Why I don't use the term 'sex work'

It's a manipulative reframing of sex and the sex industry that intentionally obfuscates the reality of porn and prostitution.

I and a few anti-sex industry activists, radical feminists, and women who managed to exit the sex trade fought for many years against the rebranding of prostitution and porn as “sex work.” We lost. The term is pretty much mainstream now, used widely across liberal media, within progressive and feminist circles, in academia, and beyond. I still refuse to use the term without quotation marks. Here’s why.

Sex is not work. I realize that this has the potential to read and be used as yet another empty activist mantra, but I think I can explain why it is useful and even important to understand.

Of course sex can be “work,” which is to say that either you can perform sex acts for pay or you can view sex as a form of labour (either in or out of a relationship). From an ethical standpoint I view this approach to sex as unethical and harmful.

Sex is fun. Or it should be, anyway. It is one of the most pleasurable things in life. It creates bonds, intimacy, and physical pleasure unlike anything else. When we orgasm, our brains release dopamine and oxytocin, known as the “love” or bonding hormone — it faciliates trust, romantic attachment, and mother-baby bonding (through breastfreeding, which also releases oxytocin). Sex is intimate, whether you like it or not. It is the closest you can be to another human, and for women especially, it is an incredibly vulnerable position to be in.

Sex also, of course, creates life, which is one of the most fundamentally important parts of life. I suppose the most important, really. It is not like shaking someone’s hand, or serving them a cup of coffee, or giving someone a haircut. None of these things create the bonds, life, vulnerability, or intimacy sex does. None of these things have the potential for trauma in the same way sex does either. One does not experience the same trauma one does from rape or molestation if a customer runs off without paying for his coffee, or grabs your hand and shakes it without your permission. I think we all know this… I hope we do, in any case.

The idea that sex is not special, that it is “a job like any other,” akin to serving coffee or building a house, has become popularized in recent decades, alongside the normalization of concepts and practices like surrogacy, artificial wombs, sex robots, online dating, and virtual reality. We seem to believe we can move past humaness. Post-modernism similarly has pushed us to detach from nature and material reality. We no longer can or should have fixed morals, we should be open and inclusive to everything from polyamory to men in women’s washrooms. Age of consent is deemed oppressive, so is “kink-shaming,” and anyone who criticizes the practice of commodifying sex or questions the ethics of a man who pays for sex is “slut-shaming” or “whorephobic.” Reality is in the eye of the beholder, so holds no meaning. Good, bad, right, wrong, true, false — it’s all relative.

Modern progressivism has deemed any discussion of the ethics or wider implications of normalizing fetishes and bringing private adult practices into the public realm as “moralism” — a bad thing, apparently. Judgement too. But, in truth, having morals and “judging” behaviours and practices and patterns is not a bad thing. It’s human and natural, to start. But imagine the consequences of blindly walking through life accepting anything and everything thrown at you. Oh, it’s just a man walking around with his dick out in a girls’ change room — don’t be judgemental! So he likes girls more than women, don’t be so moralistic — some people are just born that way. He prefers human meat over animal meat—it’s a personal preference, mind your own. Choking women is just his thing — don’t kink-shame.

What nonsense. We should be judging practices and behaviours based on ethical standards all the time.

If we detach ourselves from morals and ethics, we end up in a dangerous place. Which is not to say we should blindly impose our own personal or religious morals on everyone else, but striving to have none is just sociopathic. One of the gifts we have as humans is the ability to make ethical choices about how we behave, engage with, and treat others in what we presumably wish to be a civil society. No mudering, no raping, no torturing, no abusing are some obvious and important shared “morals.” Things like being honest, treating others with respect, helping those in need, not taking advantage of the vulnerable, and being courageous are also good morals.

The sex industry has demonstrated itself to be inherently and abhorently unethical in pretty much every way. Exploitation, coercion, and abuse are rife within both prostitution and pornography. We can see this easily simply by looking at pornography: the themes are consistently disturbing and unethical, from basic stuff like “Barely Legal” and the endless slew of “step-dad/daughter,” “father/babysitter,” “daddy dom, little girl,” “Lolita,” and other varities of incest porn, to gangbangs, “facial abuse,” and gonzo porn that aims more explicitly to degrade and dehumanize women through things like gagging, choking, slapping, double penetration, anal, double anal penetration, and various other forms of physical and verbal violence. Women are consistently, intentionally hurt in porn — subjected to painful and humiliating acts. Women engage in these acts because they are being paid. In real life, women do not enjoy being choked with a dick. That I even need to say this out loud is weird. Common sense (and morals) should tell us that hurting women is a bad thing, even if it is happening in the name of cum shots.

At its most basic level, paying someone to perform sex acts for you or with you is unethical. It is coercive, and as a society we have agreed that coercing people into sex is a bad thing. It still happens all the time, of course, but that doesn’t mean we should support it. Calling sex “work” makes light of the realities of the sex trade and normalizes the idea that coercing or pressuring women into sex acts they wouldn’t otherwise engage in or into having sex with people they wouldn’t otherwise have sex with is innocuous or even empowering. (I mean, hey — she’s getting paid, right? And getting paid is a good thing!)

This was indeed the intention behind forcing the term “sex work” into the mainstream — to destigmatize and normalize prostitution and pornography. It worked! Leftists, libertarians, liberals, and third wave feminists have all embraced “sex work” as a thing one should “support.” This is often framed as “supporting sex workers” (women, that is), but in reality it means we are expected not to criticize the industry at all. It’s a woman’s choice, we are told. Who are you to judge.

Well, we should all judge, actually. As people who care about the wellbeing of women and girls around the world, I think it’s actually great to judge men who abuse and exploit them for orgasms or profit.

Women don’t “choose” prostitution and porn for no reason. Girls certainly cannot be said to “choose” it, as minors. And yet most women get into prostitution as girls. (Once they turn 18 we seem to conveniently forget this.) This is called trafficking and it is what makes up most of prostitution. We don’t hear a lot about this from OnlyFans fanboys, who like to pretend like that one chick on Twitter who plays the role of a modern courtesan in order to ensure high brow intellectuals can feel proud rather than ashamed of their porn habits is representative rather than an anomoly (and, more likely, a lie). And while yes, some women do choose to sell sex of their own volition, they are a tiny minority among hundreds of thousands who don’t want to be there, but don’t feel like announcing that on Twitter would be wise, lest they lose their income or life.

If you listen to the stories of women who leave the sex industry, or even listen to the stories of the women working in porn or prostitution currently, they’ll almost always share a history of abuse, molestation, or rape. Emotionally and psychologically healthy women tend not to desire to be fucked on camera by an endless stream of men, leaving their bodies battered and bruised, and with a permanent record of their humiliation online.

“Sex work” sanitizes an industry that should not be sanitized. Which is not to say I think the industry should be a disgusting hellhole of nastiness and abuse, but that it is, and it will always be. This is an industry that is neither physically or mentally healthy for women, rife with STDs, of course, as well as a place where women routinely sustain physical injuries like anal prolapse (this is in fact a desired genre of porn, not just a workplace accident) and vaginal tearing. Mental health issues and addiction are a norm.

It’s not “work,” it’s physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse you are paid to pretend you enjoy.

I do not wish to be polite about something so dark, so destructive, and frankly, so disgusting. I do not wish to pretend away reality because some would prefer we not think about that reality. Therefore, I will continue to use the descriptors that make people feel uncomfortable, rather than comfortable, but that describe the thing I am talking about.

“Sex work” is used as an umbrella term to describe everything from stripping to porn to camming to prostitution. We are to believe it is an entirely separate thing from trafficking, and therefore acceptable. But it isn’t. There is not one area of the sex trade that doesn’t include trafficking, from strip clubs to camming to the legal brothels of Germany and beyond. It’s a garbage term pushed by leftists who want to reduce violation and depravity to a “labour issue” and by those who want to pretend that Max Hardcore and Denis Hof aren’t monsters, but business men. It erases the legions of girls and women whose bodies and lives are sacrificed in the sex trade, and tars critics who refuse to say “sex work is work — just a job like any other” as the problem, hurting women in prostitution and porn via “stigma,” rather than placing blame on the men who use, abuse and profit from those women.

When the truth is unpleasant, unethical, or dangerous, we should say so, not shroud it in pleasantries and tidy lies.