Julie Bindel is a prominent figure among so-called “radical feminists” who oppose the decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work. In fact, she objects to full service sex work being considered to be work at all, preferring to conceptualize all prostitution as a form of abuse.
The laws Bindel advocates for go against her stated goals of supporting and protecting those who sell sex. Sex workers are safer when we are not criminalized for working and our clients are not criminalized for paying us. Bindel’s strict abolitionist stance leads her to support the Nordic Model, which criminalizes paying for sex and puts sex workers in more danger at the hands of the very clients she claims to want to protect us from.
In a recent video for Triggernometry, “Why “Sex Work Is Work” Is Bullsh*t” (a segment from a longer video where she discusses her general brand of feminism), Bindel quickly covers what she thinks of some feminists’ positions on sex work and the sex worker rights movement in general. As expected, given her previous work, she misrepresents the sex worker activists whose arguments she is dismissing. I won’t do the same, so we’ll go through what she says in this video honestly and assess the merits of her assertions.
To begin her characterization of sex worker rights activists, Bindel says that during a talk she gave about “the horrors of the sex trade” there were “a load of blue fringes” who protested the event. She brings up the slogan they used, and thus begins her dishonest framing of sex workers’ positions. Bindel tells us they used the slogan “blowjobs are real jobs” and then ridicules this phrase by saying that the people who are saying this phrase should go and do so.
I’m someone who sells sex. I’ve been doing so since I was 17, and I’ve been involved in sex worker activism for several years. While I’m sure there are cases of non sex workers picking up our slogans and repeating them to show solidarity, everyone I’ve ever seen using the phrase is indeed someone who sucks dick for pay. It’s a memorable slogan created to draw attention and get at a genuine point at the same time – that selling sexual services is a form of labour.
My personal favourite version of this slogan is: “Blow jobs are real jobs, and real jobs suck!”
Bindel either hasn’t heard this complete motto, or chooses not to acknowledge the existence of it because it undermines her point. She suggests the people saying the phrase in protest of her speech should tell her they’d prefer to suck “unwashed dick” than be researchers or academics or journalists… of course listing a small number of relatively cushy jobs that are not careers someone can simply step into instead of doing sex work. The thing is, preferring a job above all others is not required for something to be work.
I’d prefer to be a researcher or an academic to being a bartender, and detested bar work when I did it. I was constantly harassed and made miserable by it. The long shifts took a huge toll on my body, particularly because I have joint problems, and my bosses regularly talked down to me and dismissed threats against me at work. None of those things mean that being a bartender suddenly isn’t a job.
In fact, personally I preferred selling sex to bartending, when I finally quit in favour of going back to sex work full-time. I had more control over my hours, worked for myself rather than having to deal with being belittled and degraded by bosses, and suddenly I wasn’t crying myself to sleep over the physical pain in my feet after working without sitting down for 12 hours or more.
Unsurprisingly, Julie immediately describes sex work as women being “orifices to rent”, language which suggests clients can do anything they want to the bodies of women who sell sex. Clients do not have the right to use sex workers as if we are objects. The fact that many do, particularly when those sex workers are women and the clients have deeply misogynistic attitudes, does not mean that selling sex in itself reduces women to that. A huge portion of men view their partners in the same objectifying ways, and this doesn’t mean that women having any sex with men are diminishing women as a group into being objects.
Bindel makes a point of talking about “women who’ve actually done prostitution” and assumes the viewer will lack familiarity with the sex worker rights movement enough to think that those who oppose her have not sold sex. For those of us who are sex workers, or who know and love sex workers and talk about these issues, the truth is clearly the opposite. The loudest dissenters against Bindel’s bullshit are sex workers ourselves.
To further convince the viewer to ignore the words of current sex workers, in favour of the small portion of those who have sold sex in the past who agree with Bindel’s harmful rhetoric, Bindel then mentions how many survivors of abuse she has spoken to have said they would claim to love their work whilst they were doing it but were in fact lying. There are indeed sex workers who lie about loving the work to get more clients, or who do so because they are defensive in the face of people who say we are damaged. I am one of them. However, there are also sex workers who genuinely enjoy the job. I struggled to believe it when I was younger, because I experienced so much abuse when I was selling sex as a teenager, but it is not the case that everyone who says they like the work is a liar!
More importantly, you don’t have to love your work to be deserving of workers’ rights, and in fact industries where worker exploitation is rife are those where workers’ rights are most sorely needed. Even if all sex workers who say they like their work were lying, it would not change the fact that it is work and that the full decriminalization of sex work is what makes us safest.
Later, Bindel claims that what pimps want is the full decriminalization of sex work. She does this to call forth this ideal of a pimp lobby, which she can claim sex worker activists are secretly a part of, but it’s nonsense. Those who want to exploit people who sell sex, or to force people to do it, do not want sex work to be decriminalized and normalized. Decriminalization allows sex workers to work for themselves more easily, because they can get clients without fearing the intervention of the police, so they don’t need to rely on pimps. In a criminalized environment, or within a legalized environment which still criminalizes brothels or regulates the industry in a way that creates a black market, pimps are able to have far more control over the sex workers they manage and can charge higher rates.
After misrepresenting the desires of pimps by saying they want to see the decriminalization and normalization of sex work, Bindel draws a link between the idea of normalizing sex work and Durham university’s training for students on safety whilst doing it. To me, the implication is clear; Bindel wants us to think that Durham university is profiting from sexual exploitation within sex work, and that they share the attitudes of pimps. Of course, she has to lie about what pimps want to create this link!
People will continue to sell sex, regardless of the danger, when they need money badly enough. Since student loans are often not enough to cover all of a person’s expenses, and university takes up so much time, students are a demographic who are quite likely to pick up sex work. They can sell sex in a relatively short space of time, for a much higher hourly rate than they could find in other part-time jobs available to them, and support themselves whilst studying. Give these logical reasons someone might choose sex work, despite the danger and stigma, students aren’t simply going to be talked out of it. That is why teaching students on how to be safer whilst doing sex work is a fantastic way to reduce harm.
Selling sex in the UK cannot be made perfectly safe, no matter how many safety tips people follow, but it is certainly better to take some precautions than none if someone is going to do it anyway!
One of the ways sex work could be made much safer across the board is to decriminalize it, so that (among many improvements) sex workers could work together from one premises without fearing arrest, but alas Bindel does not support full decriminalization and instead is a proponent of the Nordic Model which criminalizes clients and makes sex work more dangerous.
Bindel speaks as though she is an authority on the realities of selling sex, detailing the set-up in specific brothels and repeating the accounts of sex workers and survivors of sexual abuse that she has spoken to. For the clueless men she is speaking to in this video, and ignorant viewers, her confidence can cause them to assume her opinions are worthwhile. They are not.
I encourage people to consider what actually makes sex workers safest, rather than listen to the words of people like Julie Bindel who have a huge saviour complex and refuse to listen to us. She acts as if she is a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves, but in truth sex workers are out here screaming to be heard and being ignored because our needs and wants aren’t convenient for those in power or who have platforms like Bindel does.
Sex work is work, regardless of what Bindel and her ilk keep saying.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 