Op-ed in response to “San Francisco residents sue the city over thriving sex trade”

By Ernestine

In response to the San Francisco Chronicle article “San Francisco residents sue the city over thriving sex trade.”

Dear SF Chronicle,

Anti-sex-worker misogyny is a prejudice like any other. And like any other, it regularly results in the murder of human beings who happen to belong to this group. My heart goes out to my sisters/brothers/others who work on the streets of San Francisco under an atmosphere of so much animosity. It is something I can relate to. 

I am an American escort living in Berlin for this specific reason. I started my career in Boston, where sex work is heavily policed, which terrorised me to the point of impacting my physical health. Moving to a country where I can pursue my career legally and not under constant fear of arrest, with access to the legal system, was the best choice I ever made. I was drawn into sex worker’s rights activism as soon as I realized what an ideal career it is for me…except for the fact that it turned me—and upper-middle-class, college-educated white woman—into a criminal. It was the first time I ever experienced this level of systemic discrimination, and boy was it painful.  

Here in Berlin, a desire to stem hate crimes against sex workers led me to a side career as a historian of sex work, and I recently curated an exhibition about the history of sex work in Berlin up in the red light district (“With Legs Wide Open: A Whore’s Ride Through History,” Schwules [Gay] Museum). We hope it educates neighbours about how sex workers have used those streets as their workplace since at least 1860, and probably before. The central message of the exhibition is ”we have always been here,” and we hope educating people about our historical legitimacy decreases the violence. (Incidentally, globally, we have excellent studies demonstrating how trauma due to violence or frightening experience with police officers reliably keeps people unable to leave both addiction and sex work.)   

People become sex workers for all sorts of reasons. Some have kids to support and need a job where they can make enough money to survive in less than 40 hours per week because they can’t afford full-time childcare. Some are coerced or trafficked into it. Addictive illness plays a huge role in the creation of new sex workers. Some people just don’t want to work at Starbuck’s or prefer making more than minimum wage. There are lots of disabled or neurodivergent sex workers, in addition to activists and artist, who don’t fit into the traditional job market. For me, I discovered it when my ballet career was abruptly ended by injury. I had the excellent luck to be mentored into the profession by someone who taught me to do it as safely as possible. 

Increases in numbers of sex workers often directly result from historical factors. For example, after the Iron Curtain fell, queer and trans sex workers moved to Berlin because it was still illegal to be gay in Eastern Europe, and doing sex work in Berlin allowed them to support their families back home who were living in the particular flavour of poverty experienced by Soviet satellite countries. 

San Francisco has been home to sex workers for over 150 years, when the importation of Asian workers to build California’s railroads led to an enormous population of Chinese women entering sex work as immigrants in an unfamiliar land with few options for survival. These prevailing forces were, of course, entirely beyond their control—as is the opioid epidemic today. (Perhaps San Francisco residents should sue the Sacklers instead.)  

The reason I find sex work activism so interesting is that it lives at the center of every modern injustice and inequity: Pay inequality, racism, anti-migrant hatred, trans misogyny, and the struggles of people with disabilities all intersect to increase the number of sex workers. As long as these marginalized groups make less money for the same work, there will be people who think sex work is a better option for them. In this way, it also becomes a labor rights issue. Sex work unionization movements exist all over the world (although criminalization makes them nearly impossible). Whether or not you think there “should” be sex workers (and darling, we aren’t going anywhere), surely, we can all agree that everyone deserves fair, equal, and healthy working conditions. 

Or…maybe not? Lawsuits such as this come from an othering of the real human lives involved that frightens me. Even here in Germany, anti-sex-worker misogyny is alive and well and resulting frequent hate crimes by neighbors. I can only imagine what sex workers have to endure in the Tenderloin.  

It is my life’s work to educate people of the fact that sex workers are equal human beings with equal human rights, deserving of humanity and respect. The legality of sex work in Berlin has enabled us to found the first all-gender, worker-owned escort agency—Paramour Collective—revolutionising working conditions and empowering sex workers to finally get what we deserve, outside of the grasp of garden-variety exploitative bosses (something almost all of us have experienced). 

Rant over. I hope your readers can now see how abundantly absurd it is to combat these tides of history with such crude acts of nonsense. Such attempts are destined not only to fail, but to reinforce a tide of human suffering and hatred that is already far too great. 

If San Franciscans are serious about decreasing the number of sex workers, there is very clear work they can do:  

-Lobby for an increase in the number of beds on addictive illness wards.  

-Agitate for more affordable housing to get people off the streets.  

-Look inward, find your empathy, and be a person. 

Thank you for reading. 

Fondly, 

Ernestine