Sex Industry Stonewall

Rebecca’s Hidden Chamber, an S&M dungeon in midtown Manhattan, got busted for prostitution the other week. Now I know next to nothing about this house of domination that bills itself as “the polite dungeon” (whatever that means), but I do know about BDSM, having been both a personal slave and a pro-dom, as well as prostitution, having been involved with a high-end male escort for six years.

And I say, “Enough!”

When are sex workers finally going to come out of the closet and take to the streets? Instead of denying that one agreed to engage in sex for $220 (if Rebecca’s mistresses did indeed consent to that paltry sum then they got busted and low-balled to boot!) or tearfully pleading guilty, why not try some dominant defiance? “Yes, officer, I did agree to fuck you, but I didn’t consent to my hard-earned tax dollars – yup, many of us do vanilla gigs, too – going to the prosecution of “vice crimes” when education budgets get slashed, when infrastructure repairs get tabled, when men and women lacking body armor are dying in Iraq.”

Where is the outrage?

Instead of focusing on “sex slaves” (apples to the oranges of run-of-the-mill hookers) and the myth of prostitution as a non-victimless crime, let’s focus on the bogus “morality” nonsense that keeps the vice unit in business – a unit as antiquated as prohibition. The government has no right telling me what to do with my womb, or so the pro-choice voice would say. Then why in 2008 is there not an equally strong sexual rights lobby, one demanding that government stop making decisions for the rest of my body as well?

At the beginning of the last century, in “Tropic of Capricorn,” Henry Miller wrote,” “I meant by that a very simple thing – The Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage.” We should be embarrassed that those words still ring ominously true today, ashamed of our puritanical laws, and not by the acts they futilely attempt to prevent us from engaging in.

For more sex workers advocacy head over to Bound, Not Gagged.