Editorial note: I am starting this new blog on the history of prostitution with entries in German and English and I am kicking it off with a source – a text written by sex worker’s rights activist Margo St. James. This and all future entries will most likely confuse many among the readers and this particular one may, hopefully, just be one of the many steps towards historicizing, deconstructing and eventually overcoming the harmful notion of the “two” opposing camps in sex work debates, which are supposedly so clear cut and utterly immobile. This source is published without comments – for now. But I encourage readers to engage with the source in the comment section. 

I am Margot St. James from the United States. I am a whore. I was labelled a whore in 1962 when I was forcibly arrested. I am obliged to remain a whore for the rest of my life. I have never been able to get a job since I was so labelled, even though a higher court hound me innocent two years later

Streetwalkers in America are the most oppressed women, the most oppressed workers in the country. They are mostly minority women, and they are discriminated against by the hotels and the parlor owners, who I call legalized pimps. the parlor owners take at least 60% to 75% of the money, and give the women no benefits and no job security.

Forty-eight thousand women in the United States are arrested every year for prostitution. They are so labelled by the police, by the courts, by the traditional sexist legal system, for providing sex for establishment men. Seventy percent of the women in prison in the United States today were first arrested for prostitution. They learn other ways of earning money faster once they go to jail. They learn how to steal and sometimes they go into drugs. Eights percent of juveniles -girls under 18 – who become prostitutes, were first incest victims in their own families. This is something that is never talked about.

If we are to do something about the juveniles in prostitution, we must go after the men who buy those girls. In the U.S.A. only the women are arrested. IN France, only the women are arrested. Everywhere it is the same. Inly the women are put in jail or arrested for prostitution. The enforcement of prostitution laws against women makes the prostitute an object lesson to all women that they had beter stay home and they had better live within the roles defined by men.

The illegality of prostitution, the laws which are enforced against the women, make the women easy victims for any sadistic man who wants to do and rip her off and brutalize her, or even murder her. Twelve prostitutes were murdered in San Francisco in 1974. That is one a month, but no one  of them got a story in the aper. Yet, when one policemen gets shot it is a headline for three days!

On Mother’s Day in 1973, I started an organization to combat this blacklabelling process, to combat the divide-and-conquer technique used by men. I called it COYOTE: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics. Men call prostitution the oldest profession. I call it the oldest injustice. The enforcement against women only promotes the rape ideology. As the woman from Japan pointed out, the women themselves get hardly any of the money. Ninety per cent of their income is taxed away informally by anyone who is in a position to know what they do, and that what they do is illegal: the landlord, the hotel manager, the policeman.

The problems are the same in whatever country I have been to. They charge you for soliciting even when being a prostitute is not against the law. They arrest your boyfriend and your husband and say he is living on your earnings, which is immoral. Yet many countries, like Germany, want to have governments-run houses. But the government is the worst pimp of all!

Beitrag von Margo St. James in: Van de Ven, Nicole, Russell Diana E. H. (Hg.): Crimes Against Women: International Tribunal Proceedings, S. 179-181. (PDF)