Review: HeidiWorld Wants You To Rethink Prostitution

Podcaster Molly Lambert's gambit to get listeners to critically examine the conflation of sex work is mostly successful.

Just as the '90s nostalgia boom is peaking, a new podcast arrives set in the pleasingly seedy world of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. Host Molly Lambert is explicit about her agenda in the first of the series's 10 episodes: She's using Fleiss' story to push listeners to reconsider the criminalization of prostitution, and to critically examine the conflation of sex work and sex trafficking.

Her gambit is mostly successful. Lambert's presentation of Fleiss as a restless, ambitious woman who serves time for facilitating transactions between consenting adults is sympathetic without being fluffy or flattering. HeidiWorld suffers from a mild case of Wikipedia disease; each new setting or character gets a too-thorough backstory. But the central narrative about sex, money, and power is just as fascinating today as it was to the scandal sheets and magazine shows of Fleiss' heyday.

Comments

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

If sex work is work, just like working at Starbucks, is asking for sex in exchange for something in lieu of money harassment and/or illegal coercion?

[Minadin]

It is at my office. At least according to HR and all the posters in the break room.

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[Eeyore]

The first question to ask yourself – if we throw in a little sex will that raise or lower the price? If the answer is that it will raise the price – it is sexual harassment.

[BestUsedCarSales]

Interesting question I hadn’t really thought of.

[mad.casual]

This has been mentioned repeatedly the last couple times ENB brings this up. She has a mid-teen girl fairy tale conception that women are going to flock to OnlyFans and equality will be achieved, rather than four dudes in their late-20s, early-30s in a moving crew negotiating with a coed freshman over the cost of moving her stuff.

[Briggs Cunningham]

But she doesn’t really even believe that. I don’t know what she looks like now, but when she was in her 20s ENB was not an unattractive woman and certainly more attractive than a good number of women making money on Only Fans. Yet, she never went on Only Fans or did any of the stuff she claims are just liberating ordinary jobs for women.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I remember a documentary back in the 90s about a strip club in San Francisco that was unionizing. One of the strippers who worked at the club had a mother who was a sex-worker activist and advocate. Guess what happened when her mother discovered her daughter was a stripper. Just watching it you could sense her universe was being metaphysically torn asunder.

[mad.casual]

As you obliquely point out below, you can see, discuss, and compare/contrast it in the various waves of feminism as well. Activist women who were protesting disparate pay and access to education considered the sexual revolution to be a lark. Burning your bra was hip in the 60s when you were 20 and, like every 20-yr.-old male who’s 6 ft. tall and bulletproof, the laws of physics didn’t apply to you.

Now that you’re 60 and reality didn’t care about your feelings all along, some parts of the movement were more permanent and critical to equality and some parts were transitory, vacuous sensationalism.

[The Encogitationer]

I don’t know what she looks like now, but when she was in her 20s ENB was not an unattractive woman

A double negative is a positive… 🙂

[BestUsedCarSales]

I think there’s a lot of negatives with it. I think the OnlyFans model right now is very, very negative. Turning relations contractual like this has negative impacts.
I still don’t think it should be illegal, but I think Reason is often somewhere from too optimistic to utopian about the effects of legalization of things they discuss.

[Briggs Cunningham]

I totally agree. I don’t think it should be illegal either. It is reason and a lot of other people’s pretending that it is a good thing or a normal thing rather than an evil that legal prohibition can’t solve is what bugs me.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

It’s like the conversation… (debate) I had with Overt the other day. I staunchly don’t believe that any of this should be legislated, or made illegal. But to say that all of it has nothing but positive outcomes for all parties involved is, I think naïve.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I only bring this up because it’s been brought up by people who are studying this issue more deeply than I am. In particular, one author who recently wrote a book on the sexual revolution noticed an interested dichotomy within the sex-work-is-work philosophical wing of politics.

On the one hand, they argue (convincingly) that sex work is work and should be treated as a completely non-controversial subject. But the the literal exact same group (and she names names) are the most hot-headed, hypersensitive actors on the stage when it comes to perceived sexual harassment and/or exploitation– and even support laws which ban things such as trading sex for rent during Covid.

So sex work is work. Stop being such a Republican Trumpy Prude.

Fine.

What? A landlord offered a trade in sex for rent during the COVID lockdowns? LIFE IN PRISON! EXPLOITATION! LITERAL RAPE!

I think it’s a topic worth exploring.

[mad.casual]

*raises hand*

Uh, I’d like to place my order ahead of Mr. “I’m going to choose ‘no’ on the contactless payment option.”

[Eeyore]

You never know where the payment system has been.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I never think much before I stick my card in any slot, personally.

[Briggs Cunningham]

That is a great question. The other question I always want to ask women like ENB is
“If sex work is just like any other work, why don’t you do it?”

The answer of course is “I don’t want to”. Well why not? ENB could make $300 an hour or more as a sex worker. If there were some job out there I could work nights and weekends making that kind of money, I would certainly do it. If ENB really considers it just another job, then why wouldn’t she want to? Sure she is married but if it is just another job, why would her husband mind?

[Rossami]

I could make a lot more money working on an oil rig or a long-haul fisher. I don’t want to for reasons that have nothing to do with the money. I could make a decent living on a garbage truck and have a lot more free time. I don’t choose to do that either.

What’s your point? There are lots of jobs out there that are “just another job” that I don’t want to do. There’s no hypocrisy (on ENB’s part or anyone else’s) in saying “it’s just a job and if you want to do it, you should be allowed even though I personally don’t want to do it”.

[Briggs Cunningham]

You can’t work on a oil rig part time. And those jobs are physically grinding and dangerous. They are also full time jobs that would require you to quit your current job. Being a sex workers is nothing like those jobs. It is literally something you can do as a side gig and make hundreds of dollars an hour. If someone offered you a job that you could do for a four hours a week after your regular job and you could make say $1500 every week, I bet you would say yes to that. Why wouldn’t you.

You totally miss the point. It is not that she doesn’t want to do that. It is that the reason why she doesn’t want to do that is because being a hooker fucking sucks and is an awful and degrading way to make money. It is not just another job. If it were, her and you could explain why you won’t do it without insulting people’s intelligence by saying stupid shit like “I wouldn’t want to be a garbage man either”.

What is your point here other than to show that you don’t think being a hooker is just another job either?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

And those jobs are physically grinding and dangerous.

You know what else is physically grinding and potentially dangerous?

[The Encogitationer]

Goose-stepping?

[mad.casual]

What is your point here other than to show that you don’t think being a hooker is just another job either?

Well there is a pretty solid conflation of having sex for money and picking up trash.

There is, of course, the issue that ENB and others would almost certainly prefer to avoid. That is, I’ve picked up a lot of trash on a volunteer basis, I’ve never heard of heard of anyone discovering they had to surgically murder the trash 15 weeks after doing so.

[Briggs Cunningham]

I have also never heard of anyone volunteering at the whore house to help out guys who have to pay for it. It is just another job but somehow no one will ever do it for charity. Funny that.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

A sex worker who donates time pro boner… huh.

[The Encogitationer]

Hurt me, Baby! Hurt me! Make me tell bad dad jokes!

Calling Utkonos! Let the pun-stream begin!

[Rossami]

I’m “missing the point” because so far you haven’t made one. Not a coherent point, at any rate.

Being a prostitute is “just another job”. It’s not great and it’s got plenty of down-sides – just like pretty much every other job out there. You call it “an awful and degrading way to make money” and you are entitled to that opinion. What you seem to be missing is that there are lots of other jobs that I and probably you think are “awful and degrading” yet are completely legal, not stigmatized and useful to society.

Your point about part-time and high pay is true only for the tiny percentage of people at the top of that field. For the vast majority (and I’m afraid I would be in that category), it could still be part-time but it would be beer-money at best and might not even cover expenses. Would I do something unpleasant for beer-money? Would I even do something I enjoy for beer-money? Clearly, I don’t. I like driving but don’t DoorDash. That doesn’t make the ‘something’ an invalid choice for other people who either need the money more or can command higher rates.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I’m going to be real heretical and say that an economy where someone can make more money at prostitution than at honest work is a messed up, corrupt economy.

[mad.casual]

Call me a radical feminist but a society where a woman’s most valuable contribution is non-reproductive use her vagina is a very, literally, misogynistic one. Especially one that’s currently struggling with “What is a vagina?”

That said, I meet plenty of people who’s single greatest value is that they just happen to mostly enclose 5.5-6 cu. m of space and understand that places like SF have a problem with scores of people who can’t effectively do that.

[The Encogitationer]

It doesn’t get any more misogynistic than throwing a woman in jail and effectively declaring her outside of legal protection and recourse from assault, rape, and murder. That is the state of things with prostitutes today.

[The Encogitationer]

I’ve always said let stores pay retail workers $300 an hour or let Big Papa pay Monks and Nuns $300 an hour and then we can talk about the morality of prostitution.

[The Encogitationer]

One to one and absent coercion, no problem, but even in a free society, within a corporate structure, it would be an accounting problem…Or then again, it might make Certified Public Accounting exciting for once! 🙂

Monty Python–careers advice
https://youtu.be/NAOQH4xEyhM

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“transactions between consenting adults”

You mean the clients’ wives were OK with it? Kinky!

[mad.casual]

Marriage is just a contract. Like renting a car or applying for a credit card.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Then for one party to go to a prostitute would breach the contract.

Like promising that only certain people will drive the rental car, then letting an unapproved person drive it.

[mad.casual]

Then for one party to go to a prostitute would breach the contract.

Not at all. Long-term commitment, family car goes into the shop, the shop gives me a loaner car until the work is done. Bed on the loaner car can’t handle the length or girth of the lumber I use to get the job done so I rent a car for an hour or two from Menards (or other big box hardware store). No violation of any contracts, no complaints from the car in the shop that either the loaner car or the car I rented for an hour to handle my lumber is a problem.

Pretty sure there was no commitment not to drive any other cars and, if there was, it was a verbal contract.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I think I was referring to cases where there is a contract not to have other drivers for your rental car, except for people listed in the contract itself.

Rental car companies have been known to put those things in their contracts.

However, even if those type of contracts are purely hypothetical, they still work for purposes of my analogy.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Or are using an analogy in which a pros- excuse me, sex worker – is compared to a loaner car while the spouse is in the shop?

[The Encogitationer]

Bed on the loaner car can’t handle the length or girth of the lumber I use to get the job done

I see what you did there… 😉

[The Encogitationer]

The term for such wives is “Cuckquean,” especially if they like to watch.

[Roberta]

HeidiWorld suffers from a mild case of Wikipedia disease; each new setting or character gets a too-thorough backstory.

Are HyR bloggers so used to superficial reporting that this is a flaw? OK, maybe it’s better in print than audio, which is too hard to skim.

[mad.casual]

which is too hard to skim

For the people too dimwitted to use skip and hi-speed playback features maybe.

[Liberty_Belle]

Blech. This is one of those unpleasant topics. I think prostitution is immoral AF… but it consenting, non duress, adults are making a transaction the government should stay out of it.

[The Encogitationer]

Review: HeidiWorld Wants You To Rethink Prostitution

Oh, I’m rethinking! I’m rethinking, Baby! 🙂

[The Encogitationer]

As if it’s not clear enough, would.