In the final days of New York’s Mayoral Election, Andrew Cuomo’s team amplified its Muslim-baiting to such an extreme that the resulting backlash may have overshadowed a few significant points of contention between the establishment Democrat and Zohran Mamdani. For instance, in the campaign’s closing weeks, few noticed as Cuomo repeatedly knocked Mamdani for the latter’s commitment to decriminalize prostitution - a proposal supported by a majority of New Yorkers. Cuomo’s Twitter account described this proposal as “a gift to traffickers, gangs & organized crime” while bragging about the ex-governor’s role in defeating the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act.
This bill, if passed, “would decriminalize sex work in the state, while upholding felony anti-trafficking statutes to hold people who seek to buy sex from minors accountable.” Additionally, it would “allow sex workers to apply for criminal record relief/expungement” for past convictions. The formulation of this legislation has several glaring defects: the anti-trafficking stance and focus on ‘protecting minors’ give credence to many conservative biases that dominate the discourse surrounding sex work. Furthermore, the process of ‘applying for criminal record relief’ implies a bureaucratic nightmare that places a heavy burden on those whose criminal guilt should have already been absolved by the state.
The forces that drive Americans to a career in sex work are usually of an economic rather than a directly violent nature. This is a major reason why the “human trafficking” narrative surrounding sex work has been attacked by major advocates for legalization and unionization. Liberal-minded legislators, including many radical feminists and socialists, view sex work as exploitative to an intolerable degree, and the legislation they support tends to reflect their overriding disapproval of the profession. “Not only does this narrative ignore the underlying structural components that might compel someone to voluntarily participate in sex work,” reads one recent, highly informative report, “but the hypocrisy of the binary is also revealed when sex workers and trafficking survivors alike continue to face arrest and entanglement in the criminal legal system.”
“Street-based sex workers have limited job opportunities outside of sex work, and almost no access to employment that offers a living wage,” according to a valuable study by Juhu Thukral & Melissa Ditmore. This same study found waitressing to be the most common job among New York sex workers, followed by various service-industry jobs, retail sales, and receptionist positions. Respondents who held skilled positions as hair stylists or EMTs cited a lack of sufficient income from this work as their main reason for becoming sex workers.
It is often assumed that many women who enter into sex work do so as the result of coercion. However, it is rarely suggested that this is the coercion of American capitalism, which fosters instability and desperation among its working class. Instead, we often hear about the coercion imposed by pimps and human traffickers, the wrongdoings of a few nefarious individuals taking advantage of our free and open society. The victims of these individuals are presented in monolithic terms: helpless, devoid of agency, pliable and submissive, and thus in need of “saving.” The language of Cuomo’s campaign is wholly ripped from this playbook. His innuendos about the “Bad Old Days of Time Square” represent not just a cartoonishly simplified version of New York’s history, but a form of fearmongering that is implicitly directed against racial minorities and poor people.
The language deployed in these discussions often intentionally conflates sex work with trafficking. This piece from The Times describes how “the New York police failed to respond to the brazen sex trade” around Roosevelt Avenue while operating on the assumption that armed enforcers are required for a situation in which sex is being sold. This leading language is also employed by New York police, who justify squashing the livelihoods of entire communities of sex workers by claiming that they are eradicating trafficking networks that weak helpless women have been sold into.
New York has recently seen widespread targeting of sex workers by the city government and police. Last fall Mayor Eric Adams unveiled Operation Restore Roosevelt, “a 90-day effort to dismantle the sex trafficking rings in the area” which entailed “200 police officers and 50 state troopers…deployed to the streets on the first day of the operation.” This initiative drew condemnation from those who have long criticized Adams’ militaristic, heavy-handed solutions to nonviolent offenses. While arrests for prostitution have declined in recent years, the police still find other ways to impose criminal penalties upon those who buy or sell sexual services, for instance by arresting individuals for unlicensed massage acts or for loitering. Due to the illegal nature of their work, New York sex workers are effectively always on the run from the police, finding themselves “repeatedly going in and out of the court system, spending nights at Rikers Island or in court pens at enormous expense, and coming back out only to face the same situation, with no lasting change or benefit to prostitutes or the surrounding community.” Sex workers have little to no recourse when they are victims of a crime. They have frequently been “told by the police that their complaints would not be accepted, that this is what they should expect, and that they deserve all that they get.”
Transgender women have notably been a major target in the NYPD’s crackdown on sex work, and are only recently beginning to find some legal relief. The same is true of migrant sex workers who, according to the aforementioned piece from The Times, “are often recruited outside city shelters, where groups of migrant families in legal limbo are sent after they cross the border and are triaged to sanctuary cities such as New York.” Raids on massage parlors have disproportionately affected immigrant businessmen and women. According to a report from Decriminalizing Sex Work (DSW), “arrests of Asian individuals charged with unlicensed massage and prostitution increased by 2700%” between the years 2012 and 2016, with Chinese and Korean immigrant women constituting the vast majority of those arrested. Racial and gender biases continue to dominate these arrests. In 2019, 98% of arrests for prostitution were women, while 91% were people of color. Additionally, over the last decade “90% of arrests for patronizing a prostitute in the 3rd degree were Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) despite the fact that national studies report between 80-85% of sex buyers are white men.” New York legislators’ pretense of tolerance towards minority groups such as sex workers and migrants is exposed via these statistics, which show numerous vulnerable populations trapped under the heel of state-sanctioned repression and dehumanization.
Mayor-elect Mamdani has claimed on numerous occasions, and again in his acceptance speech, that he intends to be a mayor for all New Yorkers, be they black, white, Jewish, Muslim, “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas” or “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses.” One can only hope that these promises of diversity and inclusion extend to sex workers, who hitherto have gone unmentioned by him in public. I hope that this exclusion is a calculated one stemming from political prudence and good intentions. For the most part, Mamdani’s hopeful inclusivity stood in sharp contrast to Cuomo’s highly negative campaign. Seeing the malice directed towards sex workers from Cuomo’s camp, it would have been nice to see Mamdani step forward as a clear ally. Still, under a Mamdani administration, there is a chance that some progress might be made to advance sex workers’ rights. Along with his support for decriminalization, Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability has resonated with thousands of working class New Yorkers. This undoubtedly includes beleaguered sex workers, who see some chance of their economic situation improving. Under a Cuomo administration, there would be no such chance.