The Problem with Sex Work Narratives

Why inconvenient women confound both sides of the debate

Photo by Hugo Jones on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

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Today, I came upon this note by Alex Potts whom I know as someone who makes thoughtful and nuanced posts on current affairs and politics.

This is true. The ‘sex work is work’ tribe are different to the ‘sex work is empowering’ tribe in that way. The former do not typically make a case that sex work is good but that it’s not uniquely terrible in a way that puts it in a separate category to other forms of work very few people would do by choice if they suddenly won the lottery. It might well be preferable to other jobs that produce disgust responses like cleaning out sewers or emptying portable lavatories or clearing up crime scenes or are dangerous like being a lumberjack or working on an oil rig. We don’t tend to try to rescue people from those jobs because they do need doing (and are overwhelmingly done by men whom we tend to perceive as having more agency and not needing to be rescued from anything). Sex work is not an essential service, but this does not speak to how terrible the experience of doing it is.

I am sympathetic to the “sex work is work” argument, in principle. If somebody really does make a level-headed cost/benefit analysis that goes “I don’t enjoy sex work but I don’t hate it. I’d rather earn the money I need to cover my rent & bills by doing that for two hours a night than by doing 8 hour shifts in a factory, supermarket, cleaning offices etc. which are the other options realistically available to me. I hate my life less with the first option.” I defend their right to make that choice. I don’t think the anti-sex work crowd would really be helping them much if they succeeded in banning it and saying “See! Now you have to work those tedious long shifts instead. It’s for your own good. We have saved you.”

However, for very many women, sex really is categorically different from typical forms of compensated labour. It seems very likely that this is due to the hard-wired intuitions that make us the more choosy sex and also much less likely to want sex unless we feel some bond with our partner. These almost certainly exist because we are the sex which gets pregnant and evolution has favoured the offspring of choosy females who require commitment thus passing on choosy and cautious genes. Many women have reported feeling genuinely degraded and violated in a deeply personal way after having sex without genuine desire or emotional connection. It is more likely that this is a result of evolved psychology deterring indiscriminate mating as counterproductive to female biological fitness than of patriarchal cultural conditioning telling women that their worth and value is bound up in their chastity, as some sex-positive feminists have argued. It is also unclear that sex just is objectively a more degrading exercise than other forms of physical labour women can engage in for money because it services man’s desires and is therefore necessarily a form of patriarchal oppression as some radical feminists have argued.

Men do, of course, engage in sex work too, although in much lower numbers due to men creating the overwhelming majority of the market for sex and the majority of men being heterosexual. Those who do seem less likely to feel this way. I was close to two male sex workers in the 90s.

For one of my friends who was gay, sex work really was just work. He took a pride in being good at it and having a loyal clientele, but did not feel empowered by it and frequently found it a chore. He was fond of some of his clients but actively disliked others. His clients tended to be wealthy, successful, professional men and two became bonded lovers with whom he had a loving, longterm relationship but he felt that both of them had a paternalistic, condescending attitude towards him because of the power imbalance in their relationship. The job was not his ideal one. He wanted to be a writer. If he’d won the lottery, he would have stopped sex work and focused on that. Nevertheless, he’d rather do sex work than any other job available to him and it paid well and he got to pick his own clients and hours. It was relatively safe by the time I met him but had not always been so. When he began, he was picking up clients in gay bars and was only prevented from going home with the serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, by another man intercepting him and warning that he had attempted to strangle him when he had passed out drunk. Police had not been interested in this information.

The other male sex worker I knew was a family member and he was heterosexual. There is very little demand for male sex-workers from women, but it does exist. He was an aspiring actor and model and his clients were older, very wealthy women who wanted no-strings sex. He loved this job. The women were typically attractive and in good shape and not terribly demanding in their requirements, preferring quality over quantity. The main perk, in his view, was that they would sometimes take him on expensive holidays to 5-star hotels and exclusive resorts that were quite out of his reach. Unfortunately for him, his shelf-life was limited and when he developed male-pattern balding in his late twenties and his youthful, model good looks faded, he was no longer in demand. The way he earned money also caused rifts in his relationships with other men who found it unworthy of respect and a temporary estrangement from his father ensued when he was featured in a newspaper article about an actress in her 50s who had been using his services. Nevertheless, he remembers the period fondly and does not feel demeaned or scarred by it.

Women can feel this way too, of course. While attitudes towards sex differ quite profoundly between the sexes statistically, individual variation always exists with some men only desiring sex within a committed relationship and some women being fully open to casual sex and regarding transactional sex as legitimate and honorable. I am a woman who falls in the latter category and regarded myself very much as a sex-positive feminist in the 90s. A gay male friend joked to me at the time that I conducted my sex life like a gay man, by which he meant I was direct and unapologetic about it. From my own perspective, I simply objected to complicated social game-playing and also an expectation that women be ‘hard to get’ which led to both ambiguity about whether a woman really meant it when she said “no” and men feigning interest in a relationship when they only wanted a casual sexual encounter. I believed that women who felt their self-respect depended on their sexual behaviour were buying into sexist narratives that reduced women’s value to their sexuality.

In retrospect, I think I fell into the trap of mistaking my personality for my politics and morally rationalising a personal preference for directness and no-strings casual relationships for a liberatory feminist stance. I suspect this to be very common and that often when we hear a socially conservative woman telling us that women inherently do and also should feel shame and lose self-respect if they have casual sex, or a radical feminist telling us women inherently feel that way because heterosexual sex actually is inherently exploitative we are hearing about their own experiences and preferences with a moral/political justification. I think it is significant that my attitude was likened to that of a gay man because gay male relationships are the clearest view into what male sexuality looks like when it is not accommodating the preferences of women. If women and men repeatedly exhibit different average sexual attitudes even in contexts where complementary traditional gender roles are absent, that weakens the claim that those differences are entirely products of patriarchal socialisation.

I have known women who genuinely enjoyed sex work or preferred it to other forms of work. When I was in a relationship with a woman, also in the 90s, another female couple suggested to us that we could make a lot of money by doing ‘video-cam’ work, because we were both attractive in typically feminine ways. They were very positive about this, telling us that this was their ideal job because they only needed to have sex with each other which they were already doing enthusiastically and could work from home for a couple of hours three times a week and take requests and earn more money than they ever could have done in other jobs available to them. This did not appeal to me but it did to them and I have no reason to think they were not exercising full agency.

Two of my female friends engaged in sex work, one as an escort and one as an exotic dancer, from a purely economic standpoint and have never regretted this. The first was saving for a home and offered her services by word-of-mouth in addition to her day job in retail. Her experience was much like that of the gay man described above in that she liked some of her clients and disliked others and saw it very much as a job that she would not do if she were rich. She would rather do the sex work and buy a flat than remain renting for another decade. She did not hate it. The second was a single mother funding herself through a social work degree. She actually enjoyed the work because it required a certain amount of skill and fitness, but did leave it behind when she had secured the degree and instead attended dance and fitness classes which she preferred.

Where I have most often encountered women engaging in sex work, however, is when I have been either working or recovering in psychiatric hospitals/rehabilitation centres. I suffer from OCD and have also worked in a variety of health and social care settings. These have not been women who have chosen sex work following a careful, level-headed cost/benefit analysis that introspected on their own psychology and mental wellbeing and determined that sex-work was compatible with that. These were women who were seriously mentally ill or struggling with addiction. This foreclosed the option of alternative work that could enable them to have a home and pay their bills because they required reliability, stability and the ability to work long, regular hours. The problems which made them unable to hold onto regular jobs also relegated them to the most risky and poorly paid end of sex work. Many women who are struggling with disablingly painful emotions and/or addiction are vulnerable to being sucked into sex work as a way to keep themselves afloat and/or because they are suffering with very low self-worth and self-destructive impulses. Men experiencing the same emotional pain or dependencies are more likely to exhibit different maladaptive ways of coping and self-destructive behaviours.

The purpose of these personal anecdotes from the life of one 50-year-old woman (which is dubious evidence at best) is not to make a blanket, declarative statement about how we should understand sex work. It is to support the argument that making such statements will always miss part of the picture and that those of us who care about individual autonomy and addressing material issues which affect the most vulnerable people should resist buying into any of them.

The right answer to ‘Sex work is empowering for women” is “For some women, certainly. For most, probably not.” The correct response to '“Sex work is (just) work” is “It can be, yes, but for many people, especially women, sex is a more personal thing they do with their body than manual labour and thus belongs in a different mental category.” The best way to respond to “Sex work is exploitation of vulnerable women who have no other options” is “Yes, it often is. How do we address that in a way that does not simply close down the one option for survival that they do have?”

All too often, when people say that sex work is a certain thing, they mean “You should consider yourself morally obligated to see it that way. You should find sex work empowering/think of it as just another job/consider yourself a vulnerable and exploited person. If you don’t, there is something morally wrong with you or with society which has culturally conditioned you into believing otherwise.” (Why is it always women who are considered particularly vulnerable to being culturally conditioned while men are considered to be using their autonomy to work within the options they have?)

The problem with buying into one or other of these narratives uncritically is that they are all very easily falsified by simply pointing at women whose experience disconfirms it. This then leads to claiming that some women have the authentic, authoritative stance on this while others are brainwashed in some way or inauthentic. We see this dynamic online when sex-positive feminists and feminists who oppose sex work argue with each other. They are each likely to bring out personal accounts of sex-workers whose experience and beliefs match their own and then accuse the other of not listening to sex workers. This is not remotely helpful to women.

What is helpful to women is having a default assumption that they are individuals with agency and autonomy who may have a range of experiences and beliefs and exercise that autonomy differently, just like men. When they are able to exercise this, we do not need to be managing their sex lives for them or deciding what they may or may not use their bodies for in terms of recompensed service. This frees us up to focus on the women who are not able to exercise agency or autonomy due to mental illness, addiction or other factors which have led them to lose control of their lives, without assuming that this is the natural condition of women. The solution to this is the provision of better services for mental health and addiction and programmes to assist those struggling to cope with work demands into regular jobs rather than penalising them for not having them.

The temptation to feed the complex reality of sex work into simplistic narratives that define all women involved in it as empowering themselves, straightforwardly working their chosen job or being passively exploited is both common and destructive. They cannot map onto the complex reality of real people’s experiences. Some women experience sex work as empowering. Some experience it as degrading. Some experience it as merely a way to pay the bills. Some are making free choices from a position of relative stability. Others are making desperate choices in circumstances nobody should have to face. None of these women cease to exist because their experiences are inconvenient to anybody’s preferred narrative.

If we genuinely care about women in sex work, we should spend less time arguing over which ideological slogan captures the essence of their experiences and more time recognising them as individuals with a variety of circumstances and views. Liberalism requires us to tolerate such complexity. It requires us to accept that women, like men, are autonomous individuals whose desires, values, vulnerabilities and ambitions differ profoundly from one another. Once we stop trying to force every woman into a single political story, we can focus on the far more important task: acknowledging the agency of women who are capable of directing their own lives (even if the direction they take is one we wish they wouldn’t) and supporting those whose lives are currently out of control to change their direction.