CARNAL NATION

This Tuesday, The Washington Post claimed that Craigslist's Erotic Services listings have been linked to "recent high-profile murders," an error that is egregious yet entirely unsurprising given the nasty discussions taking place in the wake of Julissa Brisman's murder. There's been an abundance of calls for the closure of Erotic Services, all of which exploit her death in order to present a moral agenda as a public safety issue. These rallying cries are normally delivered with a liberal dose of disrespect for the individuals who advertise on Erotic Services. This is a peculiar hallmark of American treatment of sex work: sex workers are unsavory criminals who must be policed, yet they're also defenseless victims who need our help.

Nowhere has this problematic way of thinking been more evident than in the Boston sting that resulted in 50 arrests shortly after Brisman's murder but prior to the arrest of suspect Phillip Markoff. Although police claimed they intended that this large sting would "provide evidence or a suspect," they targeted women who posted their own Erotic Services ads as well as men who responded to false ads. That is to say, law enforcement apparently arrested any random sex worker in the general area with the hope that, once arrested, these women might confess to booking previous appointments with a man who then assaulted them.

One officer explained "Some of the women that had posted ads weren't aware at all of the killing or the assault, which was scary." Indeed. Definitely much scarier than being arrested and taken to court by your friendly neighborhood policeman, who only takes people into custody so he can helpfully expose them to personally relevant news. City Councilor Barbara Haller cluelessly added that "it is shocking to me that people would continue to actively seek out dangerous behaviors at a time when we've all been reminded how dangerous it is." Never mind that our current laws discourage and criminalize the sharing of information between prostitutes, and that the work is dangerous largely—some would argue only—because it is illegal. Haller then promoted her work to eliminate prostitution in her district and lamented the way in which Craigslist has circumvented her efforts. Is this about finding and convicting a murderer or about penalizing sex workers? According to state officials, this moment can and should be about both.

Of course, we're not even sure that Brisman was a sex worker. The media has been meticulous about calling her a masseuse, and many articles quote her friends and family members' assertions that she was never providing anything more than a non-erotic massage. But this hasn't stopped men like Connecticut's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, or Mark Lagon of the Polaris Project from appropriating Brisman's murder as yet another opportunity to conflate sex work with trafficking and sex work (a nebulous term that could encompass phone sex to a porn shoot) with prostitution.

What journalist Edith Honan should have written, if she were interested in accuracy before pandering, is that the whole of Craigslist itself has been linked to several murders (three in its 14 years of operation) and that one of those was the result of a babysitting ad while another came about through a post looking for unpaid sex. (George Weber listed an ad that garnered a response from a young man asking for $60 for their encounter, but there was no reportage claiming Weber posted his ad under Erotic Services. It's far more likely he used the site's "Casual Encounters" section.)

Curiously, arguments for the elimination of ads for baby-sitting services or sex for free are nonexistent. So what is it about Brisman's murder that's different? The undetermined nature of her work—did she simply given an unlicensed sports massage? or was she providing some type of sexual release?—is key, because it allows officials to charge into discussions of "prostitution" in spite of the fact that Brisman may not have been a prostitute or even considered herself a sex worker. What if she were wearing a bikini while she gave a chaste massage? What if the man was naked and she was naked but never touched his genitals? Speculating and debating could occupy thousands of articles and never yield any useful information. We know what we need to know: someone was murdered and justice should be served. Arresting sex workers or driving their dealings further underground and off the radar won't honor Brisman's memory any more than outlawing babysitting would honor 2007 Craigslist murder victim Katherine Olson. As Craigslist representatives have pointed out repeatedly during this media storm, keeping erotic services active and popular is beneficial to potential victims and law enforcement alike, since employees of the site are cooperative with police and can provide valuable information about the people who post as well as respond to ads. The only article I've read that actually frames this issue with a sex worker's point of view included the quote, "We love Craigslist."

In late March of this year, CNN aired a debate on Weber's responsibility in his own death that ended in one guest saying the situation was indicative of "terrible judgment on [Weber's] part." No media story that I've encountered has been so gauche as to discuss Brisman's judgment when she scheduled an appointment with Markoff, although many sex workers are intensely curious about how she screened her clients. (Audacia Ray has pointed out that while screening helps, it's foolish to think that it's foolproof in terms of self-protection.) But far more important than personal responsibility in this case is an honest exploration of social responsibility, of the way our laws and personal judgments serve to demonize and marginalize those in the erotic industry. When Richard Blumenthal claims that erotic service ads "lead to" murders, it's our duty to remind him that murders occur because of murderers, and that assaults against sex workers are pervasive because we constantly ensure that they are vulnerable without laws and our attitude that they are not valued members of our society.