Is sex work bad?

In my first year of teaching, I had a student who was a spunky, vivacious kid. She had an infectious laugh, loved witty conversation, and would always enter my room with an emphatic greeting and a seemingly impenetrable optimism. I had her in my first period class every day, and in a room full of groggy kids still blinking away the sleep from their eyes, her radiant, positive energy stood out.

So when she came in one morning looking wilted and almost panicky, I immediately knew something was wrong. Her body language conveyed extreme distress, and before I could quietly check in on her (to maintain her privacy as there were other students present), words and tears started spilling out. On her way to school a car had pulled up beside her and a man had started asking her questions. She tried to keep walking and ignore the guy, but he was persistent. Sensing danger, she started running and thankfully was able to go into a nearby grocery store, which was the only business open at the time. She hid inside there for a while before leaving again, now worried that if she didn't go she'd be late for school. In a crisis moment of fearing for her safety, she still worried about being late for school.

Other girls in the room comforted her and shared similar stories while I called the counselor who came to get her. I didn't know this at the time, but the route that she took to school was also a local hotspot for prostitution. While it's possible that the man who spoke to her in the car was merely attempting to solicit her, the counselor shared with me later that it was far more likely he was attempting to recruit or even abduct her. I was horrified to learn that my twelve-year-old students (and even those younger than mine) were common targets for sex traffickers. Up until that point I had assumed that sex work was largely the domain of adult women. It turns out this is far from the truth.

I've learned a lot since then, not just from that incident but because I have a family member who works for an organization that attempts to support women who have exited sex trafficking, sometimes by choice but usually only after police intervention in their lives. Many, if not most, of the women she works with were recruited or forced into it at a horrifyingly early age. Though many of them are adults now, they certainly weren't when they started. In fact, she said that one of the hardest parts of her job is that most of the women she works with have never been able to develop as normal human beings in natural, functional human relationships. Their exploitation started when they were so, so young. She said that she often feels like she's talking more to the symptoms of chronic trauma rather than actual people. The women have severe trust issues, don't believe in kindness without ulterior motives, and demonstrate severe codependencies as well as frequent behaviors of self-harm and substance abuse. Her work is not a quick fix of teaching them some job skills and putting them on a path to economic enfranchisement. Instead she has to undo the years or decades of damage done to these women's understanding of how the world and people work.

I read a book a few years ago, recommended by my family member, called The Johns by Victor Malarek. Rather than focusing on sex workers, it instead focuses on the men paying for sex, which is an odd thought for many, myself included, because sex work so often has visible supply but invisible demand. The idea of women selling sex is part and parcel of modern culture, but the idea of men buying sex is seemingly absent, despite the transaction being two-sided by its very nature.

The book is an interesting if unacademic look into this invisible demand (he relies primarily on the self-disclosure of internet forum users which we know is shaky information at best). Nevertheless, I consider it worth reading for what it brings to the table: the idea that behind widespread exploitation of sex workers is the demand for them in the first place.

A lot of conversations about sex work I see focus on it as an abstract ideal, navigating issues of consent, sex-positivity, and regulation. These are important issues to discuss, and I don't want to downplay them, but I think a lot of them often exist in a bubble that's separate from the lived reality of sex work, much of which is aligned with the worst parts of society: human trafficking, slavery, exploitation, abuse, etc. Certainly not all sex work supports these, but much of it does, and more than we think because so much of it is invisible.

When my student was crying in my room after the incident with the man in the car, she was comforted by other girls in the room sharing similar stories. Twelve-year-olds were commiserating about the commonplace experience of potentially being targeted for sex trafficking -- that's how common it was in that area. What does that say about the "invisible demand" in that area? And can we argue that it's unique to that area, or simply equally hidden everywhere else? Years later I worked at a school in a completely different location but in an area that was similarly economically depressed. Multiple times, as I pulled into work at 6:30 AM, I would be propositioned by sex workers on my walk down the street to the school building from where I parked. As I was beginning my shift, they were ending theirs. These were not economically liberated women consentually selling their services; these were women doing what they could to survive in the poverty-stricken area in which I taught. I wonder how old they were when they started.

Often conversations about sex work take a relativistic tack with regard to exploitation, where suddenly the whole world is seen in degrees of exploitation, of which sex work is only posited to be a few shades darker than other forms. I'm not a fan of this, because I feel like it's almost always done to downplay the indignity and danger of coercive sex work. Again, not all sex work, but much of it. It is often dependent on power structures which strongly disadvantage the worker, which sounds similar to, say, pulling minimum wage at a fast food joint but in reality is far more invasive and dangerous.

Sex work, unlike many other jobs, is fundamentally inseparable from personal health and safety, and the economic factors that drive many women to pursue it also encourage women to compromise in those areas (netting more money for sex without a condom, for example). Abusive clients are not an if, but a when and a how much, and of course the sex worker has little to no recourse. In fact, there's often a really perverse incentive to permit the abuse in hopes of negating retaliation -- not so that the person doesn't suffer as much but so that they don't jeopardize their ability to continue their means of survival. In making money with one's body, one needs to make sure it remains desirable or, at the very least, functional. Even in the absence of overt abuse, sex workers subject their bodies to a constant intimate uncertainty that's unheard of in pretty much every other career, because it's not always clear when abuse might happen, and the mere threat of it is enough to act as a powerful and significant stressor.

My family member who works with women from sex trafficking tells how frequently women are subject to grooming tactics. They meet a loving man who sweeps them off their feet with attention and gifts, only to slowly accustom them to sex work by habituation. The gifts can become leverage, with the man asking for financial reciprocity that he knows the woman can't give, tacitly encouraging her to sell herself to pay him back. They can also dry up, creating the illusion of financial hardship, so could she get them out of this bind, just this once? That once becomes one more time the next time the money dries up, repeating and ratcheting up until the woman's guard is down and her excuses are gone. Why would she now say no to sex for money, her partner will tell her, when she's already said yes to others two, three, four times? Parters often introduce the women to drugs, getting them hooked so that they are dependent on them. Sex work then becomes the method by which they manage their addiction, as it often inhibits them from working more standard jobs.

Though the women are led down a garden path of exploitation, they often feel it was their choice or it happened for "valid" reasons. Many do not even realize they've been taken advantage of; that the boyfriend who led them into this was grooming them from the start. They still hold onto memories of his initial affection as an ideal of true love. The same forces and people that exploit them also make them feel complicit in or responsible for it. It is such a grotesque mangling of human intimacy that it makes me sick to my stomach. Using love and trust as a weapon is abhorrent to me, but then to hide your tracks and make it look like theirs alone? It's one of the most disheartening things I can conceptualize.

I realize that much of my discussion up to this point has been gendered, but it's worth noting that men are exploited as well, and the power differentials that disadvantage many women in sex work also disadvantage them. The 2008 documentary Men for Sale details male sex workers who service primarily gay clientele, and the exploitation they face is identical to that seen by women sex workers. I don't want to give the impression that only women are harmed by sex work, but I also don't want to create false equivalencies either: it is still mostly women who are harmed.

I also realize this is a long, meandering answer to your question, and it's ultimately an unfair one since I've chosen to focus on the worst aspects of sex work. Realistically the field is something more diverse and broad than I'm demonstrating here, but I say all of this because I can't adequately divorce myself from its most ugly elements: the elements that would prey on my twelve-year-old student and people like her; the elements that would use the guise of love and support to lure a person into their own exploitation; the elements that commoditize human intimacy to the point that it's a grotesque, unrecognizable facsimilie. These are fundamental and widespread problems of sex work, and ones that I feel too often go overlooked if we stick to purely academic and intellectual discussions of what sex work should be.

The distance between ideal and execution is a tough thing to navigate. In 2010, Iceland banned strip clubs, with the politician who proposed the ban saying: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." The sex-positive part of me thinks that such a ban is overkill. Shouldn't it be fine for a person to strip and make money from it if they're doing it on their own terms and of their own volition? On the other side of a large gulf is the reality that very few women are likely doing so in such idealized circumstances, and if permitting the former, even slightly, indulges the latter, is that the right move to make? I don't know. This is yet another issue where I have very strong feelings but few good answers.