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Sex Work

6 min read

Part of Crime, police and punishment.

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Every episode (3)

Who argued it

Cathy Reisenwitz · Elizabeth Nolan Brown · Maggie McNeill

Operation Choke Point · Section 230 · Civil Liberties · Libertarianism · Criminal Justice Reform

Background

Overview

Bob Zadek’s guests treat sex work as a category of voluntary exchange whose legal treatment rests on bias rather than on harm to others. Maggie McNeill was described as a former sex worker and the blogger behind “The Honest Courtesan”; the excerpt for that episode carries no quoted argument. Cathy Reisenwitz, appearing twice, supplies nearly all of the recorded position: sex work is “private to the people involved,” and identifying a victim is difficult because neither buyer nor seller obviously occupies that role The War on Sex (2022).

Reisenwitz divides sex work into the legal and the criminal. Making pornography, being an OnlyFans creator, stripping and phone sex operating are legal. The main illegal category is “full-service sex work” — a straightforward exchange of sex for money, which she says is not legal in most parts of the United States. She describes escorting as gray: it is sometimes legal, and it is the arrangement in which a client pays for time during which sex may or may not happen. Sugar babying she calls legal, likewise paying someone to date or be in a relationship with you. Regulation reaches into the legal categories too — where strip clubs may be located, how naked performers may be, whether a full-nude club may serve alcohol, and what phone sex operators may say, with obscenity charges a risk for talking about certain acts The War on Sex (2022).

The case against criminalization

Reisenwitz’s argument is that exploitation attends all work and varies with the power the worker holds; a chief executive is exploited less than a janitor, and a well-educated, high-end sex worker is treated better than a survival sex worker working outside. What makes sex work more dangerous and more exploitative than it needs to be, she says, is criminalization and stigmatization. Remove those, she argues, and a worker who dislikes the arrangement can do something else. Where decriminalization has been tried, she reports lower rates of exploitation, violence and trafficking The War on Sex (2022).

She names the opposing position “sex negativity,” which she pairs against sex-positive feminism, and describes its adherents as “sex worker exclusionary radical feminists,” or SWERFs. Their error, in her account, is granting that a woman can consent to clean a toilet or make a latte for money but not to have sex for money The War on Sex (2022). Bob frames the same position as a presumption that cannot be overcome — that a woman lacks the emotional or intellectual capacity to consent, which he calls a built-in sexist statement The War on Sex (2022).

FOSTA-SESTA and unintended consequences

Bob describes sweeping federal legislation enacted under the guise of protecting women and calls the title Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act misleading. Reisenwitz says a moral panic around sex trafficking has been ginned up by organizations with evangelical roots and funding whose goal is to end all commercial sex, including online pornography. She says the government at state and federal level in most cases does not differentiate between adult consensual sex work and sex trafficking, so any instance of sex work can be considered trafficking in the eyes of the law. That moral panic led to legislation making online platforms liable for sex trafficking on their platforms; the platforms responded by booting all sexual content The War on Sex (2022).

The results, she says, were that sex workers lost the places where they advertised and where they exchanged “bad date lists” and safety information, so they could no longer screen clients online and had to find and negotiate with clients in person — both far more dangerous. Rates of sex workers murdered and of sex workers taking their own lives rose significantly after passage of SESTA-FOSTA, and she says sex trafficking rose while law enforcement had a harder time because it had previously worked with platforms. Bob calls SESTA the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and summarizes: a non-problem fixed by a statute that was itself a major problem The War on Sex (2022).

Decriminalization versus legalization

Asked whether any jurisdictions do better, Reisenwitz names New Zealand, where sex work has been decriminalized, and says that in every place that has tried decriminalization, rates of violence against sex workers and against clients, rates of STIs and rates of human trafficking have gone down, with less exploitative working environments. She reports that in 2020, for the first time, a majority of United States voters said they favored decriminalizing sex work, and that Scott Wiener proposed legislation to decriminalize sex work at the state level; an organization called Decriminalize Sex Work is also working on the issue The War on Sex (2022).

She distinguishes legalization from decriminalization, saying sex workers by and large support the latter. Legalization is highly regulated as to who gets a license, forces workers into brothels, leaves few brothels to choose from, and regulates in corporatist ways that keep incumbents out rather than protecting health and safety. Its worst feature, she says, is that it leaves a black market open: a worker who does not want to work for a brothel still suffers the harms of criminalization, and a large black market makes it harder to find and rescue victims The War on Sex (2022).

She also notes that full-service in-person sex work is generally regulated at the city level and that the laws do not vary much, but prosecutors do — they hold broad discretion over whom to prosecute, and police direct their energy accordingly. San Francisco’s last prosecutor, she says, went on record declining to prosecute adult consensual sex work offenses. Where police work with sex workers rather than against them, she argues, that is one of the best ways to find true trafficking victims, because sex workers often know who is being coerced The War on Sex (2022).

Across episodes

Two Cathy Reisenwitz episodes — “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” and “The War on Sex” — and one Maggie McNeill episode, “Of Sex Work and Censorship,” touch the topic; the Reisenwitz episodes appear in the same week and restate the same positions, and the episodes show no development between the 2020 and 2022 treatment.

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