Episode Summary

The Trump Administration's wars on federal employees and research science are getting a lot of headlines, but there's a third war that's being conducted by the radical right that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should, and that is its efforts to control Americans’ bodily autonomy.

Whether it’s trying to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, or trying to place restrictions on birth control, the reactionaries are trying to control sex itself. They’re even supporting laws to eliminate restrictions on child marriage so that minors can be forced to have babies.

As disparate as right wing’s wars on governance, science, and sexuality may seem, they are actually linked because all three of these things are expressions of knowledge—about the world through science, about how to serve the public, and about ourselves and who we are. That is ultimately what these attacks on bodily autonomy are.

Savannah Sly, my guest on today's program has thought a lot about all of these issues because she has been an advocate for sex workers' rights for quite a long time, including her efforts as founder of the New Moon Network, a board member at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and with the Free Speech Coalition.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:18 — Understanding sex work and its misconceptions

12:10 — Religious fundamentalism and control over sexuality

17:07 — Impact of changing gender roles on society

24:28 — Normalization and stigma of sex work during the pandemic

27:54 — Sex work in right-wing political environments

33:14 — Sex workers' access to power

36:05 — “Traditional values,” polygamy, and non-heterosexuality

41:29 — Moving forward

48:28 — Right-wing groups want to ban porn via disingenuous “age verification” laws

58:27 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, before we get into the discussion of the topic here, let's can you just give the audience a bit of a background on what New Moon is and what you guys do there?

SAVANNAH SLY: Sure New Moon is a national nonprofit located in the us. And our goal is to support the movement for sex workers' rights. We do that with three different areas of work. We talk to funders and philanthropy about the issue of sex workers' rights and how it might align with their current giving portfolios.

And then we try and unlock dollars so we can channel funding into the grassroots movement. So this means hundreds of small. Sex worker and survivor led nonprofits around the us. We try and get them a little bit of funding to do their good work, and then we also do capacity building because we know it takes more than money to accomplish things.

So we offer programming to help grassroots leaders be more effective and sustainable at what they're doing.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, cool.

And so I think a lot of people, you know who, who don't know anyone who or don't know that they know who was in, involved in. Erotic services in one way

SLY: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: I think, that may seem all a bit strange and unfamiliar to them. So, and I'm guessing that that is something you have had to explain to people why this is more widespread and more important than they may realize.

SLY: A time or two, I do find myself talking about what is sex work and. How is it different from sex trafficking? I, I, I have that conversation a lot and I'm always happy to have that conversation. I myself have been in the erotic industry since I was 18, so it's been [00:04:00] quite a while. And if I was not directly involved in sex work myself, I think that I would carry a lot of the assumptions that most people do because from the outside it looks pretty scary.

And you might think, how could anybody ever voluntarily do this? But then when you're on the inside, it gives you a whole different perspective on the different motivations and realities faced by people in the adult industry. And you might notice that I'm using a lot of different phrases interchangeably sex work.

Is a big umbrella term. That's sort of like a, a labor rights framework. And it's a, a phrase used to describe the exchange of money or something of value for a sexual or erotic service. So that's a, a lot of different kinds of behaviors and activities we're talking about everything from prostitution to, in my opinion, certain kinds of marriages.

But then not everybody identifies with the phrase sex work. because they might be they might create adult content online. There might not be no sex involved. They're like, I'm not a sex worker. We, in the sex workers' rights movement, we include them, we advocate for their rights. But some people use phrases like adult content creator or erotic professional to describe their works.

There's a lot of different words we use to describe similar things.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there are, and there are a lot of different things, as you said, facets to that. But and as you alluded to earlier, I think a lot of people, they do have a lot of misconceptions about. The adult entertainment industry and people who, who work in it, and I probably most principally involving this idea that, oh, well, everybody who's doing it want to do it. And, oh, everybody's just being trafficked and, and they're, they're slaves and, and it's just not, it's not consensual for them. And none of that's true though.

SLY: Well, it's kind of like anything else. It's, I mean, if you talk to people in the sex trade, the erotic industry, the adult industry, whatever we wanna [00:06:00] call it. And you ask them, why are you here? The vast majority of people are gonna say, to earn money, right? So it's a job, it's a labor sector. That's why we use that labor framing sex work when we're just talking about all these different kinds of activities.

And so when you have an opportunity for people to make money. That means there's also an opportunity for other people to make money off of people. So I think where people get concerned about sex work is, in my ideal world, sex workers themselves would have labor rights and protections that are standard in other industries so that they could make their money for themselves and their families and if they were going to work with other people.

They would have a lot of legal frameworks and assurances to make sure they couldn't be exploited because like in a lot of other industries it's easy for third parties to become motivated by profiting off of other people. And this is where you see in the, in the sex trade. You see people exploiting others, maybe even coercing them into the sex trade so that they can make money off of them, and that's a big problem.

We don't like that. Nobody in the sex worker rights movement stands for exploitation or abuse of any kind.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, and it is, it does, it does happen. And, and there are organizations that are standing against it. but I think, a, a lot of people tend to. focus on that aspect of things. And especially when you look at other industries such as agriculture or hotels, cleaning services, or construction. Like those in industries, farm work, actually have trafficked people often and no one seems to care about those victims.

SLY: There's also a great deal of sexual exploitation that can go along with those labor rights violations in those industries. I, I agree with you. I do feel that people give more attention to harms in the sex trade than they do in [00:08:00] other industries because of sex. And for a lot of people, sex causes a knee-jerk reaction.

A lot of people themselves have traumatic sexual backgrounds. It's very hard for a lot of people to imagine sexuality being part of somebody's occupation, and I can understand that again if I had not done it myself. I might have had a hard time understanding it as well, but when we're looking at violations of human rights or harms or exploitation, if, if we do treat sex work like an occupation, and I've, I've talked to thousands of people who work in the sex trade mostly, mostly women.

They're there to make money. So they're workers, okay. They think of themselves largely as workers. There is no other industry where workers are kept safer by taking away their rights or their ability to do their job. And so in the Sex Worker Rights movement, our whole thesis is that if you give sex workers, if you recognize their fundamental human rights for one, and then allow them to actually work towards.

Formal labor recognition so that they can have workers' rights on top of human rights. We think that they will be in a better position to resist and deny people who would exploit them to reach out for help when somebody's trying to harm them. Like if there's a predator posing as a client and they assault somebody, a lot of sex workers don't feel comfortable even calling 9 1 1 if they've been assaulted or raped because they're afraid they're gonna get arrested.

So if people can't even report crimes against themselves. How are we gonna mitigate harms in the sex trade? So we advocate for decriminalizing it, talking openly about it, letting people be sex workers above ground and not sort of in the black market shadows. And then we think that a lot of that quality of life and safety would improve greatly.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. And I, a, a lot of people when they think about this stuff, I think another reason why there is more of a, undue [00:10:00] focus on sex workers, as alleged victims of other people is, this, this this trope of trying to protect the, the, the dainty woman. and, and they don't, like people who are engaging in that.

They don't really care about women who are being trafficked to clean hotels or to pick crops in the field. Like that doesn't matter to them because, well, they're, they're, they're. They're not dainty enough. They're not cute, they're not. Whatever it is, they might happen to think and it's just extraordinarily patronizing.

SLY: I think what. If you were to read between the lines, the difference between society's impetus to protect women from engaging in sex work versus agricultural work or salon work or domestic cleaning work, where they might be subject to exploitation is sex is protecting women from sex because we think of sex as being, something inherently violent. I think I think especially a lot of women have sexual trauma in their lives. I, I know more women than not who have experienced sexual abuse or assault from young ages. That's a societal problem. And so I, I understand how it can be very hard. For people to take their personal experiences or their personal relationship to sex, or they might have a relationship to sex where sex is sacred and it's only something that you have with a trusted and beloved partner.

If your binaries are trust and love is where sex happens or I. Coercion and assault and rape it, it's gonna be very hard to understand how somebody like me could choose to have sexual engagements with strangers sometimes for something as crass as money. So I understand people's knee-jerk reaction to wanna protect people, especially women from sex.

But it's. Really patronizing, frustrating, and not helpful. If anything, it's kind of [00:12:00] endangering and I don't think that people realize that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, because it keeps people in the shadows. And when you're in the shadows, you, you don't have rights. And that's what it comes down to.

Religious fundamentalism and control over sexuality

SHEFFIELD: Um, but, but there's also, and you alluded to this a bit earlier, that, you know the, the religious agenda as well, and know when, and you can see that in so much of these state laws that these far right legislators are pushing through.

And I imagine we. They may try to do that at the national level. I, I don't doubt that they will to try to, ban adult content within their site or require bogus age verification because they're trying to women's sexuality and repress it. I

SLY: Absolutely. I've been very gentle with my language so far because, hello, I'm new to your viewers. I'm trying to meet you where you're at, but so when I was speaking about people having a knee jerk reaction to sex work, I was talking about. Everyday people who have, who, who think of themselves as having respect for their fellow human and they're not driven by an extreme religious doctrine when you're talking about religion and sexuality.

It's a whole different ballpark, and my language is a little less gentle.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, go for it.

SLY: great. So religious fundamentalists around the world of different stripes from Christianity to other religions. The power is concentrated on controlling reproduction, and you can only control reproduction if you control the people who can reproduce, who are cisgender women or transgender men.

Depending on how inclusive you wanna be in your language. But people with reproductive organs who can give birth, it's really important to control them. If your goal is to control a population to. Create a, a larger population so that you have an army or a labor force. You need to have something to control.

And when people like me, when women like me, decide when. How, and with whom and why we have sex and whether we [00:14:00] reproduce or not. That's that's kind of a loose cannon for religious fundamentalists women such as me who exercise bodily autonomy and choose who we sleep with and why are a. Threat to religious fundamentalism because we will not be controlled.

We will actually use our sexuality to create our own resources and our own safety nets with our communities and our own forms of stability for ourselves and our families. So it makes us less dependent on, I. A single man, which is a problem for religion, which is patriarchal. It's a problem for institutions like churches.

If we're not dependent on a church as the center for which we get different resources to take care of our families or guidance on how to take care of our families or how to live a good life. If we're defining that for ourselves, they become obsolete. So this is why we see religious fundamentalists in politics pushing to eradicate abortion and criminalize it.

Sex work has never been popular amongst different parties, even secular ones, but sex work is certainly in the cross hairs and then the censorship and criminalization of pornography because you just can't have things like that, or people start getting their own ideas about how to live a good life and what's moral and what's not.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, and it also works the other way as well about about controlling cisgender men in that environment as well, because. Allowing men to, who to control their own sexual expression. So whether they have a partner or not, whether they're married or not whether they, choose to have sex at all. Those are. don't want them to do that. Like they and I, and I experienced that as growing up in Mormonism. But you know, like everything is about driving young men into, you cannot have sex unless you're married and you can never have an abortion and you cannot use birth control. So,

SLY: Gotta procreate.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And to, and to, and to tie you down to the community and the control because you're, when you're, busy changing a million diapers in your [00:16:00] early twenties, you don't have time to think, you don't have time to question, and you don't have time to just be by yourself.

SLY: And you would know this better than I do because you come from a religious background. But isn't there something about status and having a place in the world, like if you are a young man who fulfills your community expectations? You, you father many children, you have a wife or maybe several. You're contributing to the community and also you're the head of your household, right?

Isn't there some implication that you have respect or power, at least in your society?

SHEFFIELD: Definitely. Yeah. Actually in for Mormons. They, if you like, and I, I experienced this, so, so I was running, a nationally recognized website and I was on TV and talk radio on the regular. And yet, because I wasn't married, somebody who was like, a 19-year-old, fresh, or even an 18-year-old, fresh out of high school who had gotten married, they had a higher social status than I

SLY: Right, right.

SHEFFIELD: Mormonism, despite the fact that, it, that I was serving the community much better than that person was. But within the control theology, I wasn't serving it as well.

Impact of changing gender roles on society

SLY: And I, I think that this is really important in the situation we find ourselves in society today where gender roles have been changing. Women have been accessing education and employment at a pace that sometimes outpaces young men, their peers. People are getting married less frequently and having fewer children.

When women have control over these things, there's a shift in how many babies are had and how many marriages. And that can cause. It's change, and change is always hard. There's always an uncomfortable aspect to change, even if you're moving in a direction that could yield a lot of cool new things, a lot of different ways to live your life.

I think it's been very challenging for young men to understand their place in society. I. Their place in romance and dating. What respect are they owed? What does being respected even mean in this culture anymore? And I see a lot of further right ideologies on [00:18:00] podcasts and from podiums, speaking directly to young men about like.

It's time you got the respect you deserve. And they're talking about hearkening back to an older time where the only way you could get respect was if you had a submissive woman or two or three and you had a bunch of children. And then you know, you would be the head of the household and your own type of God under the church.

And then under God a very kind of patriarchal, top-down lineage. Like you have your place in the company, your middle management. And I think that that appeals to a lot of young men who feel lost. And like they don't know where their place is. You're clearly the, I think you're more of an expert on that than I am, but that's something I certainly observe sometimes in the young men that I interface with as a sex worker.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and like, and that is really an important thing in place that sex workers have to sort of equalize things because, as women have become more. Aware that their place, that they don't have to be married to a man in order to have, self-respect or to be valued in the community. Instead of encouraging young, young men to have that same attitude that says, look, I don't, it doesn't matter if I have a relationship, doesn't matter if I'm married. I am my own person and I'm, I'm valuable in my own right. And so, instead of encouraging that they, they go after sex workers because sex workers enable younger men to, control their own sexuality.

Really, that's what it comes

SLY: I, I think sex workers are vilified, not only because they are a threat to the reproductive requirements of religious society and the marital requirements, but we're also seen as home wreckers. I. We're seen as a distraction outside of the marriage that could draw a man's attention away from his wife, away from his family, and draw resources away.

And I think that that's a legitimate concern in some ways, but also there's a total lack of recognition for the fact that sex workers have quietly kept many relationships [00:20:00] together because. The wife is no longer interested in having sex with her partner for whatever reasons. Maybe the sex was never very good to begin with, which is a different conversation.

Or maybe she's going through menopause and just like not into it anymore. I. Men can see sex workers with very strict parameters as to what's required for that exchange. Usually it's an amount of money and then they can pay that amount of money, get their sexual needs met, and go back to their family and keep fulfilling their requirements as a father, as a husband in that household.

But I think that sex workers are seen as homewreckers unfortunately. And sex workers are also just lumped into, unmarried quote unquote loose women in general. To be a whore is not necessarily to be somebody who charges money for sex. A whore could be just a woman who sleeps with multiple people.

Right? And I think that sex workers and women who are unmarried are kind of all lumped together, are and vilified equally. Because they're seen as a threat to the family. They're seen as a threat to this whole institution, this patriarchal construct of religion. Which is really too bad because I think that sex workers and what I would call liberated women have a lot to offer other women and men as far as different ways of doing things, and.

When you do something different, as I said earlier there's gonna be change. And change can be really uncomfortable, and there's chaos that comes with change and some people are less chaos tolerant than others. And I think that's what we're seeing is a backlash to big change and the chaos that people feel around changing gender roles and socioeconomic status.

But there's so much at the end of the tunnel if you can make it through the, the transformative process. And, you've had your own experiences with things like that. I.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And at the same time, the, while the, right and these other fundamentalist, groups are, are going after. Sex working people. also is a sub [00:22:00] a subset of, the kind of the, the, the turf feminists who are very anti-sex work as well.

And what's your, I mean, what, what do you have? What do you think about those? What's your

SLY: I've spent well, I started Sex Worker Advocacy around 2013 because of the publicized conflation between sex work and sex trafficking. I was living in Seattle at the time and I started seeing all these media headlines around sex trafficking everywhere. And I. I realized that they were talking about sex work and I'm like, oh, these people are so misguided, these liberal Seattle people, they've never met sex workers.

So my friends and I went to a town hall where they were having this big sex trafficking public awareness summit, and we tried to introduce ourselves and try and balance the conversation. And we found very quickly that there was zero interest in balancing the conversation. because there was an agenda and I was very surprised and a little naive to learn that it was mostly women driving this agenda.

And it wasn't even conservative women, it was Seattle liberal women who see, I think they. They're divided into two camps, and it depends on how aware they are of their own analysis. Some of them are in that knee jerk place that I was talking about at the beginning of your podcast where they just cannot fathom.

How a woman could meet strange men, have a sexual encounter with them, receive money in exchange, and feel okay about herself at the end of the day, they don't see how that could be anything other than exploitation and rape. And that's one set of conversations to have. Right? Then there's another set of women who are ex, they exclude sex workers from their feminism.

They are more conscious I think, and they are either opposed to sex work because they see it as a threat to other women. Actually that's the whole crux of it. They see it as a threat to other women. As far as other women who want to be married and have happy relationships. They actually see sex workers as home records like a lot of conservatives do.

Maybe they've had an experience where they had a partner who saw a sex worker. And those are [00:24:00] specific conversations that need to be had. And I've had a number of those conversations with women with that experience. Then there's women who see sex workers as a threat to feminism in general. They don't understand how a woman selling sexual and erotic services could be empowering.

They think that it undermines the whole feminist agenda that will never reach equality as long as women. Some women choose to categorize themselves as dispensers of sex. And that's a deeper conversation to have. That's a little trickier.

Normalization and stigma of sex work during the pandemic

SHEFFIELD: Uh, it is. And although I do think that with the proliferation of, just so many people who are now doing, I OnlyFans or, I mean, hell even Instagram, like, there's a lot of pretty erotic stuff on Instagram nowadays. And like, but as that exploded, especially during the pandemic. I feel like, and, but you obviously know a lot more, interface a lot more with these types of people that those types of, of irrational prejudices are at least are, are lowering somewhat because the girl next door is literally the girl next door in many cases.

SLY: think it's a really mixed bag. I think that we are getting the normalization effect where it's like during the pandemic. I found data to suggest that in may of 2020, so like the height of the pandemic when before vaccines and all this stuff, everybody's at home. I found data to suggest that between seven to 8,000 people per day in May of 2020 we're signing up to sell erotic content on OnlyFans.

OnlyFans is one website. There's a litany of websites like OnlyFans that tens of thousands of people in the month of May were trying to sell erotic pictures on OnlyFans. It, I, I think that that moment the pandemic created more clandestine sex workers than ever. The majority of those people didn't make.

Any money. because newsflash, it's kind of, it, it, it's can be a challenge to make money in sex work, especially when it's so competitive like that and oversaturated. But all those people now carry a scarlet letter, [00:26:00] right? If their mainstream employers would've found out that they did OnlyFans, they might get fired.

If they were in a contentious custody dispute, they might lose custody of their kids. They could even be kicked outta their apartment if their landlord found out. Not to mention all the social ostracization that could happen if you're. Friends or fr family found out. So I think a lot more people are aware of the stigma that sex work carries.

But again, as I said at the top of the show, and not everybody identifies as a sex worker. I, I think that the vast majority of people who signed up for OnlyFans to sell pictures of their feet or their butt or whatever. They may not have even heard the phrase sex work. They might not think of it as sex work, but they know that it's naughty and that other people can't know about it.

They know about the stigma. So some, a lot of people are getting normalized to that area of sex work. But then on the other hand, I think we're seeing a huge backlash. Especially amongst young men. Some men, young men are like, oh my goodness, it's a cornucopia of booty and OnlyFans and I can access sexual pleasure in a way I never could before.

And yay for those young men for being able to access that pleasure. But a lot of people, I think a lot of young men are kind of offended by the proliferation of women who demand that you pay for it, right? Because again, that's a change. I talk to many men who are a generation or two older than me.

And they're like, it's not like it was cheaper or easier to get in a woman's pants. Back in the day. You had to bring her out to dinner and quarter and meet her parents and put on a nice jacket, and then you still might not get laid. It's like, well, I wanna tell fellows now. It's like you can pay.

Three to $12 and get some really sexy content from your favorite model and enjoy that. Or sometimes you can even meet people in person to have a good, like a real experience and gotta take 'em to dinner or meet their parents and all this stuff. And I see that as kind of an upside. But I think some young men are offended by the having to pay for it, but I think you've always had to pay for it just in different ways.

Sex work in right-wing political environments

SHEFFIELD: The other thing about the, so many people getting into adult entertainment in [00:28:00] one way or another is that not only is it people in, everybody's neighborhood, but it's also people are getting into it who are in the right wing. Political environment as well.

And as we're recording that over this episode that we in the news is this woman named Ashley St. Clair, has gone public with a lawsuit, is saying that she had a child with Elon Musk and. She met him through Twitter and the interesting thing that a lot of people don't know about her is that Ashley St. Clair is a sex worker. She made money selling pictures of herself, like that was what she was doing before she got into politics.

SLY: not know that about Ashley St. Clair. So she was was she on OnlyFans or something like that, or was she creating porn with a studio? Do you know?

SHEFFIELD: we don't fully know what she was doing, but like she had her, your username on the internet was sex, laptop.

SLY: Oh, okay.

SHEFFIELD: so we have an idea of, what she was using at least her, her devices. But we do know, yeah, she, people have. Said that she was, in various discord groups, offering, you paid X number of dollars, then she would send you, various photos,

SLY: for her. And now she has a baby with Elon Musk. Wow. That's a, that's a power play for a sex worker. How do you think that's going for her?

SHEFFIELD: Well, we'll see. He, so far he hasn't admitted it in court and

SLY: I.

SHEFFIELD: I guess, she's trying to get him to pay up. we'll see how that goes. But, like this. But she's one of many people that are, that that sex work is so it's everywhere, including in these right-wing environments.

And she's just one of several people I think we could point to. Right.

SLY: Absolutely. There's also Amber Rose who I think of as one of the people who was really involved in something called Slut Walk. Have you heard of Slut Walk? Matt?

SHEFFIELD: I have, I have. But why don't you give the a review for just for anybody who doesn't know

SLY: Slut [00:30:00] Walk was or it still is, it still happens.

It's a protest. I think it started in Canada actually. And Slut Walk was to protest the idea that if a woman dresses a certain way that she should be a target for assault and rape and violence and.

SHEFFIELD: it.

SLY: deserves it.

She was wearing a short skirt. And so the message of Slut Walk was, we can wear whatever we want, including very little. And that does not mean that we should be subjected to gender-based violence or a lack of justice if somebody does hurt us, especially sexually. And so when I think of Amber Rose, I think of her as being a loud supporter of Slut Walk and it's been really.

Interesting to say the least to see her turn towards the right. I also think of Melania Trump, who I think of her as a sex worker and she has one client. Right. But it, and I don't know for sure, but Melania seems like a very familiar character to me. She seems like she was probably a high-end escort or erotic model.

Somebody who was prob probably I would allege dispensing her time, companionship and sexuality. Two high net worth individuals such as Donald Trump. And then she probably brokered a deal for him to be her exclusive client. And if I were her, I would be horrified by the turn of events. She doesn't strike me as somebody who wanted to be First Lady.

But it is interesting to think that we, we probably have a sex worker as First Lady again in the White House.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I, I think that that is a very good point, and it is one that the mainstream media doesn't. Talk about because I mean, you look at the public interactions that, that Melania and Donald have had over the years, including Mo, very prominently at the Republican National Convention where she in 2024 where she didn't even speak at all.

So literally the first time wife of a candidate had not spoken since, I believe like the 1964. and then she in public refuses to kiss him. Like that's because it's

SLY: Can

SHEFFIELD: in her

SLY: you imagine who could blame her? Yeah. If it's not in the contract, stick to your guns. [00:32:00] And it's interesting, so sex workers are not a political monolith.

I mean, there's millions of people in what I call the sex trade or the adult industry, and they're, they don't all belong to a single political party.

They have different worldviews, religions, they come from different backgrounds. But generally the movement for sex workers' rights is more on the progressive side of the political spectrum because we recognize that, progressive values are the ones best positioned to defend our rights to bodily autonomy, which is central to sex workers' rights.

And on the right we have things like Project 2025, which are looking to criminalize pornography and strip us of bodily autonomy and the right to who we can love and who we can have relationships with. So it's always odd to me to meet sex workers who are on the right, but they certainly exist.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. And and I guess in Melania's case, she did it one. Concession. If you remember during the campaign that right before election day, she came out and said she supported abortion rights and that she believed that they were important for women to have that. But you know, who knows?

Maybe that was just ploy. They campaign managers thought, well see if we have his wife saying she supports it, then people will, will not be afraid of him taking it away. I don't

SLY: Oof. I don't know.

Sex workers' access to power

SLY: I have met sex workers who are on the right, and I think that there's a mentality amongst some people that I mean sex workers have access to power. Many men, regardless of where they are in society everyday working class people or heads of state have sexual desires and a desire to connect with sex workers.

And so sex workers can get very close to people in all different echelons of society. Stormy Daniels is a great example of somebody who had a, a direct sexual relationship with Donald Trump under, bizarre seeming circumstances. I think one reason that sex workers are criminalized and vilified is because we get so close to power.

And because people like Stormy Daniels can be like, this guy has a weird penis. He's a, he is, he is a, he is a jerk. He intimidated me and my daughter in a, in a parking lot through some [00:34:00] thug.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

SLY: we are in a position to know some of people's most intimate secrets, and also to call them out when they are behaving in a way that is not aligned with their behavior behind closed doors.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that is a great point and, and it's another way that you know, that I was saying earlier that. Well actually maybe I can't say that because I don't know if it was earlier or not. Maybe I won't remember the comedy and sex thing being the deepest in the thing. Okay. Well say that. Because I don't remember whether I did or not. Okay.

Well, so, just back to the the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Thing though, you, you, you, you mentioned, that you, you, you work very closely with them. So it's named after a woman who who was named Victoria Woodhull. Tell us about who she was. because she's got an interesting

SLY: She is a fascinating person and actually the person who tells Victoria's story the best is comedian Caitlyn Bailey, who has an amazing podcast called The Oldest Profession Podcast. There's a two part series and she's been on. That's wonderful. I love Caitlyn. But check out the Old expression podcast. And there's a two part series on Victoria Woodhull that is fascinating, but in a nutshell, I would describe her as the first woman to run for president in the us.

One of the first women to be active on Wall Street, and also a very likely sex worker. She was an advocate for sexual freedom, for non-monogamy and for women having a, a litany of choices in their lives, especially where sex was concerned. She was a controversial figure. She was sort of, disowned by the early feminist movements and the the suffrage movement because she was seen as a a little too hot for the mainstream.

She was ahead of her time, for sure, but that's who Woodhull is named after.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And she ran for president, as you said in what was it, 1872, I think. So yeah, that was definitely, far ahead of, of what people were expecting. Yeah. Because not only could a lot of women not even vote she was running for [00:36:00] president before they could even vote

SLY: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: So

SLY: Fascinating character.

SHEFFIELD: absolutely.

Absolutely.

"Traditional values," polygamy, and non-heterosexuality

SHEFFIELD: And that is one of the greatest ironies I think of, people who talk about traditional values, quote

SLY: Right.

SHEFFIELD: like the original, traditional values were. Polygamy and and bisexuality. Like that's, that's what, that's what humans were doing, before all of this stuff came in.

And, the invention of monogamy and, and especially for, for women, I mean the, the scientific research is pretty clear that, when you do or when psychologists have, have measured the arousal, natural arousal patterns of both men and women, a lot more people are, are are bisexual or aroused by, doesn't matter necessarily the the sex of the person they're looking at.

And so that's the, people say, oh, I wanna live naturally. The RFK Junior is big on natural and holistic stuff. And it's like, well that's the original traditional values. And if you don't realize that then, then you should.

SLY: I think that's a, so I think the double-edged sword, of what sex work has to offer society, the the ways it can be embraced and then also resisted or like bristled at, so sex work, like everything that's available online now, it's easy. I mean, I have this experience I'll be poking around online looking at erotic content. Sometimes I'm just researching my colleagues. I'm not there to just like have a fun time with myself, but occasionally I'll find something or someone and be totally turned on And, surprised because maybe I didn't think that that was my cup of tea. But here's evidence to the contrary. Oh, this new thing I just discovered is totally my cup of tea.

For me that's exciting because I'm like, oh, cool. I just diversified my own sexual persona. I. There's even more things in this world that I can enjoy and more people I can connect with to find pleasure. To me, that's exciting. I think for a lot of people though, it can be very threatening when it is contrary to deep, deeply societal condition, especially around homophobia, right?

So being attracted to other men, [00:38:00] I think that the vis increased visibility of trans women through erotic media has been, a complex experience for young men who were raised in such homophobic cultures and transphobic cultures, because, I mean, clearly they're turned on. I mean, trans porn is selling, somebody's buying it.

But then look at the rhetoric. Trans lives were made into one of the strongest wedged issues during this presidential election. That was, I think that coincidence is, I don't think it is a coincidence actually. So sex work has a lot to offer, but that also kind of makes people self-reflect. And if they can't reject their societal, societal conditioning to embrace what they are naturally into and who they wanna connect with, and that's gonna cause a conflict inside.

Right.

SHEFFIELD: And the other thing also is that, sex work and, encouraging people to fully get to know themselves. It's also, against what these right-wing authoritarian religions. Tell people because they don't, they tell people to think with their body. When it comes to, whether evolution happened or whether, people, evolved from, from apes, like that. They say, no, don't listen to that. Tell, listen to your heart. Your heart will tell you if these things are true. And then, but at the same time, sex work is going around and saying, well, actually you should listen to your body be and you should, be not, don't be afraid to be attracted to what you're attracted to or interested in what you're interested to. that's deeply unsettling, I think, to people who have this authoritarian mindset because it's hitting them where they're most vulnerable, which is embodied knowledge.

SLY: That's an eye-opener for me. I didn't know that people were instructed in religious communities to look into their hearts to determine whether or something is true. I would, I would assume that there's lots of messaging and conditioning in a whole environment that might inform the signals that somebody's getting from their heart, right?

SHEFFIELD: Is.

SLY: yeah, like again, if I had never done sex work, if you told me to check in with my heart about [00:40:00] sex work as somebody who had never done it, is this right or wrong? My heart might tell me something that is just not correct because I have a lot of societal conditioning and messaging around the issue of sex work.

Once you have done something or I don't know, like tasted the fruit off the tree of knowledge, I don't know. You probably know like whether that's an accurate.

SHEFFIELD: You got the metaphor

SLY: okay. It's a good metaphor, like once you've gone there, you've had an experience for yourself, then you can listen to your heart. But if you try and listen to your heart on things that you have no basis in, no experience in, then you're probably more listening to the factors around you than from within most likely.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. I mean, that is what, how it is. But at the same time, you know when, I mean there's, there's, there's something about both humor and sexuality that is really threatening to these religious control mechanisms because they both are the, are, go to your core as a person because you know what you think is funny and how you know you are, what you think is, is arousing.

Those, nobody can, nobody can really impose that on you. Those are things that you feel in your own self, whatever, for whatever your reasons are. And, and so that's why, when you look at. How are these, various towns or cities or states like they, they come after comedy and they come after sex because that's, those are, that's your body telling you, the truth about yourself.

I think.

Moving forward

SLY: I think you're right. So what do we do about it? How do we reach people and tell them that, comedy can be enlightening and sex is really not that scary. You just need the right tools and community and information to navigate it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And well, and, and I mean, you do other things besides New Moon. You and you were doing some other stuff as well. Why don't you, let's talk about that a little bit.

SLY: Sure. Where do you wanna start?

SHEFFIELD: Hey, wherever you wanna start, Savannah.[00:42:00]

SLY: A lot of my mission being a sex worker advocate has been to focus on the experience of sex workers and the welfare of sex workers. Sex workers themselves will always be my priority because there's nobody advocating for us except for us. Secondary to that, I would say, is advocating for the rights of our clients to access adult media and the services of sex workers, the clients of sex workers.

Are far less able and willing to come out and advocate, I think, because in some ways they have more to lose which is not always true. Sex workers have a lot to lose too. It depends on how out we are and how many, how much we have invested in sex work. For, for many of us, sex work is a pretty big part of our lives.

It might be a secret that we keep from our families and our mainstream communities. But I would say that that is less and less so with the proliferation of sex work as a, mainstream phrase and sex worker rights movements and communities. Whereas clients. They might see a sex worker once a month for an hour, and that is the only time, and it might bring a lot of value to their life.

But that is the only time when they're interfacing with sex workers or even thinking about sex work or their risk, but I know so many men whose lives have been totally turned upside down and ruined because they were part of a sting operation. They got busted. They thought they were gonna see a consenting adult sex worker.

It was a cop instead. Before you know it, they're being dragged to the media and court and their lives are totally ruined. There's an increasing criminalization around even accessing. Adult materials that are constitutionally, our right to access accessing porn. Seeing the criminalization of porn in many states, unless you upload your id a lot of people are not gonna upload their ID to look at adult materials, even though it is their right, because the stigma is so heavy.

So I think about the, I think about advocating for sex workers, but then I also think about our clients and what can we do to invite our clients into advocacy, to [00:44:00] speaking for themselves and to also, helping to push things forward so that they can keep living lives that are happy and informed by the services of sex workers.

And to do all of that, we kind of need to look at our opposition. Now, there's religious opposition, which I'll be honest, Matthew, I don't really know how to. Bridge that gap. It seems pretty far that that's a big aisle to cross from sex workers to religious fundamentalists. But I can talk to other women.

I can talk to women who think of themselves as progressive or liberal, but who are exclude sex work in their feminism. Right. And so something we've been doing at New Moon actually is trying to foster. Foster dialogues with clients to see how they might like to show up in the movement, but also fostering dialogues with women who oppose the movement for sex workers' rights.

Talking to them like human beings because they are, and trying to like do unto others as they would do unto you. Treating them with respect and acknowledging that they're not just advocating against sex workers for the fun of it. They're afraid. They're afraid that sex work will lead to the increased subjugation of women.

And when we take that concern seriously, it makes their actions. Much more understandable and it gives us a place to start identifying common cause. So, new Moon is starting to host a series of dialogues with people who do not support sex workers' rights but are somehow active in tr sex trade related policy conversations.

Usually when it comes to like, anti-trafficking efforts, to see if we can a, humanize each other and just have a respectful dialogue. That's the starting point.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

SLY: maybe identifying some shared language. They don't like the phrase sex work. They think it's gross. They think it's crass and they don't think how, they all think it's, they think it's all rape.

So the phrase sex work to them is totally nonsensical. I. They might use phrases like prostituted people or prostituted women, which we don't like because it makes us into this like passive object that gets passed around. So maybe we can come up [00:46:00] with shared language, like people in the sex trade. Is there neutral language we can at least use to have these conversations?

because it's gonna be really triggering until we come up with shared language and then policy priorities. We argue for decades now, Matthew, about whether sex work is work, whether clients can be anything but predators, and whether sex work can or should be decriminalized, and the arguments around those key points prevent us from having dialogues around things like discrimination protections.

I think everybody on all sides of the conversation believes that all those OnlyFans models we talked about who signed up during the pandemic to sell seat, feet picks. They're all at risk of on a wide array of different forms of discrimination. And I think that anti-sex work, anti-trafficking advocates and sex workers rights advocates could all get on board with protecting people, especially women from discrimination related to their past and the sex trade.

There's so many policies that we don't even. Take the time to identify, let alone work together on, because we're so hung up on our fundamental disagreements. So that's a, that's actually one of the main ways that we're trying to push things forward at New Moon.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. And you're also involved with two other organizations as well. You want to talk about

SLY: Sure. I'm on the board of Woodhull Freedom Foundation, which is actually New Moon's fiscal sponsor, and they are the only organization in the US dedicated to sexual freedom as a fundamental human right. Woodhull has been around for over 20 years now, and I. They show up wherever sexual freedom is at risk of being violated.

So they show up for L-G-B-T-Q individuals polyamorous families and individuals, people engaged in kink or BDSM and sex workers as well as other sexual minorities. And they use the UN Declaration on Human Rights as their sort of. Fundamental document for understanding whether people's sexual freedoms are being violated.

And they actually have an amazing series out right now called Fact Checked fact checked by Woodhull right [00:48:00] now looks at myths around pornography and some of the different policies being proposed to keep minors from accessing pornography. So if you are. Interested in the debate around porn?

Is it harmful or helpful, or is it like what's the deal with porn? You can go to fact check by Woodhull and get some academically research and cited. I. Just myth busting facts, so that's a great place to go if you're looking for some information about pornography and age verification.

Right-wing groups want to ban porn via disingenous "age verification" laws

SLY: And then I'm also on the board of the Free Speech Coalition, which is the 5 0 1 C six trade association for the adult industry. I recently Bo joined that board and they are. Leading the resistance against so-called age verification bills across the United States that would on face value.

They're trying to prevent minors from accessing adult content online. But really these so-called age verification bills present. A huge violation of privacy and a chilling effect on people, adults accessing. Constitutionally protected adult materials. Because people are not going to upload their IDs to PornHub, to, to look at materials.

It's, it's a chilling effect because that stigma we talked about,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and I mean, aside from stigma, it's also people are afraid of, of identity theft because, if PornHub has your ID and then they get hacked, well then you're fucked.

SLY: I.

SHEFFIELD: not in a good way.

SLY: Totally. And that would be such a target for hackers, right? Because it's a stigmatized population if you're looking at porn. We live in a society where if you look at porn, you're bad, even though it is your right to look at porn if you want, if you're an adult. So yeah, it creates incredibly vulnerable data.

It's just a bad idea. And also people just like use VPNs to get around this. It doesn't even work. We need better. More common sense solutions to keeping miners away from materials. They are not old enough to be accessing.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and the other thing also about these databases that they're, that, these Republican states are asking people to assemble is [00:50:00] this is a Trojan horse for using databases for other content. So like, and, and this is something that FSEI think does very well at making the case to more libertarian oriented people to say, look. know, you are afraid. You say you're afraid of government, Tyra, well, this is

SLY: Here it is.

SHEFFIELD: instance of it. This is what it looks like. And then, why couldn't this same database or these same legal principles be used to say, well, you know what, we, we don't think you should be reading this kind of political content on the internet.

SLY: Exactly. I think the people who are in it can see what's coming. I think it's can sound alarmist to everyday people. because they just don't know. They just don't know. They're like, oh, how could it lead to that? But the adult industry and sex workers are what I refer to as canaries in the coal mine for creeping human rights violations.

And so what happens to us is stuff that people should pay attention to because it will come for them eventually.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's because these are legal frameworks, like once it's legal. To engage

SLY: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: of conduct for the government, then it can be legal in any other area. As long as someone's willing to say it. Like that's, that's the only difference of why it would or would not be plausible or implausible is. Just someone willing to do it. And, and we're seeing that, over and over with, with the new Donald Trump administration, that things that people were like, oh, the norms will protect us. The institutions will protect us. No, now that's not how it works.

SLY: You gotta protect yourself. You gotta protect yourself. And that means advocating for your personal rights to remain fully intact. And that means that you need to. Protest these government overreaches with your fellow Americans. Even if you disagree with your fellow Americans on a litany of other issues, you need to keep your fundamental human rights intact and your constitutional rights because otherwise they're gonna get steamrolled.

SHEFFIELD: a lot of this right wing fear and intimidation that they're doing against sex work and against adult content. also that they are trying to [00:52:00] enforce,

SLY: yes.

SHEFFIELD: because the, and, and again, you look at like, so much of the ancient material you can find, whether not just in Greece but in other ancient civilizations, India, and other places, and native American tribes, people, there was no concept of. Of straight or gay or lesbian.

These things did not exist. No one thought to try to, divide people in that way.

SLY: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: so in a lot of ways, sex work is kind of returning things to how they used to be. And that's dangerous, I think for a lot of these, forced heterosexuality, people that are on the right.

SLY: I think it is dangerous. They want us to get with the program. Right, and to procreate. And to have big families that can turn into workforce and soldiers and more breeders. And as soon as you start having non procreative sex just for fun, well that sort of makes that whole process seem pretty unnecessary and like a lot of work.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

SLY: thing that sex work has really opened my eyes to is the range of sexual desire that people have. Even people who think of themselves as. Really vanilla, conventional. I've had the privilege, I've been a sex worker for over 20 years, and so there's some people that I've worked with for about 20 years and I've seen their progression as sexual beings.

And I work predominantly with cisgendered men who usually identify as straight eventually over time. It's interesting how these straight men, when they become comfortable, it takes years sometimes for them to share with me that. They kind of like to try sucking cock, or maybe we could just start with having another man in the session with us just to see how it is to be naked around another man in an erotic environment.

A lot of men wanna explore what it feels like to wear what we think of as women's clothing, because let's face it, women's clothing is more interesting. It if. Feels good on your skin and especially [00:54:00] lingerie is all about sex and men do not have nearly the options to express themselves sexually. So what we call cross-dressing might also just be a man accessing eroticism, right?

Because that's the only option to, to wear erotic clothing generally, is to cross dress. Unless you're into like really kinky men's clothing, like the leather harnesses and things like that.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

SLY: But I think, so it's been interesting to talk to you about this issue of, heteronormativity and how the mainstream and, religious institutions really drill that as the only option and that you're perverted if you wander outside of it.

When really as a sex worker I see people of all sexes, all being far more bisexual and sexually fluid, given the chance and the space to be not judged for it there's a lot of interest in connecting with. People you just find attractive regardless of what they have between their legs, and that seems to be a big threat to the powers that be.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And and, and then it, it's also, especially even with some of the content creators themselves, like, I think most prominently there's that YouTuber, Steven Crowder, who was sued, I believe, or at least, yeah. He was sued by his former male employees for sexual harassment. and, had to admit. yes, I am bisexual. And I, I have a problem with it as, as he, as he put it, but you know, is, the thing. Like they, they always talk about, oh, we, we want freedom. We, we believe in freedom on our side, but they don't believe in freedom and, and they live such repressed and miserable lives and they want everybody else to have that same misery.

I think that's part of it

SLY: And speaking of misery, so I specialize as a dominatrix, which means that I'm usually what we call running the fuck in, in the, in a session. That means that I am the one who is like if, if I'm having A-A-B-D-S-M session with a man, usually he's in a more submissive role. I'm in the dominant role. I might be the one [00:56:00] actually wearing a strap on cock.

And the beauty of that is that man gets. To experience sexual situations that we only allow women to experience, and that is the experience of being desired, of being ravished of, oh, look, I have little.

SHEFFIELD: Oh,

SLY: Interesting thumbs up.

SHEFFIELD: thumbs up.

SLY: experience of being ravished desired. The feeling of psychodrama of somebody wants you so much that they just can't help themselves.

And in a role play scenario that can be really intoxicating and exciting and also to let go and not be in charge of everything. I think that one of the many burdens that men carry in conservative societies is having to be in charge of everything. Maybe some people love that, but I don't know many people that do.

And so wouldn't it be nice to, at least in the bedroom, to give up that control and let somebody just do scandalous, delicious, fabulous things to you and to not feel bad about it and not feel like you're being a beta or whatever. Just to understand that there are multiple sides of the coin when it comes to sexuality and get to have a balanced life.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they, and that's not what these control based religions are telling people. You can have, because. It's all about, well, you can only do this one thing and, check the box and you're done. And so, yeah, like this is, this is terrifying in a lot of ways because, I mean, ultimately in a, in many ways, sex and sexuality are, they are forms of knowledge. Ultimately, that's what they are. And in the same way that you see this fear of, I mean like the Trump administration just came out with these rules saying that you can't, if you have. In your scientific studies that have nothing to do with social science or whatever, like, a biologist is saying male or female in their study, they can't do it.

SLY: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: and like this is, that's how these things are all linked in. So I think a, a lot of times people, they have this, if you, if you are more scientifically or businessy, bus businessy, that's not a word, business [00:58:00] inclined. People might think, oh, well that doesn't apply to me. It's not relevant to me.

This authoritarianism, it's. Not coming for me, but in fact it is. And

SLY: is.

SHEFFIELD: why you were saying, the urinary and the coal mine point really does make sense because it is about, it's an attack on knowledge ultimately. All of

SLY: It's an attack on knowledge and basic humanity and the most private aspects of our lives that are also the most fulfilling straight up.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. It is.

Conclusion

SHEFFIELD: Um, all right, well, so people who want to keep going and looking into more stuff on this, so like obvi obviously our, our friend Kaitlin has lots of great material. You got any other places people can go to besides the Woodhull stuff, which you mentioned, which is also good as well.

SLY: Sure.

SHEFFIELD: are some other ones?

SLY: So, as I mentioned at the start of the show, I run an organization called New Moon Network. That's new moon network.org. You can log on there to learn all about the movement for sex workers rights and how we're supporting it. Also if you're interested in finding local sex worker led groups in your region, maybe you yourself identify as a sex worker and you'd like to get involved.

You can drop us a line and we might be able to help you find a local group if you can't do that on your own. because some of these groups are a little more underground. Also, free Speech Coalition. Highly recommend if you believe in free speech, if you are defender of free speech. If you think that we should have the right to watch porn in peace without surveillance or risking our personal data, you should totally check out Free Speech Coalition.

They have an amazing legislative tracker on their website where you can see what's going on in your state. You can sign up for action alerts and they have some really great, clear information on what's going on.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely they do. So, and for people who wanna follow you on social media, what's your addresses for them or usernames?

SLY: I'm on blue sky now under Savannah Sly. I am still on Twitter under Savannah Sly, and you can also find me on Instagram trying to exist without being shadow banned. Savannah Sly,

SHEFFIELD: All right, sounds good. I encourage [01:00:00] everybody to check that out. Thanks for joining me today.

SLY: Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion, and you are a paid subscribing member, so you got. Access to this full episode, and I thank you very much for your support and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show.

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