Re: this whole Secret Service “sex scandal” that began in the Colombian city of Cartgena just ahead of a summit attended by President Obama, I just can’t. Is that a bored-whore posture? Oh no, another prostitution scandal! Loosely involving a Democrat (or a Democratic regime), which guarantees nothing good can come from it on the Left, and lots of madness will come of it on the Right, and just about nothing good will come of it for any of the sex workers involved. I first heard about it late Friday night in the Washington Post, and aside from speculating what headline the New York Post was going to go with (ICYMI: SECRET SERVICED), I tried to just let. it. go.
Now today it’s A1 above-the-fold in the New York Times, so I guess it’s back? Or I have to say something. Okay.
Charlotte Shane, over at (my favorite sex work blog) Tits and Sass already covered the possible corners this story will get dragged into – the legal status of prostitution in Colombia, the martial status of the agents involved, the role of the military in the cover-up, sketchy feelings about national security, and, lest we forget, the spectre of “sex slavery.” You could just read that and stop if you wanted.
But the thing the Times did that I was hoping someone with a reporting budget would do? Get an interview with the woman “at the center of the scandal!” as they say in these things.
At least women get to be at the center of something? Though truly the thing at the center of this scandal is yet another man trying to cheat a woman out of her pay.
(Did that sound sort of second wave? It was on purpose.)
The thing that no one really knew as this thing broke, and that I suspected had to be part of the story… as it’s ridiculous that of upwards of a dozen Secret Service and military dudes in a hotel, all conniving to shut up a woman one had paid for sex, that there was only one woman being paid for sex? (Come on.)
What happened was this: solidarity, motherfuckers. There were (at least) two escorts working together, looking out for each other in the club where they picked up their clients (no matter what the Secret Service bro insists, that he was shocked that there were prostitutes in that bottle service section). That as soon as one of the women was facing difficulty in getting paid by her client, she could storm across the hall and get back-up.
That’s just so beautiful.
And the kind of thing, under most anti-prostitution law in the US, that could get you charged with pimping, pandering, or conspiracy.
Sex workers here do it anyway, of course: have each other’s backs. It’s not front page news to us. Neither is it that clients will, on occasion, try to rip you off. But that you can incite an international incident over it? That’s just beautiful.