People care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

flickr/Phil Roeder

For years, I have been writing on Twitter about the impact of legislation on sex workers, which is to say, on my community. Sometimes people pay attention, sometimes strangers write to me about it, sometimes I get threats and name-calling.

But never have I faced on the internet the kind of vitriol or the kind of frighteningly zealous support as I have since I told a family story online last week about Bernie Sanders behaving less-than-perfectly-progressive toward my mother some time in the early ’80s:

My whole life, my mother has told this story: she went to a democratic socialists’ convention when I was about a year and a half old where they had promised there would be childcare. She showed up, with me. They said,

???@MissLoreleiLee

Sorry, we didn't get the money we thought we'd get, so we cut the childcare." So she was like, okay, taking my kid to these talks then. She went to hear the keynote speaker. We were in the back of the room. I was playing with a toy and making some toddler noises.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The keynote speaker stopped what he was saying and said, "could someone tell that child to be quiet.

???@MissLoreleiLee

My mother has never been a patient woman. She lost it. She stood up and started to shout. "How dare you," she said. "How dare you pretend to support families and working women when the first thing you cut during a budgeting failure is childcare.

???@MissLoreleiLee

She definitely said it with more swearing.

???@MissLoreleiLee

Folks, that keynote speaker she stood up and swore at was Bernie Sanders.

???@MissLoreleiLee

The response to the tweet was overwhelming. As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

Sanders, along with 96 other Senators, passed H.R. 1865, also known as FOSTA-SESTA (or just SESTA) on March 21. On April 11, Trump signed the bill into law. SESTA removes protections in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create new civil and criminal liability for “anyone who owns, manages, or operates” a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law does not clarify what this means. Is warning other sex workers about dangerous clients (as workers have done online for many years) facilitating prostitution? What about sharing safety and health information with sex working people? How many harm-reduction tactics are now against federal law? How will the owners, managers, and operators of social media and other communications websites respond to this, and what impact will that have on already-marginalized people?

The Legislation That Would Harm Sex Workers—In The Name Of Their Own Protection

For months before this law passed, my friends and I wrote to reporters, we tweeted and posted to Instagram and called our representatives and made as much noise as we could. It seemed obvious that this legislation would be devastating to the safety of our loved ones, and had the potential to cut all of us off from each other by making us a liability to websites that facilitate the everyday online forms of communication everyone has come to rely on. When the bill passed the Senate, our predictions came immediately true.

Websites that sex workers relied on to screen clients shut down. Google Play and Microsoft changed their terms of service. Skype and Microsoft Office have banned “offensive language” and “inappropriate content,” to go into effect on May 1. Google Drive began to delete sex workers’ content and lock out users. Sex workers started an alternative social media site called “Switter,” to ensure we would have a place to communicate with each other if we were summarily kicked off of social media. This week, Switter was kicked off of its content delivery network.

There has been other impact as well: reports of an increase in sex workers working outdoors, and stories about friends who have gone missing or harmed themselves. A friend had her bank account frozen. Another friend said that though she’d had plans to leave the adult industry, the hostility of the current climate had convinced her she would not be able to do any other kind of work. This impact is widespread and has hit folks whose work was criminalized as well as those doing legal forms of sex work such as stripping and working in adult film.

Since the law passed, my friends and I have been holding meetings, gathering donations for sex worker emergency funds, sharing information with each other as quickly and as widely as we can. All of us are frightened. All of us are angry. I’ve posted continuously about this impact on social media. I’ve criticized celebrities and politicians who supported these policies. Yes, to all of you writing to me, I’m angry at Kamala Harris too.

But my mom never yelled at Kamala Harris, as far as I know.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders. It has always been a story about my mother. It’s a story about her standing up to authority, as she frequently has done, when she believed that what they were doing was wrong. Prior to his presidential bid, Sanders was incidental to the story’s telling. It is a family story. When he began to campaign in 2016, the funny part of the story became the fact that the politician mom once yelled at was now famous. Incidentally, most of us supported Sanders in the primaries. I even gave an interview in 2016 in which I said that I believed his policies would be better for sex workers than the policies of the other candidates. In my house, we had no trouble reconciling someone’s once less-than-perfect behavior with a larger question of who might implement the best overall policies.

I did not fact-check the story before I posted it. I’ve criticized many politicians on my social media, and I’ve shared many personal stories. I have never before had something I posted retweeted thousands of times and then reported as news. Perhaps I should have been more savvy. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that I should have known how the internet can take hold of something and make it symbolic of one hundred other things. That I should have foreseen, with the recent attention paid to Stormy Daniels, the temptation for online publications to write anything with a headline referencing a “porn star” and a political figure. I did not foresee these things.

Among the hundreds of messages I received were:

“Better disrespect your mom than grab her pussy”

“she raised a porn star so she probably deserved it”

“Porn actresses are just whores with contracts”

“Couldn’t they use that whore who took down Al Franken again?”

“I think you’re a Russian bot middle aged white women trump supporter go home to Moscow traitor”

“Why do white women have to lie?”

“HAHA that’s right, you better fucking hide you liar.”

“You scared?”

Strip Club Raids And Closures Are Weapons Of Gentrification

There were some people who seemed to have spent hours researching the details of my tweets — in order to “debunk” them. They wanted “the truth.” I did some googling with the scant additional information I have about the incident. My family members disagree about the exact details of time and place, and I couldn’t determine with certainty whether the story was true or not. My family believes that it is. I did not, initially, question its truth. In part because I grew up with it, but also because the details about Sanders himself seem utterly banal. That a man might have told a woman to keep her child quiet while he talks seemed to me utterly unsurprising. The only part of the story that I find remarkable is that the woman stood up and shouted rather than leave the room. But my mother has always been that kind of remarkable.

The internet commenters who were the most vicious seemed to believe that I had been paid to write these tweets, that they were part of a calculated political “smear.” They seemed to believe (perhaps accurately) that this kind of anecdote holds more political power than any kind of substantive analysis ever could. I will tell you, I did not post this story with the intention of doing even minimal harm to Sanders, or with the hubris that I might be capable of doing such harm. Despite my rage at the impact of H.R. 1865 on my community, I do not wish harm on anyone who voted for it. What I wish for them is only knowledge.

The story I wrote on Twitter has never been, in my family, a story about Bernie Sanders.

I wrote that story down because I am inspired by my mother. Because I know her to be a woman who has never once kept her mouth shut. Whether or not this story is true about Bernie Sanders, I know it is a true story about my mother. Whether she shouted at Bernie Sanders at a democratic socialists convention (“I think it was actually a democratic socialists conference,” she texted me) or at (as another family member remembers it) a rally about a housing bill, or at some other less-famous, equally-imperfect politician at some other kind of early ‘80s leftist political event, the most important part of the story is not where she was or even who she said it to. The most important part is that she refused to cower. That she has always refused to live quietly.

Of course, I want it to be a story about Sanders. I want to know that my fierce and rageful and impolite mother stood up in a crowded room and shouted at one of the 97 people who would, 35 years later, vote to harm her daughter. I want this even though it is petty to want it, even though it does nothing to change the circumstances in which we now live.

On April 18, Sanders wrote:

Cardi B is right. If we are really going to make America great we need to strengthen Social Security so that seniors are able to retire with the dignity they deserve. https://t.co/B8cOkoOdLc

???@SenSanders

I do not disagree with this statement. Former stripper and current genius Cardi B has said many true things. However, what Sanders is doing with this tweet is a move that is as old as sex work. Anyone who has been a sex worker has seen this behavior a million times before. Powerful people are happy to associate with sex workers when they think we are just “edgy” enough to gain them something by association, and quick to distance themselves when confronted by the systemic stigma in our actual lives.

Bernie Sanders praising Cardi B after voting for SESTA is every ex I’ve had who brought me to a few parties, but wouldn’t let me even be seen in the vicinity of their parents or their boss. Every sex worker I know has exes like this.

Once You Have Made Pornography

At marches and demonstrations, my friends and I have spent so much time shouting. We’ve spent so much time writing letters, calling legislative staff, talking to journalists, showing up at administrative and legislative hearings. We’ve spent so much time being unheard by anyone, from any political party. Equally vehement in the messages I’ve received in the last 48 hours are ones from folks who think my story demonstrates some allegiance to Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Apparently there is a thing called donut twitter and something else called rose twitter, and the 2016 democratic primary is still alive on the internet as though all of this were about gaining and losing points in some ongoing adversarial sport.

Sex work, however, is not a partisan issue. Sex workers are equally hated by the right and the left. Conservatives and liberals and socialists alike have supported policies that have led to the deaths of sex workers. Nonetheless, sex workers hold beliefs across the political spectrum. We continue to vote for people who are demonstrably flawed. We vote for people who we know do not like us. We vote for people who are imperfect, and then we call them on the phone, we show up at their rallies and at their offices and demand that they become the representatives that we need them to be.

We know that they are flawed and we believe, still, that one day they will hear us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/hilary-clinton-is-neither-a-saint-nor-a-demoness-b7dcc7dd008a/ Fri, 15 Sep 2017 01:24:16 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3210 Read more]]>

The reaction to Clinton’s new book ‘What Happened’ has been, predictably, wildly divided. Where does the truth lie?

I t seems like another century ago when we were all eagerly awaiting Election Night 2016 — for no reason other than the fact that it seemed to promise an end to the whirling merry-go-round of misery that had been unleashed by the bruising Democratic primary. Whatever challenges we’d face the morning after, at least the Hillary/Bernie bickering, with its self-important posturing and out of control hero-worship, would be consigned to the crematorium of history where it belonged.

How so very naive we were to think so.

The launch of Hillary Clinton’s election memoir What Happened has seen the usual invective directed at Clinton reach a crescendo. According to The Hill, one former Clinton fundraiser said “The best thing she could do is disappear…She’s doing harm to all of us because of her own selfishness. Honestly, I wish she’d just shut the f — — up and go away.” One Obama aide laments, “It’s the Hillary Show, 100 percent. A lot of us are scratching our heads and wondering what she’s trying to do. It’s certainly not helpful.” Vanity Fair’s T.A. Frank asks, “Can Hillary Clinton please go quietly into the night?” California Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman said that, “There is a collective groan whenever there’s another news cycle about [Clinton].” All that in an op-ed by former Clinton pollster Douglas E. Schoen, who argued “Sticking to an unpopular candidate with an unpopular message will only leave the [Democratic] party continuously unpopular,” adding she needs to “exit the stage.” “Go back to the woods” is a popular enough phrase on Twitter that merely searching for it brings up a bipartisan chorus singing the phrase, all day every day.

In response to a Clinton quote about the challenges faced by powerful women, one characteristic Trump supporter said, “Bullcrap @HillaryClinton people just don’t like you because you are an evil woman who leaves people for dead! Go back to the woods.”

The launch of ‘What Happened’ has seen the usual invective directed at Clinton reach a crescendo.

Meanwhile, Martin Shkreli, already awaiting sentencing for fraud, was thrown in jail early for putting out a $5,000 bounty on a lock of Clinton’s hair.

And, as if this sort of weirdness weren’t enough, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci shows us there’s a subgenre of thinkpiece that casts Clinton as a blame-obsessed loser who says everyone’s responsible for her loss but her.

But as Clinton herself writes in the book, “I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”

Such words could never be enough for wounded liberals, Democrats, and leftists who seem to reserve more bona fide scorn for Clinton, for losing to Trump, than they do for Trump and his entire fascist agenda. The Woman Who Failed You is a difficult figure to forgive, especially when she’s already been cast as an unfeeling, power-mad harpy rather than the warm maternal figure we’re all taught to seek in women. There cannot and must not be any doubt that so much of the animus to Clinton is motivated by the audacity of her seeking power while female; it magnifies her real failings into demonic proportions, fit only to be screamed at.

Hillary Clinton And The Unending Burden Of Women’s Work

As Sarah Kendzior put it quite well in The Globe and Mail, “The wrath Ms. Clinton’s book inspired feels like an almost nostalgic aggression, a misdirected anxiety harkening to a time when Ms. Clinton could be judged as a threat and Mr. Trump dismissed as a joke.”

Even the most doctrinaire leftists, for whom Democrat is a four letter word, see Clinton as uniquely execrable. Similarly situated liberal men simply aren’t scapegoated the way she has been. It’s impossible to imagine this level of scorn being levelled at some other milquetoast liberal who ran against Trump and lost (certainly Tim Kaine commands only a small fraction of the hatred doled out to his erstwhile boss, despite being more conservative than her). And it’s impossible to imagine this milquetoast liberal man being told by such a towering chorus to “go away.”

Al Gore has built a post-electoral career that’s kept him in spotlights so bright, he’s even on the silver screen. He too won the popular vote, and lost a winnable election to a sentient mayonnaise jar who went on to ruin the country. But he doesn’t summon the scorn Clinton does, and there isn’t a horde of Democrats, liberals, centrists, and leftists alike telling him to naff off. The double standard is real and undeniable; it must be the starting point in any debate about Clinton, and seen as a bias to constantly acknowledge and correct for in one’s criticism.

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But criticism is merited, and the publication of What Happened is an ideal time to share it. So long as Trump and his cronies are yammering on camera and online, Clinton should have every right to the public square; but she is not our future. There is a polar opposite sentiment to Clinton hate — and it’s Clinton-worship: seeing her as a fallen goddess-queen, a martyr of whom we are all unworthy. She’s a president in exile and the queen of our hearts, a tragic heroine who Did Nothing Wrong. All discourse must bend toward redeeming her, and even, hope against hope, making her President as she so richly deserves.

This sort of nonsense simply sends us face first into a different moral, discursive cowpat. Though many attacks against her are irrational and viciously founded in sexism, the ineluctable fact remains that she is a flawed human being at the end of the day, and a politician at that. While I would argue that politicians can be heroic, lionizing them into demideities is always a fraught affair, as 2016 should’ve taught us with painful clarity. A different species of sexism, the kind that seeks Madonnahood in women in direct contrast to its opposite, drives some of us to see Clinton as a perfect heroine, paying only lip service to the errors in judgement and terrible beliefs that she is unequivocally responsible for.

She is neither a saint nor a demoness. Just a politician.

Politicians can be heroic, but lionizing them into demideities is always a fraught affair.

A politician is someone you nominate to office so that you might struggle with them; they are not your friend, they are not your mother, not your queen, and certainly not an alabaster angel. The cult of personality around Bernie Sanders has led to the obnoxious myopia surrounding his neverending campaign, and it does much the same with Clinton and her die-hard supporters as well.

This reached an embarrassing nadir when former Clinton surrogate Peter Daou actually built a tech start-up around redeeming Clinton’s legacy, the bizzare Verrit. Verrit is a link aggregation site with cards at the top of each page (the eponymous verrits) containing a quote or some factoid, whose veracity is confirmed by the seven-digit authentication code in its corner. Yes, I know. At any rate, it quickly turned into a sorry spectacle where pro-Sanders memes clashed with the wounded pride of Daou and other diehards. In this it was a microcosm of so much liberal-left discourse since the election: leftists with sick owns on twitter dot com matched up against sanctimonious liberals who fiddle with “facts” while Rome burns, each wasting the other’s time with insipid and occasionally hilarious nonsense that feels more and more like a surrender with each passing day.

This cycle is fed by each side digging in its heels and seeking to relitigate the 2016 Democratic Primary (hence the “Bernie Would’ve Won” meme). But there remains a fundamental fact buried in all this. While Bernie Sanders isn’t the future, neither is Clinton. It seems to me that if there is hope left in the Democratic Party, then 2020’s deliverance will most likely come from someone whose name we don’t yet know — and, frankly, from all of us working for that change.

Dear Hillary, I Wanted You To Win, But Now I Want Something Bigger

Clinton should continue being a public figure — her stature is undeniable and she’s earned that right as surely as Gore, Kerry, and McCain. Her book, love it or hate it, was as necessary as it was inevitable and it needed to be written. Her insights on our moment should be welcome; she learned from the best, after all.

For when Clinton diehards asseverate “she was right!” they leave a key truth unspoken: Women of color were right about the fascism on the horizon. Clinton’s wisdom lay in heeding us, at least in part. She, like Sanders, was pushed into getting our agenda on the national stage. But Clinton is not a martyr to rally around for that fact. We should organize around and with the people fighting on the frontlines now, at airports, in the Great Plains, in city streets, at the border — people who live and are fighting for those who yet live. Not devote our energies to redeem the reputation of a politician who has enough well-paid PR people to do that for her full-time.

What Clinton got right during her campaign came, in large measure, from young activists who had forced critical issues onto the agenda — criminal justice reform, intersectional feminism, trans justice — and they’re still out there leading the real battles that are bearing fruit. Who among these many women of color might make a good president?

I’m game to find out.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-co-creator-of-safety-pin-box-explains-why-you-should-pay-black-women-3693f128d8fa/ Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:20:13 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=6293 Read more]]> Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Leslie Mac and Marissa Johnson, two black female activists, started working on development of the Safety Pin Box which — unlike the viral solidarity campaign of wearing a safety pin from which the project took its name — provides guided tasks for white allies who want to fight to end systemic oppression in society.

While many celebrated the project as a useful and innovative approach to activism, others have been skeptical, even angry. In the midst of Leslie and Marissa dealing with both praise and criticism as they launched Safety Pin Box, I had the chance to chat with Leslie about the controversy, why allies should be accountable to their commitments, and why we should pay black women.

Ijeoma Oluo: What has the last three or four days been like for the two of you as this project has been picked up by high-profile people who take issue with it?

Leslie Mac: It’s been interesting, but also super predictable. We went into this with eyes wide open, knowing what eventually would be coming our way. Nothing was shocking, but [the outrage] has been wholly unnecessary — it’s interesting the level of scrutiny that we’ve been having. There are businesses that have been around for hundreds of years with no scrutiny, but little ol’ us — everybody wants to know everything right now and if we don’t have an exact answer, it’s a problem.

When Marissa and I first started this, the only measure we had as to whether or not this was a good idea was what black women thought. For us, it’s been really clear — we’ve had really great support from black women. Of course we’ve seen the “ultra-left” have a problem; all of a sudden, making money is a problem — when black women are the ones doing it. And, of course, we’ve seen a lot of white fragility — many white women in particular are taking issue with having to pay for our content, our work, our energy, our time.

Marissa herself is often a target, ever since her disruption of Bernie Sanders in Seattle. For me, personally, I get very defensive when this criticism is coming from people because they feel a certain way about her and her actions from over a year ago.

Ijeoma: I think it is really funny, the grudge that people who claim to be all about social justice will have against a black woman who dared interrupt a white man. This has been a year and a half long grudge against a young black woman for interrupting an old white man giving a political speech. The levels of cognitive dissonance . . . this is not a good look.

Leslie: It’s the opposite of radical. We hear things like, “Why aren’t you a 503c?” What the fuck is radical about that? What’s radical about giving to organizations? We’re trying to do radical things, because we can. How can we embody something different? How can we have a different way of doing this work and a different way of being in business with each other and the community?

Ijeoma: What really motivated this project? I know that the name is of course linked to the current talk of wearing safety pins for solidarity, but I’m assuming you didn’t just hear safety pins and say “I’m going to come up with this box.” What motivated the product that you’re offering?

Leslie: Marissa and I were both on vacation when we came up with this idea. We left the country shortly after the election. We were in this idyllic place with friends and loved ones for an entire week. The safety pin fever really started the day we all left. We were watching it happen, but because we weren’t here, we weren’t the ones dealing with these white women fighting for this pseudo-symbol of solidarity. From our perspective, because we were in this place with likeminded people having general conversations, it started sort of jokingly. We started asking, “Wow, what is it about safety pins? What is drawing people to this?”

We realized that: 1. People really do want to do something, but in the moment they feel hopeless and helpless. And 2. these people who want to do something come from a segment of the population that has absolutely no idea how to show true solidarity. They’ve never had to show it, and so have no true skill sets in doing it. And so, of course, what comes out of that is something as completely useless as a safety pin. It’s like, “Oh, what’s the least we can do? Let’s do something right below that.”

Because Marisa and I were in a situation where we weren’t having to argue with people about safety pins, we were able to just ask questions. Out of that distillation of people wanting to do something but who were ill-equipped to do it, we had this idea: What if we gave them something to do? What if we said, “You want something to do? Here, do this.” What would make them do it?

I’m a big proponent of transformation being an equation, with commitment and consistency on the other side. So the idea behind a subscription box and a monthly fee is really about consistency in allyship. Too often allyship means “I’m here when something pops off.” Or, “I’m here when something really big happens, and then I’m gone.” Part of the idea was: Give people something they can do, and put it in a model that makes them show up over and over again. We are integrating their lives with allyship. It’s not separate from them, it’s something they do regularly.

Ijeoma: Can you give me an example of a couple of the tasks that you would send people to do?

Leslie: Sure, the sample project we have on our site right now is about power-mapping. It involves guiding folks through exercises to learn what power-mapping is — how to define power, learning to evaluate power structures in their lives personally, then taking it a little wider and evaluating power in their community. We ask them to go to some sort of community meeting, whether it’s a city council or a school board meeting, and take notes: Who holds power in the meeting? Who talks first? Who talks longest? Why is that?

The fourth week in this particular task we ask them to take three things that they identify in the power structure that they personally have some say in, and to evaluate how they can shift power to more marginalized people. Then we ask them to make a commitment to do that and share that commitment with others who are also going to be doing this work.

This month we have a special Holiday Box that’s going out. The theme of it is radical compassion and the tasks going out are focused on that. One of the items we’re going to be talking about is: Are you a safe place? We’re going to take people through an evaluation of whether they are a safe place for marginalized people — are they equipped to respond when those folks need help? — and how to get ready to be able to respond.

Ijeoma: What would you say to people who say that you shouldn’t be charging for this service?

Leslie: I think we’re actually offering a pretty good deal for folks right now, to get the content that we’re putting together. I don’t understand this notion of not getting paid for it. I know that it’s rooted somewhere in this notion that 1. Black labor should be free and 2. that any work you do toward liberation or activism becomes worthless if it’s not free. I don’t subscribe to that model myself. I don’t believe in scarcity models. I don’t believe in this notion of not compensating people for their work — especially black people, who are the least compensated, generally speaking. And I also need folks to understand that, while we fight capitalism, we live in a capitalist society. So, we need to eat, we need to be secure in our lives in order to do this work.

I have in the last two and a half years watched activist after organizer burn out, lose their homes, lose their livelihoods, and leave the movement. I don’t want to be on that path, I don’t want Marissa on that path, and I don’t want any of the other women that do the work to be on that path. So part of this project is to really embody and model a different way of being. A different way of doing this work with integrity, with fair compensation, and with an eye toward giving back to others who aren’t compensated for the work that they’re already doing.