On the heterodox fascination with Aella and the "happy hooker"

Why do those who have positioned themselves as critical thought leaders still have such a juvenile fascination with prostitutes?

I recall being 19 or so and thinking it would be a fascinating and edgy academic project to study the “empowered prostitute”—why focus on the boring and depressing “victim” narrative when you could highlight the far more sex-positive, feel-good caricature that is the “happy hooker”?

This was what third wave feminism encouraged—victims were out, and we were to instead seek out “empowered choice,” even in nonsense places. This approach was embraced by academia, and with the transfer of “women’s studies” to “gender studies,” came the idea that one could not have critical views of anything any woman did—particularly not if she existed outside your immediate bubble. We were not to criticize Islam, the veil, the sex trade, anything any “woman of colour” said or did, Indigenous cultures, obesity, pole dancing classes, amateur strip nights at the local hipster dive bar, BDSM, stilettos, makeup, plastic surgery, or “kink.”

My brief attempt at joining in on the fun failed on account of reality. I hated strip clubs and pornography—I found both disturbing, grotesque, depressing, and decidedly unsexy. As I entered into the realm of radio, podcasting, and journalism in around 2010, I began to meet, interview, and work with many women who had been in the sex trade, and they told me the truth—not the shiny one sold to us in modern academic texts or by young women selling their wares on social media, certainly not the one forced down our throats by the pro-legalization lobby, who had the left wrapped around its little finger.

The truth about the sex trade is endlessly dark—far more disgusting than one unfamiliar might imagine. Most women enter as girls, after a short lifetime of molestation and abuse, groomed by family members, men in their communities, their mothers’ post-divorce partners, their own “boyfriends,” and pimps who sought out preyed on damaged girls with no one looking out for them, and who desired attention and love. Once in the trade, the trauma and abuse was amplified tenfold by the older men who bought them—often while underage, or barely of age. These buyers were not all the sad, lonely, socially awkward man we are told have no choice but to coerce a woman into sucking him off because no other woman will volunteer—often they were wealthy men, family men, young athletes with girlfriends, single men who were between girlfriends and liked to party, and of course men who wished to abuse and torture women, accountability-free. The stories I heard were vomit-inducing—traumatic even to hear and store in my mind, never mind to experience firsthand.

As I continued on through my various degrees—a BA in Women’s Studies, an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, a near-MA in Journalism, abandoned just before completion because I needed to work, had actually begun working in the field, and could no longer afford to spend my days at university (nor did I desire to)—I was almost consistently the only one willing to say that the sex industry was not a good place for women. My writing, podcasting, and academic work was pilloried by the masses of leftists, feminists, and local Poverty Industrial Complex hustlers, who needed the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver to remain decrepit and depraved in order to keep their jobs and funding.

There has always been a perverted fascination with prostitutes and porn stars, but only in the past couple of decades was there an attempt to neutralize selling sex as “a job like any other.” The only problem with the sex industry, we were told, was that it was “stigmatized,” and therefore we needed to “remove the stigma” through both legalization and political rhetoric (a la “sex work is work”) in order to protect the women and girls in the trade from abuse.