Is Sex Work Work?
A few days ago, a reader sent me this essay by Canadian writer Meghan Murphy, asking for my thoughts. Well, for better or worse, here they are.
The essay carries the unwieldy title: “The dystopian place ‘sex work is work’ takes us: Belgium’s new labour law allows pimps to file government complaints against prostitutes who turn down clients and sex acts.”
In her essay, Murphy disputes the wide-spread progressive notion that “legalizing an illicit thing and bringing it above board to regulate it will make it safer.” To the contrary, Murphy believes that, “Framing prostitution as a form of ‘work,’ and therefore subject to labour laws and open to unionization, was the first step, not in protecting women and girls in the sex trade, as presented, but to normalizing and expanding the industry.”
In the course of making her argument, Murphy repeatedly misrepresents her opinions and biases as established fact. A few examples:
Sex isn’t work (or it should not be, in any case). (Who says? Why not? According to what logic?)
We are talking about sexual exploitation, abuse, and trafficking. We are talking about the trade of human beings and selling access to the bodies of women and girls. (No, the law in question is clearly about adult women [not “girls”], and stipulates that these women are choosing sex work freely, under no pressure other than the omnipresent pressures of capitalism.)
Women and girls don’t want to sell sex. This is not a desirable occupation. (Again, says who? What qualifies Ms. Murphy to decide this for all women?)
From a logical perspective, Murphy clearly began with her certainty that sex work is inherently, unavoidably demeaning, exploitative, and abusive, and then argued backwards from there. She never even addresses what seem to me to be the two most salient questions in any discussion of the ethical implications of sex work:
Isn’t most work inherently exploitative? Aside from the observer’s judgmental indignation (based on personal experience, religious beliefs, and so on), is there any way to objectively assess how exploitative any given paid activity is? Is the woman who is earning $50/hour to give “happy ending” massages objectively, measurably more exploited than the woman making $10/hour to kill and gut chickens coming down a conveyor belt or shoveling horse shit behind a race-track on a hot day? Who decides the relative levels of exploitation in such activities, if not the worker herself? By what measures and by what rights are such judgments made? Which brings me to…
Do adults have agency over their own decisions or not? Having established that most work is inherently exploitative (someone is paying you to do something you wouldn’t do for free), why shouldn’t adults have the right to choose sex work over the sweatshop, the Amazon warehouse, cleaning bedpans at a senior center, or working a mile under ground in a gold mine? What is the argument in support of removing the option of choosing this particular form of paid service from adult women? I’ve yet to hear a good one.
To be clear, the hypotheticals I’m presenting assume that we’re talking about adult women of sound mind who are making decisions based upon their own assessment of their interests. Please don’t lump this in with trafficking or the abuse of children — as Murphy does — which are clearly exploitative and should be illegal.
What annoys me is that sloppy, leaky arguments like Murphy’s are taken seriously when they’re aimed at supposed “sexual exploitation,” when the same arguments would be dismissed or ridiculed in any other arena. In defense of women, should we make it illegal for them to marry wealthy men they aren’t attracted to? Outlaw men paying for dinner in the hope of getting laid later? Let’s make it against the law for men to accumulate wealth and power as a means of attracting women who shouldn’t be attracted to such things anyway. Should the fast food industry be shut down because people who work there only do so because they couldn’t find anything better? Should we just assign people jobs because they aren’t competent in making such decisions for themselves? Aren’t casinos inherently exploitative? Shut them down, too?
It seems to me that logical consistency really only permits us to conclude that if it’s legal to have sex, and it’s legal to sell services, then it should be legal to sell sexual services. Indeed, decriminalization empowers sex workers by making it possible for them to report precisely the kinds of abuse and exploitation Murphy claims to be against. Even Murphy admits that the Belgian law she’s so upset about “says prostitutes can receive health insurance, a pension, maternity and vacation leave, as well as unemployment benefits.”
To be sound, an argument cannot be founded on moral repugnance or personal disgust. And yet, when applied to matters involving sexuality, logical standards seem to be easily abandoned. If anyone has a logically sound argument why adult women (and men) should not be free to choose sex work, I’d love to hear it.
The arguments for decriminalization of "sex work" are better than the arguments for the criminalization of the same. So I'd certainly favor decriminalization of "sex work".
That said, no, I don't believe sex really is "work," and that we ought not to treat it as if it were work. But I'm not saying it is morally wrong to treat sex as work. I'm saying it is aesthetically repugnant to treat sex as work. Here, I'm raising aesthetics up to occupy a space overlapping with ethics which together, these two, have what is often called a "spiritual" saliency. For me , as a nature mystic, and a non-theist, this kind of spirituality I allude to isn't theistic in nature, but natural. My ethics and aesthetics, which are integrated rather than segregated, are naturalistically "spiritual," but not religious.
Just because something is ethically and aesthetically repugnant is no reason to make or enforce laws about it. For me, sex is a sacred gift, not work. But I'd not outlaw "sex work".
When we treat sex as "work" we tend to desacralize it. But , as you say (or, rather, imply) Chris Ryan, most which we call work is also a kind of desacralization, since it tends to be exploitative in nature. I would wish to sacralize all work. And I'd like us to treat all things erotic as a sacred art rather than a commodity for sale.
Your post needs to be read carefully because it is an example of focused thinking regarding a perspective that many people hold, making a knee-jerk reaction when someone calls prostitution "exploitative." Instead, they need to take a close look at the broader picture. What work is free from any taint of exploitation? The example of CASINOS is an excellent case in point. It is in the very nature of work that some sort of "exploitation" inevitably enters the picture. If WORK is exploitative, what about PLAY? One can make the case that PLAY exploits people because it turns their attention away from "more important" tasks.