Sex Work and Careers
Who are prostitutes? Many people cannot answer this question accurately and our failure to answer that question keeps the stigma and stereotypes alive and well. In The State of Sex, Brents found that one third of the women working in a legal brothel in nevada came from service work. Live Nude Girls Unite11 detailed the lives of the women working in a strip club, highlighting how many of the women had bachelor's degrees and had worked in highly skilled fields. Women often enter sex work because of the above average pay, which many claim is easy money. Several of the women Brents interviewed spoke to their reality: no other job offers such quick cash for so little training and commitment. They sometimes pitied other women who worked double the hours in thankless, difficult jobs, all for a fraction of their pay.12
For many women, sex work is not the focus of their career. Many of the women in The State of Sex expressed how they turned to sex work when they wanted to make money quickly. For some, it was for the downpayment on a house, or seed money for a business venture. They didn’t see this as a career. But because of stigma, we treat women who engaged in sex work as “once a sex worker, always a sex worker.” A woman who works in a brothel for one month to cover the cost of a new car is permanently attached to the label, where as a teenager who works in Mcdonalds all summer to buy a car isn’t permanently stuck with the label of frycook.
Brents found that one third of the women she spoke to do the work because they enjoy it. These women she dubbed as having “holistic” approaches to the work. They saw sex work as healing, beneficial to society and those who purchase it. They cared about their customers, and they often saw themselves as providing a psychological service in these men’s lives. “Women convey that there is a reciprocity with their clients,” Brents found, and they get “both sexual enjoyment and fulfillment.13 ” This model of a sex worker doesn’t fit with the stigma and stereotypes. These women see it as a good thing, an affirmative choice, and a preferable career, but the dominant narrative claims women cannot have this sentiment. This is the removal of agency that the stigma seeks to achieve: if these women are being coerced into sex work in one way or another, then this affinity for their job is false consciousness. With that, the stories and assertions of these women are rendered illegitimate, tainted by a lack of awareness. And so we do not have to listen to them. We disregard their narratives and uphold other narratives that reaffirm the stigma and stereotypes, narratives about women who were coerced and eager to get out.
The stigma around sex work tries to isolate sex workers into being an “other,” making it so they are a perceived out-group with whom average people cannot identify with. But this is not the case. Sex workers are not some freak step in evolution, and they are not a biological based group. Women of all social classes engage in sex work. Women of all backgrounds, all races. Some socioeconomic groups may be overrepresented in sex work, but all kinds of women do engage in it.
Of course, there are people in sex work who do it to survive. But the same goes for any job-- not many people working as cashiers in the fast food industry are there out of passion. Working a job you hate to provide income is not unique to the sex work industry. What is particular to the women who sell sex to survive is that they may have limited options given the economy or social situation they are in, and that is when consenting to selling sex becomes dubious, dangerous, and problematic. But this is not the experience of the all of sex workers, and to hold it as the standard experience is dishonest and unhelpful. Many waiters endure long standing, damaging verbal abuse from customers and work and low paying establishments, but we do not conceptualize waitressing by those bad experiences. We are able to separate bad experiences with a job from the job itself in essentially every other line of work-- but with sex work, the bad experiences become the job. They are inextricable, making is to that the problem with sex work is never the circumstances it happens under, and always the sex work itself. It becomes regarded as an inherent negative, and thus easier to condem.
11.unari, V., Funari, V., Funari, V., Query, J., Query, J., & Query, J. (Writers), & Funari, V., & Query, J. (Directors). (2000). Live nude girls unite! [Motion picture on DVD]. United States.
12.Brents, B. G., Jackson, C. A., & Hausbeck, K. M. (2010). The state of sex: Tourism, sex, and sin in the new American heartland. New York: Routledge
13.Brents, B. G., Jackson, C. A., & Hausbeck, K. M. (2010). The state of sex: Tourism, sex, and sin in the new American heartland. New York: Routledge