When people want to convince others that prostitution is inherently dangerous, and especially when they want to use their claims about the danger to argue that it should be illegal and continue to be stigmatized, they will often resort to giving long descriptions of possible traumatic scenarios for sex workers. Sometimes these scenarios are based on real events, at least vaguely, but in many cases they’re nothing but fantasies.
Whilst it’s common for people to frame fantasizing about other people’s trauma as being necessarily sexual in nature, I don’t think that it’s a case of sex work abolitionists fetishizing sex worker trauma (most of the time). I think the reason they imagine us being subject to these specific scenarios of extreme abuse is because it brings them satisfaction, but not of a sexual nature. People like to feel righteous and as though they’re being saviours and arguing in defence of those in need – the more traumatized they imagine we are, the worse they imagine our experiences as being, the better they feel about themselves. This, combined with what is often a desire to see what they perceive as sexual immorality being punished by broader society, leads them to concoct false narratives.
It is common that when I speak about decriminalizing brothel-keeping, for example, for SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists) to argue that this would make a certain type of sexual exploitation legal. Instead of allowing the focus to be on how decriminalizing brothel-keeping would make sex workers safer, by allowing us to work from one place and to not have to hide what we’re doing or risk being raided by police, their focus is on how managers should be punished. If you push back on this, to talk about how allowing us to work together makes us safer, they argue that brothels will never be safe… by describing what comes across as a fantasy idea of what brothel work is like.
I cannot count the number of times people have told me there’s no way to make brothel work safe by describing brothel work as being non-stop sex of dozens of clients a day with no breaks. They talk about sex workers being raped a dozen times in a day, claiming that almost every client is physically violent. On occasion, you’ll see them make guesses about how much we get paid, suggesting that we get £20 or £10 per client with the implication that lower amounts of money means we are devaluing ourselves more. They imagine dirty rooms and describe clients as having traits they find unattractive in ways that are often additionally bigoted (calling them old, fat, bald, sweaty).
There are certainly sex workers who are paid very poorly and subject to frequent assault and high client volumes. The average brothel isn’t at all how they imagine it, though. Getting dozens of clients in a day is practically unheard of. In brothels I’ve worked in, with many other workers, we averaged between a couple of clients per day up to my personal maximum of 12 within 24 hours which was a notable outlier. A high-volume brothel will mean seeing up to around 10 clients per day, certainly not dozens. They’re usually decently-maintained, with wipeable surfaces or frequent sheet changes, because without it being relatively clean clients won’t be willing to come back. With regards to how unattractive clients are, the belief that they’re all ugly and undesirable is based on the idea that they cannot get sex otherwise and must turn to sex workers or that immorality is tied to ugliness. Neither is true. Clients are, for the most part, fairly unremarkable men. Many of them have wives, and were at least once desired by them.
My experiences as a sex worker have been harrowing at times. I almost never share the specifics, and I’ve never written out all the worst details or told them all to one singular person. There are many things I have told to no-one about my experiences in prostitution. Still, they’re nothing like SWERFs fantasies of our abuse. I’ve been abused by police officers, something that they would like to sweep under the rug when they advocate for the Nordic Model which would keep sex workers in close proximity to the police. When I’ve been disgusted by clients, it’s not because they were unattractive and uniquely awful men, it’s because I didn’t want to have sex with them.
Abuse is rarely like it is in a film. It’s not cinematic. Most of the time, the abuses that we deal with are fairly mundane. The brothel manager takes 50% of my pay despite doing nothing but providing the premises. A client keeps battering my cervix despite me suggesting that he should be softer, and I’m annoyed and it aches for the rest of the day. I see ten clients in one day and one of them makes creepy comments asking me about the age I first masturbated and implying he’d have liked to sleep with me when I was a child and I can’t sleep that night because I keep replaying his words and being horrified.
Sex workers’ realities are more important that SWERF fantasies. It’s not that abuse doesn’t happen; it’s that the abuse doesn’t happen the way they act like it does, and so their supposed “solutions” won’t work.
If the only type of brothel that did or could exist was one where workers had no choice over clients and were expected to work every moment of the day seeing dozens of clients within a 24 hour period without being allowed to leave, it’d be easy to agree they shouldn’t exist. The reality is that the volumes aren’t so intolerable, most allow sex workers to decide what services they do and don’t offer, and that people willing return to these brothels as a means of earning money. The real abuse that happens within them can be mitigated by lessening stigma and providing workers with rights and making it so we can search for these workplaces more easily because they’re not illegal to discuss or advertise. Better yet, with full decriminalization, we can rent flats or share our homes with other workers without having to rely on a third party to take the legal risk at all.
The way that abolitionists discuss “the sex trade” rarely hits home for me, even as someone who they’d claim to be aiming to protect and whose experiences they’re supposedly talking about. I started selling sex as a teenager living in poverty and struggling to earn enough to feed myself. According to UK law, I’m a sex trafficking victim automatically because I started when I was under the age of 18. I hear SWERFs talking about teens being trafficked by concocting stories of them being kidnapped off of the street or of their clients pimping them out and keeping all of the money. It’s not as though no child has ever been kidnapped, or that no client has ever taken a vulnerable sex worker and used them to make money, but the majority of teens selling sex are doing so because they’re desperate for money and are actively seeking out clients.
One of the main elements of these fantasy versions of the abuse that sex workers endure whilst selling sex is that they remove our autonomy from the equation. The idea that we might be choosing to sell sex would, in their minds, makes us responsible for at least some of the risk we are in. To create a more idealized victim, SWERFs act as though all of our work occurs by force. By treating us as voiceless victims who are all trapped under the thumb of pimps and traffickers, they can speak over us and for us without having to reckon with the fact that we can speak for ourselves.
Engaging in prostitution is dangerous. Sex workers know this. We do it not because we want that danger, not to seek attention or to act out, but to meet our needs. Some of us are traumatized and hypersexual as a result and suppose that we might as well earn some money if we’re going to be having unsatisfying sex either way. For the most part, it really is about the fact that when you’re poor enough you’ll do things that are more and more dangerous and unpalatable to meet your basic needs.
There is no need to try to create a narrative where sex workers are perfect victims, to argue that we deserve rights and respect. No perfect victim exists. As long as we uphold the idea that making the choice to do something means you’re responsible for another person’s choice to harm you doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We cannot focus only on rights for those who are forced and discard anyone who has made a choice to sell sex and been abused just the same.
Punting forums (online forums where clients discuss sex workers they see, including reviews) will include lots of graphic descriptions of bookings. Radical feminists will sometimes post these reviews publicly, talking about the language used in them. Interestingly, many of them will use similar language themselves: calling sex workers cumbuckets or pieces of meat for their rhetoric. The point isn’t to sympathize with us or to support us by arguing that these forums themselves are bad, but instead to argue that since clients are objectifying us that we must indeed be selling our bodies as objects for their pleasure. As if a client makes the determination over our worth via only their thoughts about us. Via our clients seeing us as objects, we really become them to anti-prostitution activists.
When the average person is asked to picture what prostitution is like, their image of it comes from all of the awful stigmatizing media about us that they’ve ever seen. Most people haven’t heard our words, know nothing of our real experiences, and many have only heard about the idea of selling sex from Modern Slavery PSAs and jokes about “hookers” and “whores”. Even their ideas about what the harms against us must be like are warped by this image of prostitution.
People need to hear about our real experiences. The stigma surrounding our work makes sex workers unlikely to speak up and we end up with this awful cycle.
I don’t want more stories about our trauma that make it entertaining and consumable for people who see themselves as better than us or view us only as tragic victims. What I would like to see is more awareness of the realities of our lives. I want journalists to be responsible and to interview us when talking about issues that impact us, and for media that depicts us to treat us as three dimensional. We’re not going to reach a world where people have an understanding of what prostitution is really like without changing how people get their information about it.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 