CARNAL NATION

I recently spoke on a conference panel that briefly touched upon the media's handling of sex worker clients. I remarked that it's possible for sex workers to like their clients, although those not in the industry seem to labor under the eternal assumption that clients are unsavory people who are hated and resented by their providers. This dynamic seems logical to those who buy into the generalization pushed by anti-prostitution activists: that most johns hate women and want to hurt or degrade them, which is why they seek out prostitutes in the first place. (Such "reasoning" generally ignores the existence of male and trans workers.) As blogger and apparent client expert Amanda Marcotte puts it, "prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash."  And blogger Twisty Faster exemplifies the radical feminist viewpoint pithily when she writes "even if johns are 'nice' to you, you're still gettin' raped."

The gentleman at this conference me asked if I thought this experience of sex work was symptomatic of class, meaning that the clients who pay more per hour and visit indoor workers are less likely to be misogynistic or dangerous than those who pay less and patronize street workers. This highlighted a series of fallacious assumptions about men and class in general, including the idea that education or income is a direct corollary to conscientiousness and morality; but also that those of a lower class (blue-collar as opposed to white-collar) are regularly incapable of humane interactions. My answer was that yes, class is absolutely a factor, but not in the biased and baseless way it's often used.

There's no denying that class confers a vast variety of privileges on those who are lucky enough to be on the up end, in all sectors including the sex industry. Prostitutes with access to a computer are better positioned to gather concrete identifying details about clients (phone numbers, IP addresses, legal names, and job titles) than are those who work for an agency or who work on the street. Prostitutes who aren't living day-to-day may have enough money saved up to work from their own location rather than traveling to or with an unknown client, while workers with some modicum of economic stability are better equipped to decline those clients or situations that seem unsafe than workers who are desperate for cash.

But the aspects that designate a well-off client as more trustworthy than a financially or socially disadvantaged one are unclear. If a client has proven he has a job, concerns about him being unable or unwilling to pay are alleviated, as is the anxiety that he might rob the prostitute he's come to see. One may also claim that clients who are established members of the community have more to lose by being aggressive during their encounter, or that their success is proof of, at the very least, their sanity. Much-hyped recent film The Girlfriend Experience never once acknowledges a threat to the main character's safety from law enforcement or from clients; she's simply too "high class" for those concerns. But as politicians consistently prove, prestige is never a guarantee of good behavior, and access to money and power can foster immorality and arrogance.

The classic serial killer profile is a young (20s-30s) white man, the same characteristics that also often describe those who assault sex workers. (And it's worth noting here that distinguishing clients as "white" is often unnecessary; studies have regularly found that white men constitute the vast majority of sex worker clients across class stratifications, with African-Americans being the least well-represented demographic.) Recall the shock with which the media regarded news that accused killer Phillip Markoff was a successful Young Republican pursuing his medical degree. Canadian Robert Pickton, who founded and ran a charity organization, is suspected of murdering over 25 women, many of who were prostitutes. (He was convicted on six charges; the rest are pending trial.) Bakery-owner Robert Hansen used his private plane to fly kidnapped prostitutes to the location where he would eventually let them loose to hunt them down. He's suspected of murdering 21 women total. On a milder but still scary note, popular blogger Debauchette, who worked in New York during the financial boom, once wrote about being stalked by a particularly infatuated client whose considerable resources allowed him to bug her home and regularly have her followed.

The point is not that all white-collar clients are murderers or sociopaths; killing and stalking are not the norm. But to suggest that a construction worker client is reliably more threatening to a sex worker's safety than a doctor is entirely unsupportable. However, as I pointed out in my first column, pernicious assumptions about class decide, in essence, which johns are guiltier or more redeemable than others, and thus also dictate their form of punishment—if any.

This is starkly exemplified in the handling of "johns' schools," where men arrested for solicitation are exempt from a permanent record of conviction if they can attend a daylong class.  Such arrangements are blatantly discriminatory since the primary requirement is that the individual in question can pay $600 (or a jawdropping $1,000 in San Francisco) as a fee. Furthermore, the opportunity is not offered to a man with a previous conviction for drug possession, although it's unclear what this has to do with his ability to be disabused of an interest in prostitutes; a previous conviction for solicitation also renders one ineligible. (This in spite of the fact that repeat offenders might reasonably be thought of as those most in need of "rehabilitation.") When looking at the stipulations surrounding enrollment, it's hard not to see johns' school as a loophole designed for more socially powerful individuals to slough off their arrest while disadvantaged men stay caught in the system.

It's comforting for both citizens and "high class" prostitutes to adhere to destructive class assumptions when it comes to sex work. For escorts, these beliefs provide a false sense of security in a situation made fundamentally volatile by dangerous laws. For the general public, investment in class means that those members of society deemed most valuable—lawyers, businessmen, politicians, etc.—can continue to patronize prostitutes within a system of illegality while rarely suffering the consequences.