Although I have little doubt it's a complex discourse even among sex workers, discussing sex work as someone with no experience in the industry can be especially divisive. On a personal level, I learned this in college, in a class where we debated each week a piece of 19th-century literature. In a polemical letter written by a Victorian prostitute, there were stern anger about the treatment of prostitutes as criminals & whores, as well as deep sadness & regret about the circumstances that offered her & her fellow lower class women no choice but to become prostitutes. The debate on this letter was a sloppy one, with OnlyFans' rise as a seemingly lucrative career for young adults. As soon as my mouth uttered "No one would be a prostitute in an ideal world," an angered classmate responded, "My aunt is an escort & she loves it." The conversation collapsed afterwards– I was too polite, or too chicken to ask if her aunt was also a college-educated white woman from New Jersey like herself, & too clueless to distinguish escorts, prostitutes, porn starts, etc.
From a policy-making perspective, I presume it's important to differentiate all the categories of sex work, the subcategories (intercourse vs. non-intercourse, organization vs. individual, digital vs. physical, etc.), & their overlaps. I also presume the overlaps between consent & non-consent, & autonomy & heteronomy are why it's so difficult to render policies with no backlash. But within the blurry definition of sex work & what sex means to people, I am disconcerted by the transaction between money & sex. It's almost seductive how incomplex this trade can be, then I think about the time when I was in 6th grade. My mom had told me to grab some cash from her vanity cabinet to pay for my school field trip. As a working mom, she often forgot about these deadlines & what exactly she had in her cabinet. Going through all the shelves, I swatched some of her lipsticks, spritzed her perfume on my clothes, skimmed through some parenting books, & got my hands on some papers stapled & folded in between the books. On the top of the front page in bold, it said, "Sex Life Questionnaire," which got me to sit down on my parents' bed & read through the whole thing with quivering curiosity. I hadn't kissed anyone or watched porn at that point & I remember distinctly a sense of desperation in this survey:
1. Do you engage in foreplay before intercourse?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
2. Do you use a lubricant for intercourse?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
3. Do you initiate sex?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
4. Are you excited to have sex with your partner when he initiates?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
5. Do you feel safe to say no to your partner during sex?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
6. Do you experience pleasure during sex?
a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always
Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, throughout many questions, including the last one asking if her spouse would ever come in with her for a consultation.
In her neat high school teacher handwriting, she wrote that she wanted to know what she could do on her own to make sex less painful. I carefully folded the papers following their original crease, slid them back in between the books, & closed the cabinet door. As a sexually inexperienced teenager in a turbulent relationship with her mother, I felt a certain schadenfreude, guttural pity, & shame for invading her privacy. In hindsight, I don't think she ever returned the completed survey, & for the rest of my teen years, my parents remained miserable. When I brought up the possibility of a divorce, she simply listed the things she wouldn't be able to do without him: filing taxes, paying for my college education, & most of all, growing old with someone in her corner. & perhaps it's debatable whether my mom was raped in her marriage. She would say she wasn't. She vowed to be a wife, which means different things in different cultures & generations. He paid her bills & the children's. Like many women who choose to stay in abusive relationships, my mother, despite all her misjudgments & shortcomings, was not overall less competent or less educated than an average woman. Was my mother selling sex to my father? Did she want to do it? I believe that is debatable as well.
Exchange of sex & money, no matter how implicit, did happen in my parents' relationship. & I find this transaction virulent for reasons that sometimes contradict one another, but certainly because it warps the definition of dignity. Money contorts the value of abstruse things, & as much as I'd like to say that sex is only a matter of inches & minutes, I do think that sex is abstruse. So is labor. I read books & essays where sex workers described the agony of working a 9 to 5, & the relative flexibility & high pay per hour of sex work. (White women are authors of most mainstream literature on sex work.) But the dead-end 9 to 5 aside, there are indeed workplaces no less dehumanizing than a brothel. Through the trades of cash & exploited/manipulated labor, there comes a collapse in our ability to intuit what it feels like to have dignity. The feelings that distinguish safety & danger, empowerment & humiliation become untrustworthy. & I believe that when it comes to morality & humanity, what was degrading doesn't organically become enfranchising for more money. It feels that way, however, due to the system that keeps all principles & instincts negotiable at the will of currency.
My instinct is to discourage an industry that grows with the pimps & johns, with an inherent structure that is incapable of outgrowing them. But I also don't believe it's an impasse– "the oldest profession in the world" is a regressive spell, not a tradition. Some women might enjoy sex work, some policies might make a sustainable career in sex work, & someday the sex work industry might cause no harm to women. Regardless, there will be women like my mom & men like my dad.