Prostitution is not work: The crib sheet

Published online at Feminist Current and printed in the April 2021 book Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century edited by Elizabeth Miller.

Another research paper promoting the legalization of prostitution as beneficial has been released. Titled, “Associations between sex work laws and sex workers’ health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of quantitative and qualitative studies”, the report was funded by the staunchly pro-legalization Open Society Foundation in service of “tackling the structural drivers of HIV.”

Investigating the structural drivers of HIV transmission is a noble public health goal, however it is not a feminist goal. Feminism centers its advocacy on bettering the lives of women and girls. I have been writing feminist analyses of prostitution research for several years, which is to say I read research with the question, “How does this serve women and girls?” on my mind.

Expecting people to pore through the daunting statistics that sometimes spin even my academically-inclined head is unrealistic and also unnecessary. Statistics are useful to quantify the severe harms of prostitution, but I have found more success convincing people legalization exacerbates prostitution’s harms when I lay off the numbers and lay into common sense rationale connecting my audience to recognizable elements in their lives.

I wrote the “Genderberg Prostitution FAQ” in 2005 to emphasize reason over statistics and it remains the most popular page on my archived website Genderberg.com. Few emotions satisfy me more than occasionally seeing someone reiterate my point, “There is no other ‘job’ where a 13-year-old with zero experience can be sold for 100 times the price what a 23-year-old with ten years experience is sold.”

For December 17th’s International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, here are ten more pithy explanations for how prostitution is much more aligned with exploitation than with work.

1) No job title is threateningly flung in the faces of women and girls all over the world the way “whore” and its many synonyms in many languages are used to commit verbal abuse.

2) Prostitution is often compared to coal mining. Harms to coal miners are accidents that safety equipment aims to reduce; harms to prostituted women are intentionally inflicted on them. Pornography commonly portrays harming women as an attractive goal for consumers.

3) Prostitution is often compared to low-paid McJob work. Fast food employees don’t need specialized social services to help them quit the way prostitution survivors need protecting from pimps. When prostituted women escape they’re more often in the same situation as domestic violence victims, fleeing from imminent harm with only the clothes on their back and the fear of recapture in their minds.

4) Prostitution is often compared to cleaning toilets. Being forced by economic necessity to clean toilets every day would be deeply unpleasant but it isn’t rape and it doesn’t leave people with PTSD, sexually transmitted diseases, or unwanted pregnancies. Anyone who has both cleaned a toilet and engaged in sex could explain the vast differences in these two activities.

5) Prostitution is not service work, it is bodily exploitation. The sex, race, and age of who provides a legitimate service doesn’t matter for cashiers, plumbers, accountants, cab drivers, etc. the way it matters to prostitute-using men who won’t accept sexual services from a man’s body when they want a woman’s body or from an elderly woman’s body when they want a young girl’s body.

6) There is no occupation that can be done while the worker is unconscious. Prostitutes are often drugged, passed out from unendurable pain, or have head trauma inflicted on them before and during being sexually assaulted.

7) Prostitution is not an entertainment media profession like modeling or acting. Actresses pretend to have sex, prostituted women are not pretending sex and the harm to their bodies and minds is evidence of exploitation, not an occupation. There is no trafficking ring forcing teenage girls to perform Shakespeare for men’s leisure.

8) Basic work safety conditions are impossible to reconcile with prostitution. Laws about occupational exposure (“reasonably anticipated skin, eye, mucous membrane, or parenteral contact with blood or other potentially infectious materials”) mandate latex gloves, eye goggles, face masks, and aprons to protect employees. Prostitution can never be OSHA compliant.

9) Unionization is not possible. Pimps and pornographers call themselves sex workers because they are employed in the sex industry as they lobby for deregulation and exceptions to worker safety laws. You can’t negotiate your way out of being raped when enduring unwanted sex is the job.

10) “I’ll give you a dollar if you let me punch you in the face,” is not a freelance job offer and neither are prostitution solicitations. Men soliciting for prostitution in public are not magnanimously offering women jobs, no one approaches strangers in the street with offers of gainful employment.

Melania Trump, America’s first sex worker First Lady

published at Feminist Current December 17, 2016

In late November I was in the Portland State University’s Women’s Resource Center listening to a teacher explain that sex work is feminist work. Where an evidenced explanation for the Nordic Model’s supposed failure should have been, she asked the students to postulate a reason for its failure and one young woman guessed, “Because sex is used transactionally all the time, police can’t know if transactions are professional or not.” The teacher agreed and moved on to how not all prostitutes were raped as children.

In that woman’s mind and to the teacher’s agreement, sex is perceived mainly as a means to acquire things. All women are prostitutes, but some go on to make careers of it and the transition is so seamless that onlookers can’t tell the difference between having sex for stuff as an amateur and having sex for stuff as a pro.

I bring up this recent anecdote because the assembled sex-positive liberals in that class were adamantly anti-Trump and aghast at his election without reflecting on how Trump is the most pro-sex work president the USA has ever had.

The knee-jerk position of the American Left is to oppose anyone who goes through public life with an R in front of their name. However, liberal men are much more supportive of women as public sexual property than conservative men who prefer their women privately owned. So why are liberals who advocate for expanding the public harem deciding, against all his prior actions up to and including marrying a sex worker, that Donald Trump is anti-sex worker?

Jenni Kutner wrote for Mic about porn actress Jessica Drake, one of the dozens of women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse. She concluded:

“Trump has done more than imply how he feels about people in the sex industry. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t view them as people at all.”

According to Drake, he treated her the same as he has numerous other women, “He grabbed each of us tightly, in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking permission.” That’s an ordinary day for the world’s most notorious pussy-grabber. Donald Trump treats women the same way he treats sex workers because he agrees with the Portland State teacher and student that all women prostitute, some are simply more organized about it than others.

Drake said Trump called her later and offered her $10,000 for sex plus the use of his private jet to get back home the next day.

I haven’t seen any of the people who want to legitimize prostitution as a profession acknowledge Trump’s generosity here. It’s very rare for a sex worker to make $10,000 in one night. A sum of that amount should be cause for sex-positive celebration and an example of a man honoring the work of sex they proclaim it is. The added offer of a private jet ride home afterwards surely makes him a gentleman john if ever there was one.

Robert Brannon of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism collected details of Trump’s financial dealings that support prostitution in his article, “Donald Trump and the Sex Industry.” Among his findings are such pro-sex worker facts as Trump’s Taj Mahal casino being the first casino in Atlantic City to have an in-house strip club and Trump’s numerous collaborations with Playboy:

“Donald Trump, himself, has appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine, and has proudly performed as an ‘actor’ in three different Playboy-produced ‘softcore’ pornography videos in 1999, 2001, and 2004 (Moye, 2016). He was always fully clothed, but in other scenes in these films, many women were naked. In the most recent film, young women are shown naked in sexual positions, dancing naked, rubbing honey on their breasts, taking a bath, and suggestively touching themselves and each other while naked (Moye, 2016).”

And still the mainstream liberal media keeps trying to paint Donald Trump as anti-sex work.

Rolling Stone ran a story on sex workers donating tips to Planned Parenthood in protest of Trump that included this rationale, “Whether their clients are Republicans or Democrats, they all spend the same money.“

AlterNet ran a story wondering if a Trump presidency will be bad for the porn industry.

What more could this avid client of erotic service providers possibly do to show he’s one hundred percent on the side of pimps, pornographers, and sex workers? Would marrying a sex worker, having her bear his son, and making her America’s first sex worker First Lady suffice?

Apparently not.

Even the most apologetic of commentators can’t bring themselves to claim Melania Trump as one of their own and congratulate her on her new position as First Lady. Self styled “dominatrix and sex worker” Margaret Corvid poses the oddly noncommittal question, “Who Cares If Melania Trump Was Maybe A Sex Worker?” as if it doesn’t matter that an alleged former sex worker will be America’s First Lady for the next four years.

Corvid avoids treating Melania Trump as an agent of her own destiny and turns the topic towards herself and the abuse liberal men continue to dish out to prostituted women, “When liberals aim at Melania for alleged sex work, they hit me with their bullets of shame.”

It would be a step forward for Corvid to stop being wishy-washy about Ms. Trump’s rumored past and embrace it. Perhaps then she could show concern for the woman whose naked image is being used by liberals as a cudgel to hit conservatives with instead of twisting it into an attack on herself by proxy.

Jill Filipovic, a former AlterNet editor and Guardian columnist who typifies the politics of third wave feminism, once wrote about begrudgingly allowing abusive men the legal right to purchase sex:

“I do think men who get off not just on sex but on exploitation are irredeemable shitholes, though. And yeah, they should have a legal right to access porn and to pay for sex (with people who are above the age of consent). But I still think they’re shitholes…”

By her own stated ethics, Filipovic should accept that not-convicted not-rapist Donald Trump offered a very agent-full sex worker a respectful sum of $10,000 for one night’s work. Drake considered the offer then refused, an ideal sex work scenario conjured by advocates for legal prostitution.

I disagree that the best people can do about paid-for sexual assault is make an informal complaint, heave a sigh, and walk away feeling superior to “shitholes.”

By third wave feminist standards, Donald Trump is a sexual freedom hero. He offers vast sums of money to sex workers, pioneered strip clubs in Atlantic City casinos, appeared on Playboy’s cover plus performed cameos for Playboy products, and his third wife is said to be a former sex worker he made the mother of his child before making her First Lady.

Today, on International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I will toast America’s first sex worker First Lady and drink for the liberals who got the punter-in-chief they wanted.