Who Has Time For Sex Worker Rights Activism

When I sell sex less often, I have more time and energy to advocate for sex workers’ rights. This has always been true for me and it has always been a source of frustration and internal conflict. I want the people who are the most impacted by awful laws and by stigma to have their voices uplifted, whilst also recognizing that people in those situations are at the highest risk if they speak up and may be too busy or fatigued for activism.

The times when I have been in most desperate need of legal change and a reduction in stigma were when I was the least capable of speaking publicly about the topic. Days and weeks of consecutive brothel shifts left me too fatigued to imagine going to a rally on my day off. After a long day of seeing multiple clients, I vastly preferred sleeping to writing about my experience, and I couldn’t make the time on the following day if I was working yet again.

I find time to write or to attend protests or to pester my local officials about supporting the decriminalization of sex work only when I’m not consumed by my need to sell sex to survive. Since I began selling sex, I’ve never entirely stopped, but there is a difference between my current situation where I meet with only a couple of clients per month and the time period where I would see many dozens in that same span of time. I experience violence far less often than I used to and criminalization of aspects of my work impacts me less.

Inside, I experience a conflict. I don’t want a sex worker rights movement that is dominated by those who work less and are therefore at lower risk, whilst I recognize that I couldn’t have engaged in time-consuming advocacy efforts when I worked more. As a teenager, the things I would have said if I’d tried to do activist work would have harmed me and other sex workers alike in the eyes of the public, because I hated myself for selling sex and didn’t understand the law. These past versions of myself weren’t suited to the exact kind of advocacy that I hope to see from people in those situations, so who am I to suggest they risk arrest and familial rejection by exhausting themselves with activism? Then again, who am I to speak for us when I’m now speaking from a position where I struggle so much less now?

I am aware of how this internal conflict benefits those who seek to stigmatize and criminalize sex workers further. SWERFs (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists) who have never sold sex seem to have no concern at all about speaking over sex workers and saying what they think is best for us. The people with lived experience who they uplift are most often ex sex workers and/or trafficking victims who are relatively well-protected compared to current sex workers. I still sell sex, my experience working at a high volume is incredibly recent, and I have been abused in a plethora of ways whilst working. Compared to my adversaries, my standards for who has a right to speak are ludicrously high.

My fears are not entirely unfounded, though. There is validity to my concern that doing less frequent sex work makes for a less ideal activist. We all have a recency bias, placing a greater importance on our experiences in the present than on those in the past. As my clients improve in quality and I experience violence less often, I’m inclined to think more favourably about how I feel when selling sex because it’s better now than it was.

Crying because I felt so demoralized from earning only £40 from a very abusive client after the brothel took its cut will become a distant memory, when my more recent experiences selling sex are all relatively quick and easy bookings where I keep all of my earnings. I still have difficult clients and my PTSD loves to regularly remind me of the worst experiences I’ve had selling sex, but that won’t necessarily always be true. One day, if I find myself being generally comfortable selling sex and financially stable, will it become easier to get me to compromise over issues which impact my fellow sex workers more keenly.

Creating my own platforms for sex worker rights advocacy (like this website, or an anthology where I can uplift the words of other sex workers and allow them to stay anonymous if they need to) are the ways I combat any concerns I have that I’m taking up too much space. Left-wing activism is by no means oversaturated with sex worker rights advocacy, and I know that putting my voice out there can be helpful to educate people or make them aware of our cause. I just don’t want to forget to be cautious about the fact that sex workers with less skin in the game are more easily corrupted by malicious influences who seek to tear down our movement.

As things stand, my clients range from easy and quick to rough and almost intolerable. I see a couple of them a month and will soon be significantly increasing that number by selling from a criminalized venue again, because I desperately need to pay off my medical debt. I remember what it was like to sell sex at my worst and I privately journaled my way through the experience so I wouldn’t forget it. I don’t think I’m at risk of becoming the kind of vapid and disconnected activist that I despise any time soon.

I remain conscious that there will always be a skew to who is willing to speak, no matter how accessible our movement is and how much we uplift the voices of the most marginalized, since those who are the most impacted also face the worst consequences for their activism. I still want to be sure that the skew is not amplified because of the failure of people like me to step aside when the most marginalized sex workers do find a moment to share their stories and advocate for our shared rights.

I don’t have solutions, only worries, but I think these are worries it’s important to have. Anyone who involves themselves with activism should make it a priority to be connected to the issues they work towards resolving and we should think about stepping back if we ever begin to drift.

All my love to the sex workers who are barely scraping by, and to those who aren’t scraping by at all and feel like they are drowning. Your priority should always be staying alive first, and I promise to do my best to make sure that you will always be the people I am thinking about when I speak out about our needs as a community.