Criminalising consensual sex between adults, under any circumstances, is a violation of our human rights against personal autonomy and privacy.

No government should be telling consenting adults who they can and can’t have sexual relations with and on what terms. Women have a right to do with their bodies whatever they want to do with their bodies. Yet sex workers have faced decades of ignorance and misunderstanding by a government, and a society at large, that has vilified sex workers.

Why is she doing this to herself?

Regardless of what the media would have us believe, sex work is not always a ‘last resort’ for desperate women, for addicts and teenage mums struggling to get by, it’s just… a job.

Sex workers are not selling their bodies any more than office workers are selling their brains. What a woman does for work does not define who she is, it’s just how she earns her money.

‘Everybody has sex’, a long-time sex worker, Tamika Spellman from Washington D.C says. ‘The only difference is that we charge for it.’

Sex work has been considered a form of employment by many female activists since the 1970s. It allows women to creatively express their sexuality against a patriarchal society that has long endeavoured to repress it.

Some feminists, however, argue that sex work upholds the patriarchy by allowing men to objectify women. ‘If consent has to be bought, it isn’t consent.’ To those people though, I would pose the counterargument that sex workers are in fact in control. They are taking advantage of a man’s sexual needs, and it is their choice to do so. 

They are not victims, they are empowered. 

They are liberated.

They are not working for a man who is going to take 90% of their earnings…

She’s not a prostitute or an escort, don’t make that her entire personality, she is a sex worker. It’s just her job.

Albeit, an (unnecessarily) risky job at that…

Being a criminal offence in many countries around the world (sex work in a private place is not illegal in the UK, but kerb-crawling is), means that victimised sex workers (women who have been subject to rape, for example), are often too scared of being penalised to report the crime to the police.

A report published in 2010 by the Human Rights charity, Amnesty International, highlighted several cases of women who were told that because they were selling sex they were ‘asking for it’, and that ‘a prostitute can’t be raped.’

As one sex worker, ‘Queen’ (name changed), told Amnesty International:

I have never reported any crimes such as rape because I’m afraid I’ll get charged with soliciting.

Legal recognition of sex workers and their occupation maximises their protection, dignity, and equality. This is an important step toward destigmatising sex work.

When laws exist to keep society safe, yet laws against sex workers are putting women in grave danger, there must be an overhaul, a change to the system, where the focus is on protecting women from exploitation and abuse, rather than on trying to ban all sex work and thus further penalising sex workers.

It’s not only the government who ‘tut’ and shake their heads in dismay at sex workers, either, but so too do men.

The double standards when men have been exploiting and sexualising women since the dawn of time and objectifying them daily are stark. When walking down the street is reason enough for unsolicited comments and whistles, (of which, not giving men attention back qualifies us as being ‘frigid’ or ‘prudish’), yet when women ‘objectify’ themselves, they’re a ‘slut’, it proves to be the biggest contradiction.

Alas, in a society that has seen men profiting from women for decades, women are reclaiming their power back, and rightfully so.

Men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and the lowest-paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.
– Nawal el Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero.

Men love porn when it’s free and it suits them, but when the pornstar actually gets something out of it, they hate it.

Why?

Because it’s all about control.

When a man objectifies a woman, he is in control of that situation. He is in control of how she feels (overwhelmingly, intimidated), therefore allowing him to maintain his dominant position in society. 

In contrast, when a woman ‘objectifies’ herself as the creator, when she is in control of what she does and how she feels, and when she can get paid for her time, it’s ‘immoral.’

She’s a slut.

‘Whorephobia’: the fear or hate of sex workers.

Even some women hold this view, having had their minds infiltrated by the same men who catcall them when they leave the house, following them home with their eyes while they rush across the street, phone out, head down, praying that they will make it home safe.

Women must stand with women.

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Sex workers are not an exception to the calls for women to have agency and self-determination over their work and their bodies.

You’re not a feminist if you pick and choose which women’s rights you want to support.

Women, again, must stand with women.