The Paternity of Prostitution

published by AMSA (Alternative Mobile Services Association) on February 4, 2025

I moved to Portland in 2001 as a New York liberal. Witnessing prostitution in Portland eventually made me drop the liberal label and accept I was now a radical.

Radicals go upstream to where problems start and do less damage control on the front lines than liberals. Both advocates are essential, and as an upstreamer invited to speak to first responders about prostitution I’d like to explore alternatives outside the liberal bandwidth.

Portland has several neighborhoods where prostitution is a constant and I live in the city’s worst one. The 82nd Avenue rape neighborhood (“red light district”) has more Asian massage parlors than food stores and men drive there to hunt for prostitutes near my Montavilla home.

My neighbors have stories:

A father stopped at a stop sign had a prostitute try to open his passenger door and get into his car while his two small children were in the back seat.

A mother was walking with her 11-year-old daughter and a man in a car slowed down to proposition her in the middle of the day.

A woman waiting on the sidewalk while her car was serviced had a man in a car pull up and motion for her to get inside, then he sped away as she tried to take his photo.

The sheer amount of strip clubs has long been a warped Portland bragging point, a smirk to an overly romanticized Wild West. Studies show 100% of strippers have been solicited for prostitution, confirming one stripper’s observation, “We’re not showgirls, we’re prostitutes pretending to be showgirls.”

I’m here for alternative solutions, so let’s begin at the beginning—men’s choices.

The Nordic model approach (also known as the Equality Model) decriminalizes people who are prostituting and makes buying sex a criminal offense. It has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Israel, Canada, France, and Ireland.

The Nordic model is the compromise between legalizing prostitution and not legalizing prostitution. It has been spreading outside Scandinavia because it works marvelously. After only three years, Oslo, Norway saw dramatic drops in all categories of severe violence against prostitutes, and emergency room visits dropped a whopping 79%.

Source

It’s a world-changing idea. Most people understand it should not be a crime to be so desperate that you let someone hurt you, but should be a crime to sexually prey on vulnerable people.

I won’t presume to tell first responders how to incorporate the Nordic model into your daily work, that’s your expertise. Mine is going upstream and relaying what I’ve learned.

1. Decriminalize those who are prostituted

The Nordic model repeals laws targeting those who are prostituted and clears their criminal records of previous convictions for offenses related to their own prostitution.

2. Criminalize those who attempt to purchase sex

Purchasing sex should be an offense punished with public transparency, fines, and the threat of jail. Sweden has a jail sentence of one year, however no one has been sent to jail for buying sex in Sweden. Men who pay for sex are rarely hardened criminals, they’re the ordinary men around us, in our families, our workplaces, our schools. Fines and exposure are more effective at changing the behavior of ordinary sex buyers than jail.

3. Training for service providers

Experience (in Sweden especially) shows the Nordic model is most effective beyond the larger social shift against sex buying when accompanied by in-depth training for police, judiciary, and frontline workers.

Police abuse of prostituted women is a significant problem, with some studies finding as much as 30% of violence can come from police. It’s worth pointing out none of the Oslo violence reported by prostituted women was committed by Norwegian police, not so much as one act of verbal abuse.

4. Exit services for victims

Since a key component is not forcing prostitutes to exit, there must be non-judgmental support (addiction services, education, legal advice, childcare) to meet people where they are and not where others want them to be.

Prostitution can never be made safe and its existence makes women’s human right to equality with men impossible.

Finally, let’s go ALL the way upstream, no bullshit.

If you have never mustered the courage to look at the pornography your husband or sons or other men in your lives masturbate with, I beg you to break the silencing spell pimps have cast over your family. We can no longer continue to ignore the propaganda of prostitution media and how it grooms mainly male consumers to take orgasmic pleasure in violent, life-threatening sex acts.

Melania Trump, America’s first sex worker First Lady

published at Feminist Current December 17, 2016

In late November I was in the Portland State University’s Women’s Resource Center listening to a teacher explain that sex work is feminist work. Where an evidenced explanation for the Nordic Model’s supposed failure should have been, she asked the students to postulate a reason for its failure and one young woman guessed, “Because sex is used transactionally all the time, police can’t know if transactions are professional or not.” The teacher agreed and moved on to how not all prostitutes were raped as children.

In that woman’s mind and to the teacher’s agreement, sex is perceived mainly as a means to acquire things. All women are prostitutes, but some go on to make careers of it and the transition is so seamless that onlookers can’t tell the difference between having sex for stuff as an amateur and having sex for stuff as a pro.

I bring up this recent anecdote because the assembled sex-positive liberals in that class were adamantly anti-Trump and aghast at his election without reflecting on how Trump is the most pro-sex work president the USA has ever had.

The knee-jerk position of the American Left is to oppose anyone who goes through public life with an R in front of their name. However, liberal men are much more supportive of women as public sexual property than conservative men who prefer their women privately owned. So why are liberals who advocate for expanding the public harem deciding, against all his prior actions up to and including marrying a sex worker, that Donald Trump is anti-sex worker?

Jenni Kutner wrote for Mic about porn actress Jessica Drake, one of the dozens of women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse. She concluded:

“Trump has done more than imply how he feels about people in the sex industry. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t view them as people at all.”

According to Drake, he treated her the same as he has numerous other women, “He grabbed each of us tightly, in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking permission.” That’s an ordinary day for the world’s most notorious pussy-grabber. Donald Trump treats women the same way he treats sex workers because he agrees with the Portland State teacher and student that all women prostitute, some are simply more organized about it than others.

Drake said Trump called her later and offered her $10,000 for sex plus the use of his private jet to get back home the next day.

I haven’t seen any of the people who want to legitimize prostitution as a profession acknowledge Trump’s generosity here. It’s very rare for a sex worker to make $10,000 in one night. A sum of that amount should be cause for sex-positive celebration and an example of a man honoring the work of sex they proclaim it is. The added offer of a private jet ride home afterwards surely makes him a gentleman john if ever there was one.

Robert Brannon of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism collected details of Trump’s financial dealings that support prostitution in his article, “Donald Trump and the Sex Industry.” Among his findings are such pro-sex worker facts as Trump’s Taj Mahal casino being the first casino in Atlantic City to have an in-house strip club and Trump’s numerous collaborations with Playboy:

“Donald Trump, himself, has appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine, and has proudly performed as an ‘actor’ in three different Playboy-produced ‘softcore’ pornography videos in 1999, 2001, and 2004 (Moye, 2016). He was always fully clothed, but in other scenes in these films, many women were naked. In the most recent film, young women are shown naked in sexual positions, dancing naked, rubbing honey on their breasts, taking a bath, and suggestively touching themselves and each other while naked (Moye, 2016).”

And still the mainstream liberal media keeps trying to paint Donald Trump as anti-sex work.

Rolling Stone ran a story on sex workers donating tips to Planned Parenthood in protest of Trump that included this rationale, “Whether their clients are Republicans or Democrats, they all spend the same money.“

AlterNet ran a story wondering if a Trump presidency will be bad for the porn industry.

What more could this avid client of erotic service providers possibly do to show he’s one hundred percent on the side of pimps, pornographers, and sex workers? Would marrying a sex worker, having her bear his son, and making her America’s first sex worker First Lady suffice?

Apparently not.

Even the most apologetic of commentators can’t bring themselves to claim Melania Trump as one of their own and congratulate her on her new position as First Lady. Self styled “dominatrix and sex worker” Margaret Corvid poses the oddly noncommittal question, “Who Cares If Melania Trump Was Maybe A Sex Worker?” as if it doesn’t matter that an alleged former sex worker will be America’s First Lady for the next four years.

Corvid avoids treating Melania Trump as an agent of her own destiny and turns the topic towards herself and the abuse liberal men continue to dish out to prostituted women, “When liberals aim at Melania for alleged sex work, they hit me with their bullets of shame.”

It would be a step forward for Corvid to stop being wishy-washy about Ms. Trump’s rumored past and embrace it. Perhaps then she could show concern for the woman whose naked image is being used by liberals as a cudgel to hit conservatives with instead of twisting it into an attack on herself by proxy.

Jill Filipovic, a former AlterNet editor and Guardian columnist who typifies the politics of third wave feminism, once wrote about begrudgingly allowing abusive men the legal right to purchase sex:

“I do think men who get off not just on sex but on exploitation are irredeemable shitholes, though. And yeah, they should have a legal right to access porn and to pay for sex (with people who are above the age of consent). But I still think they’re shitholes…”

By her own stated ethics, Filipovic should accept that not-convicted not-rapist Donald Trump offered a very agent-full sex worker a respectful sum of $10,000 for one night’s work. Drake considered the offer then refused, an ideal sex work scenario conjured by advocates for legal prostitution.

I disagree that the best people can do about paid-for sexual assault is make an informal complaint, heave a sigh, and walk away feeling superior to “shitholes.”

By third wave feminist standards, Donald Trump is a sexual freedom hero. He offers vast sums of money to sex workers, pioneered strip clubs in Atlantic City casinos, appeared on Playboy’s cover plus performed cameos for Playboy products, and his third wife is said to be a former sex worker he made the mother of his child before making her First Lady.

Today, on International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I will toast America’s first sex worker First Lady and drink for the liberals who got the punter-in-chief they wanted.