I’ve been following this issue a bit recently — in fact I wrote a little a piece about it for this month’s Prospect — and I was keen to go to the meeting in Parliament which Cath mentions. Sadly, I’m unable to assess her contribution to the debate. I got through parliamentary security with a bottle of wine and a cheese knife (!) but couldn’t get past the feminist bouncers who were turning away anyone who is interested in actually debating the future of prostitution in this country. Also turned away: colleagues from the World Bank, staff from the offices of MPs supportive of rules that will make sex work safer, and (needless to say) anyone who actually chooses to sell sex for a living — the people the meeting organisers don’t believe exist.

“As everyone in the room agreed, it’s time to bring an end to the selling of women and girls: who could possibly disagree with that?” concludes Ms Elliot. The organisers didn’t need to police the crowd to get everyone to agree on that point. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that selling people is wrong. Not anyone outside the Premier League, anyway. Selling sex, on the hand, is not wrong, in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who choose it as a profession. Oh but wait, they don’t exist….

The truth is that they do exist, just as the ex-Nevada hooker who left the profession with debts because she hadn’t managed to save any of the $2000 + a week she earned while on the game exists. Some women who sell sex do it because they are forced to. They are trafficked, and we already have laws against that. Some do it for the same reason people work in McDonald’s — because it is the best job they can get for the skills they have (though you tend to earn more selling sex than burgers, and the hours are more flexible). Helping people who hate their jobs (in prostitution or McDonalds) to “exit” is surely a worthwhile thing to do. But some women (and men, of course) sell sex because they want to. Forcing them to stop by criminalising punters would be like promoting welfare in the restaurant industry by outlawing fast food. The distinction between the voluntary and involuntary sale of sex is an important one, and one that the draft policing and crime bill is inching its way towards recognising. Trying to keep willing sex workers out of the room is both undemocratic and unhelpful.

For 26 million dollars, you’d expect a good party. The AIDS conference in Mexico didn’t deliver much in the way of new science, but on the party front, it did just fine. It did serve to push some neglected issues up the agenda; the right of women, men and transgenders to sell sex safely was discussed in a plenary session for the first time. Read more about Argentinian sex worker Elena Reyanga’s speech over at Bound Not Gagged.

The sign of a good party is of course that you make new friends as well as running in to old ones. I was especially glad to put a (predictably gorgeous) face to Susan Lopez from the Desiree Alliance; we’d know each other only as disembodied radio voices over on XXBN.

Oh, please. These women (and the transgendered men you mention) don’t take home those huge fees. They give a big share – sometimes a ridiculously large share- to their pimp or madam. Often they work as whores because they don’t have qualifications to do any other kind of work – indeed, they get fired from jobs they attempt in the business world because they have disorders, psychological or physical, that prevent them from staying at any routine.

In my annoyance, I called “kathyw” “maryk” in my response. I appeal to those with cooler heads to share your thoughts with kathyw, either on this site or at The Guardian.

• Decriminalization of all aspects of sex work involving consenting adults.
• The right to form and join professional associations or unions.
• The right to work on the same basis as other independent contractors and employers and to receive the same benefits as other self-employed or contracted workers.
• No taxation without such rights and representation.
• Advocating sex worker rights to be free from coercion, violence, sexual abuse, child labor, rape and racism.
• Legal support for sex workers who want to sue those who exploit their labor.
• The right to travel across national boundaries and obtain work permits wherever we live.
• Clean and safe places to work.
• The right to choose whether to work on our own or co-operatively with other sex workers.
• The absolute right to say no.
• Access to health clinics where we do not feel stigmatized.
• Re-training programs for sex workers who want to leave the industry.
• An end to social attitudes which stigmatize those who are or have been sex workers.
• Working to end child sexual tourism

I’m struggling to figure out which of these provisions the abolitionists (even apparently lapsed ones such as Eliot Spitzer) could possibly object to.

As an American politician I will stop all hypocritical, self-righteous moralizing and judgment of the lives of others. I pledge to support legislation that treats all humans as equals and ensure that foreign assistance dollars intended to stop HIV/AIDS are allocated using the very best public health strategies, based on real evidence, and targeted to those most vulnerable. When I access the services of a sex worker, call girl, escort or madame, I will always use protection and make sure s/he has access to adequate health care. I will stop dragging my innocent spouse in front of television cameras to support me in a moment of self-inflicted hypocrisy.

Read Scott’s whole post here.

So New York’s Democrat governor Elliot Spitzer admits to having been a naughty boy. He wanted to have sex with someone who wasn’t his wife, and pay for it. Tut tut. Paroxysms of delight from his enemies at The Wall Street Journal and comment about Spitzer’s staying power and other analysis many other places besides. Even the tech nerds want in on the gloating.

I don’t give a toss if politicians want to buy sex as long as the treat the person who wants to sell it decently and pay them well (which Spitzer was apparently more than willing to do). Many other people feel the same. The problem comes not with the behaviour but with the hypocrisy. Spitzer has in the past ridden around on his white charger, puffed up with self-righteousness, telling people what a great job he has done of busting prostitution rings. My sentiments were nicely put by Vincent Romano, lawyer for Frank Farella, who has mouldered in jail since Spitzer bust his Staten Island sex work ring. “My client feels that people who live in a glass mansion in Albany should not throw stones,” Romano was quoted as saying.

While Democratic Assemblyman John McEneny is quoted by Hot Air as saying:

“I don’t think anyone remembers anything like this. The fact that the governor has a reputation as a reformer and there is a certain assumption as attorney general that you’re Caesar’s wife [above suspicion]. It’s a different element than if you were an accountant.”…

Gosh, Mr. McEneny has a short memory. Randall Tobias ran USAID and before that PEPFAR (the US effort against AIDS globally). The Bush appointee championed the Loyalty Oath (which some call The Pledge), an anti sex work provision that handcuffed PEPFAR money to organisations that oppose prostitution. Then oooops! he turned up in the address book of Deborah Palfrey, aka the DC Madam. She spun a gossamer web around his self-righteous hypocisy, until there was no escape and Tobias resigned.

For some really interesting comment on Spitzer’s hypocrisy and the surrounding hoopla, check out some of the sex worker blogs — there’s a good summary on Bound, Not Gagged. I especially liked Waking Vixen’s account of how the media are sticking their snouts into the affair:

And while I am not ashamed that I was a sex worker, and I know sound bites are short and cannot be anywhere near as complicated as my shit it, I don’t want to be MSNBC’s whore on television. It does nothing for me personally and nothing for the movement I’m part of for me to be boiled down to the essence of “will fuck for cash. here’s how.”

(Read more here)

Another thing to be upset about: as Lee Rudolph has already pointed out, it seems that Spitzer may have done “things that, like, you might not think were safe”. And we allow this man to preside over the educational policies of New York’s schools?