Another Casualty In the War On Sex

The sad news yesterday of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's suicide once again sent waves throughout the sex worker community. Geez...can we go at least a month without a sex worker scandal? Pleeeze!

It was a tragedy when Palfrey was found guilty last month of racketeering, mail fraud, and money laundering but her high-profile clients (Randall Tobias, et al) got off Scot-free, despite the fact that they were the real criminals here. Is it fun for people to watch these women go down? Because really, women don't commit as heinous crimes as men or as often as men, so it's the prostitutes and madams such as Palfrey that get used as examples in the media for what "bad" women look like. Still, you'd have to search far and wide to find someone who actually believed that Palfrey was dangerous and should be locked away from the public.

Palfrey insisted that she didn't want to spend even one more day in federal prison again (she'd been before) and she made good on that promise yesterday, despite the fact that she may have only gotten a sentence of five years or so and been out in even less than that. I understand, though. If I was in Palfrey's case, I may have even done the same thing. What would she do once she was released from prison? Perhaps she felt there was nothing left to turn to.

It's hard to say, though and I wouldn't want to speak for someone else. I think a lot of us in sex work activism felt that maybe Palfrey was stronger than we though and would have the moxie to move on despite whatever sentence was handed down to her. we hoped she'd get a book or movie-of-the-week deal, netting her the big bucks. She'd always insisted that the clients should be held just as accountable as she was, which I agree with. Supply=demand. If she's going to go down then take the clients down to. This happens all the time in prostitution cases. It's easier to bust the women than the men.

Palfrey's trail didn't get much attention. In fact, it was called downright boring by some reports. However, several clients and providers testified and one reported any negative effects as the result of their work or the services provided to them. Hmmm...either we were too busy with the Spitzer scandal or for some reason the media didn't find that to be newsworthy enough to report. I can't imagine Diane Sawyer and the rest of the uninformed news media anting to hear that these "fantasy sex providers" actually enjoyed what they did.

What Palfrey, Spitzer, and who-knows-next are all victims of really is the US War on Sex. We live in a huge country of prudes, where sex is used to sell just about everything you can imagine, but -gasp!- selling sex is demonized to the level of rape, murder, and much more heinous crimes. Talk about sending mixed messages. Yes, I know we are a puritanical society, but just think of all the heinous crimes that happen each day, from the war in Iraq, to the FCLDS nutjobs forcing their teenage girls to marry older men (without pay!), to the random shootings that happen every day nearly everywhere. Do I sound like a broken record here? Maybe I am. Now think of the Spitzers, the Deborah Jeane Palfreys, the Heidi Fleiss' and wonder why these people ever made the front page news.

It's because we are obsessed with sex.