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Interview with Margo St. James:

HOOKERS STAND UP FOR RIGHTS

By Carol Epstein

"The problem with prohibition is that women's sex is used to sell everything from soup to nuts. But if she capitalizes on sex, she is a criminal.

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-Margo St. James

This past spring when the Women Running Conference convened at Cleveland State University, I met Margo St. James. She runs 30 to 50 miles a week. She

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is now a secretary in a Washington college hoinc economics department. She said it was all right with her. So did my son, who is now 24, a carpenter and an electrician and married."

Margo began by researching statistics on prostitution arrests and by traveling in the U.S. and Europe to talk with prostitutes. She found that when Australia made prostitution illegal, the rate of rape increased by 149 percent: "It is not, as some have suggested, that prostitution provides a healthy outlet for men's sex drives. It is that by making prostitution

From left to right: Grieseledis Real, French/Swiss prostitute; Joan Baur, Coyote Representative; Margo St. James, Founder of Coyote and producer of the Hookers Ball. Abolitionist Society: Paris, 1975.

is also an ex-prostitute, founder of the National Task Force on Prostitution.

A farmer's daughter born in Bellingham, Washington, Margo St. James graduated with honors from high school and won an art scholarship for her watercolors. After her parents divorced and her father remarried, Margo, then 17, rebelled against her new stepmother's authority, left home to get married, and had a son. She soon divorced and moved on to San Francisco "after reading in Life Magazine about the beatniks." Margo found art school too expensive. She worked as a cocktail waitress and began sharing an apartment with another woman. Both of them received many visitors. Eventually a vice squad cop set her up and falsely arrested Margo on a prostitution charge; she

illegal, society says that paid-for sex is bad and that by implication, all sex is bad. As a result, the bad activity becomes a way of brutalizing people, via rape." Margo also found that historically, the incidence of arrests for prostitution rises just before a world war.

Describing prostitution as "an adaptation for survival," Margo asserts that the age of most females involved in "The Life" ranges from 13 to 35. In the past few years, the number of middle class, college

employment as a waitress or a secretary would. However, in childhood and adolescence, a fairly large percentage of prostitutes have experienced traumatic intrusions-physical abuse, rape, and incest-all of which can contribute to low self-esteem. · One out of four women arrested for prostitution in San Francisco had been a victim of incest in her family. "And we continue to scapegoat the prostitute,' Margo explains. "We need sex education from the primary grades. Teach girls to say no. Teach youngsters what bad parenting is and train children to recognize an incestuous relationship."

Through the offense of incest against a child, an adult conveys a distorted message about the way people relate to one another. When a prostitute listens to her pimp, as Jane Fonda realistically did in Klute, she listens in isolation and separation from others who might contradict that message. The pimp tries to soothe the prostitute. He spins an interpretation of reality-of what men really want, what women need-which in turn reinforces her vulnerability and exploitation. Margo likens the sheltered, dependent homemaker who believes her husband's version of the world to the plight of the prostitute: "Prostitution is a service demanded by husbands. Men have been unwilling to rock the boat and deviate until we began to publicize their hypocrisy."

Citing that most customers who pay for a prostitute's service are white, middle class, married, and employed as professional or blue collar workers, Margo instituted the Kiss and Tell campaign. She er couraged prostitutes to publicize the names of antiERA legislators who patronized prostitutes and call girls. Her campaign extended to anti-abortion legislators as well: "When the abortion laws in Michigan were getting to the point where they were going to take abortion away from poor women, we found out that 6 legislators had paid for illegal abortions. We met behind closed doors and explained things and the inen changed their vote. There's a rule in prostitution that you never recognize a customer in public. But when it comes down to his or mine, he better watch out."

The male establishment fights hard to keep prostitution illegal. When Margo appeared in Cleveland last month on the television show Three for All, hosted by Dick Feagler, she adamantly maintained that police officers reinforce corruption in the prostitution market by either receiving kickbacks or demanding a prostitute's services: "White male judges, cops, that's their turf. They don't want decriminalization. There goes the payoff." The law is enforced primarily against poor and third world

society says

"...by making prostitution illegal, that paid-for sex is bad and that by implication, all sex is bad. As a result, the bad activity becomes a way of brutalizing people, via rape.

was found guilty and lost her job. "I went to law all sex is

school. It took me two years to get an appeal and I won the appeal. But so many judges and lawyers were hitting on me to have sex with them for money that I finally said yes. I was in it for two years. In the early 70's, I decided to fight back."

The possibility that Margo could fight back appeared when she met the former San Francisco Sheriff (and former Cleveland Chief of Police), Dick Hongisto. Casually she asked him, "By the way, what is the women's movement doing for the hookers? Is it any better since I was arrested on the say-so of the cop who solicited me?" Hongisto replied, “It is just the same—or worse--and it will be until someone from the victim class steps forward."

That exchange marked a new course for Margo. "The light bulb went on with those words. Some hooker had to go public. I thought it over for one and a half years. I had nothing to lose, no possessions, no family here. I talked with my mother, who

Page 6/What She Wants/August, 1979

educated women entering prostitution has increased dramatically whenever the economy declines:

Our bodies are our own not only in terms of abortion, but in terms of the right to choose our own sex partners, and the right to choose the conditions of the sexual interaction. The right to choose, however, depends on a society that gives room for choices. The reality is that the vast majority of prostitutes choose their profession for economic reasons. And the economic oppression of women in our society only increases the appeal of prostitution as a livelihood. Contrary to popular opinion, most prostitutes feel that they are independent, successful breadwinners, that they take good care of their children, and that their work provides them with a better life than

women who walk the streets. Although 85 to 90 percent of the prostitutes arrested each year are street prostitutes, only 10 to 15 percent of all prostitutes operate on the streets. Thus the great majority of prostitutes are concealed either behind the walls of massage parlors, encounter studios, and brothels, or by the protection of a telephone, i.e., escort services, independent call girls. Margo analyzes the discrimination within the market in terms of race and privilege: ""The women who work the streets tend to be the ones who can't get the inside jobs for one reason or another. Often the only thing 'wrong' with them from the point of view of the inside pimps is that they are from the 'wrong' ethnic group: black, latina, Asian. Massage parlors sometimes hire one of