Scarlot Harlot says she came to town to participate in an antipornography conference at the University of Chicago. Now she’s protesting it. At lunchtime, on the first full day of the weekend meeting, she is parading on the sunny plaza in front of the law school in full view of the audience gathered inside for a panel discussion on “Freedom of Expression.” She is fortyish and fleshy, done up like a clown in a dress made of an American flag and a bright red feather boa and hat. A few greenbacks are tucked into her deep decolletage.
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But, it turns out, they are not whores. Just graduate students playing dress up, “showing solidarity with sex trade workers,” as English major Beth Freeman puts it. “The legislation this conference is promoting will be repressive,” she explains. “A blow job is better than no job.”
The real prostitutes are inside, mixing it up with the academics at the conference, “Speech, Equality and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda.” Their leader, Evelina Giobbe, once a performer in porn films, now heads a Minnesota-based organization WHISPER–Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt. She says prostitution is a $40 million a day business that exploits the young (more than half of all street prostitutes are under the age of 21), the poor, and women of color. “The fact that a john gives money to a woman or a child submitting to these acts does not alter the fact that he is committing child sexual abuse, rape, and battery,” she says. As for pornography, it is “nothing more than the technological recycling of prostitution.”
She leaves them with a little prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the weaponry to make the difference.”
