The red umbrella

If King Charles II, the 17th century ancestor of the current British sovereign, were alive and cruising today, would he admit to the high-born principles that drove his unchallenged carnality? 

Would he support Tiffany Cabán's sex workers' rights bill, now pending in the City Council?

Many of that British monarch's posterity are products of his relations with sex workers during the Age of Reason. Some of them got their own placard for a coronation seat.

No group has been so maligned and abhorred throughout history as sex workers. Few have been so hypocritically exploited by the same people who have solicited their labor.

Every synonym for sex work is tinged with hate-speech overtones. The vernacular job titles for the sex-work industry carry more baggage than presidential aspirants.

Cabán's Council bill will provide "protection and economic security for some of our most marginalized, most criminalized and most disrespected neighbors.”

She is right. Although no legislation can kindle the hearth on the fire of universal tolerance, it's more than a symbolic gesture.

Sex workers have been scapegoated as threats to marriage and procreation. Among their most vociferous accusers have been politicians, religious leaders and other prominent role models in public life who turn out to have been clandestine sugar daddies.

When murders are reported in the news and communities are up in arms and interviewed by media about their fears, much of the panic simmers down when it turns out that the victims were sex workers. The crime is demoted as a priority case for investigation.

To many traditional moralists, it becomes a case almost  of poetic justice. Twenty years ago, 80 percent of New York City sex workers were the victims of violence, according to a survey cited by Vox. If psychological violence were counted, it would be 100 percent.

Sex workers are no cleaner or sullied in the accommodations of their lives than anyone else.  They need not submit to others' estimations of their humanity when it's based on their occupation. They have made choices usually under duress and out of  economic necessity. 

Conceivably out of free will.

They must best play the hand that Circumstance has dealt them, even if they themselves have stacked the deck. Struggling to cope is not wickedness and deviance.

The Council's bill will protect sex workers from the privacy invasions that have invariably torpedoed their prospects for decent housing, "gainful" employment and access to avenues to a better life. It will also reduce the incidence of forced drug addiction.

The fact that prosecution for prostitution has dropped by over 95 percent over a decade is less a reflection of a changed societal attitude and legitimization of so-called "victimless crimes" than it is a re-configuration of resources under policies of triage deployment.

The word "prostitution" has been too damaged by connotation to be salvaged. Replacement nomenclature must be found, as it has been for "crippled" or "retarded.”

Criminalization has encouraged trafficking and given social engineering a bad name.

Whether all sex work should be completely decriminalized (as favored by Amnesty International, the European Parliament and the World Health Organization) is debated around the world, and nations have adopted extremely different positions, from complete non-interference to government-imposed torture.

Just Belgium and New Zealand so far are the only nations to have decriminalized sex work. In several European nations, mostly in Scandinavia, the client is breaking the law but not the sex worker who performs the service. In Uganda, sex workers cannot be considered victims of rape because they are deemed to have been "asking for it.”

Many other countries have this despicable attitude codified into law, or at least tradition.

The American Civil Liberties Union says that "decriminalization would reduce mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system and … advance equality for the LGBTQ community.”

Sex work needs to be regulated. Not as a judgemental check on morals, but as insurance against disease and exploitation. Regulation correlates with decriminalization. Client vetting might be made more reliable with an upgrade of the profession's legal status.

Government intrusion and overreach are always an issue when discussing regulation, whether in relation to motorcycle helmets or sex work. Many of the same people who support optimal spending on social and "entitlement" programs don't trust the government's involvement in this area.

Can the government be trusted to secure personal information about sex workers so that it cannot fall into the wrong hands, or even be weaponized by the government itself to blackmail or intimidate? Maybe the bored sentries guarding our nuclear silos could moonlight as monitors of the government's database of sex workers.

Regulation, as long as it is science-based, will help neutralize the black market. As part of a wider support system it will also reduce workers' fear of reporting violence against them

The Department of Health should require regular medical exams and testing at no cost to sex workers. Insurance should be readily available and free of cost to them. They should also lobby for pension rights, although it might be a bit daunting to gather proof of time served.

In theory, everyone pays taxes. And so should sex workers. But cash businesses abound in the underground economy in New York. If  the government were serious about tracking and tapping into that slice of commerce, it would be enough to subsidize the forward motion of our country from now well-nigh into perpetuity.

It is the worst kept secret in New York that entire industries are thriving by hiding income and evading taxes.

Still, sex workers should voluntarily pay their taxes, even though the government's habitual appeals to our collective honesty are, it seems, mostly for public consumption. Documentation of income can be essential to qualify for unemployment and other entitlements.

People become sex workers for a variety of reasons. Often it is a last resort or stop-gap measure to generate the money for educational training, medical treatment or just the means to gain entry to a museum or theater.

Stigmatized sex workers should not be passive to the unwarranted defamation against them. They need not justify or explain themselves  away. Their humanity doesn't need to be sanitized any more than anyone else's, which means not at all.

The PRIDE flag has become a classic symbol. So should be the "red umbrella,” the icon of sex-work activism. If Mayor Eric Adams signs the bill into law, it will protect a vulnerable community from the elements.

And by extension, all New Yorkers.