Within the
past 24 hours, a story told by Zola on Twitter has totally blown the F up. Zola, our storyteller, is a self-possessed Hooters waitress in
Detroit who strips on the side for extra cash.
She’s self-possessed and self-assured and clearly very confident in
who she is. While working at Hooters and
stripping are often looked down upon in our society, Zola knows enough to not
judge herself by society’s standards.
Plus, she makes bank doing it. We
should all be more like Zola. We should
all have so much confidence.
Zola,
attracted to the potential for making money, rides to Tampa, Florida with a customer, Jess, she met
literally the day before in order to make some extra cash
stripping. Also in the car are Jess’s boyfriend Jarrett,
and a big, old black man. I might not
have gone with them myself because I am perhaps more cautious than Zola, but
Zola saw dollar signs and counted herself in.
In this way, she is basically a female Jordan Belfort – someone who
thinks money is more important than personal security or, you know, anything
else. The big difference is that I’d
rather hang out with Zola than Jordan Belfort.
What
follows is a story about a desperate woman (Jess) stuck with a murderous pimp
(big black man who goes by Z) and a bipolar boyfriend (Jarrett) who doesn’t
want Jess to “trap” (“trap” means to prostitute oneself) anymore. Zola, for her part, does not trap because she
is not about that life, but ends up stuck in a situation that was definitely
not as advertised. A weekend of
stripping, making money, and having a good time turned into a weekend of
trapping, pimping, violence, guns, death threats, murder, and attempted
suicide. Do not go with a girl you just
met to strip in Florida for the weekend.
Some money is just not worth it.
Some of the
elements of this story could have been avoided, however, with a couple tweaks
in how we as a society view prostitution.
For example, if trapping were legal, Jess would have had a legal
recourse against Z when he takes all of her money she made from said trapping,
despite the fact that she found most of those johns on her own or with Zola’s
help, not through him. Plus, when Jess
straight up gets kidnapped at the end of the story and beaten until she’s
unconscious, calling the police would have been a more viable option. They can’t, because Zola and Jess would be
arrested (Jess for trapping, Zola for pimping and for carrying a gun Z gave her
“just in case”). Instead, Z shoots the
kidnapper/rival pimp IN THE FACE in order to “rescue” Jess.
I’m not
advocating that everyone become a sex worker, or that some people involved in
the sex worker business are not just terrible people. However, as it stands, sex workers are simply
not protected by law like they should be.
For many sex workers, there are simply few or no other options
available. Many get started at a young
age, don’t have much of an education, and are in environments where there are
few alternatives to make money. Forced
into prostitution, these women then find that the law doesn’t care what happens
to them at all. A court case in 2007 ruled
that holding a sex worker at gunpoint and forcing her to have sex with three
men wasn’t rape; it was theft because the johns didn’t pay for her services. A recent serial killer case in the southern
Ohio/West Virginia region ended only because a sex worker had the presence of
mind to shoot dead the man attacking her. The police had known there was a serial killer looking for prostitutes
and had done literally nothing, considering it almost a blessing to be ridding
the area of prostitution. Serial killers going specifically after prostitutes are common - from Jack the Ripper to The Green River Killer to The Grim Sleeper, just to name a few. Whatever one’s
thoughts are on the morality of prostitution, these women deserve at least some
legal protection.
Most importantly,
if person A wants to give person B a blow job, why do I care? Why does the government? Legalize it.
Tax it. Everybody wins.
This story
would have been far less dramatic if sex work wasn’t so dangerous. How do we make sex work less dangerous? Making it illegal doesn’t make it go
away. There’s always someone somewhere
willing to pay for sex – and someone else willing to sell it.
No comments:
Post a Comment