LOS ANGELES — Pop star Halsey made headlines over the weekend after releasing a series of social media statements supporting sex workers and sharing a clip of her surprise appearance at a trendy bikini bar in Los Angeles, where she pole danced for tips to promote her new single, “Nightmare.”
Halsey — with an Internet influence of over 13 million Instagram followers and over 10 million Twitter followers — is the second high-profile celebrity to add their voice to the ongoing debate over sex workers' rights in recent weeks.
On May 8, actress and activist Susan Sarandon tweeted unequivocally in support of full decriminalization, garnering over 20,000 likes, 5,000 retweets and a positive consensus among sex workers.
“Sex work is a job just like any other,” Sarandon tweeted, “but its criminalization exposes sex workers to discrimination, abuse & exploitation. Talking about it is the first step to reducing the stigma, but decriminalization is the only way to implement safeguards to protect those in this industry.”
Unlike Sarandon’s, Halsey’s statements have not been universally welcome, mostly because (like many notable liberals, including presidential candidate Kamala Harris) she seems to be unclear about the crucial distinction between “legalization” and “decriminalization.”
The “legalization model” (or “Nordic model”) involves regulating consensual commercial intercourse among adults by not prosecuting the sex workers themselves, but heavily targeting any customers or ambiguously defined “facilitators”. Or, as Sen. Harris would say, “we’re gonna go after the johns and the pimps.”
Legalization is widely derided by actual sex workers, who argue that it endangers their lives and livelihoods and makes them easy prey for corrupt law enforcement.
After her surprise appearance on the pole at Cheetah’s, a bikini bar in a gentrified stretch of East Hollywood adjacent to hipster residential meccas Los Feliz and Silver Lake, which she broadcast via an Instagram story hashtagged “#supportsexworkers,” Halsey received a wave of criticism from the “all sex work = human trafficking” and “women cannot consent to any sex work in a patriarchal society” crowd.
Halsey replied on Saturday via Twitter. “If you live in a place where sex work is widely considered unsafe, violent, or threatening, I can understand your rage at me supporting sex work,” wrote the 24-year-old pop star. “But please understand the divide. And understand I mean regulated, legal, modern sex work. Thank you.”
The imprecise phrasing “regulated, legal, modern” immediately triggered long-time sex worker advocates who work hard trying to educate the public on the distinction between “legalization” and full “decriminalization."
Halsey followed the controversial tweet (which she deleted on Sunday) with another one that read “at the end of the day I support whatever keeps women safe. I support sex workers because I’ve seen sex workers in the USA ask for the support. I hear your heartache, especially in LatAm and I’m going to look into charities that help those women too.”
While the support of mainstream figures like Halsey and Sarandon is invaluable to spread information about sex workers' rights beyond the community itself, it would be even more helpful if these allies used their celebrity status to amplify the voices of actual sex worker activist organizations like the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), the Adult Performers Advocacy Committee (APAC) and others.
Organizing panels, video interviews, podcast appearances or benefits would be a great way for world-class stars like Halsey to help this historically marginalized community and also to educate themselves—and avoid blunders like saying “legalization” when they mean “decriminalization.”
Sex and Commerce
There is no reason to doubt that Halsey has the best intentions in wanting to use her celebrity to raise awareness about the ongoing conversation about sex workers' rights.
But like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift before her, Halsey seems caught between the commercial imperatives of being a star ("don't offend gatekeepers or fans") and doing sincere work for social causes. These business-savvy personalities also open themselves up to the criticism that they are bandwagon-jumping onto existing causes to promote themselves or their work.
It does not help that Halsey has conveniently decided to come out vocally in support of sex workers at the time when she's promoting a new song, "Nightmare" (described by Billboard as "her most important" single) about "what it’s like to be a woman in the year 2019."
Back in April, the singer made headlines around the world when she gave a speech about homelessness mentioning she "had considered" sex work before her music career took off.
Click here for video of Halsey's speech.
During the speech, at an L.A. charity event for youth homelessness organization My Friend’s Place, Halsey made what the mainstream press considered “a shocking revelation.”
“When I was living in New York, I was a teenager,” the singer told the charity's donors. “My friends were picking out decorations for their dorms, and I was debating on whether or not I should let a stranger inside me so I could pay for my next meal.”
Halsey mentioned that she wasn’t homeless “because I did something bad, it wasn’t because something was wrong with me, and it wasn’t because my parents didn’t love me, ‘cause they did, very much. But a series of unfortunate circumstances lead me to being in that position, and it can happen to absolutely anyone.”
Like Madonna and Gaga (and Bob Dylan, Springsteen and thousands of other hopefuls) before her, Halsey did roam the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn without a penny to her name. But unlike Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love, who actually took their clothes off and danced for tips, Halsey did not actually become a sex worker.
One cannot imagine former sex workers Hanna or Love showing up post-fame to Cheetah’s with hip scenesters "making it rain" for an Instagram story. To be fair, Halsey made it known that she donated the proceedings of her pole work to the actual Cheetah’s dancers.
The Bohemian Dream
Halsey’s description of her wayward youth is in fact revealing. Two years ago, a major Rolling Stone profile painted a picture of the singer around 2013-2014:
“A little more than two years ago, Halsey was not actually Halsey, she was Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 19-year-old community-college dropout, couch-surfing between basements in her native New Jersey and the Bed-Stuy/Lower East Side hovels of a badass, tatted-up crowd of ‘degenerate stoners.'"
Rolling Stone describes the teenage Ashley (Halsey is an anagram of her birthname) as "an arty, misfit high school kid taking AP classes and roaming the halls covered in paint.”
“She’d gotten into the well-regarded Rhode Island School of Design," the profile continues, mentioning the enormously prestigious design school, "and then learned that she couldn’t afford to go. She’d found the college she could afford a waste of time. She was technically homeless, having been kicked out by her parents after quitting school."
“I remember one time I had $9 in my bank account," Halsey told Rolling Stone, ‘and bought a four-pack of Red Bull and used it to stay up overnight over the course of two or three days, because it was less dangerous to not sleep than it was to sleep somewhere random and maybe get raped or kidnapped." According to the music magazine, she was, "living the bohemian dream, and when that got a little less dreamy, she’d go stay with her grandma, the one who had taught her to play ‘Memory’ [from the musical 'Cats'] on the piano when she was four.”
Unlike Halsey, those who go beyond “considering” sex work to actually doing the work, often do not have a loving grandma with a nearby cozy apartment to crash at, or the kind of stable teenage schooling that allows them to apply (let alone get admitted) to a hyper-selective college like RISD. Or they might find that family and institutions shun them because of the stigma associated with sex work itself.
This is not to invalidate Halsey’s harrowing experience. But it gives some background as to why so many sex worker advocates on Twitter are urging the star to educate herself on a battle that for many of them can be a life-or-death matter.