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One of the most frustrating parts of talking to people about decriminalizing sex work is that too many people refuse to listen to sex workers who sell sex because they WANT to. The insistence from some quarters that sws are beleaguered, exploited in need of saving is gross.
There are folks who are going to read this & run up with examples of sex trafficking. And that’s different from sex work. That’s rape and exploitation. Sex work is where a consenting adult sells sex and/or physical/verbal fantasy to another adult(s). Trafficking isn’t sex work.
We’re so conditioned the world over to think of sex workers—especially women—as people “forced” for whatever reason into this supposedly-moral degradation without considering, ever, that sws may actually like their work AND that for some, it pays better than “respectable” work.
Discomfort with sws and the desperate desire of folks like Ashe & Seth Meyer to “help” by making conditions more dangerous for sws is based on their disbelief that workers—especially women—may not think of sex like they do. That startles them to consider different value systems.
And their own innate prejudices about the value of labor; what counts as labor; who should benefit from what labor, combined with their conflicted personal feelings about how people should have sex, entitled them to keep sws—especially women—from pursuing Econ stability.
It’s just shockingly bad logic to think that continuing to stigmatize sws as people without agency, who “need” “respectable” people to save them from themselves, is somehow GOOD for people. That barring them from making a living in their chosen work is “empowerment.”
And it’s entirely morals-based prejudice. If it wasn’t, these folks would point out the most obvious flaw in the Nordic Model which is to criminalize buyers, thus not allowing sws to work. The goal is to control who has sex and for what purpose. That’s the point of the crusade.
I notice that no actual working sex worker was consulted for that InStyle article. It’s not like they’re aren’t innumerable workers they could have contacted, who WANT to talk about this. But nah. Talking to Raquel Savage would not have advanced the savior narrative.
And it bears repeating—sex work in all its forms—stripping, call/cam work, porn lit, photography and film, actual sexual intercourse & sex acts, erotic massage parlors, ALL OF IT—are services people WANT. For any number of reasons, several of which revolve around dissatisfaction
With partners. And there are only a million reasons why couples choose not to have those difficult convos. So sex work in all its forms is an in-demand service with thousands of people who choose that work and who deserve to be paid for their services.
The compartmentalization folks make between stripping, erotic massage & porn vs. intercourse/acts is wild to me, too. It just defies all logic. Esp. the volume of people who are titillated by and look at leaked nudes like that’s legitimate porn? But sex work is “exploitative”?
It’s a frustrating conversation, and one that is muddied by people’s pretenses and bigotry, and their sexism. Because at the end of the day the anti-sws crusade is about controlling the terms and conditions of who has sex and why.
