Sex Worker Support group
Today we’re talking with Naomi, who ran a support group for sex workers in Boston area. She discusses how corporate influences eventually broke up the group, why it’s crucial that sex-work organizing be anti-capitalist in nature, and more. Thanks for reading!
So, what was it like running a support group for sex workers in Boston area?
Well, there’s why I started it and why I wanted to quit after a year. I originally started it to create community ‘cause I work independently, which is great ‘cause I have no boss but I also don’t have coworkers to share my day with. And to kinda reduce the isolation I started my own support group. It was a lot of work getting it off the ground but after a while we had one person, then two people, then three people, then we got a small group going of maybe five to eight people that would show up on a semi-regular basis.
What slowly started happening is that the people who were really interested in the group -- like, really interested -- some of them that would show up weren’t actually sex workers. They were corporate lobbyists that would show up, which was super sketchy. Lobbyists that worked for porn companies, and I would be like, “What are you doing at a support group?” We were attracting kind-of the opposite of the type of people I wanted to attend, which was the people who actually had skin in the game, not brothel owners, not corporate lobbyists for companies, and not internet entrepreneurs. What ended up breaking up the group was we had a woman from Harvard, a graduate student, who said she did online sex work, which is similar but not exactly the same as someone who does in-person stuff who has, you know, a lot higher risk. She initially cloaked herself in saying she needed suport and stuff, and me being empathetic didn’t want to turn anybody away who said they needed support. Well, after a while she became a very destructive force. It turned out she wasn’t actually looking for emotional support. What she wanted was she was an internet entrepreneur, she had kind-of a website like OnlyFans except that it was her version of OnlyFans, and she actually was looking for, like, street cred. And she joined the group, and she actually had what was, in my mind, racist ideology about racial segregation which is disturbingly common these days, forgetting the whole Civil Rights Movement. She actually pretended she didn’t know what the Civil Rights Movement was, even though she’s a graduate student at Harvard. She’s like, “What Civil Rights Movement?” I’m like, “I don’t know, some really important event that happened in the sixties, you don’t know? Okay.” So she didn’t know anything about the Civil Rights Movement. I guess they don’t teach that in school nowadays.
She was really just trying to promote her website. She have never done sex work in her life , zero work experience. And she ended up recruiting for her group, all on the back of my group. Then she tried to steal my emails, where she asked for the password to my email. It was my email lists she was trying to gain access to. It reminded me a little bit as to what happened to Pride in Boston where they stole the emails. [Editor’s Note: this article talks about emails being stolen from Boston Pride, and shows how corporate entities try to interfere in grassroots organizing.] I refused to give her my email password. She tried to give me money in exchange for my email list. Here I was, trying to do the right thing, doing something non-profit with my own money, and she was literally getting funding from Big Tech and the oligarchy in order to create her own thing, and rather than doing her own separate thing, which she could’ve, she was trying to do it based on my work. So I ended up having to quit the group because of the destructive corporate forces that were entangling themselves. So I decided to take a break from that.
Do you remember who specifically was funding her?
I think I looked it up at one point, but I don’t know specifically. I think it’s just when you’re an internet entrepreneur and you want to start something like an OnlyFans, you have investors, people who are looking to make money. And she was unique because she was a woman-owned platform rather than OnlyFans which is owned by some dude, and they take a lot of the money of the people.
And she now runs a support group which I think is really a conflict of interest. So imagine if the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, ran a support group for his employees. Or if Uber ran their own support group for their drivers, who are independent contractors. It’s a huge conflict of interest to have brothel owners run support groups for the workers. So they separate and cloud the social hierarchy that’s involved in capitalism between boss, owners, and the workers. You certainly wouldn’t confide in your boss and say “I need support!” You wouldn’t, you know? Especially if you’re complaining about your boss, you wouldn’t have the boss run the support group, ‘cause it’s just a moral, ethical conflict of interest to do so. You gotta have a separation.
Were there any other people who joined your group who seemed suspicious?
There was this other woman who was a porn star and she worked for de-crim full time and, you know, I had a sense that in order to join a sex worker support group in Boston, you had to be for de-crim. I don’t know why you have to be. They kick you out of the group if you’re not for that, or if you even question it you’re not allowed. It’s really weird. If it’s truly a support group you should be allowed to have your own views on it or at least to question things without being forced to take an ideology. So there’s definitely a model that’s been created where you have to have this point of view in order to participate. Basically you couldn’t have anti-capitalist views and be involved in any kind of labor organizing. You should be able to organize without wanting to have to have a boss.
For example, the people that run a support group in Rhode Island, these people are brothel owners. And me, working in a strip club years ago, I can’t imagine my boss, the owner of the club, running a support group for the workers. That would have been really stressful.
But there were people who were in the group who were really great. There were a lot of really nice girls that were in the group. I met lots of nice people. We had a college professor in the group, we had just regular women, and they were really nice. But I don’t think you can organize in Boston without getting harassed, and this is true for the Anarchist Bookfair or any group, there’s a lot of, I don’t know, weird people that harass you if you try to do any organizing so you kind-of have to keep it on the down-low.
But I did have some good experiences as well. I met terrific people, I learned how to run my business better, I learned ways to protect myself. We had a self-defense class, we had a place where we could screen clients. There’s a lot of good that came out of it, just in terms of educating myself on how to be safer and make more money. But there was a strong dark side too, so it was really a mixed bag.
In terms of making more money and being safer, instead of de-crim, what does your ideal world look like for sex work?
Well, according to my research we don’t live in a democracy, so there’s some large system failures that put not just sex workers in danger, but all humans in the United States in danger. If we are are not able to make laws that reflect the public’s needs and desires and the government only represents corporations and billionaires -- well, if we don’t live in a democracy -- then we have a big problem. There was big study done at MIT ten years ago that demonstrated we do not live in a democracy, and that’s a really big issue. [Editor’s Note: this MIT study]. And it’s bigger than all the stuff I’m talking about. Also, there are other causes for concern, so it’s not that I think sex work should be criminalized, it’s that I think the system itself makes life unsafe for Americans, Massachusetts residents. Although Massachusetts is one of the better states, but I just don’t feel like it’s a safe place for a lot of people.