With the new FOSTA law, supposedly designed to curtail online “sex trafficking,” pushing sex workers who run their own businesses offline and even hindering law enforcement efforts to track down actual trafficking operations, a new article published last week by the technology site Motherboard—a site that is part of the VICE network—chronicles the lengthy history of sex work online, showing that sex workers were among the earliest adopters of the global network.
“Sex workers created the internet. People can argue that, but we are the first people who have used all of it,” Sex Worker Outreach Project co-founder Kristen Diangelo told Motherboard. “Nobody really remembers the trajectory there.”
“We were on the internet before we knew we were on the internet,” added California sex worker Maxine Doogan, who founded the Erotic Service Providers Union, which has lobbied California Governor Jerry Brown for the decriminalization of sex work in the country’s most populous state.
Sex workers who weren’t even aware of the internet in those early days of the 1990s soon realized that they were being discussed and evaluated by customers who posted in forums on such now-obsolete regions of the internet as Usenet and the Craigslist message board, which predated the graphics-and-hypertext heavy World Wide Web which came to define the internet toward the middle of that decade.
They also found that much of the discussion in those online forums contained inaccurate information—and damaging negative “reviews.”
“Many sex workers who hadn’t turned to the internet willingly were essentially forced online to combat false negative reviews which had the power to disastrously damage their income,” wrote Motherboard reporter Sofia Barrett-Ibarria. But even then, legislation and law enforcement began to force online sex workers either offline, or into their own isolated online spaces.
Passage of FOSTA by Congress earlier this year has also proven devastating to the community that, according to Motherboard, played a major role in establishing the internet as a viable space for business in the first place.
“Much of the internet as we know it today was built on the contributions and presence of sex workers and porn performers, and their exclusion from the historical narrative is a by-product of sex work’s criminalization,” Barrett-Ibarria wrote.
“[Criminalization] really empowers the unscrupulous, the people who already have the power, which are men that run the internet, that run Silicon Valley,” Doogan adds, in the Motherboard story.
Photo by Julica da Costa / Wikimedia Commons
