What Excites Us!

Episode 27: Kaytlin Bailey of Old Pros

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Gwyn: Hello and welcome to What Excites Us, the podcast that discusses sex and sexuality throughout time and place. Including the here and now because sex is part of being human and the way we think and feel about it affects us personally, politically and globally. I'm Gwyn Isaacs, a certified sex coach and educator, and I really want you to feel good about who you are and what you like.

[00:00:41] Today's conversation is with someone who is one of my personal podcast heroes. She puts out a show that I am absolutely devoted to and I rarely miss an episode. Kaytlin Bailey is a sex worker rights advocate, standup comic, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a nonprofit media organization, creating the conditions to change the status of sex workers in society. She is the host of the Oldest Profession podcast, and she is currently developing her one woman show, Whore's Eye View, which I recently got to see a beta version of and thoroughly enjoyed. She is hilarious, brilliant, an irreverent expert on sex worker history, and a lovely person.

[00:01:33] All right. Hi Kaytlin thank you so much for coming on and doing this. I totally, totally appreciate it.

[00:01:41] Kaytlin: Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight.

[00:01:44] Gwyn: Your podcast is in my top three, maybe, favorite podcasts. I absolutely love what you do. So why don't we start there? 

[00:01:55] Kaytlin: well, first of all, thank you so much that that makes you just made my day. I really, You know, I, I know that you understand this because you're also a podcaster, but it can often feel like shouting into an empty cave. So it really is such a delight to hear from you. So thank you so much for, first of all, for listening, and also for for saying so. I'm really proud of, of what we do over there.

[00:02:17] Yeah, the, the Oldest Profession podcast you know, I'm, the host. I work with Dr. Charlene Fletcher, who has been our historian for two seasons now, which is really incredible. And so we work together to, to craft an episode that is the story of a different old pro, meaning sex worker from history.

[00:02:35] It started as a comedy podcast. I was a touring standup comic when I started, and so I was like, get high and read Wikipedia and like mouth off and you know, just sort of be like low stakes, like, ah, look at these, you know, fun stories. Mostly I made bad choices last weekend and wanna go into TMI about it.

[00:02:52] Right? That was like the tone of the podcast. And then, SESTA FOSTA happened, right? And you know, the federal government passed this terrible law you know, that was sold to the American people right? As a way of protecting children from sexual exploitation. And you know, I watched like my mom and Amy Schumer fall for it.

[00:03:12] And suddenly the work that we were doing took on a really different tone. Because places that my friends and I had been using for years to schedule and screen our clients to keep ourselves safe to trade information and bad date lists went away. And I saw the up close devastating impact that that law had and how wrong the feminists in my life were about the impact of these laws.

[00:03:36] And so, I got, I got so mad I stopped being funny and, and Wendy quit the show and I don't blame her. And that's, and, and that's fine, right? Like righteousness and comedy really don't go together. I chose righteousness. I don't know if that's the right choice. But now I am the executive director and founder of a non-profit media organization and we are creating the conditions to change the status of sex workers in society.

[00:03:59] And we do that through the Oldest Profession podcast. I think that history is an especially, Powerful tool for like reminding community members and reminding legislators that we have always been, part of this. And I'm working on a one woman show that could also be marketed as a funny lecture, Whore's Eye View, which covers 10,000 years of history from a sex worker's perspective.

[00:04:24] Those two tools are sort of what we use to shape and influence the way that people talk about this. But we also have an incredible national organizer and content creator and like a team of folks that have crafted one pagers sort of through different demographics or like constituencies, values prisms, right? So we have like a gendered violence one pager. We have a disability, one pager. We have a libertarian one pager. We have a lgbtq plus one pager. We're working on a Christian values one pager and, and it's like 150 words per side. And these are talking points that we hope our audience, our listeners, our donors use over and over again to help shape and frame this story in a way that people can understand. Because you actually can build consensus across ideological spectrums across different groups around the idea that arresting people for the oldest profession is wrong and leads to bad outcomes. So yeah, I'm sorry I, so that's a lot, but that, that is what we do.

[00:05:31] Gwyn: No, that's great. You literally touched on everything I wrote down that I wanted to talk to you about. And I fully impressed with your ability to summarize my thoughts and tangible talking points. 

[00:05:47] Kaytlin: Wow. Yeah. 

[00:05:48] Gwyn: so 

[00:05:48] Kaytlin: Thanks,

[00:05:49] Gwyn: Yeah, sure. No, clearly you know what you're doing. Let's go back for a second. The podcast you do. How I've been describing it as you're telling us the real history of previous sex workers and some badass women through history.

[00:06:06] Kaytlin: Many badass women who have been maligned right by whorephobia many of whom did not actually engage in direct sex work. Right? So like we did an episode about Mary Magdalene, for example, even though it is our position on the podcast that there is no evidence to suggest that she ever traded sex for money or something of value, right?

[00:06:26] But she is also an iconic old pro. And both of those things are true at the same time. Same thing, Mae West, right? You know, this is a woman who is not an old pro, but played one on tv and that is significant and of value and we can talk about it. And we do

[00:06:42] Gwyn: So Mae West was my idol when I was three or four. I, I was that little kid who was like, why don't you come up and see me sometime? It ridiculous. And when, and I listened to your podcast, obviously, and I was so psyched to hear that episode and I learned things that I didn't know about her, even though I've idolized her pretty much my entire life.

[00:07:03] Kaytlin: I, I love hearing that. Yeah. I, I love working with Dr. Fletcher. I love being able to work with a real historian, right? Like my post-it notes in hard to find places is not a good system for doing like actual history. It's just by weird art brain. But like the, the combination of our forces combined, we really uncover a lot of cool facts and it's, it's fun to tell these stories like, old pros are the best actually.

[00:07:30] Gwyn: Would you mind telling me a little bit about the process? How does that shake out?

[00:07:34] Kaytlin: No, it's not like a secret. It's like different every time. It's just different resources available for different old pros, right? Like, some of these are famous, right? We've done an episode on Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, right? Great example. Some of these are, you know, somebody, one of my, my new favorite genres of old pro episodes, actually.

[00:07:51] So if you know of any, please send them my way. Is the daughter or granddaughter or great, great granddaughter of an old pro uncovering that in a family history which I think is always, always an interesting story. And you know, we, we work with archivists, we work with amateur historians. We work with famous figures. So, the research process is really different. And the digestion of whatever information is available process is really different. 

[00:08:16] Gwyn: Totally makes sense.

[00:08:18] Kaytlin: Thanks. Yeah, it's, but it, it is a we do do, we do do stuff before sitting down and mouthing off, which is a real change from season one where there's a lot of misinformation and I'm sorry. And we might be taking that whole season down actually, and putting it behind a payroll because it is no longer up to our standards . So if, so, if you wanna hear me not be professional, this is your moment. Go download those episodes now. They might be going.

[00:08:41] Gwyn: Fair enough. I have heard some of those earlier episodes and I, I get it. 

[00:08:47] Kaytlin: Things can change!

[00:08:49] Gwyn: Yay! Okay, so SESTA FOSTA was the thing that made you shift gears. A lot of folks don't know what SESTA FOSTA is. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

[00:09:02] Kaytlin: Yeah reasonable. The list of federal acts that I could name in a given decade is 

[00:09:06] right, like yeah, of course. That makes sense to me that people don't know the names of the laws. Right. And I wish I didn't actually, I wish I knew less about this dumb law. But long story short on April 11th, in 2018, Donald Trump signed one of the most popular bipartisan bills of his administration into law.

[00:09:25] And it was called SESTA FOSTA, which stands for the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. And what it did legally was create an exception to Article 230, opening up internet platforms to a whole host of liabilities if their users were in promoting what was sold to the American people is human trafficking, but by definition prostitution, right?

[00:09:54] And so this is when Backpage was seized by the fbi. This is when Craiglist Erotic Services disappeared. Rent Boy went through a terrible raid, but this is where a lot of places that sex workers had built or been using to schedule and screen their. Post their boundaries, share harm reduction information with one another got taken down.

[00:10:15] And not surprisingly, the direct result of that was that none of us were safer. We were all more vulnerable to a wide variety of different kinds of, of exploitation. Most notably, people doing more for less because a source of income had been cut off. Right. And desperate people do desperate things. So you saw an immediate rise in street based prostitution. You saw an immediate rise in sex workers annoying people basically on other platforms, right? Which causes a sort of cascading, right? It like turns up the temperature right on the, on the whorephobia. And people who had been playing the roles of like exploitative manager or pimp, right, coming back out of the woodwork offering access to clients because sex work is, at its core, a sales job.

[00:11:01] And so, you know, a bunch of my friends were sort of thrown immediately into financial disarray. And I I had like left politics because I was like, this is cocaine, emotionally, I don't, I don't wanna do this to myself anymore. And I did comedy, which was a meth, not, you know, not an improvement on the, the brain chemistry but anyway, I, I was like, you know, politics isn't right for me. It's not what I wanna do with my life. But I started talking to people about SESTA FOSTA and like really smart women, like pro-choice women, women that understand the deep history of misogyny were fighting tooth and nail for this terrible law that had a devastating impact on millions of women around the, the country and the world.

[00:11:42] Right? Because we like to export our media. So that's what got me. So I had been doing the podcast and the tone of the podcast really shifted into this call to action. And through that and through like sort of going to sex worker rights conferences and meeting the people that, that have been doing this work for decades, I fell into the role of working with an incredible team of dedicated advocates at a national advocacy organization talking to legislators about this issue.

[00:12:09] And after two years of doing that, it became really clear to me that we're not gonna get anywhere good policy-wise on this issue, there are too many pitfalls, too many false narratives. Legislators are too susceptible to like, you know, regulatory control on the one hand or you know, the criminalization of clients and like the sort of failed end demand policies on the other.

[00:12:30] We need to change the story. We need to fundamentally shift the way that we think and talk about sex work. And so, Old Pros sort of grew out of that frustration and that vision. And as you know, a storyteller, as a standup comedian, somebody you know, in, in the arts, I really do believe that media, art, and storytelling and the power of proximity. Being able to be in the same room, right. And make eye contact with people that are willing to be open and out about their sex work experience does so much to counter the obviously fake and wrong and bad narrative that falls apart as soon as somebody actually meets a sex worker. And so that, that is and, and here I, and this is what they teach you to do as an executive director, by the way.

[00:13:17] And it's why, it's why we're so annoying is that like, and it always circles back to, our vision, but I do think it is foundational and, and fundamental to change the story in order to change the legal and social status of sex workers.

[00:13:31] Gwyn: Well, and the thing about SESTA FOSTA is that it was promoted to be, you know, stop harming our children stop, trafficking people, but it's actually made trafficking people a lot easier.

[00:13:41] Kaytlin: Yeah, legitimately made, made trafficking harder to prosecute, harder to find and it decreased the negotiating power of like victims and service providers alike. It didn't matter where on the spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion you fell on. You were worse off the day after SESTA FOSTA passed than you were the day before.

[00:14:02] Gwyn: I believe it was you, I've heard talk about how it was really part of war on Women.

[00:14:08] Kaytlin: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that is a pattern that, that we really need to be more vocal about. Through my work on the podcast and with this show, I've spent a lot of time talking about this period of history. You know, called the American Plan. And it was the, the result of several, both federal and state level laws that framed you know, cracking down on promiscuity, not prostitution, promiscuity an important public health initiative.

[00:14:34] And so it, the Draft Act and, and subsequent copycat laws after it enabled local law enforcement to round up women, they suspected of being loose and fancy free and subjecting them to a wide variety of horrible things, right? From sort of mandatory sort of like medical imprisonment to actual prison, to being put on a stigmatized list that prevented that woman from, you know, being able to get a job or get property or marry or move. It really limited the freedom of movement of many people. And it's a, a whole legal apparatus that went on for decades. You know, imprisoning thousands of women and creating a system where like women really were not able to access public space in a meaningful way. All in the immediate aftermath of white women winning the right to vote with the suffrage movement.

[00:15:24] And so the, the sort of two tier, like the intertwinedness right, of this massive effort to like legislate and, and further enact controls on the specifically sexual choices of women was happening at a time where more of us were, were more free. And I think that we are living through a very similar backlash now, and it alarms me that feminists do not see the intersecting interests of sex worker rights and feminist values. Because the way that you police prostitution, historically, is you police where women go, what they wear who and why they have sex. Like this is not a future that any self-respecting feminist should be fighting for.

[00:16:13] Gwyn: So, Along those lines, tell us about the Old Pros Network.

[00:16:18] Kaytlin: Sure. Yeah. So the Oldest Profession Podcast I encourage you to, to download it rate and review, tell your friends, all of that jazz. But that is one of many media products that we produce at Old Pros, right? Which is a, a non-profit media organization. So, we've produced Old Pro News. We've produced a series of short documentaries through the Old Pro Project. We just started producing events. We had our first Old Pro Show last night at Caveat Theater, which was amazing. It was standing room only. Get your tickets early, be sure you're on the list. We wanna make that a monthly event. We've got Whore's Eye View, both readings, and then, you know, as that show develops, we'll be you know, taking it to theaters and then we present at conferences and to small groups of like, thought leaders, think tanks, legislators, you know, we make ourselves available to be the first old pro that people are meeting. If that makes sense.

[00:17:09] Gwyn: Absolutely are most of the folks that are involved sex workers or previous sex workers? 

[00:17:14] Kaytlin: A lot of the folks that we have involved are sex workers. We do not ask or encourage our team to, to out themselves as like a, a function of working, but we, we make it a priority and a point to hire sex workers when we can.

[00:17:28] Gwyn: It just seems as though it would make sense for perspective in working to have a sense of what it is that you're working for.

[00:17:35] Kaytlin: Yes. Yes.

[00:17:37] Gwyn: So there's a lot that is involved in the network. You mentioned Whore's Eye View, that's your, your one woman show.

[00:17:43] Kaytlin: Yes. Yeah. Going to conferences, hosting events you know, the old pro show, the podcast that we produce, we aspire to produce short and long form documentaries. But really, you know, we bring people together and we change people's minds, right? So we create opportunities to go. To where there, there are people, right?

[00:18:02] We table at events, we present at conferences, we host our own events. We produce our own events. But we feel like we put on a pretty good and convincing road show. And we're able to scale those from two minute conversations at a conference or at a canvas to the 75 minute Whore's Eye View show.

[00:18:18] We're willing to go as deep as we, as we can.

[00:18:22] Gwyn: Balls deep?

[00:18:24] Kaytlin: Yeah, for sure. That's, yeah. I mean obviously that costs extra

[00:18:27] Gwyn: Yeah, of course and I was looking on the website earlier, it looks like you've got a bunch of really nice resources available for people.

[00:18:35] Kaytlin: Yeah. Thank you so much for mentioning that. So, you know, we have crafted these talking points after, you know, years of talking to folks that come to this issue from a variety of different angles, right? Like I said, we are often people's first old pro. And so we started sort of you know, putting this might... not to sound like a cold-hearted political strategist here, but we started putting these people in, into buckets in our head of like, ah, this is this type of person, this is that type of person. Demographics, you know, voting constituencies. 

[00:19:04] And so we found that the most critical folks to activate and move on this issue are feminists, as I mentioned before. So we have a gender based, violence focused one pager. We have a reproductive justice focused one pager. And we, you know, also the lgbtq plus community, we have a one pager dedicated to the intersecting realities, right of our two interconnected oppressions. We also have a disability one pager. We're working on a Christian values one pager. 

[00:19:34] Yeah, I mean, so what we encourage folks to do is these are freely available as downloadable PDFs, right? Just like two sided short cards. And they're great for individuals. If you wanna like, prepare for. You know, a holiday gathering or where you know you're gonna be talking to somebody about this issue, you know, you can think about who they are and where they stand and, and see if you can't you know, use these talking points to, to get further along in the conversation or, you know, if you have events or wanna like get these, get these talking points distributed. But I encourage folks to use this as a personal resource and a collective group resource. 

[00:20:08] And we'd love feedback, right? If you, take this and, and make it your own, you know, if you wanna say it differently and you feel like that's having impact we'd love to hear about that. But as a comic, political strategist and, and you know, rhetorically minded person, my team and I spent a lot of time sort of crafting these talking points. We've taken them on the road and I think it can be really helpful to give people language when they're engaging in these really sticky conversations.

[00:20:35] Gwyn: Because conversation is really the only way that things move along and having actual conversation as opposed to just yelling your ideas at somebody is the only thing that will really work. So it's nice to be able to have that language to pull on.

[00:20:54] Kaytlin: Yeah, one to one conversations are really powerful. You know, we found that with we ran a canvas in 2021. We, we'd love to be able to do that again. It is not an efficient way to raise money, but it is an effective way to change minds. You know, we had 10,000 conversations in, in three months, right.

[00:21:11] Ranging. Yeah. And this is, you know, often the first time people are hearing about sex worker rights. And it's an opportunity to, to frame that narrative and to introduce folks to this movement. And we think that like being public facing and like being in spaces in proximity, visible in spaces is really important.

[00:21:34] Gwyn: Yeah, I agree. Being able to put a face to things is, is really helpful and, and realizing that, yeah, we're not just a, a set of cartoonish extremes. Along those lines, you've talked about how legalization in Nevada is not great.

[00:21:50] Kaytlin: I mean, Sure. I mean, you know, if, if you think that women are people, right? If you think that, you know, sex workers are commodities, then the system is working great. But yeah. Legalization or like regulatory efforts that are grounded in ideas about controlling sex workers inevitably create state enforced monopolies that only benefit the brothel owner. So it's all of this sort of like abusive power dynamics that people point to. Right. You know, criminalized. Pimps or exploitative third party managers, right? And they say this is the reason that prostitution is bad.

[00:22:25] But regulatory efforts, licensing schemes, asking people to put themselves on stigmatized lists, mandatory STI tests all have the same effect, right? Of creating a two-tiered system that exacerbates all of the harms of criminalization. For, you know, one half of that community and then traps the other half of that community into dependency, right?

[00:22:50] On someone they don't need in their life. And, and Nevada's a great example of this, right? It is the only state with legal regulated prostitution, and it has the highest arrest rate per capita for prostitution related offenses. That metric alone tells you that this system isn't working for sex workers. There are lots of reasons why that's true. In order to work legally in Nevada, you have to register as a legally licensed prostitute. This becomes subpoenable about you for the rest of your life. You can imagine how this plays out in child custody cases. There are lots of good reasons why people don't wanna put themselves on stigmatized lists and opt out at that point.

[00:23:29] You have to be hired by a brothel, which are notoriously sexist, homophobic places, right? That privilege tall, skinny, white girls, which is great, but like, if you're not in that category, then it can be difficult for you to even get one of the, the few available jobs. You have to, you know, of course obviously be able to like legally work and there are other restrictions. But once you become a legally licensed sex worker and you take one of these jobs at a legally licensed brothel, you are no longer allowed to come and go as you please. You are no longer allowed to freely patronize neighboring restaurants or businesses. You have to stay on the premises of that brothel. You have to undergo mandatory STI tests. And you have to follow the rules of the house, the county, and the state. 

[00:24:15] And it's truly sort of a dizzying array of rules. None of which protect, say example like, The fees that these sex workers pay. So, you know, in order to work at a brothel, you have to pay, you know you're hired by them, but they don't pay you, right? The customer pays you, and from that, you owe the brothel room and board. You owe them for your state mandated STI tests. You owe them for whatever it else is they tell you to buy because it's their brothel and they are not allowed to pay for any advertising. So you have to be like a social media mogul and like build your own brand and give your fans a place to, to sort of come. It's not a system that empowers service providers and I don't wanna advocate for it.

[00:25:01] Gwyn: So I grew up in Vegas. Very, very familiar with all of this. And the one thing that I think you need to include in the argument is that the brothels are an hour away at the minimum. And the towns that they're in are towns that have maybe a gas station, sometimes a jail. You know, if there's a bar, it's probably at the brothel. And the brothel it's nothing pretty. It's a bunch of trailers in the awful part of the desert, not the pretty part.

[00:25:31] Kaytlin: Which is another restriction on sex workers, right? It's not possible to work legally where the highest demand is in Vegas or Reno. You have to go out in the middle of nowhere, right? To these establishments that have invested right in, contorting themselves around this byzantine system of dumb laws. 

[00:25:48] Gwyn: Right. And, and, and, and that's why the, I mean, I'm sure that there are more reasons to it, but they're like that with gambling and marijuana is a felony Nevada, like, and anything that's slightly outside of what is legalized is clamped down on such an extreme it's just, it's ridiculous so that they can say that they're doing the right thing.

[00:26:10] Kaytlin: Right. Yeah. No, the, I mean, the history of Nevada, I think, you know, demonstrates this. We, we did an episode on the, the history of legalization and what you see throughout Nevada history during that period is like, it really is a compromise between, you know, government and organized crime controlling vice, right? It's like you can gamble here, but we're gonna own you for that whole process. And if you break any other laws, right? So like the casinos are sort of like uniquely hostile to smoking pot and selling sex. Not because they are virtuous at their professional gambling dens, but because if they are caught allowing that kind of behavior, then they risk losing their gaming license, which is an existential threat to their business. So yeah, it's bananas.

[00:26:54] Gwyn: So if you could fix everything with a wave of your magic wand, what would that look like?

[00:27:02] Kaytlin: It would look like destigmatizing and decriminalizing sex work, right? It would look like removing criminal penalties and working towards a future where no one was arrested, evicted, fired, or lost custody of their child just for engaging in this work. And I think that that alone, Would allow sex workers to contribute their wisdom and knowledge to the communities they're already in. It would allow them to take care of their families. It would open up a huge source of wealth and stability that I think would truly be transformative. I think that our continued war on whores is in a way efforts to maintain the social status quo. It's a form of coercive control.

[00:27:49] Gwyn: Is there any society that you know out throughout history that has done this?

[00:27:55] Kaytlin: I mean, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that like we as a species spent a long time with sort of like fertility deities and sacred sex and other things that sound awesome.

[00:28:07] New Zealand has decriminalized sex work in 2003 and had some pretty incredible results. You know, huge reduction in violence across the board, right? Huge reduction in STI rates because when you. Increase the negotiating power of sex workers. We do advocate for our own health. So it's we've seen, we don't have to guess at what the positive ramifications of decriminalizing sex work would be. We have, you know, empirical evidence. This has been tried before, but we also can't rewind history and make it like not a patriarchy. So, you know, we are all, we're all operating in the system we're in. Yeah.

[00:28:48] Gwyn: Have you done any or you and your team done any research into, like Pompeii and those areas where we are aware that there were brothels and sex work was a part of the culture, but we don't have any real understanding of how that looked. I don't have any real understanding. 

[00:29:05] Kaytlin: We have an old episode about Phryne who was a courtisan in ancient Athens but like, I think that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that there have always been you know, different people doing different things. And so societies that have brothels might also have courtisans might also have kept women, might also have dancing girls. You know, We know that sort of like commercial sex as we understand it comes into the world in Athens, right? Which is a huge port town with lots of travelers coming in and out. And then it was a, a way for sailors and merchants who spend a lot of different time in different places to like do sex for money instead of like sex for religious rights, right? It's like I'm tired of learning 12 different rituals just to get laid, ya know in every port that we're, you know, it's fine, And as soon as that happened you see, you see slave brothels in Athens, right? Which had slavery and had, you know, stables. 

[00:29:59] And you also see that the only women who are able to accumulate wealth independently in that society are courtisans who are sex workers that are operating at the highest level. And so both of those things exist simultaneously. So I think we can learn a lot on how brothels are run, but like every major metropolitan, you know, area's got lots of different kinds of people doing lots of different kinds of things.

[00:30:25] Gwyn: Have there been new studies coming out from New Zealand on what things are? It's been 15 years.

[00:30:32] Kaytlin: Yes. Yeah, it's been, there's been a lot of studies. I know a lot of Fulbright scholars who have gone over. You know, New Zealand all of the studies are in English. It's very accessible. I encourage my academic minded friends to like, go forth, seek out what has been studied, what did people find? My favorite story to come out of New Zealand is a couple years ago a young woman was doing, you know, consensual adult sex work in a country where that was not a crime. And then her client refused to pay her at the end of their time together. And so she called the police and the police called the client and said, Hey dude, would you like to pay this young lady for her services or do you want us to come pick you up? And I think that's a pretty remarkable story.

[00:31:16] Gwyn: That's wonderful. Yeah. See people, it can be so easy.

[00:31:21] Kaytlin: Yeah

[00:31:23] Gwyn: So going back to the podcast, is there a favorite, do you have a favorite? 

[00:31:28] Kaytlin: I re-listened to my uh, my episode about Ching Shih recently, cuz I'm working on an essay and I, I'm really delighted with sort of like my enthusiasm. This is still back in my Wikipedia days. So I was like wrong about her age and some facts that I now know, which is fine. But yeah, the greatest pirate to ever live was a sex worker. And like, I wish more people knew that. And I think that like the fact that we have multiple series starring Johnny Depp as like a pirate king and Ching Shih makes an appearance and isn't the main character of that whole thing. Feels like a missed opportunity for me.

[00:32:01] Gwyn: Is there anything that we haven't covered that you wanna be sure that you get out there?

[00:32:06] Kaytlin: Thank you so much for having me. And you know, I encourage your listeners to, check out the podcast, join our email list, and I hope to see y'all at an Old Pros event in the not too distant future.

[00:32:18] Gwyn: Perfect. We'll leave it there and thank you so much. I will include all of the appropriate information in the things, and people please go check it out in one way or another. 

[00:32:29] Kaytlin: Awesome, badass. Thank you Gwyn, this was a delight. And I hope to see you at an Old Pro's event soon.

[00:32:35] Gwyn: So did you enjoy the conversation with Kaytlin Bailey? What were your takeaways? Maybe you'll join her in the growing movement to decriminalize sex work. You can start really easily by visiting OldProsOnline.org or simply adding the Oldest Profession podcast to your pod feed and learning some of this fantastic history for yourself.

[00:33:04] The links are in the show notes, of course. Hopefully you'll be able to find at whatexcitesus.com. There's a little glitch still happening with the website, but hopefully by the time you hear it, it'll be all fixed and if it's not just come back in a day or two. We are actually really working on it diligently.

[00:33:26] Anyway. I'd like to thank again Kaytlin Bailey for making the time to chat with me and hopefully I didn't fan girl too much. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure that you are subscribed to all my episodes and tell a friend so that we can continue to normalize these conversations. 

[00:33:46] Also rate and review the podcast if you're on one of the apps that does that, you wouldn't believe how much that helps spread the word. If you'd like to learn more about working with me, other episodes, or how you can make this a two-way conversation, please visit whatexcitesus.com. What Excites Us is produced, edited, and hosted by me, Gwyn Isaacs.

[00:34:09] All the music is used under the Creative Commons attribution license. The opening song is The Vendetta by Stephen Kartenberg, and this is Quando by Julius H. I'm working on discovering my signature sign off, so if you have any ideas, let me know. Until then, I so totally appreciate you and thanks for listening.