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Abstract
Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security's 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing from a qualitative-interpretive analysis of the media coverage of these raids, I show that the responses to them emphasised how the sites' closures increased both men's and women's economic vulnerability, but the similarities largely ended there. Instead, I argue broadly that public responses to these events reflected and reinforced gendered notions of women's vulnerability and men's agency in the sex industry. While these responses may seem unsurprising, they are also potentially productive, calling into question the limits of respectability politics and signalling new solidarities in the struggle for sex worker rights.
Keywords: sex work, human trafficking, technology, gender, LGBT, respectability politics, media, neoliberalism, online platforms
When law enforcement came for MyRedBook for sex work ads-and before that, Craigslist and Backpage-there was criticism, but not like this. ... Where the attacks on Rentboy were understood by activists and organizations as attacks on the LGBTQ community, attacks on MyRedBook were met with comparative silence from feminists, along with cursory reporting and little editorial support from mainstream media.
Melissa Gira Grant1
The sex industry has long been at the forefront of technological change and adaptation: an extensive body of research indicates that both women and men increasingly arrange commercial sexual exchanges online using various websites and mobile technologies.2 Yet as the sex industry has modernised, concerns about trafficking in the industry have intensified, especially since 2000, when the US federal government passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). Among the many policies and procedures implemented to eradicate human trafficking, government agencies have endeavoured to end the availability of commercial sexual services by targeting online platforms, namely websites that operate as intermediaries between sex workers and clients to market and facilitate sex work.3
In this article I consider two recent instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com (MyRedbook), and the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) 2015 raid...