Around April this year, I gave a talk at an event aimed to promote a feminist magazine called LadyBeard. The subject was sexuality, I was there as a sex worker to talk about sex work in relation to desire and consent. Everything was very white and middle class, but I was happy to have a platform to speak, especially at a feminism event, and the organizers I interacted with were aware of their privileges.
Desire is not always connected with consent, and there are a lot of things that can make two people (or more) consent to have sex, money is one of them, safety is another, wanting children, or stability…The motivations are various and endless and when we consent, desire is not always part of the equation.
There is a need to make sex workers sound and look more respectable for an audience
When introducing me they said that I am a sex worker (true), a writer (not true) and an activist (it’s complicated but I’ll take it). When the microphone was passed to my hands, the first thing I said was that I am a sex worker, but I am definitely not a writer. These kind of situations happen because sex work is never enough for people who aren’t sex workers – because they think there is a need to make sex workers sound and look more respectable so that the audience can take us seriously.
Following this event, I interviewed them. The interview took two hours between my house and a park nearby. When they transcribed it I identified bits I found problematic, and asked for it to be corrected. They were incredibly nice in their approach and always open to my edits. Again, and again. But I got tired and anxious and I couldn’t keep going over it anymore, so I gave them the green light to publish.
The platform for sex workers is so small that sometimes when it’s given to us, we just want to say everything at once
One of my first sentences was “not all sex workers are drug users or come from deep poverty”. I was trying to dismantle a stereotype, but it is also true that some sex workers are drug users and some come from deep poverty, and if they chose to be sex workers that is OK too. Agency doesn’t come only from a position of privilege.
The platform for sex workers to talk and express themselves is so small that sometimes when it’s given to us, we just want to say everything at once and we slip on things that can be highly problematic. Just like I did. And some other times (most of the time), the media just fucks it up badly. It distorts, manipulates, lies and gives their own contribution to the horrible stigma and stereotypes that we have to fight. On a daily basis.
Abolitionists do not support sex work because they align all sex work with human trafficking
Even now, because the opportunity to speak openly happens only once in a blue moon, I feel like my thoughts are everywhere and are all so important that I can’t choose where I should focus! But let’s keep the focus on feminism, since it’s in the spotlight now with the release of the Suffragettes movie. Hopefully they will not use the word whore or hooker in this one, but with the film industry and Meryl Streep in it we never know.
Some feminists support sex work, some sex workers are feminists, some feminists are abolitionists and I would like to say that they are not feminists, but it’s a big accusation and a very dangerous statement.
Abolitionists do not support sex work because they align all sex work with human trafficking. They think all clients are violent and that men hold all the power over women in situations of transactional sex. Abolitionists tend to be pro-Nordic model, a model that was implemented in Sweden in 1999. It aims to criminalize a sex worker’s clients but not the worker herself. They think it’s made to protect women.
Sex workers fight trafficking in the sex industry and outside of it
Abolitionists say that this model has decreased demand, but they forget to explain that actually, before this model was implemented, there were limited statistics about demand, as the only statistics that they had hold of was that of street based sex work. If you are criminalizing the clients, I can only wonder how they know about the decrease of demand when (now criminal) clients would probably not admit it!
Sex workers fight trafficking in the sex industry and outside of it, and we stand against every and any human trafficking (why do I even have to say this?). We are aware of it, we are not closing our eyes to this horrible fact, but until sex work is decriminalized, and people have good documentation with which to move through the world, things are extremely complicated.
On the basis of people being trafficked for the sex industry there was a raid in Soho, December 2013. Two hundred police officers in full gear invited the media to come to Soho while they were taking sex workers out of the apartments to the police station. The following day, pictures of the sex workers, including their faces, were all over the newspapers. This type of exposure is an extreme form of violence. Of the women arrested no one was being trafficked, and yet all of the papers chose to appease the police officer and UKBA!
Soho is so cool that at London Fashion week it can host “hooker-chic style”, but sex workers are not welcome
The problem with Soho is not sex work but the 1%. Rich people suddenly realized that Soho is cool, because it’s kind of “edgy” or something, and found they can profit from this, but they want to “clean it up” as one of so many insane gentrification drives in London.
I mean Soho is so cool that at London Fashion week it can host “hooker-chic style”, but sex workers are not welcome. Rich people want their sparkly houses and streets clean and sanitized while going to our apartments for some snogs *wink*. They also want their kids away from us, because sex workers are not mothers, or we don’t understand motherhood, and their kids might want to engage with us (because children are not judgmental until we teach them to be!).
What I know about the Nordic model is that because clients are being criminalized, sex work is pushed more underground, leaving sex workers with less time to negotiate and screen their clients, and for clients to give some more details about themselves. It makes sense if they for example, have a family or have to travel around the world. Being seen as a criminal when you are doing nothing wrong might give you some paranoia – I know this for a fact! On the other hand people who have nothing to fear and are OK with breaking the law, are possibly not great clients.
The solution for so much of this is education
Even if it would decrease demand, the Nordic Model subsequently means that sex workers will be jobless, and that creates unemployment and poverty.
It is very difficult for someone who has been doing sex work to get another job. Sex worker organizations and projects are working on this, but when sex work is not legally legitimate it is difficult, and even when sex work is decriminalized it will still be difficult, because stigma doesn’t end with a change in the law – but it would definitely help.
The solution for so much of this is education. If we educated our kids to be respectful of everyone’s life choices, in 20 years we could have a better world.
My theory on why abolitionists don’t want to see clients as normal people but as people filled with perversion and violence is because if they do, there will be no difference between clients and their friends, fathers, husbands and sons. In truth, abolitionists just don’t understand how someone can fuck for money, because it icks them out. By making their personal moral views and agendas the priority, they are creating division, disparity, polarization and just a bloody mess.
We want decriminalization. We want the right to make unions, work together, and be safe just like anyone else
Until sex work is decriminalized, violence is allowed to happen, because violent men feel that they can target workers in the sex industry without consequences. In some places where sex work is criminalized there are less consequences for violence against sex workers than in places where it is legal; in places where it is decriminalized, there is no difference between hurting someone who works in the sex industry or someone who works for a charity. Because there isn’t. The big issue with criminalizing and legalizing is that some sex workers don’t want to use the police because – guess what? – violence, sometimes, comes from police enforcement too, when either clients and/or sex workers aren’t given proper legal protection.
We want decriminalization. We want the right to make unions, work together, and be safe just like anyone else. Denying this and voting for the Nordic model is denying us our human rights.
Almost a year ago I had an incident with a staff member of one of those chain hotels, where a key to access everything is needed. I went there to work. I had to pick up my clients from the lobby just near the reception, I had one client, and a few hours later, a second client. A few minutes after the latter left, a member of staff knocked on my door to let me know that I had to give him a blowjob because he knew what I was doing. I had another incident of someone bullying me because he thought bullying is fun. I told both of them to be careful because my work is legal but harassment isn’t. I didn’t report them to the police. This is the direct result of not decriminalizing sex work, something that the abolitionists fight and spend so much energy on. Hurray to their feminism!
Include sex workers on your panels, listen to what they have to say, don’t use us as props for your agendas
My conversation with abolitionists is always hard. It’s like this:
They say pimp, I say racist; they say legalization, I say decriminalization; they say prostitution, I say sex work; they say prostituted women, I say sex workers; they say trafficking, I say sex work is not trafficking and survivors of trafficking are not always sex workers.
They say evidence, I ask where is it. They reply something else and say 89%, I ask for that evidence, they send me a link of a funded study done by biased abolitionist academics. They say all clients are violent, I say lie, they say that sex work is based on rape and violence, I say lie and ask what do they think about marriage? They say exited women, I say women who were sex workers, they say Nordic Model, I say decriminalization.
I say look at New Zealand. I say stop making your living from survivors. Include current sex workers on your panels, listen to what we have to say, don’t use us as props for your agendas, don’t make it about men, because when you are asking for the criminalization of clients you are not caring for women. I say stop being so binary, sex workers aren’t just women, and clients aren’t just men. They say you are just angry, I say you are policing my tone just like misogynist men do with you, they say we can’t engage with you, I say FUCK YOU.
Abolitionists could be better feminist allies to sex workers if they would support decriminalization, but because they don’t like sex work and want a Utopian where sex work doesn’t exist, they support criminalization. Why not, instead of trying to criminalize the clients of sex workers, just decriminalize sex work (full stop) and let us work on the problems that the sex industry has? We could even find common ground where we could work together! When they fight for criminalizing men, they are fundamentally saying that all men are violent, and that in every encounter we have with our clients we are victims of that violence.
When we challenge this, they say that we don’t understand, that we have been brainwashed by patriarchy and we have no agency. I had three full days arguing with abolitionists who are organizing a feminist conference in London, they ended up bullying me, hiding the conversation and later deleting it (but I have screenshots, ah!). This is silencing the voice of the women they think need help. It doesn’t make any sense.
