Are Sex Workers Enabling Abusive Men?

Whether you consider all sex workers to be victims, or understand that it’s more complex than that, sex workers aren’t responsible for the behaviour of anyone but themselves. Victims of abuse aren’t enabling abuse by being victims and people in proximity to abusers, who are not their victims, are not automatically responsible for improving their behaviour based on that proximity (especially when they’d be at risk if they tried).

When abusive men see sex workers, as they often do due to the fact we are highly stigmatized and vulnerable and therefore easier targets who they’re less likely to be prosecuted for harming, the risk is to sex workers ourselves. To reframe this and to suggest that by our existence we are increasing the risk to those who don’t sell sex is not only broadly inaccurate, it suggests that people do not care about sex workers in the same way they care about the general public. The idea that the people who are most at risk are responsible for protecting those who are less at risk is an unfair standard.

Once we’ve recognized that sex workers aren’t responsible for the actions of our clients, then we can tackle the question of whether seeing sex workers makes abusive men more abusive over time or whether it makes otherwise non-abusive men become abusive. The same question is often raised about pornography, with people linking the amount of porn that depicts very violent sex or even outright abuse to men who sexually abuse people. While we do see evidence that specific acts are more popular because of mainstream porn, like choking or aggressive deepthroating, with people even citing porn as the reason they engage in it, I do not see evidence that it causes people to abuse others full stop. As far as I can see it just changes the ways in which they do.

Someone who wants to abuse people will seek out porn depicting abuse, if they watch porn at all. Similarly, someone who wants to abuse people will seek out vulnerable people to harm and therefore will be more likely to see sex workers.

An argument made by SWERFs that differs from the anti-porn one and is specific to those of us engaging in prostitution is that by the nature of us selling sex (framed as “selling our bodies” or “being prostituted”) our bodies are treated as a commodity and this promotes objectification. Primarily, their concern is the objectification of women, who make up the majority of sex workers. I wanted to include a link for this claim, but every source I could find was deeply flawed in their data collection method. What I think is clear is that women do make up the majority, though I wouldn’t trust the exact figures given in these sources (I wrote a post about that problem here).

If you are aware that you could pay a woman for sex, are you more likely to see consent as malleable and see “no” as “convince me”, or to objectify women? The question itself seems to assume that female sex workers will sleep with anyone who pays them with no other boundaries and also seems to assume this effect only works with women. Men also sell sex and yet this claim doesn’t appear to be made about men in this way, so either the volume of sex workers has to reach some critical mass for this effect to supposedly work or there are more factors at play.

If we view money as a boundary or condition or requirement that sex workers are placing on elements of our sex lives, we can compare it to other requirements people have. Some people will only have sex with others if they use a condom, for example. Does the existence of people who only agree to sex with a condom encourage others to see consent as malleable or to push for a yes from someone who says no, because in the past they’ve been able to meet someone’s threshold for willingness for sex by offering to use one? Or are they exempt from this rhetoric applying to them since it isn’t the condom itself that makes them want the sex… which somehow makes the other party psychologically process the situation differently, with regards to how they view sex and abuse?

I do see a flaw in comparisons between charging money for sex and other types of boundaries people have, specifically that with selling sex it is the money itself which sex workers want and their desire for the sex is largely irrelevant to the decision-making. So, let’s consider a situation that mirrors it: a woman wants to get pregnant but has a low sex drive and is only willing to have sex with her partner when she’s ovulating and there’s a chance of pregnancy. This is an example of a time where a woman doesn’t desire sex (maybe even actively doesn’t want to have it) but chooses to do it for a purpose (pregnancy, which can be compared with money in sex work) and is using the ability to fulfil that purpose (ovulating vs being paid) as the boundary for consent to sex. Are these women gender traitors, as sex workers are often framed as being, who are encouraging the objectification of women as a whole?

Someone who charges for sex is setting a firm boundary that in cases where they don’t desire to have sex for personal reasons, a financial barrier must be surpassed for them to be willing to have sex with someone. Refusing to allow someone specific boundaries certainly comes across as far more objectifying, to me, than someone being freely allowed to have whatever conditions they want for sexual activity. To objectify someone is to treat them as nothing more than an object and to disregard their wants and desires; for some women, their desire is to charge money for sex.

If selling a service promotes the objectification of an entire demographic, due to the idea that one can pay to bypass consent and this undermines the need for consent at all, then it’s interesting that we don’t see this claim about hairdressing or babysitting or other forms of labour. A hairdresser won’t cut your hair for free, nor will a babysitter take care of your kids for free, outside of cases where they’re doing things for a friend out of personal desire.

The reason sex work is treated as if it encourages the objectification of women as a group, while other gendered forms of work like babysitting are not, is that sex is being treated as inherently different to other services. The thing is, beyond a gut reaction people are having based on norms in society, I do not see any reason we would assume that sex is exceptional in this way. Why would sexual objectification work differently from other kinds of objectification?

If we look at the broader problem of objectification with regards to things like human trafficking, with people being forced to work without regard to their rights or personhood, we can see that most of this kind of abuse is not sex trafficking in particular. Sex trafficking makes up a portion of all human trafficking and seems to be impacted by all the same things that the other forms of human trafficking are. Poverty impacts someone’s likelihood to be trafficked, as does whether or not they are an undocumented immigrant. They seem to work in the same way, yet the existence of consensual sex work is treated as worsening sex trafficking or the abuse of women in a way that farm work or hospitality work never is.

Trafficking concentrates in places where there is a demand for the work traffickers want people to do. Trafficking that forces people to work in agriculture will concentrate in places where the land is available for people to work on. With sex trafficking, it will concentrate in places where the client base is plentiful (densely populated places that are known for having sex workers). If you know nothing about the topic, this might make someone imagine that the larger the industry is the more abuse it creates, instead of recognizing that the abusive people and practices move to certain places and concentrate there. Having abuse occur in London instead of 10 different towns in the UK isn’t better or worse, unless you think abuse matters more depending on where it’s happening – the existence of a larger industry isn’t enabling abuse it’s simply changing where the abuse happens.

In places with a large known population of sex workers, abusive men who wish to target us will show up in that area to do so. Sometimes that means individuals who live in an area where a lot of sex work occurs will believe sex work is encouraging abuse. Rather than trying to stop sex workers from working alongside each other in a way that is safer, to stop abusive clients from travelling to one place, decriminalizing sex work everywhere makes it less of a necessity for sex workers to work only in certain areas. This is how you stop areas from becoming more dangerous for the public who do not sell sex whilst also protecting sex workers.

Clients are being turned from kind and gentle men into predators by the availability of sex workers around them. Even at my most charitable, I can only see arguments that sex workers enable abusive men as being complaints that because sex workers are highly vulnerable targets that means sometimes people in close proximity to us experience a percentage of that harm too. What it boils down to is this: people think that if people in their neighbourhood weren’t selling sex, abusive men would target someone else further away from their door and they wouldn’t have to think about it.

What matters to me is the total amount of abuse occurring, not where it happens or how close it is to me. I want to lessen abuse, not simply be free from having to personally think about it.

Sex workers don’t enable abusive men. We do sometimes increase the proximity of those around us to the abusive clients who target us, bringing abuse that would have happened regardless to the doorstep of different groups of people who think they’re above seeing it, and that provokes a reaction.