188: Everybody Wants to Save the Children (feat Esme Providence Brown)
What happens when white knights role-play at saving all the children? What impacts do they have on the actual realities faced by trafficked children and adults? And how does their propaganda—rolled out in blockbuster trauma porn events like Sound of Freedom—stigmatize and endanger adult sex workers, especially those who are already marginalized? Esme Providence Brown returns as our correspondent to run it down.
Brown retired from professional sex work in 2021 after twenty-year career in Manhattan. She first joined us on Episode 169 to talk about the strange overlaps between sex work and the neo-tantra yoga movement. In this richly-researched report and discussion with Matthew, she examines the history of and present-day ramifications of anti-trafficking movements—projects that often scapegoat women who are secretly desired but publicly hated.
“Everybody wants to save the children,” Brown says, “but very few people want to step into the tangled web of what this actually means or the history of how ‘salvation’ movements - hobbled by grandiosity, white knighthood, and patriarchal ignorance—have incurred collateral damage while failing in their ultimate mission of liberation.”
Show notes for this one are extensive, and won’t fit into most pod apps. You can find them here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happens when white knights role-play at saving the children?
What impacts do they have on the actual realities faced by trafficked children and adults?
And how does their propaganda stigmatize and endanger adult sex workers, especially those who are already marginalized?
Esme Providence Brown returns as our correspondent to run it down.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I'll add, where we find out what it's like to be caught in the crossfire of conspiratorial fantasies.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Esme Providence-Brown.
And you're back, Esme, having joined us first as a guest on episode 169.
You offered this amazing analysis of the strange overlaps between sex work and women's labor in yoga and wellness.
And of course, you were quite qualified for that with 20 years of sex work in Manhattan under your belt, but also training as a yoga teacher.
Yeah, it's really good to be back.
I had such a positive experience with the last episode.
I was really moved by the reception to the episode.
And really grateful for the opportunity to keep reexamining my own story, especially in the way that policy continues to develop and the cultural understanding of sex work continues to develop.
Right.
I'm retired as of 2021, formally, officially.
But for the last 20 years, I've worked in domination, which is legal, and indoor full service work, which is currently criminalized.
Now, today, as a correspondent, I thought you'd be perfect for providing listeners with an overview of how panics around human trafficking, which are central to the kind of content bubble of conspirituality, not only distort the realities of trafficking, but they're also part of just this patriarchal, craven, misogynistic project that scapegoats women who are secretly desired but also publicly hated.
And on that note, you are still using a pseudonym, right?
I feel like Secretly Desired but Publicly Hated could have been the story of my high school experience.
So for the time being, I am still using a pseudonym.
We haven't reached full decriminalization of sex work, and even when we do, my past choices will always sensationalize and affect my future opportunities.
It doesn't extend only to me, but to my family, my partner, his family, and anyone else who's affiliated with me.
Conspirituality 188.
Everybody wants to save the children, with Esme Providence Brown.
Just a reminder, we're on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
We've also got a book out, it's called Conspirituality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format.
Esme, take it away.
I don't know a single person who would contest protecting children from abuse, exploitation, or trauma.
It's what makes speaking intelligently about propaganda-ridden blockbuster films, raid and rescue tactics, and celebrity philanthropic causes so challenging.
Nobody wants to be seen as defending something as heinous as child trafficking.
Right.
But unfortunately, like so many social problems, it's much more complicated of an issue than a simple slogan can sum up.
Everybody wants to save children, but really very few people want to step into this tangled web of what it actually means, how there's a history of salvation movements which are hobbled by things like grandiosity, white knighthood, and patriarchal ignorance.
And all of this has incurred collateral damage while failing in the ultimate mission of liberation.
So over the past 20 years and my career in sex work, I've experienced firsthand the damaging effects of policy and social perception that continues to conflate consenting adult erotic labor with human trafficking.
All of this misinformation has led to restrictive legislation that negatively impacts those of us working in this industry and still ultimately failing to assist both survivors and victims of trafficking.
And I think this brings up a big picture question right off the top, which is, is liberation or even helping anyone the ultimate mission of the anti-trafficking movements we're going to discuss today?
Or are we generally talking about people who just want to make themselves feel pious regardless of what the impacts are?
Look, I'm an optimist.
I believe that most people want to help, but they just don't understand the misguided impact of how they believe they are helping.
Right.
I think even the most zealous religious fanatics truly believe they're saving not only children, but women like myself, who although we've elected to work in the adult entertainment industry, they believe that there's no possible way we could have made that decision of our own volition.
Right.
So much of the fanaticism is really believing that a singular cause is the path to salvation.
And the problem is not a fanatic's good intentions, but biases, blind spots, hang-ups, and failure to actually relate to sex workers as human beings who can have real adult conversations about these issues.
And that's really why you're here today, because we're going to look at how all of this goes down in spectacles like Sound of Freedom.
And I know that you also have a lot of tea to spill on dudes like Tim Ballard, who is actually a type, and the ground zero psychology of the White Knight, who seems to both hate sex workers but can't stop obsessing about them.
But for First, we also have to do some stage setting and some history.
So in general, Esme, what would you say about the architecture of the anti-trafficking movement?
Where does it come from?
What are some of its underlying premises with regard to decriminalization versus other strategies?
And how does it all converge on surveillance?
So I'm going to just mention a couple organizations that are in this space of positioning themselves against human trafficking and sex work as conflated, and there's a lot of them, but I'll just mention a few just for context.
Although larger organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and ACLU support decriminalization of sex work officially, there are these other anti-trafficking organizations that have this opposing view.
First, you've got the U.S.
Institute Against Human Trafficking, started in 2016 by a formal professional baseball player.
Not sure what his expertise in this space was, but moving beyond, he claims that he's a passionate follower of Jesus Christ.
His name is Kevin Malone.
And he describes his organization as a ministry.
He's really not shying away from his theistic approach.
And even though he calls the organization nonpartisan and independent, of political and religious tethers, it's clear that it is
religiously driven just based on looking at the site and some of their collateral.
Then you've got the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, and that's an international organization
that was founded in 1988.
It's one of the oldest opponents for decriminalizing sex work and believes that all erotic labor
is a form of gender-based violence.
This is a very common belief in organizations that conflate sex work with trafficking, that essentially anybody working in sex is contributing or part of gender-based violence.
That's a very strong claim.
It's a really, really strong claim.
And I think that claim is really the foundation of some of this discourse and kind of the root of the disagreement.
Right.
That organization clearly states that even though no government or international agency knows how many people are victims of human trafficking due to the crime's illicit nature, they still wholeheartedly stand the position that human trafficking is an exorbitantly large problem.
How large?
They don't have data to support because it's too opaque to know, but they, you know, still have their position.
And then you got another very religiously oriented organization, the Valiant Hearts, which is another ministry.
It's Texas based, and they offer victims of trafficking Aftercare or resources, things like group therapy and job placement, but only if they are in a greater or lesser degree part of this conversion process to Christianity.
So there's a condition for receiving that aftercare.
Okay, so for the religious organizations, it would seem like the sex worker is the symbol of a fallen world, perhaps, and, you know, if you can get her to come back to Jesus, rather than making her world less dangerous, then you know that you're on the right track.
I'm a secular person and generally have an aversion to religious dogma as a moral framework, but again, I really can see how these organizations believe they're helping victims.
One of the first things to really understand is that the structure of this discourse, this anti-trafficking discourse, is fundamentally classist and racist.
And it infantilizes women who make a living in sex work.
It treats women like children or not fully formed adults.
In claiming to help these victims, it ends up targeting and stigmatizing women of color, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, and ironically, many actual survivors of trafficking.
It would seem like the basic cultural labor here, probably unintentional, is that if you stigmatize women of color, for example, as being sexually dangerous, you can distract the dominant culture from its own misogyny.
Do you think that's fair?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this is a whole other field of research that I'm certainly not an expert in, but there has been a lot of studies done and historical analysis done about the trope of the hyper-sexualized black woman.
It's this kind of cultural fixation.
In the 19th century, which is a period of time we're going to talk later about, some of this policy starts to change.
There was a woman named Sarah Bartman who was stolen from South Africa and exhibited as a scientific fascination in Europe.
She was known as the Hot Knot Venus, and she was advertised to audiences for her very sizable butt.
And a lot of fixation with that particular anatomy has carried over into images of Black women today.
What's really unfortunate is that even though she spent most of her life being toured in these pseudo-scientific, medicalized exhibitions, she had a really short life and died at 26.
And she is part of a very long history, right?
Absolutely.
So the stigmatization of sex work really begins to increase in the late 1800s, and a lot of the modern pathologization discourse can be traced back to Rockefeller Jr.' 's enlightened philanthropy initiatives.
Rockefeller became involved in the war against prostitution in 1911 after reading a long form essay published by William Steed, who was the evangelical editor of the Paul Mall Gazette.
We'll hear more about him a bit later.
And he really wanted to distinguish himself as a proponent of good causes to offset his father's misanthropic reputation.
So Rockefeller took it upon himself to develop something called the BSH, or the Bureau of Social Hygiene.
Uh-oh.
He was a bit late to the game because in 1905, another eerie group was created by physicians, something called the American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis.
Oh no!
Yeah.
They were not nearly as resourced as Rockefeller's later endeavor.
But essentially the aim of both of these organizations was to medicalize a moral concern and The thing about prostitution, it was really widely defined.
It included any sexual behavior that was not aligned with the moral ideas derived from Protestantism.
And that included interracial relationships, that included moving across state lines, that included being unmarried.
I mean, it was a lot of things that had nothing to do with actually selling sex for money.
So you can see how the faith-based organizations really got their start in this time, in this arena.
With the medicalization especially, so Bureau of Social Hygiene, American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, very eerie, as we said, bureaucratic names.
And you can see that the framing that sex work is a kind of contagion probably starts to take hold here, a moral contagion.
But then there's also sort of a bioethics thing as well, because we begin to think of the marginalization of sex work to poverty-stricken parts of a Victorian-era city, for example, which might also have sanitation problems.
But then those landscapes exist because of poverty, shame, and marginalization, not because sex workers are objectively polluted or polluting.
Yeah, these notions and concepts of sex workers spreading diseases, independent of conditions of poverty or lack of education, really take root in that time and continue to hold a lot of people's attention and really kind of be taken as a given today.
Now, going back to Rockefeller, I guess you're saying that he was not part of an evil cabal running a sex trafficking ring, so he was one of the good guys, or he wanted to be?
I'm sure he would love to have been considered one of the good guys.
But actually, most of the sex trafficking rings and operations were rumored to be run
by immigrants and Jews.
And this was primarily because they were in competition with the white Protestant run,
formally sanctioned legal monopolies of the time.
Believing that the knowledge produced inside the Bureau's laboratory would scientifically
mark sex workers as social deviants, Rockefeller endorsed and funded a eugenics-based approach
to distinguishing between those sex workers who are capable of being rehabilitated and
those congenitally defective and therefore impervious to reform.
Oh, I don't like that at all.
It sounds like there was a lab test or something?
And because the term prostitute was so all-encompassing, it really could be applied to any woman with things like an overactive sex drive, an unmarried woman, a poor woman, an immigrant woman, woman of color, etc., etc., etc.
And it would seem that sterilizing sex workers would have a double purpose.
Like, it's eugenicist, as you mentioned, based on the premise maybe that sex work is an inherited disease.
But, I mean, it also takes away the sex worker's humanity and reduces them even more down to the disposable object who could never biologically contribute to society or be a caregiver.
I'm not sure that it was stated specifically that sex work was an inherited disease, but it was probably inferred with this language of medicalization of moral concerns.
Rockefeller imagined that eradicating trafficking meant finding sex workers, determining which of them were genetically salvageable, and enrolling them in a program of reform which inevitably meant some kind of religious interference and
religious reform.
And he developed a really important tool that still remains true today, albeit in a different form.
And that tool is surveillance.
Okay, so Rockefeller creates a blueprint for the surveillance of sex workers.
Where do we see that play out today?
Today, we have Ashton Kutcher, a very different kind of celebrity, and he has also fashioned himself as a sort of modern-day enlightened philanthropist.
Kutcher established something called THORN, actually originally called DNA back in 2009 with his I just want to say that I think in 2009, watching a Dateline special to receive any kind of credible news is probably the equivalent of, you know, looking at an Instagram post today.
Yeah.
So just tracing how we're getting information and the sensationalism of, you know, actually researched Real knowledge and information versus just something that provokes the pathos.
Right.
He raised close to $27 million in the first 10 years, and then he partnered with Goldman Sachs and the McCain Institute.
He's worked with companies like Google and Amazon, and he's invested to create a new digital tool called Spotlight ever since.
What Spotlight does, it's a tech tool.
You can enter certain keywords such as escort or young with a name or a phone number.
And what Spotlight does is it cross-references thousands of adult services ads to see if a potentially trafficked person will come up.
They claim that Spotlight helped to identify over 17,000 survivors of child trafficking in four years.
That's what Thorne claimed to do.
But if you cross-reference that with the FBI's own reporting, they indicate that only 175 cases of verified minor victims have been documented in a six-year window.
OK, so that's either wildly inaccurate as a tool, Or Spotlight is inflating its success, or there is the possibility, as with sexual assault, that the report to conviction rate is absurdly low because the legal system is weighted against the victim.
I believe that there's definitely a parallel to the low conviction rate that happens within sexual assault.
Now, look, I can't speak to the specific accuracy of Spotlight.
I haven't used it myself.
But as far as some of the way that data is managed, I can speculate it might be something similar to how Michael Hobbs described on their episode of You're Wrong About when they talked about human trafficking.
For example, when organizations like the Institute Against Human Trafficking accumulates their numbers of victims, They self-admittedly include any time a child is reported to go missing, not excluding duplicates, or if the child has been returned home.
And I speculate that it might be similar because this is the way that so many of these kinds of NGOs manipulate numbers in order to get such a radically different number from the parallel government agencies.
I remember Hobbes saying that those reports include things like, you know, my kid went to the candy store and was gone for an hour and I freaked out and phoned the police, but really she got absorbed in playing Pac-Man in the store and lost track of time.
And you know, it's comparable, this is a different subject, but it's comparable to what happens with VAERS, or the self-reporting mechanism for supposed vaccine injuries.
Like, people can report anything about anything, and none of it is verified, but then entire conspiracy theories emerge from whatever people think those stats mean, and then the worst part is, they think they're citing data, but really they're just talking about a bunch of noise they came across.
Yeah, and just going back to the earlier point that one of the other organizations I mentioned made, which is that the data and statistics in this arena are notoriously opaque.
It doesn't mean that it's not happening, but it certainly doesn't mean that it's happening to the extent that they're claiming it is.
I mean, the two opposite ends of the spectrum are so extreme.
So given that Spotlight is circulated through police departments nationwide, it's a tool that's made available to them, and these police departments have said that it's made their lives and jobs tremendously easier, it seems strange that the FBI would also not have immediate access to this powerful tool.
With the understanding that trafficking victims are often passed through invisible networks of family and partners, it's unclear how surveilling adult services sites leads to anything more than the surveillance of adult sex workers.
And despite being frequented by many police officers, sex workers do not have a particularly copacetic relationship with the cops.
Basically, it sounds like Kutcher wanted to find vulnerable kids, but he wound up creating tech that allows cops to track and maybe harass grown women, the same grown women that they often patronize.
And I imagine that in the worst cases, this leads to cops extorting sex workers for services in return for not harassing them.
Is that something that happens?
Yeah, unfortunately, it's really increased in the, not just the amount of restriction, but also violence towards sex workers.
I mean, I don't want to say best case scenario, but like less extreme scenario, something like spotlight will allow for facial recognition, which will prohibit a sex worker from, you know, moving across international lines.
You know, she'll get recognized, she'll get harassed.
That's very unfortunate and has happened to a lot of workers that I know personally.
But there are much more extreme consequences.
In 2017, police raided a massage parlor in Queens.
Song Yang, a Chinese sex worker, jumped out of the fourth floor window onto the sidewalk,
actually running away from the police officer that she'd had a prior encounter with before.
This was somebody who had previously intimidated and sexually assaulted her,
and she just couldn't handle it anymore and was literally running away from this person
that was clearly predatory.
And she died in the hospital after hospital workers attempted to resuscitate her.
And unfortunately, this is not an anomalous event.
There's no way to track exactly how the police are using tools like Spotlight
to actually investigate child abuse.
And then we have something that happens in 2017 called FOSTA-SESTA, which stands for Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act or Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, which has further banned platforms from hosting sex worker ads, making those platforms responsible for potential trafficking.
You have platforms like Tumblr, which immediately took down anything with any kind of sexual content, and bringing down thousands of adult-themed sites, and actually on December 17, 2017, which I mean, I'm not going to speculate any kind of conspiracy theory here, but December 17th is actually the international date to end violence against sex workers by the community.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is really fucked up that on December 17th, this is the day that this law goes into effect.
I thought that felt particularly like a fuck you.
Instagram quickly developed tools for any content perceived as soliciting adult services using Spotlight or Spotlight analogous tools.
And the other part of Spotlight is that it ushered in AI-assisted facial recognition.
And this is something that was piloted on sex workers, but very likely could Go into effect on a larger population.
Some of the reasoning behind first piloting this and testing this on sex worker population is that it's a population that really has such a stigma and historically, and even today, people just are not so concerned with.
And the community, the sex worker community has been tracking this for some time.
We're always keenly aware of this idea of being canaries in the coal mine.
of what is to come to the public at large just a little bit later.
Ever since Rockefeller's time, sex workers have been a test population for such novel surveillance technologies, be it in the laboratory like we saw with BSH or online with things like Spotlight.
Now, in preparation, we spoke about this concrete example of how FOSTA or SESTA means that a publication like The Old Village Voice in Manhattan would no longer have pages upon pages of ads by sex workers.
And you were explaining to me how that's actually not a good thing to have that all disappeared.
So, can you run that down for us briefly?
Yeah, I certainly will.
I think I also found the original dungeon that I worked in Manhattan through the Village Voice ads back in the day.
Right.
So in addition to placing ads, sex workers would often use places like Tumblr or other social media platforms to stay connected with each other.
One of the things we were able to do is cross-reference client names, email addresses, and use the platforms to set up appointments, set up safety checks.
None of this is possible as a result of SESTA-FOSTA.
Workers who previously worked indoors were forced into the streets.
There's been an uptick in violence against sex workers since 2017.
It didn't make things safer at all.
In other words, in the absence of legal regulation, there had been a kind of open marketplace tool that, through advertising, that allowed for sex workers to really be on the lookout for each other.
And maybe on the other side, it would force the client to be more visible about their choices, is that right?
Yeah, I mean, there was essentially not just a paper trail, but there was a real-time visibility, you know?
You had things happening online that corresponded with things that were happening in real life.
Right.
None of this is an argument.
that claims to protect sex worker rights at the expense of sacrificing kids, as a lot of religious zealots and those radicalized by adjacent theories would claim.
It's really an attempt at untangling the networks of misinformation that are currently knotted together in a way that's no less insidious than the networks actually facilitating the trafficking.
If we can't understand this history of white slavery and extract verifiable data from a web littered with propaganda and crazy stats, how can we ever successfully save children?
So, Esme, all of this brings us to Sound of Freedom.
Now, I know you loved this film.
It must have been amazing to see a sex worker take such a starring role in a high-budget spectacle.
So, tell us about that.
Oh, my gosh.
What a complicated film with complicated feelings.
So, summer blockbuster last year, when I heard about it, felt like another generic action thriller.
Rogue federal agent rescuing children that were trafficked deep in the jungles of Latin America.
You know, kind of like Taken.
Nothing will stop this determined white man from his conviction to liberate the kidnapped children in foreign countries.
What I thought was really interesting is that despite this being an indie film, it brought in $180 million at the domestic box office.
Through an incredibly well-coordinated marketing campaign and also because QAnon's very own movie star, Jim Caviezel, was cast in the leading role.
Based on a true story, it's based on the story of a man named Tim Ballard, Who founded an organization called Operation Underground Railroad, a really unfortunate name.
Right.
And Tim Ballard was then an active member of the Latter Day Saints.
He formed OUR as an anti-child trafficking non-for-profit funded by donations primarily from within the LDS community.
He was an officer with the Department of Homeland Security and he allegedly applied his experience in counter-terrorism
which he got a real penchant for after 9-11 to the anti-trafficking cause.
And his group is really big on something called Raid and Rescue.
Let's talk about that.
Raid and Rescue is a term describing a form of intervention where authorities or agents violently infiltrate trafficking rings and extricate victims directly from the hands of traffickers, followed by arrest of the trafficking ringleaders.
The model emphasizes the dramatic, often armed interference that claims to prevent further
damage to children already in the hands of nefarious criminals.
And while victims are rescued, quote, rescued by being physically removed from danger,
the model rarely accounts for what actually happens to the victims once the adrenaline of the raid has dropped.
So from its inception, OUR's implementation of this model really emphasized the valorization
of those who rescue rather than the safety of those who actually needed the
help.
Rather than focusing on the very real needs of both children and adults caught in complex webs of trafficking, we needed real resources once they had been Cut loose or rescued, OUR Tactics put all the attention on the self-proclaimed saviors that were tirelessly working for the organization, such as Tim Ballard.
And so Ballard's experience in one of these actual real-life sting operations was the basis of the film.
Ballard wasn't convinced that it was only cartel criminals deep in Colombian jungles that were trafficking children.
Actually, in 2020, a Twitter post has him signing off on the QAnon belief that children were being sold on the Wayfair website.
And in a recent Jordan Peterson interview, which I had the unfortunate experience of listening to,
Ballard describes this witchdoctory, that's his words, that he witnessed in West Africa
where children's organs were being harvested for adrenochrome, this drug that allegedly emerges
out of adrenaline and that the Hollywood elites allegedly drink to keep them looking so young.
I think we have to stop here because this is really a hackneyed theme and I'm not just talking
about adrenochrome.
The entire North American-based satanic panic movement erupts in 1980 and is catalyzed by Lawrence Pazder, the
Victorian-based psychiatrist who co-wrote Michelle Remembers with his patient and later wife
Michelle Smith. And it's clear that the quote-unquote memories that Smith weaves for him are
partly regurgitations of his own It gets recycled and turned over and over and over again.
So, I don't know.
in the 1960s and witnessing what he thought were demonic animal sacrifice rituals.
I mean, this stuff just floats around, it gets recycled and turned over and over and over again.
So, I don't know. I mean, Ballard might be a plagiarist, as well as the perpetrator of the other allegations
we're gonna cover today.
Yeah, you'd think he could come up with something more original,
but what this really makes me think is, these memories, these cultural moments,
this regurgitation of things we've heard before, themes we've heard before.
You know, I really like to refer to this idea of the cultural stew, like the ingredients that are floating around in the cultural stew that we're all consuming in some way, shape, or form.
Right.
Just by the very nature of being exposed to things through a movie, through a news clip, through an Instagram post.
And none of us are really exempt from that information somehow getting laden somewhere in our minds and then coming up again, and then we develop these biases.
Several Hollywood studios and nine actors rejected Sound of Freedom.
Before Jim Caviezel came on board.
And he was famous, amongst other things, for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.
And he's actually endorsed some of the very theories that QAnon espouses alongside with Ballard.
Yes, throughout the press tour, he really let the mask slip.
Here he is being a little bit emotionally labile about adrenochrome.
Look, we're where we're at right now.
Hopefully, we need your prayers.
You said adrenochrome.
Essentially, you have adrenaline in your body.
I'll just simplify it.
And when you are scared, you've produced adrenaline.
If a child knows he's going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline.
For a few months, it seemed that despite the rampant conspiratorial threads running through the film, it was gaining momentum and even mainstream traction.
So what if there were some strange beliefs surrounding the film?
It would be a small price to pay for saving even one child.
Before we proceed to the accusations of sexual misconduct that Ballard was to face, I want to just talk about the film itself.
You know, Matthew made a sort of sarcastic comment about me liking it, but In complete transparency, like, in preparation for watching it, I really wanted to dislike it.
I'd heard things about how it was bad filmmaking and, you know, a lot of kind of, let's call it allies of this podcast for throwing it under the bus and making fun of it.
And so I was ready to watch something pretty terrible.
And I already had made up my mind about what I was going to say.
But what I found was a very effective use of cinematography, of soundtrack, some acting, some directing.
Clearly there was a budget and the pathos that it really all evoked.
I would say it's impossible to watch the film and not feel something.
I mean, it's a terrible story of a terrible thing that happens to children that really is something like of our worst nightmares.
And so in that way, I think it was an incredible piece of propaganda that really, you know, It affects anyone.
You'd have to be super callous to not have a response.
It made me remember when I was growing up the music video for Soul Asylum's Runaway Train, which came on in 1993.
And I was convinced, I was like a tween at that point, I was convinced that that was how you got kidnapped and abused.
That came into my little young mind.
The windowless van.
Yeah, the windowless van, exactly.
I agree with you about the effectiveness of the film.
It was intensely atmospheric, it was well-scored, great lighting.
I mean, Caviezel is like a, you know, carved wooden icon of some, like a medieval incel monk, but he still has that thousand-yard stare that can read really well on, you know, certain portraits.
He had it in thin red line and Yeah, he can bring it in moments if he doesn't actually have to act.
There are more subversive things that happen in the film.
It might not be apparent to everyone who's not doing a super close read, but there's a particular way in which the film positions the character of the one female adult sex worker that to me felt very intentional.
Yeah, okay, so this is Giselle, the character of Giselle.
So Giselle is a retired beauty pageant queen and she's clearly meant to combine like the role of a sex worker but also a trafficker.
There are several shots where the camera focuses on fragmented parts of her body, particularly hyper-sexualized parts where there's legs and high heels or Long nails or painted lips, which really mimics a lot of advertising of sexual services.
And frankly, just mimics advertising, you know, like long nails holding a cigarette.
I mean, you've seen that all over the place.
The woman is not a victim here, but rather a bad actor who's contributing to this nefarious system of child exploitation.
The moral messaging here is that anybody who continues a career in sex work could only do so at the exploitation of innocent children.
And furthermore, it's alluded to as probably exploited herself.
There's something split about her from the outset.
She's filmed, like as you say, in the classic fragmentary objectification of porn.
And as a cis male viewer, The buttons that encourage me to both desire and distrust her are being pressed in rapid succession in my brain, you know, shot by shot.
And yet, she's also depicted as successful in fashion or TV or whatever her field is, and respectable enough that the father of the two kids we follow through the film is able to trust her at the outset.
And I think this plays on this QAnon-level misogyny and paranoia that any beautiful woman in the arts or fashion could have this morbid, hidden life.
And so, I guess I wanted to ask you, referring to your professional life, when you see a depiction like this, does it strike close to home?
Yeah, it hit disturbingly close to home.
So much so that I didn't even register until I really took some time with it.
I think part of the film's success as a piece of propaganda is how effectively it reinforces the stereotype of a sex worker as a moral degenerate.
Furthermore, it's saying that any sexually expressive woman, you know, like you said, working in arts or fashion or just being expressive of her sexuality, is teetering dangerously close to being sex worker adjacent.
And if left unsupervised, our sexuality, meaning ours as women's, sexuality becomes a constant liability.
And that continuous exposure to this demonic representation is incredibly powerful.
The more films like this that I see, the easier it becomes for me to forget about the incredible sex workers that I know personally, who are mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and other caretakers.
These are people that I have met in real life.
I'm constantly flooded with the messaging that only a person who has been traumatized would find herself in this kind of work and furthermore will only continue to traumatize the children in her midst.
And pretty soon after being exposed to enough of these kinds of pieces of propaganda, I start to doubt my own capacity for caretaking or parenting, and I become determined to find the site of trauma that has led me to this line of work.
And I internalize stigma and shame so deeply that the state doesn't need to sterilize me because the screen has already done it.
Shit.
That's powerful.
Let's get on to Ballard.
So after the film's initial success, With both Ballard and Caviezel promoting it through their predictable podcast circuit like Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson, a series of bizarre events made this story that much more sensational.
By October of 2023, five women who were previously connected with OUR came forward to accuse Ballard of sexual misconduct in Utah's 3rd District Court.
And in this detailed lawsuit, the woman described the extremity of Ballard's convictions and his willingness to wrangle these women as part of his own rescue fantasy gone amok.
He did something called the couple's ruse, where Ballard would hire, although it's unclear if they were paid, women to play the role of his wives on missions abroad.
Now this didn't simply mean donning the name Mrs. Ballard on their tickets to South America.
Ballard allegedly explained that fooling traffickers required them to go to extreme lengths, including showering together or sharing a bed, because the traffickers could detect pheromones between husband and wife.
So, and furthermore, in preparation for the mission, Ballard required that the woman he was working with would attend things like couples tantric classes, visit strip clubs, and interact with escorts so that they would get more into the role of a connected couple.
So look, it's clear that he was interacting with sex workers.
He was frequenting sex workers.
This was part of his Let's call it research.
And if the woman showed trepidation at the prospect of these obscenely inappropriate requests, Ballard would pose that perpetually implicating question of how far would you go to save even one child?
This is not to mention that a lot of Ballard's intel at this point was passed to him either through a psychic Or through one of his many ketamine trips where he would speak with the Mormon prophet Nephi, I believe is how you pronounce it, advising him that he would both be running for Senate and also ushering in the second coming of Christ.
So this is such peak conspirituality.
And I mean, he's obviously an assaulting pervert gifted at elaborate rationalizations.
But notice how his own grandiosity has to be mirrored by the demonic clairvoyance of the traffickers who can smell the pheromones generated by the couple's ruse.
So I suppose they have ESP, you know, so you have to go to great lengths to fool them.
Part of me wished I was a fly on the wall to watch this whole gruesome thing play out, and then part of me is like, oh, I've already seen this happen enough times with guys like Ballard.
I unfortunately really wasn't that surprised to learn of Ballard's misbehaviors, which personally, coming from my experience in this industry, I interpret as repressed or unexamined fantasies.
We actually have a trope, um, that we refer to guys like Ballard, which is both White Savior, uh, or White Knight, and sometimes colloquially call him Captain Save-A-Ho.
There's a rap.
There's a good rap, yeah.
And if you look at the lyrics, they actually do a pretty good definition of that.
So that was something that was, you know, understood.
It's about this, this man who comes in and uses his, uh, affluence and statuses and money to extract a woman from her job in sex work.
I've seen so many clients as conflicted as Ballard where they clearly have really intense desires that bring them to frequent sex workers while simultaneously battling enormous guilt and shame around it.
They attempt to offset their guilt and shame by engaging in these fundamentalist humanitarian movements, believing that if they can eradicate all sex work, which they perceive as saving rather than eradicating, they can relieve their own desires.
Oh man.
And not only is this just not accurate management system for erotic desire, It serves to project these men's desires onto the bodies of sex workers.
It deflects their accountability for anything, making us responsible for provoking them into sin.
It really doesn't surprise me that in extreme cases, this kind of inner conflict and dishonesty looks for relief elsewhere, shrouding it in the name of a noble cause.
This is an incredible insight.
It's an amazing feedback loop.
So the client wants something from you that they will then accuse you of provoking.
And instead of being honest about what that is, they'll try to turn it into a project to save themselves or turn you into a project to save themselves.
So I suppose, Esme, after a while, you can probably smell that happening from a mile away.
And then maybe like any other muddy or complicated transaction, you just have to make a decision about whether to cut that short for your own sense of safety and dignity, right?
I mean, unfortunately, negotiating safety is the reality of negotiating with men for a lot of women.
And this is in or out of sex work.
That's been my experience.
There are legal initiatives that attempt to deal directly with the power and privilege of the client, right?
It's an appropriate time to define something called the Nordic model or end-demand model.
Now what this is, is a partial decriminalization approach where clients can be arrested for buying sex while providers will not be arrested for selling it.
On first glance, it seems like This is something that protects providers from facing criminal charges while putting the onus on patrons.
It seems like this is something that would prevent exploitation of workers at the hands of conflicted patrons like Ballard.
But what it actually does is create fear amongst patrons that prevents them from providing really important information, personal information, for doing things like background checking or cross-referencing with other people that they might have seen.
Essentially, if these men know that they're being policed, they can stay in absolute darkness.
They're not going to offer any kind of important information, making it that much more difficult to really understand who it is that you're dealing with.
Meanwhile, providers do not have the benefit of remaining anonymous, as a lot of these web hosting platforms require rigorous identity documentation, warehousing our personal data that can be used to further surveil and monitor activities.
And as online surveillance technology becomes more sophisticated, the end demand model only becomes more contested.
This is a great example of unintended consequences.
And it kind of reminds me of a saying in disability and autistic studies, which is like nothing about us without us.
And I think what they're saying is don't try to intervene or help without asking us what we need, because chances are high that you're going to make things worse.
Does that apply here, do you think?
Yeah, absolutely.
This is the first time that I'm hearing that, and I think that that's a great statement.
Historically, sex workers were not considered adult humans, either as an extension of being treated like children or because they were migrant, minorities, etc.
And so they weren't considered to have legitimate opinions and positions on their own circumstances and couldn't have any say on the policies that were extended to them.
Now, for listeners, I want to note that, as always, we'll be posting our sources for this report in the show notes.
And Esme, I want to flag in particular how we've all benefited from the reporting of Friend of the Pod, Anna Merlan, along with her colleague, Tim Marchman, over advice when it comes to tracking the exploits of Tim Ballard.
So, what has he been up to since Sound of Freedom dropped?
So in the last several months, the allegations against Ballard have resulted in him stepping down from OUR.
He's been excommunicated from LDS.
Yeah.
And even the Utah Attorney State General has recused himself from involvement in the investigation against OUR, although it was recently revealed that Sean Reyes, who's the Utah AG, may actually have been involved with intimidating critics who spoke out against OUR.
And all this is to say that larger and larger concentric circles of implications seem to be emerging rather rapidly, be it with church members or politicians.
So is your sense that if, like, you pull on Tim Ballard's leg, there's a whole fabric of misogynistic savior LARPing that starts to unravel?
Ballard's conflicted roleplay adventures are really a specific flavor of misogyny, and there's unfortunately so many.
And this is where we start getting more into the trope of that white knight that I mentioned earlier.
It doesn't derive its name by accident.
So sex work has taught me to learn a lot about boundaries, but it hasn't been easy, nor has it been linear.
Sometimes it's felt like fighting an uphill battle, because no matter how much autonomy or agency I felt in running my own business, the institutional inequities do not have a person like me and so many of my clients negotiating from the same place.
Men who bring agendas of salvation under the guise of white knight or white savior often exploit these embedded inequalities, be them educational or economic.
between worker and patron.
It's not only misogynistic, it's really a very ugly form of intimidation and bullying.
Okay, let's define white knight.
A white knight or white savior is an archetype of a man, not unlike Ballard, who solicits sex workers for our services and then pretends to want to help by explaining to us why the work we are doing is inherently damaging for us.
It's almost like they purchased the session in order to get that.
That's like where the real fantasy lies.
It's not even to do whatever services.
he had originally purchased, it's in order to get that opportunity to get on his soapbox and
sneak in more time and speak his agenda. I'm almost feeling, it's almost like imagining
like the Jehovah's Witnesses coming to your door, you know?
Right, right. And I suppose like if they go over time, you have to develop a tapping the sign policy
around that, like I'm still on the clock. Yeah, I mean, it's really a delicate balance.
I think anyone who's worked in different kinds of service industries understands that it's not so cut and dry that you can just sort of say, okay, and we're done.
I mean, I don't know, therapists do that.
So maybe take a book out of their book.
There are different ways to handle it.
I mean, you can laugh it off and other times you have to be gracious.
I mean, at the end of the day, this is still a business.
You're still entertaining, providing a service for money.
These types of men are extremely sensitive.
They're easily offended and they have this entitlement.
So these are the guys who, like, say, you know, I'm just trying to be nice to you.
Like, isn't that rare?
Like, aren't I one of the good guys?
I mean, you're a sex worker.
You can't have friends or sources of support on your own.
Like, where do you get off turning down this kindness I'm offering?
Yeah, the one of the good guys is always a red flag for me.
It's the most insidious thing because they've already set themselves up onto a moral high ground.
It's not genuine concern or kindness.
It's conditional on receiving their help, which is very much parallel to the kinds of services that are offered by a lot of these anti-trafficking, anti-sex work, non-for-profits.
They say, look, we're trying to help you.
We're trying to do this thing for you.
Who are you to turn down our group services or who are you to turn down the help that we're offering?
A lot of people might think, okay, I worked in an arena like BDSM and I'm supposed to hold a dominant role with my clients the whole time.
But at the end of the day, I'm a person.
That dominant role that I play is a curated persona.
And I crave to connect with people on a human level as much as anybody else.
And there are certain types of men that take advantage of that.
They always want to access this, quote, authentic part of a worker.
The part that can be saved.
The part that can be saved, exactly.
And they look for that little sliver of an in to get that information.
And like I said earlier, there's A lot of times these men have incredible knowledge and power in negotiating tactics.
They come from successful business backgrounds.
I'm not diminishing my ability to negotiate, but it requires an incredible amount of vigilance to not fall into that trap when all you're trying to do is be genuine with somebody.
They want to know things like your real name.
They want to know if you have a boyfriend, where you live.
Extracting information so that they can save you from what you're doing, even if you've just spent an hour servicing them.
And it's like they're two people split between two conflicting sets of values.
They have a fantasy of a sex worker.
Then once they've met their sexual needs, they feel it's their obligation to save you from this work.
And that only they are uniquely positioned to do this.
They have their own guilt about seeing a sex worker, and they project it onto us.
What's even worse is that these kinds of guys, they really want to bait you into sharing that authentic part, and as soon as you do, it becomes weaponized against you.
So whatever you say, you lose.
If they ask you why you're really doing this job, they fish for a story of struggle and survival, you tell them because I like it, I like it, then they pathologize you as a pervert.
If you tell them the opposite, they position you as a victim.
So you'll never win if you don't match the exact narrative, i.e.
their fantasy, that they've created for you, be it about sexuality, or rescue, or some really twisted combination of both.
Okay, so with guys like Ballard, we're not talking about a corporate high roller or expert in finance, but the imbalance that he would bring to the situation comes out of this kind of sense of moral hierarchy and domination.
It's the worst kind, because the last thing I want to hear about when I'm working is what the Bible has to say about my redemption.
You know, I can imagine.
I'm just trying to do a job here.
A job you literally just hired me to do.
Slate has since called the details of the OUR lawsuit as stomach-churning, and it's just become a feeding frenzy for fanatics and true crime aficionados to spin off their often unsubstantiated stories.
Now, Tim Ballard is not just an overzealous vigilante with a I mean, the public is ravenously hungry for clickbait and caught at the crosshairs of these culture wars, so these conspiratorially driven connections devolve of very real political issues into a series of rubbernecking seductions.
Everything begins to have a similar level of plausibility, from doomsday cults to children being sold online, through companies like Wayfair, and everything else.
It just all gets totalized.
So, Pizza Gate is plausible, but abuse in the Church of Latter-day Saints and the Roman
Catholic Church is not.
But in all cases, whether fantastical or real, the imagined victims are equally infantilized.
I mean, and that's a big part of what you're getting at, right?
Yeah.
And historically, infantilization really rhymes with a deeply embedded racism.
So back at the turn of the 19th century in America, The quote, white female body came to stand for national identity and serve as a trope of a threatened nation.
And the chastity of women was the foundation of Anglo-Saxon society.
Now this is by Gretchen Sordland, who offered this incredible book called Sex Trafficking Scandal and Transformation of Journalism, 1885 to 1917.
The fear of white slavery was an equal part about the horror of an enslaved white woman as it was about the influx of non-white immigration, especially from China.
Women becoming financially independent, interracial dating, increasing antisemitism, and wealth accumulated in monopolies outside of those officially sanctioned ones operated by white Protestant men.
So today, true crime really continues to capitalize on that element of sensationalism.
Soylent also talks about sensationalism, sexuality, and violence becoming inextricably linked in the news cycle.
The term sensational came to only be applied when politicians and respectable media is considered a topic disagreeable.
But if the topic was socially acceptable, the term newsworthy was used instead.
So the very language of journalism came to uphold this developing understanding of respectability politics used to police not only what was being reported, but the very language of that reporting.
And in the 1900s, all human trafficking was referred to as white slavery because it claimed to be concerned with the perceived plight of white women in a rapidly industrializing time.
And whether it referred to actual enslavement of white women or not, white slavery became a catch-all term referring to a growing list of modern-day fears.
A hundred years later, white slavery could be replaced with human trafficking, and eventually child trafficking, in its ambiguous application and how it envelops a remarkably similar collection of fears.
A film like Sound of Freedom opposes child trafficking overseas while completely ignoring the exploitation of agricultural and domestic workers in the US.
Right.
Well, I mean, to me, that's part of the cultural labor of sensationalism because it takes your eye off the ball.
Sometimes, you know, the thing that's much more obvious.
Yeah.
When Sound of Freedom makes a claim that there's more modern day slavery today than even when slavery was legal, they're conflating statistics about all human trafficking with data around child sex trafficking.
I find that also to be characteristic of exaggerations from MAGA sources more generally, that the economy has never been worse than under Biden, or that Justin Trudeau is a dictator, or that when RFK Jr.
claims there's an epidemic of chronic disease, The through line is that nothing has ever been worse, ever, and we desperately need to take action, like, right now.
And I think that's probably a real cue for the attractiveness of the raid and rescue format, right?
And there's also this weird mirror of other paranoid exaggerations.
Because when we think about something like the Great Replacement Theory, which says that immigration from the Global South is replacing white heritage, you know, there's this convenient overlap where it's suggested that girls and women of the Global North are captured and spirited away in the other direction.
Yeah, I mean, you've got inaccurate data coming from unreliable sources, and so this tendency towards sensationalism is inevitable.
And this results in the implicit conflation between child trafficking and consenting adult sex work in the public eye.
Now, I want to mention, because you said girls and women, language really matters.
And terms that are frequently used to discuss both sex work and trafficking Is women and girls.
And what that does is it merges the experiences of minors who cannot consent to sex work and decisions made by adults.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
So not only does the term women and girls evoke a stereotype of young girls sold into prostitution, it simultaneously infantilizes the experience of grown women with the assumption that we are not able to make our own decision when it comes to sex work.
Yes, I can see that.
Yeah, and there's no parallel for the male gender.
You don't see men and boys.
You don't even see women and children of all genders.
You don't even see women and children.
It's almost always women and girls.
There's no other arena where adults are denied autonomy to make decisions.
Look, however questionable, but this includes voting, enlisting in the armed services, purchase of firearms.
Sex workers, allies, and activists continue often and always to speak openly about the various reasons for working in this industry.
To assume we're not capable of making our own decisions and are coerced is patriarchy in its most covert and destructive form.
Claiming that sex worker rights are insignificant in the light of children suffering is not only myopic, it's simply not true.
Okay, well, I'm happy for that feedback on language, but it seems like it's tied into other misperceptions that people like me and others might have about the definitions of trafficking in general.
So how do those, you know, misperceptions impact how we think about sex workers, agency, and age?
So the general public is eager to jump between podcasts consuming true crime and fallen cult leaders.
This is like, what is this?
Is this count as trauma porn?
Yeah, I would say.
I think it does, right?
It's trauma porn.
But much less likely to research exactly what trafficking entails because you really get lost in the minutia of definition.
According to the 2016 UN ratification, The working definition of human trafficking is, quote, an action that is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by a means such as threat, force, other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power, position of vulnerability, and giving slash receiving or payment or benefit to achieve consent or control over another person with the purpose of exploitation.
The exception is when the person is a child.
So in order to constitute trafficking in adults, all three parts of that definition must be in place.
However, when minors and children are involved, any single part present constitutes the definition.
Now, the UN also clearly articulates that human trafficking, even in the sex sector, is not the same as sex work.
And accordingly, Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, and Amnesty all stand behind decriminalization of sex work between consenting adults.
The white slavery panic of the 1900s contributed to the belief that women, even after age of consent, were not able to make their own decisions.
In all the investigations that occurred of young white women being abducted into sexual slavery, the women themselves were rarely, if ever, interviewed or consulted on their circumstances.
Quote, the girl was surely incapable of any calculation as to the consequence of her own action.
End quote.
Wrote William Steed in 1886, that same writer that influenced Rockefeller, and he was the evangelical editor of the Palmol Gazette.
You know, Esme, in today's terms, it seems to me that this very old and potentially patronizing question of intentionality and agency is still a black box for most non-sex workers.
And that's especially in the realm of online pornography.
I think most consumers have some awareness of coercive relational or financial circumstances that can make sex work less than autonomous, but then there are also whole demographics of sex workers who are working fully by choice.
So, how do people sort that out?
I'll say that a unifying concept I've heard articulated by both advocates and opponents of the Nordic model, kind of all the organizations that are really involved in this space, whatever side of the rhetoric they're on, Is that sex work and sex trafficking are much more nuanced than most people understand.
So this black box of intentionality or gray areas of understanding and consent really difficult to pinpoint.
They don't live in a binary and they're full of paradox.
So we try to come up with definitions and language to navigate these waters, but are oftentimes bound by those very Definitions absent context.
Recently, I really started to be troubled by the term survival sex work.
So the term survival sex work is generally understood as sex work that due to numerous systemic factors or personal circumstances of poverty, homelessness, drug use, and mental health, have extremely restricted options as and as a result, work in dangerous circumstances.
The term has become analogous to street work.
And look, I completely understand the need for this definition because...
It offsets this kind of false empowerment, girl boss, entrepreneurial sex worker that you see plastered all over the social media, that kind of idea that like, this is exclusively empowering.
But it also creates a false binary because it says that some people need to work while others do this electively or as a hobby.
Right.
They're independently wealthy.
They're independently wealthy and they just decided to dabble and try this out.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Uh huh.
So, I mean, look, some people try this, they realize it's not for them, but some people who try this and decide that they'll continue to perpetuate a stigma around this career just because they made different choices.
And what I want to do is I want to recognize the workers in this industry who work because they have bills to pay, want to eventually retire, support their families, and have built a career for reasons that anybody else builds a career.
You know, it's not the thing where, you know, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life or whatever that weird myth is that is floating around.
I don't know anyone who works in today's economy that does so in order to not survive.
Regardless of how a person comes into it, sex work is a trade.
It's a skill and a craft.
Doing it develops a myriad of applicable skills, and it also requires a lot of skill sets.
It's an extremely complicated form of labor.
To diminish it as something done exclusively under duress minimizes both the work itself and the people who do it.
And I just don't know of any other industry where workers' motivations are put under such scrutiny, and simultaneously it's the only industry where women statistically make more money than men.
It's a really helpful observation and lived experience.
And I think you're absolutely right that the whole discourse around sex work begs the questions that we never really ask about Taylor Swift's autonomy, although arguably pop music spectacle is the most audience-captured art on the planet.
Or, like the agency of women who work in low-paying childcare.
And I have to think that this is because it still carries the weight of sin.
Somehow, and that sex work is ultimately conning the client by performing intimacy, by performing power, by performing autonomy.
It has to be a performance somehow.
And if it's performative, then it's inauthentic.
Like, that's also a binary that's established.
You know, whereas again, if you're, if you're a performer on stage, you know, if you're, if you're Madonna or whoever, you know, no one's saying like, that's not the real you.
Or if it's not that somehow you're at fault for that, you know, that, Right, right.
The concern over white slavery had more to do with policing women's bodies than granting women any kinds of rights.
Both white slavery and sex work allowed for the middle class to discuss sexuality while distancing themselves from it by projecting it onto a kind of chastised other.
You've got to say just a little bit more about that.
So I mentioned earlier about this white savior client archetype.
On one hand, you have clients coming to you, to me as a sex worker, to explore a fantasy.
Often with unresolved guilt or shame about what they desire.
And part of the job is to be a site for that client's desire.
That's the essential definition of that performativity.
Once they've gotten what they want, They shift into projecting their own guilt or moral judgment onto you, once again treating you as a screen for concerns and values that have nothing to do with you as a provider and furthermore nothing to do with the things that you consented to as kind of part of that negotiation in the beginning.
Consumers of pornography, which you know, these days, I think is as most people do a similar thing.
They want the erotic satisfaction of porn.
But once they've distanced themselves from it, often post orgasm, they're repulsed by it, and they want to shut it down.
There's a hypocrisy, there's a cognitive dissonance.
And this is what I have the hardest time I made my peace with being the object of desire as a sex worker, and I consented to the ways in which I would offer that desire.
But to be the target of someone's derision because they feel ashamed of their needs, which they were literally chasing just two seconds ago, and then threatening my livelihood and attempting to shame me does so much more significant damage.
It must be so bizarre and vulnerable to be constantly seen through this double vision, this fractured mirror.
I don't know, like the culture is looking at you through 3D glasses.
So let's bring this home by zeroing in on the issue that Ballard is pretending to engage.
His picture of the trafficking of children may be fraudulent and self-serving, but when we zoom out, the sexualization of children is a real thing and a real problem, and it intersects with the world of sex work, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we really start talking about nuance and paradox here.
There are no simple answers.
Yeah, right.
There are no cohesive, tight little taglines that we can just throw out and figure it all out.
So I recently watched Money Shot, the documentary about the rise of Pornhub.
And a lot of the issues that we're discussing were brought up and they interviewed parties from both sides of the debate, both from the sex industry, a lot of performers, and also a lot of advocates for preventing decriminalization.
And a lot of the adult industry professionals adamantly argued that child sex trafficking and adult consensual sex work were two mutually exclusive issues and had nothing to do with each other.
And I really felt that the nuance was missing here and made their arguments sound both reductive and defensive.
And look, I understand because it's sometimes so much like fighting an uphill battle, but I don't think that we as workers are doing ourselves any favors by kind of burying our heads in the sand and saying, oh, that has nothing to do with us.
I stand by the conviction that child trafficking is misrepresented in the media and is much more insidious than stranger danger parking lot panic.
I know there's a difference between coercion of a minor who's unable to consent and an illegal adult making her own decisions to pursue erotic labor.
And my own experience in sex work emphasized safety and consent way more than any other labor service entertainment job that I've had.
Yeah, that was incredible from our last meeting when you described how going from the dungeon where you had built up this network of very supportive relationships and you had been mentored by older workers, then suddenly I think you tried out cocktail waitressing for a while and felt completely overwhelmed by the exploitation and the unfairness and the inequality and lack of consent.
That was mind-blowing for me.
I mean, I would say literally every other job I've had, I have felt, I have felt sexually exploited where I have not been able to say no.
Yeah.
And, and in sex work, I'm not going to say I didn't feel exploited, but at least I knew how to say no in certain moments, way more than in other, you know, it's, it's not, it's not perfect, but again, statistically, like I can just not statistically rather anecdotally, I could say that's been true for me.
But to say that the sexualization of children and teens lives in a completely separate sphere and has no bearing on our cultural obsession with saving the children would be ignoring the largest elephant in the room.
Yeah.
Is this where I finally get to say every accusation is a confession?
Yeah, I think so.
I think that's it.
It's like such a great through line with the other episodes.
quote the topic teen, um, keyword, sorry, the keyword teen shows up in top 12 most searched
terms on Pornhub's own yearly analytics disclosure. You can look up to see what the most popular ones
and teen is always up there. Jeffrey Epstein's jet to his private island was called the Lolita Express.
Yes.
The fetishization of girlhood has been openly present in the cultural zeitgeist for ages.
Yeah, which is why it's incredible to witness the pearl clutching.
I mean, decades after we know the stories of Brooke Shields, Sarah Polley, I mean, countless other actors who became major movie sex objects as children with their directors giving open interviews about how mature they were.
And it makes me wonder whether the QAnon obsession with pedophilia is like an attempt to localize and quarantine a society-wide issue so that it doesn't have to be admitted to en masse.
Yeah, I like that notion of quarantining it.
One of the professionals in Money Shot attempts to explain that the search word teen doesn't refer specifically to an age, but rather a body type.
And performers can also tag their own terms, right?
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
I don't buy it.
And maybe that's unpopular, but I just don't buy it.
I'm a petite woman.
I don't think anyone's going to correspond my body with the teens.
I couldn't imagine, like, leveraging that or utilizing that.
And I'm not even sure I ever did.
Children's sexualization is ubiquitous, whether it's in porn through reenactment
or through images in mass media that are not sex work related.
And I just don't think as workers we get a clean break from this in theory because we practice having our age verified.
I think we we need to have more accountability here.
So are you saying that if the sex worker is trading on youth and innocence through petite stature or other indicators that they can't just pretend that's a harmless flavor of entertainment?
We can't really have it both ways if we're going to be part of a larger discourse.
This is where it gets really, really nuanced and really difficult.
So, as sex workers, we do end up leveraging whatever we possess to promote ourselves.
Large bodies, different sized body parts, races, faces, whatever we can to make ourselves distinct and desirable.
We're dramatizing and exaggerating traits that we know that our customers want.
And I realize that these are really muddy waters and it really can become a bit of a trap.
It's like a snake eating its own tail.
Because effectively this has to do much more with capitalism than sex.
Because the only trajectory to success is to keep producing desirable products and selling them.
It's just that our products have a very different set of stakes and can get dangerously close to reinscribing desires that are really problematic.
We don't have enough time here to discuss whether ideology belongs in the bedroom, but I do believe that there's been a tremendous shift since I've started working or since I was working.
There are ways in which many sex workers today have introduced politics into their practice.
When I first started in the dungeon, it was before social media, and there just wasn't the same level of discourse or agency on the part of workers.
Clients frequently requested fantasies with really heavy racist, transphobic, homophobic themes, and I never heard about workers questioning this.
It was like the power was really, you know, the kind of customer is always right kind of mentality.
And now I see a lot of younger workers clearly articulate boundaries around these asks.
Wow.
Yeah, I see a lot of that online and there's different reasons for that, but it's just something I've noticed happening over the last 10 years.
I don't advocate for the policing of sexual fantasy.
I mean, that's a whole separate conversation.
But what I do see, and when I notice these younger workers really articulating different kinds of consent, is the possibility of a cultural shift around what these fantasies can mean.
And this is being driven by workers ourselves.
Using platforms to address the very nature of the industry.
We have a lot of power to confront things like the desirability of a team body.
We don't have to just agree that this is what people want and we have to cater to that.
Desire can be an extremely diverse space.
I also just want to flag that Nabokov in Lolita is ruthless in his unfolding of Humbert Humbert psychology.
It's not, for the anti-hero there, just the body type.
The drive is about transgression, the possession and stealing of innocence.
It's the introduction to the adult realm through a domination that mimics caregiving and parental guidance in a really toxic way.
And of course, Humbert justifies it all by turning Lolita's acting out into a form of chosen seduction.
But I think the fetish is immature and infantile because it doesn't want to engage with the complexity and autonomous needs of the full adult person.
And if there's a full adult person who is leveraging that in sex work, then yeah, that's a very complicated situation that, yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up for consideration.
This is really...
Great coverage.
I've learned a lot.
I think it's crucial to have your point of view, Esme.
Because for me, it's clear that the sex worker's body is the site of a kind of conspiratorial anxiety because it offers promise and peril through abstractions and generalizations.
And I think it's not dissimilar to how The trans body to how trans people become political pawns instead of humans deserving dignity and privacy and work and support.
So, how would you summarize the paradoxes of being, having been in your, you know, former professional life, a blank screen for all of these neuroses that become politicized in really toxic ways?
As erotic professionals, we are expected to hold this entire tangled web of desires in our bodies and in our identities.
We're made to feel terrible shame for attempting to resolve our own sexuality and livelihood in the best ways we know how, while confidentially being expected to hold the weight of others' desire.
We're told that we arrived at this business as a result of trauma, that was not our fault, and then held criminally responsible for choosing to have some agency as adults and how we work through it.
We're expected to make our talent, skills, knowledge available to men who feel entitled to us behind closed doors while being chastised for choosing when, with who, and under what circumstance we have sex.
We're made objects of desire as long as we stay removed from actively participating in how that desire manifests.
And then we're punished for pursuing the exact same model of transactional negotiation that makes it possible for our clients to pay us in the first place.
If you could ask, like, Normie, Joe, and Betty to keep three things in mind when they're thinking about sex workers, or consuming media about sex workers, or getting drawn into moral panics like Sound of Freedom, or when they themselves are consuming sex work, what would those three things be?
Try to be short and succinct here.
Because the eroticization of children and demonization of sex workers is a base ingredient in our cultural stew, I would ask people to keep some questions in mind about existing biases, contradictions, and motivations.
Would you hold the same opinion about sex work being inherently exploitative if you think about jobs in agriculture, childcare, or other wage labor?
Or do you only consider exploitation if sex is involved?
Have you ever spoken with a sex worker about her concerns before projecting how you think she could improve it?
Do you hold women to a different moral standard when it comes to what she can do with her body?
And look, even if none of these questions concern you, can you just acknowledge that a sex worker is a human being?
That she deserves acknowledgement and respect enough to not be treated as the butt of a joke, a punching bag, or the place to dump unresolved anxiety?
Everybody knows a sex worker, whether they know it or not.
And every sex worker is a real person, just like you.
Thank you so much for your reporting and insight.
Thanks, Matthew.
Thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We will see you back here on the main feed or on Patreon.
