What matters is a legal right to justice. Legal right to sue or press charges if you have been violated, not only for rape, but for theft of services, and all other manner of things. Stigma effects that, it effects the poorest sex-workers the most. We don’t have much stigma, we can hide, we can drop out of the life and take up office jobs (btw, high school drop out, didn’t graduate college right here. not “educated”, just well-read, minor disabilities.)

3) Legal right would also cover clients, so if they have been set up and robbed, they are able to recover losses and get justice.

4) We are able to identify and alert authorities to abuse among our friends, coworkers, and others in the life who may be being coerced or threatened. As it is now, we are afraid of being charged, of attracted police attention – whether that attention is them wanting to arrest us or rape us. We don’t want them to know us until we have full protection under the law.

We think it will take destigmatizing it, especially to other feminists, in order to get it decriminalized, so women who are more easily victimized have a voice and a chance. Chances we – the sex-workers with blogs – already have.

It’s not for us, we know we are lucky, we want the other ones to get lucky too. Or we want them to feel secure that if someone tries to rape them, or rip them off, they can call the police and get service – service where they are respected – not service where the police answer your complaint that you were robbed or beaten, and they take the opportunity to take an extra-careful look around your house – that you didn’t even want to let them into in the first place.

Do you know what that’s like? Have you ever had to call the police, and hope they bother trying to catch they guy while praying that they don’t start nosing around too much? The fact that a sex worker would have to hide things around her apartment, or change her appearance to be taken seriously as someone who is a real victim is classist at the least, in even the best light.

If she is raped, should she have to worry about closing out the windows on her computer because the police may see something on the screen? – should she have to worry about that, hiding evidence of her “crime” before she calls for help? Do any of you non-sex-workers? If you don’t have to worry about hiding your crimes before calling the police if you’ve been raped, and if I don’t have to worry about it if I am, then neither should she.

And it’s great that everyone is having a calm dialogue, but right now, somewhere there is a woman bleeding from her vagina as she takes the time to tuck away the condom packages she bought earlier and shuts off the screen showing her online advertisements for “adult services”.

If you were raped, would you worry about hiding the box of condoms? Or would you not even think of it until the defense tried to use it to prove it was all consensual?

First of all, thanks Anonymous Ex-Dancer for your post. I am a rape survivor and I do not find your comment trivializing in the slightest.

The problem I have with the “all work is exploitive” and “it’s all physical labour” is that it completely misses the psychosomatic implications of a sexual exchange and particularly the psychological implications of being penetrated. Whenever a guy tells me that prostitution is just another kind of work, I ask him if digging ditches is freely interchangeable with being fucked in the ass. This usually elicits a garbled response and a hasty retreat.

What bugs me about Belle de Jour’s claim that prostitution is not only viable but glamorous, fun, sexy and fulfilling is that she will not do it under her real name. If you’re a sincere advocate Belle, then pony up and advocate.

Now of course, we know her real name and her “real job” and we are supposed to buy more deeply into the idea that being a hooker is cool because she’s an academic. Wow! A SMART chick likes to hump for cash, so it can’t be exploitive, right? So why has she not left the academy for this wonderful career path with all it’s perks? Could it be because she is actually exploiting our collective patriarchy-induced sexual repression to make herself into a Paris Hilton-style celebrity?

I know what you are trying to get at by saying privilege is not separable from class, and yet, it is still the case that say an upper-middle-class black person lacks racial privilege, and that’s what I meant to say here. I know that one privilege inflects and affects another, of course. But that’s not what I intended to apply in the above.

Also, your point re race not always being visible is of course well-taken. I was careless above.

If I were to rephrase it after the discussion I’ve had here and elsewhere, I think I would say something, again rooted in my experience which is not as limited as I suspect you suppose – I worked with sex workers rights’ activists while a student – that the argument that sex work is liberating is one I only see from the white/cisgendered/etc. Mostly because other kinds of people engaged in sex work tend to be more exposed by the risks attendant to it simply by lacking certain privileges, and so tend to speak of it in a more qualified and dare I say tethered to reality sort of manner.

There are, indeed, as you say, a large variety of people involved in sex work, and I have no desire to erase that. But, and again I am speaking somewhat anecdotally here, I am concerned that going into sex work is presented by certain advocates (the people I am referring to, sloppily, as white/educated/etc) as simply a path to personal fulfillment, because when they do that, it seems to me they obscure and negate other factors involved, including poverty and other barriers. I’m thinking, for example, of the disproportionately large number of First Nations women in Canada engaged in sex work, who are also disproportionately the victims of people like Robert Pickton. (See e.g.: this article on aboriginal women in Canada.) While it is true that removing the stigma on sex work might help them, somewhat, as the author points out, they were doubly erased by also being aboriginals. They come from economically disadvantaged communities. And they are largely the sex workers I have spoken with outside of the rich white paradigm I am presenting, and none of them have said they think of it as a liberating practice. Many if not all wanted to get out of the trade as soon as possible. I guess what I am saying is that I don’t see them served by the Belle de Jour paradigm, and that if I am, as a feminist, interested in liberation, then I think my first allegiance has to be to them over a Brooke Magnanti.

One other clarification of a line you didn’t bring up but which seems to have sparked people’s ire: when I talk about my work ending at my fingertips, I do not mean to imply that I occupy some superior moral sphere by “using my brain” or whatever dismissive euphemism there is. What I mean to do there is say that look, I know that everyone has to work, but all work is not the same. All work does not demand as much of us. Miners inhale incredible amounts of toxic chemicals; slaughterhouse employees lose fingers and sometimes limbs. I do not think that a just world allows some people to take those risks while others do not. For example, one of the things I keep thinking about as we have these discussions is an old line of Dworkin’s (yeah, I know, some people hate her, but humour me here): “Women willing to let other women do the so-called sex work, be the prostitutes, while they lead respectable professional lives in law or in the academy, frankly, make me sick.” Obviously that doesn’t go for anyone in this thread who is, in fact, a sex worker, but I do worry about it among so-called “allies” of the sex workers’ rights movement. I do worry about it among young women who call it a choice but say they simply would demur themselves out of “preference.” That, to me, seems a cop-out.

I don’t think discussion of privilege can really be divorced from class.

To clarify, I’m certainly not claiming either that the “working class” or whatever you’d like to call it is in agreement on this issue – I do think in general many of them would say the idea that “to work” is to choose between alternate paths to personal fulfillment, or that choice of profession means you have ALL choices open to you, is “what rich people think” – but simply relaying admittedly completely anecdotal evidence that I don’t hear this rhetoric from other kinds of women (and sex workers!). It’s a weak statement because it’s anecdotal, but it’s not speculating on the class background of strangers.

Katie, I think what people are trying to tell you is this: you are in no place, in this context, to tell me what my background is or where I am coming from. You assume I come from a white collar or professional background. You are utterly incorrect.

and this

As to the blog generally: if you were a more regular reader, you would know that the bloggers here have varying views on any number of things. Including what our privilege means and how it affects our blog. Now, I have less of a problem with the fact that you disagreed with me than I have with the way you did it. We try to be civil here. Often we fail, but we nonetheless request that you not (a) assume you know my class history; and (b) address everyone as though you had some superior access to a better feminism. None of us do. That is why we specifically call our blog a “Pursuit.” Not an endgame. But in order for us to continue the pursuit productively, we demand of our commenters a degree of good faith.

can come from the same person who wrote this:

Not for nothing, but I’ve never heard the sort of “sex work is a valid choice” argument come from anyone who wasn’t young, white, cisgendered and relatively well-educated. That is to say: privileged, and thus relatively able to call on certain defenses when necessary.

I would suggest that, as you pointed out, it’s unwise to presume you know the class status of strangers.

I suspect that a big part of the distinction between the two (surrogacy/prostitution) is who exactly you’re selling to and what you’re allowing them to do. When you sell your ovaries/uterus, you’re allowing people who want children to have children (a generally positive thing). When you sell your vagina, you’re allowing a man to feel like he can force women to have sex with him if he’s powerful/moneyed enough (a generally negative thing).

But perhaps there’s a whole other distinction that I’m missing, like that surrogacy doesn’t actually require you to touch the client, only the doctors.

What makes you think that discomfort with sex work is rooted in hostility towards the sex worker? Pro-prostitution/pro-porn folks always make that accusation, even when critics of sex work explain why they have a problem with it. Whether or not sex workers consent to their work, ALL WOMEN are still members of the Sex Class. For this I blame patriarchy (not sex workers).

ETA: In summary: I have a problem with the fact that women’s bodies are in such high demand. I have beef with the buyers, not the sellers.