Since the end of last week I’ve been trying to take a step back from the media craziness. The Spitzer scandal and responding to the media around it was essentially all I did last week. As you might recall, I don’t work for any one organization, which meant that I could act fast on media without waiting on clearance from higher ups, but it also meant that I have no one to turn to for advice except my small cadre of online activist pals and the folks I know here in NYC. The whole thing was exhilarating, but also terrifying and ultimately exhausting. I definitely think I did a good job with what I was handed, and I don’t think I’d do it differently if I could go back, but wow did the week take its toll on me.
By the end of the week I found myself thinking a lot about personal and professional boundaries - granted, when you work in the strange business of the sex industry, these boundaries are different than they are in other businesses. But they are crucial to mental health, even if the way they are structured seems peculiar to people outside of the business. These boundaries are also very strange within the business of politics - when you’re a politician, your privacy becomes the public interest, especially when you are doing hypocritical or illegal things in your private hours - there’s never really any “off duty” time as far as this stuff is concerned.
In my opinion, one of the strongest (and most logical) arguments for the decriminalization of prostitution, aside from the public health and safety imperatives, is this: what happens in privacy between two people who fully consent to being there is none of the government’s damn business.
Obviously doing any kind of sex online -or non-sex that can be interpreted as sex when it’s printed in the New York Post, like posing in a bikini on a boat- isn’t so much seen as private. MySpace pages are recontextualized when they aren’t seen as personal pages but rather as tawdry evidence of their creator being a “bad girl.” But there are experiences that are private ones, and sometimes money is exchanged as part of the agreement to keep them private. Yet that’s illegal if sexual acts are being performed for said cash, and then everything gets loudly public and punitive and intense.
Annalee Newitz’s Techsploitation column this week is about this very thing - well worth a read
6:24 pm
[…] Waking Vixen » Blog Archive » Private bodies, public stories “[W]hat happens in privacy between two people who fully consent to being there is none of the government’s damn business.” (tags: sexwork Spizer media msm government sex privacy identity) […]
10:47 am
The Dutch have a great outlook on prostitution. I don’t think we can expect the same of this country or even state to follow any time soon.
The whole Spitzer thing was pretty screwed up. The guy legally did not have cause to be impeached or have to resign. At the same time, the fact is that there’s no way he’d get re-elected after that.
If prostitution was legal at the time, I still don’t think it would make a difference for this case. Public opinion simply trumps legal issues.
I’m a newbie blogger myself, at the time everyone was talking about Spitzer, I actually focused on the women behind the men, and the message it’s sending that women should stand by their cheating husbands. I’m a man, but I think that’s bullshit.