Why Porn Stars Like Me Are Terrified of VP Kamala Harris

As an American, I am thrilled to see Vice President-elect Kamala Harris enter the West Wing. As a porn star, I am terrified.

I respect Harris for seeing gays and women of color through a compassionate lens. After four years of Vice President Mike Pence, it’ll be nice to see someone make the executive branch empathetic again. Still, I doubt Harris’s executive empathy will extend to exotic dancers, porn stars, strippers, prostitutes, or erotic masseuses: The vice president-elect brings a lifetime of animosity toward sex workers to Number One Observatory Circle.

It’s hard to stand out as a sex working-hate politician. Most politicians hate porn stars, so I struggle to keep track of all the senators, district attorneys, and other elected hacks who rail against the performers in the pornos they watch. But Harris is so against sex work that she came on porn stars’ radar years ago. We have been raising the alarm about Harris since her days as a San Francisco District Attorney. Our sirens are growing louder as inauguration day nears because we need public support to prevent Harris from pushing against sex work in the Oval Office.

Harris’s hatred goes back to her days as San Francisco District Attorney. In 2008, Harris opposed a San Francisco ballot initiative to legalize prostitution. “I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position,” Harris told The New York Times. She proclaimed the law would roll “a welcome mat out for pimps” and push vulnerable women into the arms of drugs and guns.

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Harris also said the quiet part out loud: She worried legal sex work “compromises the quality of life in a community.” In other words, sex work looks terrible. As a district attorney, senator, and presidential candidate, Harris has trafficked in outdated sex-worker cliches. Out reports that California Attorney General Harris fought in court in 2015 to ensure the state continued criminalizing sex work. Harris’s office’s reasoning: “[P]rostitution is linked to the transmission of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases.” Republican Senator Jesse Helms couldn’t have said it better himself.

In many circumstances, Harris’s actions harm sex workers. According to Melissa Gira Grant’s reporting in the Washington Post, Harris tried to prosecute the owners of Backpage as pimps. Harris presented the classified site as a platform for human traffickers, but both female sex workers and human trafficking advocates discounted Harris’s narrative.

“They said the website provided a platform for them to have more control over the conditions of their work,” Gira Grant writes. “Some anti-trafficking advocates also opposed the strategy of targeting so-called online brothels pushed by Harris and others.”

Instead of listening to women and victims’ advocates, Harris marched her crusade into the senate, where she co-sponsored the Stop Enabling Child Traffickers Act/Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA). The bill enshrined Harris’s view of online ads into law. Now, anyone who posts an online sex work ad can be sent to jail. Harris insists this protects women from pimps trafficking them, but sex workers say FOSTA/SESTA stopped them from screening clients over email before conducting business. In the name of protecting women, Harris has pushed sex workers back onto dangerous street corners.

Her campaign comes at a perilous time because one of porn’s biggest adversaries funded President-elect Joe Biden’s political rise: credit card companies. Biden served as a senator for Delaware, where the majority of corporations and banks base their companies. According to a Mother Jones story, employees of the controversial bank MBNA dolled out over $200,000 to Biden. He then pushed anti-consumer bills in Washington, D.C., including a 2005 law restricting consumers’ ability to file for bankruptcy. Credit card companies had lobbied for the bill for years, and Biden delivered. He was the savior of porn’s arch-nemeses.

Credit card companies have delivered hell for porn stars for years. Few Americans realize Visa and Mastercard dictate what porn they want. For instance, I refer to myself in precise language when I market my legal adult videos because the credit card companies enforce strict rules. Even though I only produce legal videos up to code, credit card companies decide their regulations. If a porn star calls herself a “mom” instead of a “stepmom,” Visa and Mastercard will bar consumers from purchasing the performer’s legal videos. The card companies hold a duopoly over how Americans buy products, so sex workers must follow their rules. Without their billing systems, we’re fucked. These same billing companies supported Biden’s career.

Meanwhile, Facebook subsidiary Instagram has created new policies targeting legal adult performers. In Section 8 of their Community Standards, they ban the advertising of everything from legal strip clubs to legal tantric massages. When COVID-19 restrictions end, I will not be able to put up a safe-for-work flyer promoting my dance at a club. I only perform legal sex work, but Facebook treats my job as a crime.

I struggle to believe Biden or Harris will fight Facebook’s policies because big tech is to Harris what credit card companies are to Biden. While the Department of Justice investigates Facebook for anti-trust violations, the Biden transition team has hired Facebook’s former lobbyists and executives. Harris’ family is a web of Silicon Valley vets. Her niece, Meena Harris, worked at Facebook and Uber and her brother-in-law, Tony West, is Uber’s general counselor who drafted California’s anti-worker Proposition 22.

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It’s disheartening because Facebook is worse than cable companies. They control what we see, and they’re a monopoly. That’s frightening. Nobody knows this better than the sex workers that Facebook censors. This censorship isn’t like when public outrage prevented Larry Flynt from selling Hustler at a particular bookstore. He could still sell the magazine at other stores. Facebook would be like if we had one newsstand. Sex workers support the Department of Justice’s attempt to break up Facebook, but considering Harris and Biden’s ties to Facebook, I worry they will stop the break-up.

What makes this so scary is that nobody supports sex workers. Conservatives, like Senator Josh Hawley, rail against tech censorship but sign up for every bill targeting working girls. Meanwhile, so-called leftists, like Red Scare hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, talk endlessly about the porn they get off to then present sex workers as damaged women and sex-trafficking victims. Sex workers only have ourselves advocating for us, but we need broader support.

There’s some hope for Harris. She turned to the Root in February 2019 to insist she “thinks” she might support decriminalizing prostitution.

“I think that we have to understand though that it is not as simple as that,” Harris said. “But when you’re talking about consenting adults, I think that yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed."

Harris claimed to consider changing her opinion on sex work. Notably, she only contemplated decriminalization, which could mean a variety of legal models. She could advocate for arresting men buying sex, or she could limit penalties for prostitution. Women could face probation instead of jail time. Many scenarios exist. The one situation that doesn’t exist in Harris’s supposed worldview is the legalization of sex work or treating sex workers like human beings who just want the right to work.

When it comes to sex work, Harris always has a but. Harris has expressed one too many buts about my chosen profession. We need all Americans to raise a but to her objection to sex work. If not, Americans might soon have nothing to jack off to.

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