Addressing Some Misconceptions About Sex Work

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1. Isn't prostitution mostly a choice?

When women involved in sex work are asked if they want to leave, consistently around 90% say that they would stop immediately if they could, but the decision is out of their hands and in the hands of their pimps, their husbands, their landlords, their addictions, their children's bellies. A recent study of street prostitutes in Toronto found that about 90% wanted to leave but could not, and a 5-country study found 92% wanted out of prostitution. If they are there because they cannot leave, they are not choosing to be there.

If prostitution were really a choice, it would not be those populations with the fewest choices available to them who are so disproportionately forced into it. If prostitution were a choice, there would no human trafficking—no billion-dollar black market trade in coerced, tricked, kidnapped and enslaved people.

2. Sex is a powerful commodity.

Tulips were once considered a powerful commodity. That is to say, what men place value on is up to men's subjectivity and is not a human universal. The same was once said about trading black flesh. We're not talking about "commodities to be traded" but human beings. In prostitution it is not sex that is sold—it is power over women.

3. Men would treat prostitutes better if it were legalized.

This has not born itself out in legalization trials in Australia, the Netherlands and Germany.

All attempts to lessen the harms of prostitution have failed because men persist in their debasement of female sexuality and propensity to commit gendered violence. There are plenty of medical records, police records and personal testimonies to substantiate men's violence against women in places where prostitution has been legalized. Where prostitution thrives, the value of women's lives is low and the gendered violence they suffer has not decreased. In fact, the province of Victoria, Australia, in which prostitution has been legalized, has both the country's highest domestic violence rates and highest child prostitution rates.

In theory, it sounds good to say that sane, reasonable people should have the right to sell a kidney for $500 or more if they choose to. But opening the door to body organ selling would not lead hordes of middle-class white American men to sell their organs; instead, such sales would come almost exclusively from populations whose social circumstances cannot seriously be said to allow for free, uncoerced choice.

4. Hasn't prohibition been shown to fail?

Depends on what you're prohibiting. We as a culture prohibit child porn, and it's true that prohibition doesn't "work," if "working" refers to the total eradication of the prohibited material. That doesn't mean, however, that the only other option is legalization.

When we stop focusing all attention on whether or not poverty-stricken teenage girls with abusive histories "really" want to be whores and begin asking why so many men are unbelievably, horrifically violent towards prostituted people, we will begin to ask the right questions. Sweden, for example, no longer blames young women for their own rape, torture and captivity, and recognizes that it is men's demand for bodies to abuse that is the real crime in the sex work equation.

5. Prostitution is world's oldest profession and will always exist.

Prostitution is not the oldest profession—pimping is, men selling or trading female bodies amongst each other for profit. Saying prostitution is the oldest profession makes it sound like women (the sex workers) have always been the cunning seducers, wielding their mighty sexual power over defenseless men. This is a grotesque misogynist lie that men have always promoted because it absolves them of responsibility for the violence they do children and women, and casts them as the victims of women's sexual wiles.

5. Shouldn't prostitution be legalized and thought of as a normal job?

I don't believe that will ever happen, and with good reason. There's no reason to believe there will be a day when being naked won't make people feel vulnerable and exposed. Having a piece of someone else's body penetrate your body is to feel what thousands of prostitutes interviewed say they feel: like a human toilet, like they are being raped over and over again. There is no reason to think this experience will be altered simply by removing some of the social stigma attendant on sex work.

Contrary to what pro-prostitution advocates claim, the worst thing sex workers face is not social stigma, it is rape, strangulation, beatings, burnings and other violence from johns and pimps (pimps being the party johns pay to outsource the violence necessary to keep sex workers obedient.)

6. Why pretend prostitution isn't a part of everyday life?

I don't see anyone pretending our culture isn't saturated with the selling of female bodies, especially not the social workers and researchers trying to find solutions to the misery. When I hear people talk of legalizing it, I see a whole lot of pretending the misogyny and abuse intrinsic to the act of prostitution can somehow be wished away. A number of experiments in legalizing prostitution—some of which, like Sweden's were decades-long—have proved that this simply isn't possible.

7. A lot of women enjoy the work

There is no research or collected evidence supporting this claim. 100% of sex workers in 5 different countries said they didn't want anyone they loved to ever have to prostitute their bodies for survival.

8. Do you think prostitutes should be arrested?

Absolutely not, since I don't believe being desperately poor and/or abused is a crime. But johns, pimps and other sexual predators need to stop their criminally abusive behaviors—and asking them nicely hasn't been working.

9. But people need sex and some have no other way to get it than from prostitutes.

No one "needs" sex like they need food, water and air, and no one has the right to purchase access to another person's reproductive organs in order to masturbate themselves.

Buying prostitutes is less about sexual gratification than about power gratification, because in an exchange of equal partners there is always the risk of disagreement and the need for compromise. 60% of American johns report having regular female sexual partners.

10. But you agree porn and stripping aren't prostitution, right?

Of course they are. If getting paid to perform sex acts is prostitution, using a camera to record people getting paid to perform sex acts is. It is comfortable for people to call porn performers "actresses" to distance themselves from the truth: porn actresses have a lot more in common with other sex workers than they do with other actresses, such as poverty, drug addiction, and a history of sexual assault.

In one study, 100% of strippers interviewed said they had been propositioned for paid sex by strip club patrons. If you don't think strippers are prostitutes, please recognize that your opinion differs greatly from that of men who spend their money to make women submit to them in strip clubs.

11. Can't prostitution be made medically safer with regulations?

Sometimes more safe is still not safe enough. Unless prostituted women are rilized, they can expect to get pregnant and must have repeated abortions. Neither sterilization nor submission to repeated abortions is acceptable, and there is no 100% effective method of containing the spread of deadly STDs.

I'm much more concerned with preventing rape, battery, torture etc., than I am in patching women up after men torture them. Regulating prostitution is about men organizing to provide other men easy access to disease-free bodies, and has nothing to do with women's health, welfare, or well-being.

12. If you try to stop prostitution, won't it just go underground?

This is extortion, something like: "If feminists don't agree to provide men with fresh bodies for their entertainment and sexual self-gratification, then johns can't be held responsible for what they do—and it'll all be the feminists' fault."

Basing public policy measures on the extortionist threat of increased violence in an already very violent environment is no way for a civil society to operate. Also, legalization has not only not stopped the violence prostituted people face, it has actually made it harder for victims to "prove" they were forced and increased the number of people involved with the sex industry overall, hence expanding the number of people affected without stopping the violence.

13. What about women like Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, etc. who say they enjoy being prostitutes?

As with antiwar leaders, many former prostitutes (Andrea Dworkin, Norma Hotaling, Kelly Holsopple, Carol Smith, Anne Bissell) are themselves survivors of the commercial sex industry.

That a few paid prostitutes have learned to profit from advocating the legalization of prostitution does not hold water next to the responses of the overwhelming number of prostitutes without columns in porn magazines, book deals, their own websites, nationwide tours and scheduled appearances on the talk show circuit for exorbitant speaking fees. Some advocates of legalized prostitution, such as Robyn Few and Margo St. James, have been convicted on pimping charges, though they continue to present themselves as ordinary sex workers—not as major players in organizing crimes against prostituted women.

If the wealthy pimps, pornographers and governments who want legalization had solid information proving that legalization has met its stated goals, why wouldn't they spread that information across the Earth? Hugh Hefner would probably make a centerfold out of such "women like it and it's healthy" research.

14. Legalizing prostitution is part of a wider campaign of sexual liberation

Liberation for who? What is it about sex and women that lowers a woman's perceived cultural value if she has sex (even without money) or forcibly, as in cases of rape? Changing the cultural economy that makes sexually active women worthless needs to be changed before legalization can honestly be considered.

There is the unfortunate neoliberal misconception that free markets are the best kind, that the economic marketplace can regulate itself through the cause and effects of competition, supply and demand. Ask yourself if Wal-mart is really the world's largest private employer because they are "better" than other companies. In light of the evident failures of free marketism to produce diverse, consumer-driven and fair business practices, how well should the free marketplace of ideas fare under the same laissez faire system? Why wouldn't we expect the same opportunistic consolidations where money equals the right to speech?

15. Why can't you see johns/tricks who pay for prostitutes as just customers of sexual services?

The man with the money has all the power. A man who has paid to have his sexual fantasies realized expects precisely that, and there are real limits on how much a sex worker can dictate as to what will happen and how far it will go—and this is borne out by the testimony of sex workers themselves. Johns are the demand that keeps the supply of prostituted bodies in constant motion.

It's true that johns do not forcibly abduct women, get them hooked on drugs, seize control of their lives, or in any other way lure them into the sex trade—because they don't have to. Pimps do it for them. Johns and other consumers of commercial sex (e.g. strip club patrons, porn audiences) participate in a system that perpetuates itself through violence and coercion—then say they can't be held responsible.


Courtesy: www.genderberg.com

Fetishizing Oppression and Adapting the Language: Authentic Suffering in Words We Can Understand

On March 5th, 2006 Tufts Women’s Center in conjunction with Tufts Feminist Alliance and Reslife sponsored the production of Deborah Fortsen’s Body & Sold. Purportedly about trafficking, the performance featured a handful of actors reading adaptations of personal narratives interspersed with occasional and seemingly arbitrary choreography. A question and answer session followed the piece.

Body & Sold catered to a voyeuristic trope of fetishized oppression among college students, complicating issues of sexuality, class, home, family, and sex work for viewers. At the same time, its messianic manner reinforced some of the most dangerous misunderstandings about sex work while flattening the issue. Director of the Women’s Center, Peggy Barrett’s, subsequent explanation of her sponsorship indicated dangerous campus-wide misunderstandings of agency.


Employing adulterated first person narratives to tell a “humanizing” account of sex-trafficking, effectively erased and delegitimized actual identities. Within her “accounts,” Fortsen clearly edited the words of her respondents. She had her characters using comparatively intellectualized language and gender studies specific-jargon, which overpowered the tales.

When I spoke with Fortsen a week after the performance, she assured me that the message her characters conveyed was representative of the messages she had gotten from the interviews. So why change the language at all? It was as if Fortsen was helping the people express themselves better than they could without her, as if she was able to articulate words they meant to say (if only they knew them.) Fortsen privileges her own words over others’, seemingly authentic dialects over actual slang, and specificity over more nuanced linguistic construction and capable heteroglossia.


What Fortsen tacitly does in translating her interviews into allegedly communicable ideas goes farther than making stories “intelligible to ignorant audiences.” She makes a statement about what is normal, what is understandable, what is rational, and consequently makes another statement about what is not. Fortsen is guilty of reifying the dangerous classist and racist realities, which help perpetuate violence against women. As Ratcliff points out in “Violence Against Women,” and Cabreros-Sud touches on in “Kicking Ass,” whenever it is convenient, women on the margins are in danger of being erased.

These are often women who, because they are poor or less educated, are perceived as less intelligent, less credible, and less important. Therefore they signify as inferior women. Cabreros-Sud demands we stop homogenizing women based on race and class. But Fortsen makes matters worse as she tailors voices to be heard, making strong but silent statements about what is worth listening to.

Body & Sold also contributed to a thriving campus fascination with oppression. Dorothy Allison talks about the difficulty of relaying spectacular poverty in the first essay of her book, Trash. There she explains how her own history can only occur as a drama- a tragedy or comedy—but can never be re-realized in anecdote. This same limitation principle ensures that Fortsen’s play does nothing more than elevate the audience above the unfortunate and suffering sex workers.

I spoke to director of the women's center, Peggy Barrett, a few days after the production to try to better understand her motives for bringing the play and possibly raise questions about the actual implications of the show. Barrett explained that she wanted to warn women to be careful the choices they make. She has become increasingly aware of students trading sex for favors (at Tufts and on other campuses.) She wanted to nip the issue in the bud.

This explanation, however, betrays a deep misunderstanding of the economic aspects of sex work. Barrett’s warning implies that women in sex work are women who made unwise decisions or have allowed themselves to be duped. Barrett did sneak in a brief and seemingly requisite plug for recognizing women’s agency; she told me that some women do like sex work and reminded me that she isn’t criticizing them. Unfortunately that argument only worsened the trouble by saying that women who are unhappy in sex work are gullible, dumb, desperate, or sick. The only actual effects of this type of warning are, of course, to further stigmatize sex workers on campus.

This is especially dangerous because the student body at Tufts is largely white and largely not poor. To say that women should be wary of the situations in which they become entangled, fundamentally criticizes the Fortsen’s trafficked youth. In this case, it questions people with unstable families- particularly poor people, sons and daughters of single parents, and people whose families have a history of addiction and abuse. This may not explicitly pathologize the poor and people of color (disproportionately “disadvantaged”) but it does reiterate dangerous racist and classist fallacies.