‘It’s really opened a lot of doors, that could lead somewhere else.’ Jay said, unyielding.
We stood at the entrance of the brothel discussing how she felt about the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act 2022. (SWD)
‘I really thought that when she [Fiona Patten] put anything forward it would have given them [the staff] a little bit more safety,’ she continued. ‘There’s nothing to it all at.’
I notice the all too familiar little red light looking dinky as it flickered affixed to the bland, brick edifice. The building faced the main road, nestled between a neglected warehouse (that Google Maps clarified as a furniture shop) and a smash repair auto-barn. A large, white SUV surreptitiously pulled out of the driveway and through it, a flight of stairs led up to the entrance of the shop. You could see a small, neon light flashing in hot pink: Girls. Girls. Girls.
‘Hello?’ A polite but demanding voice yelled out from above.
I startled her. She thought I wanted a job.
You wouldn’t pick it, but Jay was the brothel manager and receptionist and ran her club like a Level VII ballet exam at the Royal Academy. She wore a blue oversized rugby jumper and denim jeans. Playing the role of mother bear may as well have been in her job description because if anything went wrong, she was the first to react. She stood with her back straight, hardly faltering. She made this look easy.
I asked her what she thought about the new law.
‘No…’ she says immediately, shaking her head with conviction. ‘There is nothing that I can see in that, that will take it to any place where it’s a good place. I do find it’s a territory that you’ve got to be fighting for…’ she said pointedly, ‘especially how the worlds heading.’ She raised her eyebrows.
‘Japan just recently dropped their consent to 13 years… UK is fighting for 12. So, if that heads up this way, we’re f***d. We have a young one here, which is around about 19, not even 20 yet, and he’ll go “I need skinnier and younger” and we actually let them know that’s like, in the paedophilia category and we have to actually send them out. Yeah, so I just feel like it [the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act] will open a lot more doors that would lead to some…’ she said grimaced before finishing, ‘some interesting stuff.’
‘In your opinion, what’s wrong with that?’ I said.
She frowned and let out some slow but uncomfortable sighs, ‘Because that’s going to a whole new level…’
‘We’ve had men that will say to girls, “Can I just pretend for you to be my wife’s daughter?” which is younger… I think it will make it normal for older men and [for] other men to be able to have the right to, you know, to treat, or even think they can go to a younger girl and do what they want.
‘I know one of the guys from World Vision interviewed a prostitute in St Kilda and he was just asking her how she ended up there. So, her mum’s boyfriend was trying to make a move on her, she told her mum, her mum kicked her out. And that’s how she had to survive.’
Historically, women who fell into prostitution didn’t have a family or other means of support or protection. In worse cases, mothers would prostitute their children to survive.
‘It’s a little bit concerning when they drop the age, that’s like innocent still,’ she added.
The girls, including the transwomen that work at the club, don’t feel protected either.
‘They already feel like they’re not protected… Jaz was like, “There’s nothing safeguarding us, there’s nothing.”’
‘So,’ she continued, ‘if we’re going to have 13-year-olds where dads or uncles think they can do whatever they want – and we’ll have girls on the street that need to survive – then I just don’t know what’s going to end up for them… What will end up happening?’
Her voice dropped to a slight whisper and her eye darted around before finding mine again, ‘Even with the health checks, we decided we would keep that. We do let the girls know it’s not a mandatory thing. We’re not allowed to ask, but we thought we’d keep that as a standard here. The girls don’t mind… But we are not allowed to ask, at all, for that health check anymore.’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘So STD checks, everything, we keep it on file, so every 6 months they get it done, we are not allowed to do that anymore,’ she said, with a further look of discomfort.
Guys come in with cold sores wanting a girlfriend experience, which involves kissing, and Jay tells them it’s not safe and sends them away.
‘And apparently someone told me that if you have an STD you can still keep on going,’ she continues. ‘So can you see where those little things are leading?’
The push for prostitution to become on par with, say, your local fish and chip shop, appears to be high on the agenda by Members of the Green Party, like Tim Read.
‘There is much more at stake here than the fish and chip shop because you’re kind of dealing with human beings being able to put themselves out there. Like, I know girls don’t want to do it… There’s this whole holistic thing that goes in… I care about their mental health.’
Roma Britnell, politician of the Liberal Party with 30 years in the health industry as a nurse, debated the point in Parliament that ‘stealthing’ shouldn’t be legal.
‘We’ve found that there’s a few [guys] that really push the boundary lately,’ Jay tells me.
‘I’ve warned guys, there’s one question you are not allowed to ask my girls. I said, “What we have on that wall stays here, that’s our policy and standard procedure, and it’s also a safety going both ways…” But they still try it out.’
‘Stealthing’ is when either party, removes the condom during sex without the other person knowing.
Do you think that’s because the laws have changed?
‘I have a feeling, but then I don’t know if they’re conscious about it or if they’re taking the chance. Coz I’ve had to ask a guy to leave and never come back because he slipped and thought he could do it, girl was pretty distraught, so there’s just a few things we’ve noticed lately… And our girls don’t feel safe in that sense.’
It seems, counter-intuitive to remove such a law when the underpinning purpose of the Act is to make things safer for the people it set out to protect.
The Andrew’s Labor government has been known to ‘ram’ things through ‘all too often lately’ – as Roma Brittel puts it – without taking the proper time to consider and debate certain pieces of legislation.
It was in February this year when the Victorian government passed Fiona Patten’s long-awaited repeal of the SWD with the hopes to rid the stigma and discrimination that has long followed prostitution.
Andy Meddick, Western Victoria MP of the Animal Justice Party and former sex worker, says that prostitution is one of the ‘oldest professions in the world, yet it remains one of the most stigmatised’. He recognises that just by decriminalising it, it doesn’t mean that all the ‘harmful stigmas’ would dissipate.
Ruby is a vivacious, 35-year-old sex worker, who I coincidentally met at a house party while writing this piece. ‘I love the adventure, the thrill, all the new experiences and meeting new people…’ she tells me openly. ‘But I can’t have my family know because of the stigma. There’s a lot of guilt, shame, and fear… there’s constant fear of having them find out.’
The word prostitute derives from the Latin word prostitut, which means ‘to be exposed to the public’ or ‘offered for sale’. It has been the centrepiece of debauchery for a really long time, and sex workers feel an intrinsic sense of shame and ignominy, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t legally protected in some way.
Looking at prostitution in other parts of the world, since 1754 BC, Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece had laws that dictated what an illegal and what a legal prostitute was; in Ancient Greece, legal prostitutes even paid taxes. Carved into the Hammurabi Code (one of the most organised, best preserved legal texts from the ancient era which is currently sitting in the Louvre right now), there were laws enshrined to protect women’s rights with a section specifically devoted to female prostitutes. Prostitution in brothels only became legal in Australia in 1992, and street-based sex work has always been illegal in this country.
Vixen Collective, in partnership with the Scarlett Alliance, are both foundations that support prostitutes psychologically, emotionally, and developmentally that pressed for older laws to be repealed, but they are not satisfied with the new law that just passed because there are still elements in the law that criminalise street prostitutes for soliciting near churches and schools and between 7pm and 6am. The most obvious reasons this is considered a criminal offence is because it’s dangerous to solicit at night, on your own, and there are children at schools and churches.
Now, in our very own state of Victoria, sex workers have admitted there are no safeguards to protect them from the abrasive elements of their industry – at all.
‘Imagine if they [the union] took down all the safety signs at a construction site and told everyone working there that they don’t have to wear steel-capped boots or a hard hat and if they get hurt it’s their fault because, well, who cares, you’re a subbie [sub-contractor]?’
Ruby makes a formidable point.
‘The reason I’m doing this is coz I’m not vaccinated [for Covid], and I got let off work for an injury.’ Behind the receptionist desk in a brothel there are signs saying, No condom, no sex.
‘The signs on those walls is my fallback, without them it’d be so dangerous. You need a condom. I see myself as a luxury item, and a companion. Most people just want company.’
Ruby works at a brothel in Geelong and sees clients privately. At brothels, the girls are private contractors, so they get paid half of the standard fee clients pay, but most of the money they make is from the extras including kinks and the ‘girlfriend experience’. She’s worked with men and couples on all rudders, from ‘Old Man Gary’ who wanted to show her his dim sims in the freezer and trim his privates, to a guy with cerebral palsy who just wanted his hair played with, to Kamagra-fuelled sex pests.
‘There’s so much pressure now,’ Ruby says informatively, ‘to be self-reliant, as independent workers so that we don’t catch diseases. People don’t have to check for STI’s anymore. That’s f***d.’ She told me that when you go down to get an STI test at the Melbourne Sex Clinic you can give the receptionist any name. ‘So it wasn’t really regulated to begin with.’
The idea of not testing sexually transmitted diseases is to bring prostitution on par with other, ‘standard’ businesses so workers don’t feel discriminated against if they have a disease.
During the first outbreak of syphilis in Naples in 1494, for everyone’s safety, authorities in some cities outlawed prostitution and Germany shut down all their brothels to try and stop the spread. Brothels, after that, quickly became known as the cesspools for plague and disease – hence much of the stigma. There has always been an ‘unclean’ stigma swabbed onto prostitutes since the age of Exodus, but the manifestation of this in physiological disease really took the cake in urban culture.
This doesn’t mean to say people won’t get tested in modern day. The onus is always on the individual, but one thing Ruby was worried about was, whose fault does it become if you’ve contracted something? And hypothetically, if it was the worker, how do you track down the person if you’re not allowed to keep documents on file so diseases don’t keep spreading? Or what if a client is passing something around to workers? What if it’s HIV, or Hep B, or herpes?
‘Stuff’s going to spread around like wildfire,’ she cries. ‘I made a lot of money but he stealthed me and I had to take a month off…’ she told me. ‘I had to take the morning-after pill and my hormones were all over the place, I was tired, plus I had a longer period, and I had PMS, it was a lot. I thought I was pregnant, which just sucks because you can’t make a consistent income when this stuff happens.’
The arbiter of justice has now abdicated its position of protection, leaving Ruby exposed to the very real and ruthless elements of her industry.
‘And there’s the sex trafficking too,’ she says.
To assume that people will do the right thing is never enough, considering that men will push every boundary possible and workers and managers are already worried about their wellbeing in an industry that is already heavily under-regulated and dangerous enough as it is.
‘So no, I’m pretty against it to be honest with you.’ Jay burst out laughing out of the front of her shop. ‘Burn the damn thing,’ she thanked me, and went on back to work.
