As a young feminist growing into my political and philosophical shell, I didn’t know much about formal feminist theory and hadn’t even begun to dig into the droves of research about sex work and female prostitution. My 16 year-old self only knew two things: the third and fourth wave feminists are infallibly right, and my mother is infallibly wrong.
I can still hear the chants from the marches I attended with my friends:
“No bad whores! Just bad laws! Sex worker rights are human rights! When we say: Sex work! You say: Real work! Sex work! Real work!”
Black and white.
I thought questioning it was a betrayal of my new-age feminist identity. I thought anybody willing to question it was betraying their feminist identity. Every part of me thought that female prostitution should be not only legal, but celebrated as a reclamation after so many years of violent sexual objectification and patriarchal oppression of the female body.
But this issue lives on the greyscale, anywhere besides black and white; the first step to coming to some sort of productive discussion surrounding female prostitution is both acknowledging and accepting this fact.
That’s not to say I don’t support the decriminalization of sex work – I do. Criminalization especially harms groups disproportionately vulnerable to turning to sex work as a result of poverty and discrimination. This includes Black and Hispanic women, as well as transexual people. The criminalization of their selling sex is a criminalization of their poverty.
In the United States, Black youth account for 62 percent of minors arrested for prostitution, a startlingly disproportionate number, as Black people make up only 13.2 percent of the U.S. population. The effects of arrest, ranging from fines to public shaming to being added to the sex offender registry, can last a lifetime
Arrest and/or police abuse has led sex workers to avoid reporting crimes committed against them or even to report the trafficking of others. Criminalization discourages women from meeting buyers first in safer, more public places, business premises, or in groups to assess potential danger. Additionally, they are less likely to use condoms because they can be used as police evidence of prostitution and consequently lead to arrest.
The current laws surrounding women in sex work are, no doubt, extremely isolating and make the act far more dangerous than it should be. At the same time, however, I find it important to circle back to something I mentioned above: “Criminalization especially harms groups disproportionately vulnerable to turning to sex work as a result of poverty and discrimination.”
We tend to hear most of the first-hand testimony about sex work from white women who have access to large platforms. Take Chloe Cherry for example. The star was on season two of the hit Max show Euphoria and has garnered over one million followers on Instagram since. She has long worked in porn, and was quick to speak up about it on Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast.
“I really, really, really don’t understand what is wrong with sex work. To me, it seems like people hate women,” said Cherry.
YouTtube star Trish Paytas is another example. She announced to her 5 million subscribers that at the height of her career on OnlyFans, an online sex-content platform, she was making $1 million per month. To be frank, with those numbers, it’s not much of a surprise that she’s an unwavering advocate.
But sex work is historically linked with poverty, and the majority of women who turn to it have no other option. These are the same women who more than likely do not have any sort of platform or safe opportunity to speak out in support of any sort of sex work in a positive and/or negative way. The public is far less likely to hear stories of violence or exploitation because the women who experience it on a daily basis are afraid of coming forward; they could lose their tonly sources of income, face arrest or worse.
This is partially why decriminalization is a necessary measure to promote safe conditions and to limit the consequences of structural racism and police abuse on sex workers, particularly sex workers of color. However, it’s also just a bandaid on a bullet hole.
We’ve been asking the wrong questions. It shouldn’t be a debate about whether or not prostitution is moral or immoral. About whether it’s empowering or degrading. About whether the old-age or the new-age feminists have it right. Rather, why do so many women feel they have no other choice besides sex work, and what is that indicative of?
Sex work is not simply a feminist reclamation of sex or an exercise of female power. It is evidence of a much deeper structural issue – female poverty – and it’s paramount that this part of the conversation not be swept under the rug in the name of progressivism. It’s paramount that if we talk about sex work’s potential to empower, we consider its roots in disempowerment.