Opinion | What It Means to Call Prostitution “Sex Work”
Final week on the Nationwide Group for Ladies’s New York workplace, girls’s rights advocates, anti-trafficking teams and former prostitutes convened to impress New Yorkers to take motion towards town’s booming intercourse commerce. Along with arguing for enforcement of current legal guidelines — and for the penalization of consumers and pimps versus the ladies and kids who’re their victims — they wished to ship an essential message concerning the language used round the issue.
“The media makes use of phrases like ‘intercourse work’ and ‘intercourse employee’ of their reporting, treating prostitution as a job like another,” mentioned Melanie Thompson, a 27-year-old lady from New York Metropolis who launched herself as a “Black sex-trafficking and prostitution survivor.” The language of “intercourse work,” Thompson argued, implies falsely that partaking within the intercourse commerce is a selection most frequently made willingly; it additionally absolves intercourse consumers of accountability. (My colleague Nicholas Kristof lately profiled Thompson, who now works for the Coalition Towards Trafficking in Ladies.)
“I urge the media to take away the phrases ‘intercourse work’ and ‘intercourse employee’ out of your fashion handbooks,” she mentioned.
In reporting the occasion afterward, The New York Submit used the time period “intercourse staff.”
The Submit is hardly alone. In what at first look would possibly seem to be a constructive (and presumably “intercourse constructive”) transfer, the time period “intercourse work” all of the sudden seems to be all over the place. Even outdoors tutorial, activist and progressive strongholds, “intercourse work” is turning into a widespread euphemism for “prostitution.” It will probably additionally discuss with stripping, erotic therapeutic massage and different technique of partaking within the intercourse commerce. It’s now generally utilized by politicians, the media, Hollywood and authorities businesses. However make no mistake: “Intercourse work” is hardly an indication of liberation.
Why, you would possibly marvel, does exchanging cash for intercourse want a rebrand? Derogatory phrases like “hooker” and “whore” have been way back changed by the extra impartial “prostitute.” However “intercourse employee” goes one step additional, couching it as a traditional job title, like one thing plucked out of “What Shade Is Your Parachute?” Its most grotesque variant is the phrase “little one intercourse employee,” which has appeared in a variety of publications, together with BuzzFeed, The Decider and The Impartial. (Typically the phrase has been edited out after publication.)
The time period “intercourse work” emerged a number of many years in the past amongst radical advocates of prostitution. Folks like Carol Leigh and Margo St. James, who helped convene the primary World Whores’ Congress in 1985, used “intercourse work” in an effort to destigmatize, legitimize and decriminalize their commerce. Not surprisingly, this shift towards acceptability has been welcomed by many males, who make up a overwhelming majority of shoppers. The time period subsequently gained traction in tutorial circles and amongst different progressive advocacy teams, similar to some targeted on labor or abortion rights.
I first heard the time period within the early ’90s whereas dwelling in Thailand, the place I supplied to volunteer for a company aimed toward serving to native girls caught up in prostitution. I’d been in sufficient bars with pals the place underage ladies flung themselves onto my companions’ laps, showering them with compliments, encouraging them to drink. Simply being current appeared like complicity in what felt like a mutually degrading ecosystem. All of us knew many of those ladies had been bought into intercourse slavery by their very own desperately poor mother and father.
However fairly than concentrate on difficult methods of exploitation, the group I used to be planning to assist, led largely by Western girls, aimed to higher equip “intercourse staff” to ply their commerce, similar to negotiating for more cash. I modified my thoughts about volunteering. I definitely didn’t wish to make life harder for women and girls caught up in prostitution rings, however I couldn’t in good conscience assist perpetuate the system.
No advocacy employee desires to stigmatize the ladies or kids who’re trafficked or who resort to prostitution. Survivors of the intercourse commerce ought to by no means be blamed or criminalized. Nor ought to the humanity of people working within the intercourse commerce be decreased to what they do for cash. Each opponents and advocates of the time period “intercourse employee” share these objectives. Lots of these urging legitimacy for the intercourse commerce additionally take a stand vehemently — and presumably with out seeing any contradiction — towards little one labor, indentured servitude and slavery.
However as with these shut opponents for the title of “oldest occupation,” the fact of prostitution isn’t value preventing for. Although knowledge is commonly incomplete, given the difficulties of monitoring a black market, analysis from those that work with survivors signifies that solely a tiny minority of individuals actively wish to stay in prostitution. Those that enter the intercourse commerce typically accomplish that as a result of their decisions are sorely circumscribed. Most prostitutes are poor and are overwhelmingly girls; a lot of them are members of racial minorities and immigrants; many are homosexual, lesbian or transgender. Many, if not most, enter the commerce unwillingly or underage (one oft-cited statistic exhibits the commonest age of entry is between 12 and 16; some have additionally disputed this). They’re regularly survivors of abuse and sometimes develop substance abuse issues. Many undergo afterward from post-traumatic stress dysfunction. To say that they deserve consideration and compassion is to acknowledge the breadth of their expertise, to not deny them respect nor solid them solely as victims.
That some prostitutes finally come to phrases with their state of affairs doesn’t imply that they might have chosen it if they’d higher choices. Melanie Thompson, who was kidnapped and bought as a prostitute at age 13, mentioned on the assembly final week that by age 16, she advised herself prostitution was her personal selection. “We needed to consider that to be able to proceed to endure,” she defined.
The urge to take care of that phantasm is comprehensible. The time period “intercourse work” whitewashes the financial constraints, household ruptures and sometimes sordid circumstances that drive many ladies to promote themselves. It flips the character of the transaction in query: It permits intercourse consumers to justify their very own position, permitting the acquisition of girls’s our bodies for their very own sexual pleasure and violent urges to really feel as flippantly transactional as the acquisition of packaged meat from the grocery store. As an alternative of girls being purchased and bought by males, it creates the impression that girls are those in energy. It’s comprehensible that some girls choose to think about themselves that manner, and positively a vocal portion of them do.
However we owe it to take heed to the opposite aspect as effectively. “We aren’t right here out of a way of morality about intercourse,” mentioned Alexander Delgado, the director of public coverage at PACT, a company working to finish little one trafficking and exploitation and which co-sponsored final week’s occasion (together with Mujeres en Resistencia NY/NJ, Voces Latinas, World With out Exploitation and several other different organizations). “The intercourse commerce is a spot the place violence happens and never a spot the place work occurs.”
At a time when labor rights have gained traction and the Me Too motion has raised consciousness round sexual harassment and abuse, it’s essential that activists select their targets correctly. The momentum of their hard-won victories shouldn’t be misplaced. A small, typically elite, minority of people that work fortunately within the intercourse commerce shouldn’t dictate the phrases for everybody else.
“Prostitution is neither ‘intercourse’ nor ‘work,’ however a system primarily based on gender-based violence and socio-economic inequalities associated to intercourse, gender, race and poverty that preys on probably the most marginalized amongst us for the worthwhile industrial intercourse business,” Taina Bien-Aimé, the manager director of the Coalition Towards Trafficking in Ladies, advised me.
In recent times, language has undergone drastic shifts in an effort to cut back hurt. Typically these shifts lead to contorted language that obscures which means. Typically these shifts make individuals really feel higher with out altering something of substance. And typically they do transfer the needle towards constructive change, which is at all times welcome. However using “intercourse work,” nonetheless lofty the intention, successfully will increase the chance of hurt for a inhabitants that has already suffered a lot. To assist individuals damage by the intercourse commerce, we have to name it like it’s.
