“It just feels degrading…some of the things the men ask you,” said Danielle, a sex worker in the U.K. who was interviewed in a psychology study on sex work. “You know, we’re worth more than that… I am a human being, and I’m worth more than that.”

Outreach service worker Becky commented: “I think if you’d spoken to all of our clients, to all 600 women, they all would have said that they felt degraded.”

The discourse surrounding sex work around the world in the past few years has been polarized. Pro sex work feminists reclaim sex work as part of the sexual liberation of women, while sexual conservatives have clung to purity culture in order to determine the value of women.

It is important to mention that this argument on sex work is not derived from purity culture. We are not sexual conservatives. What we’re going to be arguing is that sex work cannot and should not be placed in a vacuum. Sex work exists within multiple realities, dimensions and worlds — all of which are touched and moulded by notions and concepts such as intersectionality, capitalism, cisgendered heterosexual patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, racism etc. While we’re going to attempt to cover some of them, it is impossible to cover all of the dimensions in which sex work proliferates because of two major reasons: firstly, we are both white women speaking from a place of privilege, and secondly, this article cannot exceed 1300 words.

Liberal pro-sex work feminists’ understanding of sexual liberation centers around “working within the system.” Namely, liberal feminists claim there is no need to destroy the tenets of capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy since women can feel liberated within them. This opinion is based on an assumption that sexism, racism, homophobia and a plethora of other forms of oppression are a faulty detail of society and not, in fact, the platform on which capitalism and patriarchy rely on. These systems are premised on and perpetuated by existing social power dynamics; there is no logical way in which marginalized bodies that are negatively impacted by these dynamics can be liberated. What liberal feminism attempts to do is create a platform in which the issues of sex work are veiled in order to make the value of marginalized bodies palatable and acceptable. This is the pattern that we noticed in the article and the reason why we’re against the glamorization of sex work.

The author made sweeping conclusions which encompassed all forms of sex work while providing evidence and arguments derived only from online sex work. The problem with this is that the world of online sex work and the world of in person sex work are vastly different — from how extremely dangerous in person sex work is, to the impact of the work on the quality of life. Online sex work is safer because it distances the sex worker from the client, meaning that the sex worker has less of a chance of being abused and/or murdered. This is not to say that online sex work doesn’t have its own challenges and problems as we will discuss later on. However, treatingall sex work as being liberating and consensual while ignoring obvious issues is not helping sex workers nor the liberation of women.

Sex work in the U.S. is not degrading because the act of sex is involved. It is degrading because one has to perform the act under oppressive cis-hetero-patriarchal and capitalist systems. The author mentioned that the real scandal behind the article of a medical practitioner having to turn to sex work was that she had to do it in order to pay the bills. We absolutely agree with this sentiment. It is despicable that medical practitioners during a pandemic have to have additional income in order to survive. But the way to go about solving this is not to glamorize sex work, but to realize the oppressive systems that have allowed for this to happen.

Liberation does not come from working within the “system” and trying to reclaim the body, for the body has been politicized and degraded because of the centuries-old boundaries and expectations set by male supremacy. Liberation under the patriarchy is just not possible. This dichotomy between being either a degraded person or a liberated person is a problematic understanding of what empowerment is. When we throw around terms such as empowerment and liberation, we must first think about what these loaded words actually mean, as well as what groups they apply to.

The world of sex work and the experiences sex workers have in the industry differ from case to case. For example, people with multiple intersectionalities, such as Trans women, as well as BIPOC sex workers have to deal with transphobia and racism on top of rampant and regular sexism. Some Trans women, in order to afford basic necessities to live, find that their only option is to engage in sex work due to the oppression and discrimination they face systemically, institutionally and also within interpersonal relationships. Pro-sex work feminists have failed Trans women by excluding them from the conversation. Sexual “liberation” for different groups of women does not look the same, and placing all sex workers within one conversation of liberation is not only inadequate but excludes the experiences of marginalized groups of people.

The conclusion that the article drew was that people hate that women are now consensually taking back their sexuality. This is simply not true. The issue of consent within sex work is a very contested subject that needs further elaboration than just this article. The idea that the consent of a women can be bought, as though economic benefit can change the nature of consent, is abhorrent. A woman should not have to choose between starving on the streets, unable to support her children, or selling her body for men to use. But even if we say that that’s the case for all kinds of work and not just sex work, there are a lot of other issues that are common in sex work that do not exist in other industries.

For example, not many people outside of sex work feel that their life is threatened by the same people who are providing” for their livelihoods. In real life sex workers, and even online creators, have to face death threats, rape, physical abuse, and emotional turmoil on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Combined with the notion that consent cannot be bought, these women are stuck between a rock and a hard place — and saying that they are not being degraded, and are in fact being liberated, is ridiculous.

The rising discourse, however, on sex work in the last couple of months has been spurred by a famous article outlining the thousands of hours of illegal material on one of the most popular sites for online sex work. The site has over 3.6 billion visitors each month, and in a recent “purge,” it deleted nine million hours of illegal content out of the previously existing 13 million. While the percentage of illegal content on online sex work sites in and of itself is problematic, sex work creators were not celebrating taking down “competition”; people were celebrating — if that’s the right word — taking down child pornography and rape videos.

Sex work is not glamorous. It is not liberating, and often it is not consensual. Blanketing it as such not only disguises the issues plaguing the industry, but it also grooms young girls into accepting that being sexually liberated means capitalizing off of one’s body. We can unpack purity culture and sexual conservativism without disregarding the horrendous experiences of sex workers within the industry. And we can respect sex workers not because they’re making money, but because they are human beings.