Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

In 2018, Backpage, a classified advertising website that many sex workers used to screen clients and advertise their services, was shut down by the FBI. Only days later, the Stop Enabling Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) were signed into law and immediately began to impact sex workers, rather than helping the trafficked people the law was allegedly written to protect. A 2020 Hacking/Hustling study authored by Danielle Blunt and Ariel Wolf with advisement from Naomi Lauren of Whose Corner Is It Anyway found that the law drastically reduced workers’ ability to screen clients, and post-SESTA/FOSTA, 99 percent of the sex workers they surveyed felt less safe. One respondent characterized it as “a bill that is aimed to stop sex trafficking but is making the sex work industry more dangerous.” The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reformers who went around trying to “save” fallen women are reborn anew in each generation of powerful elites who believe that they alone hold the answer to an age-old question that journalist Melissa Gira Grant articulates in her book Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work as having shifted from “What do we do about prostitution?” to “What do we do about prostitutes?”