The Worst Sex Work Laws of My Lifetime

The Trump administration is abandoning abandoning Jeff Sessions crusade announced crackdown on recently legalized marijuana because..it has shifted all energy into destroying prostitution in America. While relaxing on the weed laws relieves some of us so that we can medicate while being persecuted, the final fall of the Backpage empire definitely leaves us feeling the same familiar hopelessness that the Trump administration always brings with his stupid grin and photo with his signature on a big bill to destroy your environment, your livelihood your future...Perhaps Stormy Daniel’s is one of our only hopes in this dark dark era of anti sex, fucked over privacy, fucked over freedom of labor choice and outright confiscation of adult autonomy. This is the worst tsunami of change to sex worker laws that I may have seen in my lifetime. There have been some pretty dark times but Trump has not yet disappointed in taking things to a whole new level of shitholeness. Bush and 911 were fairly dark times, and I was younger and more idealistic then, so the fall would have been harder. This, however certainly effects sex workers in ways that none of us have ever seen or prepared for in previous decades. We now have no outlets to advertise and can be busted for the trafficking if you work with a driver, drive a friend to work, or share screened clients and receive a fee for doing so. Before we had to actually get caught in a sting. Now it feels like we live in Sweden and are trying to work under similarly impossible laws.

Apparently, if you had turned in your passport to be verified by Eros, which was just raided in September 2017 you can be banned from even entering the U.S, banned from traveling as a tourist to places like Canada and Japan if the passport has some sort of prostitution ban that has global reach. I read an announcement from a sex worker who entered the U.S and was caught at the border and slapped with a 10 year ban from entering America as a result of some alert on her passport. “What’s Eros for?” the border security asked. Heart and jaw drop on the floor. Many sex workers were hoping that Backpage owners would continue to fight as they always have been but I think finally they were worn thin and just decided to plead guilty and start doing their sentences. They were charged guilty in CA for money laundering and guilty for trafficking in Texas. They did not try to fight it, they pleaded guilty and started there sentence as soon as BP was seized. No Larry Flynt type of victory was going to ensue in 2018 for the Backpage owners, they had been fighting this fight for years already.

If you are wondering if it was all Trump’s doing alone, you are wrong. "In case anyone is wondering who should be president in 2020 based solely on the FOSTA/SESTA vote, it's Barbara Lee, the east bay rep, who voted no. Voted no on the War In Afghanistan in 2001. We used to say "Barbara Lee speaks for me" back then. Guess it's still true.

Not: 
Bernie Sanders
Cory Booker
Elizabeth Warren
Kamala Harris
Kristen Gillabrand
Maxine Waters 
Jimmy Gomez basically every other democrat (except Ron Wyden and 10 other house dems) who all voted Yes"