Democrats continue to abandon Stormy Daniels and sex workers

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) has a Law and order Last week’s parody video chronicling some of former President Donald Trump’s most notorious transgressions: outrageous lying, sexual assault, and financial fraud. The latest crime listed? “He cheated on his wife with a porn star.”

The “porn star” in question is, of course, Stormy Daniels. In 2016, Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money to cover up a previous sexual encounter with Trump. Daniels played a crucial role in securing Trump’s conviction earlier this year, putting her privacy, safety, and family at risk.

As Sinnamon Love, adult content creator and founder of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, recently put it succinctly in a tweet, “If it wasn’t for @StormyDaniels, y’all wouldn’t be able to call him a criminal.”

By denying Daniels her name and her humanity, the Democratic Party is failing Daniels and everyone who works in the sex industry. For a campaign that claims to be pro-woman, pro-worker, pro-bodily autonomy, it’s a bad thing.

The parody video wasn’t the only time Daniels—or, rather, a “porn star”—was referred to on the DNC stage. In another instance, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett doubled down on the DNC’s otherworldly “prosecutor vs. criminal” narrative, arguing that “(Kamala Harris) became a career prosecutor, while (Trump) became a career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.”

If Daniels worked in a less controversial industry, these politicians wouldn’t see her work as her identity. But since Daniels has built a successful career as an adult film performer, her profession is the Democrats’ favorite “gotcha.” The Democrats’ framing suggests that cheating on a porn star is somehow more deplorable than cheating on a teacher or an engineer—and that Trump’s infidelity with Daniels is somehow more corrupt than, say, going after Daniels’ livelihood, mercilessly mocking her for years, and encouraging his followers to threaten her life. The Democrats’ comments are particularly insulting to Daniels, since she was the MVP of Trump’s legal arrest, a downfall that DNC ​​speakers have repeatedly emphasized.

So why did the DNC make a joke of Daniels, perhaps the Democrats’ greatest ally? America’s stubborn sex-negative culture is certainly not on Daniels’ side. And given Harris’ history of disenfranchising sex workers, particularly those whose work carries greater risks than Daniels’, the disrespect should come as no surprise.

When Harris was California’s attorney general, she helped shut down Backpage.com, a classifieds website that many sex workers relied on to screen their clients. Then, during her Senate career, Harris co-sponsored and voted for the Stop Enabling Child Traffickers Act (SESTA), which was signed into law in 2018, along with the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). These bills were intended to prevent sex trafficking. Instead, the legislation did little to help those who had been trafficked and deprived sex workers of classifieds platforms and tools like e-verification services for clients and “bad date” lists that could help them do their work safely.

Under FOSTA/SESTA, porn industry workers and others in the sex industry are banned from social media accounts, bank accounts, and payment platforms. People who rely on sex work to support themselves and their families are stripped of their financial security and exposed to increased violence. These laws also allow websites and social media platforms to censor a wide range of erotic content, even if it is educational or unrelated to sex work.

In a 2019 interview with The Root, Harris claimed to support the decriminalization of sex work, a far cry from her 2008 statement that decriminalization was “completely ridiculous.” Harris’s definition of “decriminalization,” however, did not match what sex worker advocacy groups have been fighting for. She described a version of asymmetric criminalization that would target the clients of sex workers rather than the workers themselves. This approach, often referred to as the Nordic model or the “End Demand” model, forces many sex workers underground due to police surveillance, making it dangerous, if not impossible, for them to do their work.

Harris’s nomination has brought hope to those hungry for a woman of color in the Oval Office, those who believe Harris will turn back the clock on the erosion of abortion rights, and those who feared Biden would be no match for Trump. But her history of bulldozing the lives of sex workers — coupled with her pledge to keep sending weapons to Israel, the DNC’s refusal to allow Palestinians to speak, and her promise to provide the “world’s most lethal military force” — has brought skepticism and outrage about her campaign among many potential supporters.

In an open letter updated on August 8, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, which supports currently and formerly incarcerated “sex workers, trafficking victims, and their communities,” outlined how a Harris administration could reverse the “unintended consequences” of FOSTA/SESTA and address the dangers and stigma sex workers face. The letter’s authors called for legal reforms that would decriminalize consensual adult sex work and distinguish it from trafficking, along with access to health care and social services, protections from violence and exploitation, labor rights, and educational campaigns to change harmful narratives about sex work. The Harris campaign has not acknowledged the group’s pleas.

To make matters worse, the DNC’s recently updated platform fails to name sex workers among those the party wants to protect. This is a major change from the 2020 DNC platform, which stated: “We recognize that sex workers, who disproportionately are women of color and transgender women, face particularly high rates of sexual assault and violence, and we will work with states and localities to protect the lives of sex workers.”

Daniels has not issued a statement regarding the DNC comments, but she did respond to a recent tweet asking what she thought of the term “porn star.”

“It’s not inaccurate and I’m not ashamed of my work in the industry,” Daniels wrote. “It’s the tone that is sometimes offensive because the person implies I’m ‘just a porn star,’ which I’m not.” Her statement echoes what she said in the documentary Stormy: “When I first started speaking out, you never saw my name without ‘porn star’ in front of it, because we’re not considered human.”

The DNC missed a crucial opportunity to show respect for Daniels, who in addition to being a porn star is also an award-winning director, dancer, paranormal investigator and author of a New York Times bestselling memoir—and those are just her job titles. Daniels is also running a voter registration campaign, with a website that reads, “If a certain person gets back into the White House, we’re all in danger.”

But the Democrats’ transgressions paint a grim picture for sex workers under any administration, whether led by Harris or the so-called “orange turd” Daniels tried to flush. Grassroots organizations like SWOP-USA, SWOP Behind Bars, and Red Canary Song will need to continue to fill the gaps with mutual aid and legal advocacy where government has consistently failed.

If Harris wins the November presidential election, some supporters may be tempted to claim victory and throw in the towel. Hopefully, others will hold Harris accountable for her past and demand that her policies embody the values ​​she proclaimed in her DNC speech: that everyone “has the right to safety, dignity and justice.”

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