution, rob, kill, etc.  No, we have to make sex work itself illegal in order to prevent these things from happening.  I mean, obviously it’s not the murderer or trafficker committing the crime that’s the problem here, it’s the fact that these women are out earning money by fucking strangers that is causing all of these other ills, and therefore the sex workers must be prohibited from doing that in order to protect them from harm.

I know, the logic there misses me as well.  You’d expect more intelligent reasoning from a college professor; someone with, allegedly, a PhD.  This is what happens when you allow your personal biases and ideology to co-opt your reasoning abilities, however.

It takes a considerable amount of intracranial density, and great big set of brass ones to stand before a body of people and assert that a law that would make criminals out of sex workers, leading to their inability to get other jobs, losing their children, losing any job they currently held, possibly resulting in the loss of homes, divorces, etc., is going to “help them.”  Think about the sheer lunacy of such an assertion for a few minutes.

If we made such a claim about any other proposed law that did something similar, yet didn’t involve people who sell sex, we’d be laughed out of the room.  That politicians buy into this kind of shit speaks volumes about them as well, though.  No one’s ever accused politicians of being the brightest bulbs in the box, have they?  I’d call them whores to the likes of Hughes and her ilk, but I’ll not disparage the fine sex workers who use that term legitimately to describe themselves.  I’d not dare to denigrate true whores by associating them with politicians.

And there’s also the staggering irony in the fact that this specific kind of law is the reason Julissa ended up dead, yet it’s being promoted as a tool to “help prostitutes.”  Anti-prostitution laws have specifically been shown to harm sex workers, not help them. Time and time [PDF] again, in fact.  So to advocate them as a way of protecting prostitutes is tantamount to intentionally harming and abusing them.  Donna Hughes is an abuser as I see it.  There’s no other possible justification for it.

One of these often-mentioned ills is being trafficked.  In Hughes’ mind, any woman working as a prostitute is, by definition, trafficked.  No person does sex work consensually in her eyes.  I guess we have our agency up until the point where we decide to accept that first $100 bill from a client.  Who knew it was that simple to become trafficked?

Now, let me state for the record I know and understand trafficking is a major problem, domestically and internationally.  And it most certainly should be prosecuted when it is encountered.  No one I have ever known has advocated sanctioning the trafficking of human beings for any purpose, including prostitution.  But let’s not conflate human trafficking with consensual prostitution, which was the case in the cases of Brisman and the dancer, and is the case in literally hundreds of thousands of like transactions that occur on a daily basis here in the United States alone (and probably millions of times worldwide).

And this faux concern about trafficking is purely a smoke and mirrors tactic to begin with.  A recent examination of trafficking arrests in the UK showed that there was very little trafficking actually taking place.  It’s all a big farce.  If this sounds familiar, this kind of thing has been going on for over a century now.  Not coincidentally, there are already laws on the books making it illegal to traffic human beings, though.  Making the work trafficked victims do illegal does absolutely nothing except punish the people who are the victims!!!

Far more people are trafficked into domestic servitude¹ than prostitution in this country.  Why doesn’t Ms. Hughes show a similar concern for them and advocate a bill outlawing domestic employment?  Or advocate for a bill to outlaw farming to prevent the vast numbers of people who’re trafficked into field work from being “exploited?”  Those are rhetorical questions, of course.  They don’t involve someone using their sexuality to earn a living.  Your bias is showing “Dr.” Hughes.

If I was the Chancellor of the University of Rhode Island, I’d be embarrassed (and pissed) that a professor (of womens’ studies, ironically) who’s responsible for educating students, is intentionally skewing and misrepresenting information to push a personal ideological agenda under my institution’s name and banner.  She actually gets poor marks from her students, by the way.  Perhaps she’s too busy pushing her political agenda to be concerned about creating a good learning environment?

Hughes, whose favorite tactic of addressing her opposition is the personal and ad hominem attack, insists if Rhode Island doesn’t pass this legislation, it’ll be a “disaster.”  This, despite the fact that things have been just fine in the state for the past 30 years and they’ve not experienced any such “disaster” up to this point. Now, all of the sudden, it’s a fucking crisis that only she has the solution to!

She’s hardly the only person to adopt this tactic.  Melissa Farley^W is widely known for taking statements, facts, and figures out of context and manufacturing “evidence” to support her ideologies.  She’s been called out on it [PDF] numerous times by true researchers, in fact.

Amanda Kloer, another self-professed “anti-trafficking” activist, is similarly afflicted with the inability to separate the two issues.  For the past several years, according to her profile on Change.org, she has “created reports, documentaries and training materials on human trafficking in the United States and around the world.”  Like many other so-called activists, though, she has little real world experience in this field and just doesn’t have the mental capacity (or intellectual honesty) to understand or admit the differences.

As I see it, when you intentionally equate my experience with that of children used as sex slaves and other individuals who truly are kidnapped, coerced, or trafficked into prostitution, not only do you negate my agency (which is far more dehumanizing than anything I’ve remotely encountered with a client), but you also denigrate the painful experiences of those individuals.   It’s disingenuous at best, and , in my eyes, tantamount to fraud.

Kloer also distorts statistics and ignores evidence to suit her own purposes, not unlike Hughes and Farley.  A perfect example of this involves the UK study I referenced above.  She insists the UK study was a “failed” study, and explains:

…the reasons why this study may have failed are not nearly as important as the many, many other studies that have shown human trafficking does exist and in significant numbers. The UN just estimated that 270,000 victims live in the EU right now. The U.S. State Department ballparks the number of individuals trafficked globally at 800,000 each year, with 17,000 of those being brought to the U.S. The International Labor Organization has also weighed in, claiming 2.4 million trafficking victims around the world. [Emphasis added]

You can see her ignorance shine here.  None of those organizations has done the first “study.”  Every single one of them has estimated the number of trafficking victims, based on SWAGs² by their own admission.  Estimated.  Estimates do not a study make, sweety.  Not in the real world at least.  Time and time again on her little missives on Change, she’s been called out on her misuse of statistics, the manufacturing of evidence, and the obvious bias against prostitution itself, not just “human trafficking” as she claims.  It’s rare to see it done so blatantly, though.   At least Hughes and Farley couch their bias with a mask of quasi-intelligent rhetoric capable of misleading those of lesser intellectual capacity. Kloer has no such skill, but doesn’t seem to care.

Back to Rhode Island, though.  That many prostitutes are willing to come forward and testify to the harm this new legislation would cause them speaks volumes – they all freely admit to voluntarily doing sex work, not having been “trafficked” or coerced in any way.  A group of 50 well-known, well-respected academics signed a letter to the legislature speaking on behalf of sex workers, their rights, and the harm this legislation would engender as well.  Yet the legislature appears poised to make the consensual exchange of sex and something of value illegal in all cases regardless.

Not that politicians would actually listen to the people who’d really know what sex work was about, of course.  To be fair, there are a handful of legislators in RI who are supportive of sex workers’ rights.  Sadly, there aren’t enough of them, however.  One has to wonder how many of the politicians voting in favor of these laws have availed themselves of the services of paid professionals in the past.  Statistically, there should be quite a few.  I pray that it will become public at some point which ones have.   Hypocrisy has never been an issue for politicians, though, so it’s not like it would matter.

It might be possible to make a rational argument for laws like this if they even remotely stood a chance of working as Hughes has suggested.  How many times throughout history have societies tried to regulate or outlaw the sale of sex, though?  And how often has that worked, exactly?  I think the figure is somewhere in the neighborhood of zero percent (someone correct me if I’m wrong here).  There are places in the world where the penalty for prostitution is being stoned to death, and it doesn’t work there.  One sex worker in Rhode Island stated the obvious: “Yeah, it’s illegal. But it happens everywhere. It’s not like you can stop it, even if this law gets passed.”  Idiocy indeed.

So, in the face of overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that these laws don’t work and actually bring harm upon the prostitutes, the only plausible reason for outlawing sex work is, quite obviously, punishing sex workers, not “protecting” them.  It is literally impossible to argue anything to the contrary.

I wish Hughes was forced to look every woman who was arrested for prostitution after this in the eye and be forced to explain to her how this law was “helping” her.  And be forced to look a woman who’s losing her children because she’s been convicted of prostitution in the eyes and explain to her how this law is “helping her.”  And be forced to look a woman’s who’s just lost her day job because she’s been convicted of prostitution in the eyes and explain how this law is “helping her,” especially when the woman has to go back to prostitution (literally forced or coerced now by circumstances brought about by Hughes herself) to continue to make ends meet, thereby running the risk of being arrested again, perpetuating the cycle.  Yeah, “helping” prostitutes.  The next Julissa Brisman may be in Rhode Island, and her blood will be on Hughes’ hands.

And while I’ve only ever advocated doing harm to people who take the life of another human being, or abuse children or animals, if Hughes were to die a slow, painful death as the result of having an accident, I’d not lose a nanosecond of sleep over it.  As far as I’m concerned, these kinds of laws are tantamount to intentional abuse, and since she’s been its biggest proponent, she’s just as guilty of abusing human beings (sex workers are human beings, if you weren’t aware of that already) as anyone who’s trafficked another human in my mind.  I’d want her to have some time ( perhaps a minute for each) to reflect upon every sex worker who’s harmed as a result of this law before her light went out, though.

Intellectual malcontents like Hughes, Farley, and Kloer make my skin crawl.  Each of them directly advocates the abuse of other human beings, and does damage to the cause of helping people who truly are trafficked, exploited, and harmed around the world by intentionally conflating the two issues in the minds of lawmakers.  And for that they should be ashamed.  What disgusting individuals.

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