Radfems, racism, and the problem with "pimps"

I was re-reading Iceberg Slim recently (as you do), and wondering what exactly it is the anti-sex brigade mean when they go around calling people "pimps".

I've been called a pimp before. By Julie Bindel, to my face, and I laughed because it is so ridiculous: I have never profited off of anyone's erotic capital but my own… and arguably Billie Piper's, though that makes me no more and perhaps significantly less pimp-like than (say) her agent and the show's producers.

I don't get particularly offended by such obviously over the top labels. But the word itself has started to crop up more and more in the arguments surrounding sex work and the pros posed laws regarding prostitution. Take for example in Ireland, where the widespread assumption is that all sex workers are a) women and b) "pimped". Both of these are demonstrably and flagrantly not true, and yet are found in virtually any media coverage of the topic which is heavily influenced by an unholy coalition of extreme religious groups and extreme radfem ideologues.

The side issue dogging the proposed changes, that is, the discourse about what exactly constitutes trafficking and who exactly is trafficked, is of course pretty openly racist - both the words and the imagery. This has been covered in some detail and extremely well by eg. Laura Agustin, whose work on the topic I highly recommend.
 

Typical "trafficking" propaganda: shades of White Slavery all over the place.
 
Anyway, back to the concept of "pimp". Now we all know, or think we know, what a pimp is, and much of this archetype comes from highly fictionalised misrepresentations of Mr Slim's own work.
Go on, you know exactly what people mean by the word. What "pimp" implies. A man who runs women, lures them with money and romance, then turns them out to whoring, often beaten, always drug-addicted.

And he is black.

Starting to sound like casual use of "pimp" is dog-whistle racism, isn't it?

For the life of me I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I "know" they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. I've met streetwalkers, both drug-addicted and not; escorts and call girls, same; not one ever had what popular imagination would classify as a "pimp," but then I keep getting told I'm not representative, so maybe the literally hundreds of men and women, cis and trans sex workers I've met are just "not representative" too?

Occasionally you also hear talk of the "Eastern European gangmaster", but for some reason the class- and racially-evocative term "pimp" comes up far, far more often. Could that be because plain xenophobia just doesn't inspire the troops in quite the same way bald racism does?

Independent sex workers who organise their own affairs and work solo. Roommates who share a flat and both happen to sell sex. Managers running escorts agencies with a dozen or so girls they mostly interact with by text. Massage parlour owners. Women whose house is used by other sex workers, so technically I guess are madams. People who set up message boards and internet forums where clients and sex workers talk among themselves and with each other. All of these are people who get called "pimps" by the anti-sex lobby.

A guy in a crushed velvet suit on a street corner, keeping his girls high and working the neighbourhood? Not so many of those to the pound.

But, let's say he really is out there, because we all keep getting told he is. This working-class black man in the loud clothes who is sexually and physically aggressive and probably has a criminal record. This "pimp".

Do you think his choice of work isn't somehow constrained by society too? That he wouldn't rather be earning money some other way? Because anyone with any sense can surely suss out that a lot of activities, both legal and illegal, would be far more profit and far less hassle than running girls.


Iceberg Slim: hustling because it's not as if you were going to save him and his mother from poverty, were you?
 
This is the reality of waged work, all waged work, whether sex is involved or not. No one, but no one, has "free choice". If you think otherwise, remind yourself what you wanted to be when you grew up, and reflect on how exactly you ended up where you are now. Did you freely select from all career choices in the world, ever? Or did you choose as best you could from the options offered by your abilities and (more crucially) your circumstances? You know, like Iceberg Slim did?

Some folks seem especially resistant to acknowledging the truth about work, so I'll underline it some more. Entire towns in the North weren't full of miners because everyone there just happened to have the aptitude and preference for that sole job, but because it was the only job going. NE Scotland isn't full of fishermen because they have a particular concentration of people whose life's dream was to catch fish, but because that's what the job market offers. Everyone's outcome is the product of limited choices, from streetwalkers to the Queen. And no one's suggesting she needs to be "rescued" from her lack of career options.

If you want to improve someone's options, you address the things that constrain their choices in the first place. Poverty, addiction, education, to name a few. Not take away the only choices they have.

The pimp as we perceive him is a low-end tough. He's not exactly a criminal mastermind. And unlike a lot of the people who talk about "pimps" and whatnot, I know criminals. I have seen that life up close and fucking personal. I have lived in their neighbourhoods and their houses, and even in their families. I know that anyone who runs a business in the way the supposed pimp supposedly does is making little money, if any. What's 50% of that £10 anal bareback the anti-sex lobby claim is available in red lights everywhere? A fiver? Yeah, that sounds logical. Now pull the other one.

I know that his power - again, if he exists, because even when I was living in Cracktown, Pinellas County I saw shit that would stop your heart but I never once saw a "pimp" - is a power of an extremely limited kind. The power of someone with few and possibly no other options.

The anti-sex lobby's fantasy use of the term "pimp" is bogus and it is racist. Anyone who claims otherwise is being purposely disingenuous for the sake of striking fear into white, English-speaking, middle-class people.

How trafficking is counted

There is an excellent article by investigative journalist Nick Davies, a primer on how the UK trafficking numbers were blown out of all proportion: Anatomy of a moral panic. (For commentary about US-based numbers, here's a blog about the topic.)

To summarise Davies's article, a paper which estimated a very small range - between 142 and 1,420 trafficked sex workers in the UK per year - was misreported and misinterpreted, ending up with people claiming 4,000 (or even as many as 80,000!) trafficked women entering the UK sex trade every year.

Part of the problem with these kinds of numbers is that while they're very, very wrong, they are also difficult to disprove. And the idea, once it enters mainstream media, is difficult to dislodge, even with facts.

In many social research fields, exact numbers can be hard to come by. Even seemingly straightforward calculations are fraught with error. Let's take a simple example. Imagine you were trying to count the number of people living in the world (and that you, like Father Christmas, are able to get to every household in an unfeasibly short amount of time). It would be a hard job. By the time the count was finished, loads of those counted would have died, and even more would have been born. An actual number that represents the real number of living people on earth at any one time? It's impossible. So, the world population is actually an estimate made based on some facts known about the countries of the world, their last population estimate, and their birth and death rates.

Making this kind of an estimate is a “Fermi problem”. Enrico Fermi, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, was reputedly able to make accurate guesses based on limited information.

Here’s an example of a Fermi problem in action. I was at pub quiz one week, and our team was tied for the lead. The tiebreaker was the question “How many performances did Yul Brynner have as the King of Siam in The King and I on Broadway?” As the only former drama geek in our team, it came down to me.

I calculated that Brynner probably did 8 performances a week ("once a day and twice on Sundays", as the saying goes). It’s a full-time job, so minus a two-week holiday, Brynner was probably performing 50 weeks a year. I wasn’t sure how many years it ran but knew he had been in at least one revival of the popular musical, so let’s say ten years of being the King total. That makes an estimate of:

8 shows a week x 50 weeks a year x 10 years = 4,000 shows

Sounds pretty high, right? We won the tiebreak (and the quiz) because, as it turned out, the real answer is 4,525. I was off by over 10%, which would be terrible for science, but was good enough for the quiz. The other team guessed 600... way too low. Picking a number out of thin air, as the other team probably did, is fraught with error. It’s hard to make good guesses with no information. Apply a few basic assumptions, however, and your accuracy goes up rapidly.

Fermi problems are great for pub quizzes, less so for evidence-based reporting. Common-or-garden estimates are not the stuff on which good research is built. At the very least, applying a set of assumptions to estimate a number should meet two major criteria:

1. The assumptions must have some foundation in reality. Eight Broadway performances a week is reasonable; 80 wouldn’t be.

2. The method of calculation needs to be explained. If an assumption turns out to be wrong, the calculation can then be adjusted. I don’t think the other person on my team would have bought 4,000 as an answer if he hadn’t seen my reasoning.

What does this have to do with the trafficking estimates?

The people who claim there are thousands, or even tens of thousands, of sex slaves in Britain are claiming an unrealistically high number. So unrealistic in fact that if it were true, that would mean the vast majority of prostitution in Britain was undertaken by trafficked people. That violates the first principle - basis in reality. Some people involved in sex work have encountered people who may have been trafficked; the vast majority have not. So either there's a whole other sex industry going on that no one in the sex industry knows about, or... the calculations are wrong.

Part of the difficulty with fighting such unrealistic claims, however, is getting good estimates to counter them. There is no comprehensive UK mapping of sex workers, much less trafficked ones, but there are some estimates. As part of the European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution (EUROPAP), Hilary Kinnell contacted projects providing services for sex workers. [pdf] She had 17 responses. The average number of prostitutes per project was 665. She then multiplied that figure by 120, the total number of projects on her mailing list, to get an estimate of 79,800. This total includes women, men, and transgender women and men sex workers in the UK.

Kinnell notes there are obvious problems with this particular Fermi problem: the centres responding might be larger than most, some sex workers might use more than one centre. She finds it strange that number - ten years old, a huge estimate, and taken out of context - is still quoted. "The figure was picked up by all kinds of people and quoted with great confidence but I was never myself at all confident about it. I felt it could be higher, but it also could have been lower."

Meanwhile data from the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (UKNSWP) records an estimate of 17,081 sex workers in some kind of contact with centres. Of these 4178 - about 24% - work on the street. A larger total for all sex workers was 48,393. More recent, and rather lower, than the 1999 estimate. So if the trafficking hype is correct, that would make anywhere from one in 12 to as high as one in 2 sex workers in the UK the victim of trafficking.

Let's go back to the paper which kicked this all off, the one that estimated a range of 142 to 1,420 trafficked sex workers in the UK. Now, a note about that number: it included not only women who were trafficked against their will, but also women who willingly arrived (perhaps illegally) to the UK for sex work. In other words, Kelly and Regan’s total included both unwilling and willing sex migrants.

Part of the problem is how different groups define “trafficked”. Some assume that if someone is not British and is working in the sex trade, she must be trafficked. That’s quite a leap in logic! Hold on a sec - I was born abroad. And I worked in the sex trade. Does that mean they count me as "trafficked"? WTF?

The Poppy Project reported in 2004 that 80% of prostitutes in London flats were foreign-born. But there is no evidence that those women were trafficked or that this high proportion of foreign sex workers to natives is true of the entire UK. (In fact, evidence puts the UK-wide proportion closer to 37%.)

‘Foreign-born’ also includes citizens of other EU countries, who have the automatic right to live and work in the UK. Eaves, the organisation that includes the Poppy Project, did an interesting nip-and-tuck on reporting the origins of women working in the sex trade in London. In their 2004 report Sex In the City [pdf], they claimed 25% of women working in London were from Eastern Europe. But look closer - they have classified Italy and Greece as “Eastern European” countries.

Why? Well, the reason is given that “because these ethnicities are often used to code women from the Balkan region, advised by pimps and traffickers to lie about their ethnicity to avoid immigration issues.” Hey, my dad is Italian... if I said this to a researcher, does that mean they would assume I'm really Eastern European? That violates the second principle of the realistic estimate: show your work clearly. It’s the kind of sloppy calculation that throws all subsequent conclusions into question. It's bad Fermi.

So if some people who come here voluntarily can be erroneously called “trafficked,” then what is “trafficking”, exactly? The Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, part of the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime defines ‘trafficking’ as

…the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

In other words, illegal migration for purposes of economic advantage, if undertaken willingly, is not trafficking. If nothing else, it's worth remembering the excellent analogy offered by Charlie Glickman:

Sex work is to Trafficking as Consensual Sex is to Rape.

Just because rape exists (and is rightly both reviled and illegal), that doesn't mean banning sex would solve any problems. What Glickman's statement encapsulates so brilliantly is that while trafficking occurs within sex work, that in and of itself is no good reason to either equate the two, or to ban sex work. Pumping up the trafficking numbers might be great for getting media attention, but it does nothing to solve the real problems of people who are really trafficked.

Claiming huge numbers of trafficked sex slaves where they do not exist distracts attention and resources from the (far smaller) number of people forced into sex who genuinely need assistance. And I for one think inflating a problem is not only unethical, it's dangerous to real victims. Let's get our terminology right, at the very least. Let's start with realistic research and maybe someday we'll get realistic results.