The Oldest Profession
I was the victim of incest as a child. In my teens and twenties, I read a lot of books and magazine articles about human sexuality to try to sort my life out and also did substantial therapy.
I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old. In spite of being one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and everyone expecting me to have a serious career, I spent my twenties in a 1950s style marriage, doing the full-time wife, mom and homemaker thing and checking books out of the library on various feminist topics.
I read at least three biographies of sex workers plus read the description on the jacket of others. The ones I read were relatively positive depictions of sex work and sex workers.
I chose to not read any of the books whose jackets suggested that reading them would be emotionally traumatic. I was trying to fix my life, not wallow in human manure and justify hating men.
I chose to not read a biography by a woman molested, raped and pimped out as an underage prostitute by her own father. I didn't care for the description about her mixed feelings and complex relationship to her "charismatic" but abusive father.
Children routinely tell themselves they love their abusive parents because they effectively have no place else to go and their lives are dependent upon the person abusing them. Trying to find something positive in this person is survival instinct, not a reasonable explanation for how he's really a nice guy with positive characteristics other than how horribly he's treating his own child.
One of the biographies I read was by a Black woman who wished to leave The Life but ended the book noting that she continued to hit the gym and keep her looks. The reality was prostitution was paying her bills better than most jobs could and people have trouble changing careers under the best of circumstances.
I met a woman at my corporate job who had a secretarial or administrative assistant type job and she spoke of wanting to do something else but being unable to make a lateral move within the company. Her existing experience in this role made her highly qualified for similar jobs and helped keep her doing that and never mind that it wasn't really what she wanted to be doing.
Another biography was probably from a Latina gal. I only really remember one thing from that book.
She fell in love with a gambling man and he agreed to stop gambling and she agreed to stop doing sex work. One night, he was gambling and got in over his head. It was more money than he could pay if he lost again and the house was considering making him cash in his chips and leave.
She caught the eye of the manager and let him know she would cover it on her back if her boyfriend lost. They let it ride, he won the next hand.
When her boyfriend realized she had agreed to cover his losses on her back in bed with the manager, he dumped her for breaking her word to him and never mind that she did so to be supportive while he was breaking his word to her.
My favorite biography of a sex worker is by Dolores French and it's called Working: My life as a prostitute. It's my favorite in part because she consciously chose to become a prostitute at the age of twenty seven.
She wasn't pimped or trafficked or forced into it in any way by other people and she didn't feel forced into it by poverty or by becoming a divorced single mom with kids to raise and no other means to earn a middle class living.
She was also not young and stupid. She was very much an adult who had been working for some years and had other work experiences.
She had fallen off a truck and realized she could die suddenly and unexpectedly even though she was young and she decided she wanted to have more of a life than "working for the weekend."
Shortly after deciding to become more adventurous and try stuff and get a life, someone she knew asked her to take an appointment she couldn't make. Her acquaintance was turning tricks and asked her to sleep with this guy for money because she had a scheduling conflict and couldn't make it.
So Dolores French went to a hotel and I think she was paid like $70 dollars for an hour of her time and she said it was the most money she had ever made on an hourly basis and he paid her with a smile on his face.
So she CHOSE to continue making a living as a sex worker because she liked the work and the money more than what she had been doing while working for the weekend.
My recollection is she had a college degree in fine arts, so she probably came from a fairly comfortable upper class background. She was educated and childless and she had previously worked in politics, I think on political campaigns. She said she was good at it but hated it and her point of view was you should never do work you hate merely because you are good at it.
She eventually married a lawyer and continued working as a prostitute. She served for a time on some kind of board in Atlanta advising police on topics related to her work as an advocate for sex workers' rights.
Most sex workers today will be women who were forced into it or who felt forced into it. Women are generally not supposed to like sex and there is enormous social baggage concerning women and money and sex that puts pressure on women to pretend they wouldn't have sex for money and only have sex for "love" while we tell women if you are beautiful you should expect to marry well and be set for life financially in the name of "love."
So my suspicion is most sex workers either won't tell you "I CHOOSE to do THIS." or won't be adequately educated and articulate in an upper class fashion to be convincing about such a claim.
Dolores French went to college, she had steady work and no children prior to going into prostitution and she ultimately married a lawyer and continued being a sex worker. Dolores French made a very credible claim that this was her choice and she had other options and wasn't in any way forced into this life path.
She saved up her money for a European vacation so she could go visit museums and see famous works of art in person in line with her substantial interest in fine arts. While in Italy, someone was persistently hitting on her and her Italian wasn't good and she finally tried to tell him "I only do that for MONEY."
He was happy to pay her and she never saved for vacation again. She traveled at will and worked as a prostitute wherever she went.
Most prostitutes do one kind of sex work. They are street walkers or work in a brothel or as a call girl. She became a prostitute to experience life and she researched various forms of prostitution and tried them out.
She bought herself a cute new pair of shoes and went and asked a street walker for tips on working as a street walker. The first thing she was told was "You need different shoes. Those will cut your feet up. You make your money on your feet as a street walker."
She worked as a prostitute in suburban malls and concluded that no one cared what she wore. She could have worn a potato sack dress and men would have paid her for sex so long as she had long red fingernails and high heels on to signal that she was a working girl and not a homemaker out shopping.
She said she was having foot problems or something and had flat shoes with her. Wearing flats was like a closed for business sign and putting her heels back on was like an open for business sign.
She was someplace like Amsterdam and talked to a sex worker who was visibly old, fascinated that men still paid for sex with a woman in her sixties. It gave her hope she could work as long she liked, which she didn't expect.
My recollection is she had an abortion at some point. She paid her taxes and was a responsible, involved citizen.
I paid attention to her opinion that legalizing and regulating sex work would be bad for sex workers' rights. She wanted decriminalization.
My recollection is she wanted there to be no law against charging money for sex.
I've thought a lot about the relationship between sex and money and our Cinderella fairytale narratives about heteronormative culture. I think it's a huge problem to act like women should only marry for love and only have sex for love while defacto expecting women to get most of their financial support by marrying well.
This narrative makes it Verboten for a woman to explicitly think about career versus marriage in terms of her own financial welfare, much less discuss such things in pragmatic terms with anyone.
I'm absolutely certain that making sex work illegal makes it hard for trafficked women to escape defacto imprisonment because going to the police and complaining you are being trafficked means admitting YOU are committing a crime by engaging in sex work.
This means the most likely outcome is your own arrest. Trying to prove trafficking is challenging and pimps rarely do time compared to sex workers according to what I have read.
I don't actually know how to create a better future. Trying something new is always a gamble and it's guaranteed that most women doing sex work will absolutely not be women like Dolores French who are educated and responsible and politically active and crystal clear about this being a CHOICE and WHY they chose it.
Even if we find better answers than the garbage we have today, many women will continue to be opposed to sex work generally because they want to believe in love and many sex workers will be women who feel forced into it and like they would rather be doing something else but aren't qualified for anything else with similar pay.
I'm for decriminalization for two reasons:
1. I think criminalizing sex work defacto keeps women in difficult straights, both by making it illegal to do well-paid work for which they are qualified when nothing else is available and by making it difficult for sex workers to leave the life.
2. It's part and parcel of the narrative of heteronormative culture that women only have sex for love and it's inherently a bad thing for women to think about marriage etc. in terms of money.
We currently expect all women to choose virtuous poverty over taking a realistic and hard look at life and making decisions that include a healthy dose of survival instinct and self interest.
And that results in women being dishonest about being after a man's money and it also results in most women spending their final years in poverty no matter how virtuous and hardworking they are.
We need to find some path out of this ugly reality being a global cultural norm. I think step one starts with making it okay to talk about the fact that we currently expect women to earn their living on their back and politely call it "love."
And decriminalization of sex work is essential for that conversation to happen.