Bullshit Radical Feminist Arguments About Sex Work

Whilst not all radical feminists have exactly the same positions on sex work, there are common beliefs and arguments. Focusing on the big picture is useful, but sometimes it can help to look at a single person with these beliefs as a way to unpick their reasoning on an individual level.

I often get into arguments with radical feminists on Tumblr, and I’d like to break down the comments made by one user in this post (which you can look at in full here).

These arguments come from a radical feminist who took issue with me discussing how people can better support sex workers’ rights.

This is a false description of what sex work is. Consent is not “sold” when a person sells sex. Their consent is conditional upon being paid, but that is not the same thing. In the same way that I’m not selling consent for a condom when I require a condom be used for me to agree to sex, I’m also not selling consent when I require money. What I am selling is sex itself, as a service, and I retain the right to say no and to have boundaries. When you pretend that selling sex is selling blanket consent, this lie encourages people not to see the difference between when we agree to sex with a client and when a client rapes us and encourages clients to believe that we are selling away our right to have boundaries.

I sell sex and I am not an object. The idea that I’m objectifying myself by selling sex and fighting for workers’ rights as I do so is laughable coming from someone who is themselves insisting that I am a product. I am a person using my body to provide a service, as are other people engaging in prostitution, and we are people while we sell sex in the same way that a hairdresser is still a person while they cut hair or a care worker is still a person while they wipe their client clean after using the toilet.

Sex workers selling sex does not encourage clients, or men in general, to view women as sex objects. The men who do so are misogynists who will do that regardless, and who treat sex workers the worst in part because the public (and even radical feminists) allow and encourage it by objectifying us too.

One person selling sex doesn’t imply that every person is available to purchase sex from, just like how one person being a firefighter doesn’t imply that anyone can be expected to go and fight fires. This is nonsense that is claimed about sex work because sex workers are so detested that people want to hold us accountable for the behaviour of abusive men who may or may not be our clients. Victims are not responsible for their abusers behaviour, and sex workers are not responsible for the actions of our abusive clients or of men who hate sex workers and are also violent misogynists.

Even if no-one agreed to sell sex, misogynistic men would still request to buy sex or nude photos from people who don’t want to, because they don’t care about consent in the first place.

Sex workers deserve to be able to leave sex work if we want to, and we shouldn’t face discrimination. If you do not decriminalize it, it is impossible to avoid that discrimination – when elements of prostitution are illegal there necessarily has to be discrimination, it’s structural. If it’s a crime to buy sex, the earnings are proceeds of crime and banks are made to discriminate against sex workers. If it’s a crime to run a brothel, sex workers who work together for safety are criminalized and cannot pass background checks for future jobs or will face criminal penalties. If it’s a crime to make money from the proceeds of prostitution, it’s illegal for sex workers to hire security or even rent a home because the landlord or security are “profiting” from that prostitution!

Decriminalizing sex work makes sex workers safer because we’re able to access workers rights, to work together for safety, to have banking access to save money and be in less precarious situations, to hire security, to report mistreatment without risking arrest themselves, and so much more. When our clients aren’t criminalized, they’re more willing to provide screening info and we can assess clients more easily for our safety.

(Here’s the link that was provided, a sourceless blog post, and here’s a link to a well-sourced article by Scarlet Alliance which is a sex worker activist group in Australia.)

It’s not true that a sex worker has been sued for “incomplete services”. It was claimed in 2019 that sex workers “could be” sued for incomplete services, but this is a misrepresentation of the law:

What the law does do is say that if a client pays for sex, and the sex worker doesn’t want to have sex and changes their mind, that the client has the right to their money back. If instead of this, you would like it to be illegal for the client to pay for sex at all, this far increases the likelihood that the client will assault the sex worker when they refuse, because the client has no recourse to get their money back and clients in this situation often become entitled and abusive.

The law does not, at any point, give managers of sex workers the right to sue the sex workers who work for them. I’ve actually read the law, and I assume most radical feminists havent, so it’s understandable why they’d make this error.

Interested for someone to imagine it’s unfair, rather than to be able to state it outright, when a sex worker has their bank account closed, and even then to caveat it by giving a scenario where the money is being used to escape sex work! Whether someone is saving to leave sex work, looking for another job or not, or is simply living off the money they earn from month to month, sex workers do not deserve to lose our bank accounts. Losing an account means we can’t rent most places, can’t use certain types of public transport, can’t use various shops or online services, can’t get a mortgage, can’t reference our credit history, can’t get a phone contract… I could go on.

Sex work is indeed often dangerous, particularly prostitution. It’s made that way by criminalization and stigma. Decriminalizing it gives sex workers more rights, more freedom, and more control over our bodies and consent.

We must abolish poverty, not prostitution, because trying to abolish prostitution is not possible and only means that the people who find themselves with no better options are left to engage in sex work with less rights and whilst in more danger. You need to get rid of the things that push people to sell sex when they don’t want to, like poverty, not put people in more danger once they’re already selling sex.

Radical feminists do not wish me well. They want the veneer of acting like they care about me whilst simultaneously advocating for laws like client criminalization (the Nordic Model) that will make me face worse mistreatment or get me killed. Fuck off.