The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (30 page)

Others demonstrate a naïvety about economic reality that is almost touching in its innocence. Catherine Redfern writes of prostitution that ‘[n]o one should be forced to do any kind
of work that they really don’t want to do, simply to survive.’
¹⁷⁵
Which is rather amazing given that the vast majority of all waged work is
probably done for exactly that reason. How many people does she reckon restocking the shelves in supermarkets are there because it’s what they always dreamed of doing?

Most people have to work to earn a living. In my experience, having sex for money was far better than the long, long list of low-paid, exploitative, going-nowhere jobs I had as a student. I
worked briefly as a charity mugger, which was infinitely more depressing. I worked in a call centre, being yelled at and hung up on by literally thousands of people. I was taken advantage of and
underpaid in countless retail jobs and several research ones. Never once did I experience in sex work the dehumanisation that I experienced daily in many of those other jobs (and often for far less
pay). And my experience of that is far from unique.

Sex work is the only profession in which commentators assume you must hate the thing you do in order to take money for it. That would be like accusing Gordon Ramsay of hating food. Sure, there
are probably a lot of people working in fast food who barely tolerate their jobs, but no one assumes that’s a condition of employment. Most long-term career sex workers I know don’t
hate sex and don’t hate their jobs.

Sex work is infinitely more complex, and approaching it under the umbrella of assuming all sex workers are streetwalkers is a problem. Heck, assuming all streetwalkers are the same is a problem.
‘Being a streetwalker’ is not a discrete outcome of a single experience.

Let’s say that, included among sex workers on the street, there are:

There are a lot of people, of course, who would look at that list and write off every category on it as not deserving of support. I’m going to make the assumption that
readers progressing past this point don’t believe that.

Each of these groups has different needs. There are some solutions that overlap, but others that would only be suitable for one group. Any programme that claims to serve the needs of this
population must provide the essentials of a quality of life as well as the stepping stones to get out of prostitution if they choose to take them. It must also accept that some people may not
choose to take those steps.

Over and again, when sex workers are asked why they do the job, the answers revolve around two issues: money and time. Without a sea change in the ways people have access to money and time,
there will always be prostitution. Always.

Further, even if these issues are addressed, there are still people who will choose to do sex work. Some among those will take up its most visible and dangerous forms. This is an uncomfortable
truth about sex work, one that is written off. Again and again, actual sex workers with actual experience in the business who do not paint the work as universally awful or say they would do it
again are told they have ‘false consciousness’ or are ‘fake’ and ‘lying’. Fine, whatever. Attributing your assumptions to someone else’s thought process is
a dangerous game to play, but we all do it sometimes.

It’s when the people saying those things are also affiliated with, or supporting, the ‘rescue industry’ that I have a problem. How is it
possible to
offer comprehensive assistance that has a real outcome to people you think are deluded or lying? How is it possible to offer compassionate support to people you belittle? The short and obvious
answer is that it isn’t. It’s like becoming a pharmacist when you really believe in homeopathy. The two are not compatible.

Women in danger, women who can’t defend themselves, women who hate themselves and their lives . . . the arguments made by feminist opponents of sex work bear surprising similarities to
those made by social conservatives of the nineteenth century. The result? An atmosphere in which both the far left and the far right claim to know better than women themselves do. In these analyses
there are no shades of grey.

Labelling sex workers as victims is dangerous ground for anyone who claims to be in favour of women’s equality. It presents them as all the same and denies them a voice in the debate.
Also, many who advocate eliminating prostitution have neither worked in it nor have they conducted peer-reviewed research in it. As supposed experts, their exposure to the topic is no more in-depth
than that of anyone else who watches movies or reads the paper.

The way the sex work issue has been handled elsewhere can give us useful insights into what does, and does not, work. The legalisation of prostitution in New Zealand is one
such example.

As both Europe and the US embraced colonialism, venturing into unknown territory didn’t just mean opening supply routes around the globe. For many indigenous people, first contact with
Europeans also brought exposure to the sex trade. As in the American West, there was money to be made from men who rarely travelled with female company. New Zealand was no different.
¹⁷⁶

By the nineteenth century, in New Zealand, as in most British dependencies, pressure was exacted to pass the Contagious Diseases Act, and to heavily prosecute the ‘social evil’. But
after the Massage Parlours Act in 1978 allowed massage as a de facto cover for indoor prostitution, lobby groups in New Zealand began to push for legalisation of sex work across the board.

In 2003, New Zealand opted to overturn their laws that criminalised prostitution in favour of regulation. The people most visibly
affected by the law were streetwalkers in
larger cities like Auckland, where in 2003 about 360 girls were estimated by police to be working. Streetwalkers represent about 11 per cent of the total number of prostitutes in the
country
¹⁷⁷

Suddenly the world’s focus was on New Zealand: would legalisation change the sex trade there, and if so, how? Would it benefit the women, or harm them? What would it do to neighbourhoods,
to tourism, to the country’s international image?

An evaluation released several years later showed that the number of sex workers changed very little – and in some places, the numbers of them on the streets actually decreased –
compared to before sex work was legal. In Auckland, the estimated number of girls working the streets decreased significantly, from 360 to 106. People working in massage parlours and other
establishments expressed a desire to stay in the work because of the financial rewards.
¹⁷⁸

However, the report came under fire from the usual suspects. Melissa Farley in particular attacked the evaluation, saying that the numbers actually increased.
¹⁷⁹
She provided no evidence to support her claim. This is unsurprising since the report used verifiable numbers obtained through reliable channels and would be difficult to
challenge with any credibility. The numbers in the official evaluation came from police estimates and actual headcounts, which are straightforward since New Zealand cities are rather small.

Farley also claimed that the UN found evidence for trafficking and child prostitution in New Zealand after 2003 – but does she establish a causal link between trafficking and the law
change? No. Is there discussion of what the situation may have been before 2003? No. As we have seen previously, correlation does not prove causation . . . and Farley’s paper does not even
give any evidence of increase in trafficking.

In 2010, a book was published that included interviews with over 700 sex workers in New Zealand.
¹⁸⁰
The number of interviews represents almost 12 per
cent of the estimated 5932 prostitutes in the country, a far higher proportion than in virtually any other qualitative study of sex workers ever conducted. It concluded that the majority entered
and stayed in the sex trade for financial reasons, that they felt the new laws gave them more protection, and that the result was positive changes overall for safety and health.

Many of the prostitutes reported that social stigma was still a problem, but that as a result of the legislation they had become more willing (and able) to report crimes
to the police. Which surely represents a victory for women’s safety.

On the other side of the world, in Sweden, a law was passed in 1999 –
sexköpslagen –
that criminalised the buyers (but not the providers) of sex. Norway and Iceland
adopted similar laws in 2009. Even before the Swedish government’s own evaluation in 2010 of whether the law had been a success, the UK’s anti-sex-work concerns were claiming it was the
panacea Britain needed.

Was it? The evaluation, released in July 2010, relied heavily on a scattering of data about street prostitution, as other sex trade activities have become, presumably, far harder to identify as
a result of
sexköpslagen.
It also included data from – wait for it – seven active sex workers and seven former sex workers, a rather small sample by anyone’s
standards. The evaluation compared the same time period to streetwalking activity in Denmark, where there is no such law. But those data came from a Copenhagen NGO whose numbers claimed the number
of streetwalkers in Denmark was about six times higher than it actually is.
¹⁸¹

The bulk of the analysis focused instead on reiterating ideological arguments about why prostitution was bad. But as to any actual information . . . it’s severely lacking. The report has
next to nothing about Swedes accessing sex services using the internet, which is widely exploited all over Europe by call girls and independent escorts. It shows no data regarding trafficking and
whether the law has changed activity there. It is at most a puff piece – that the UK government seems keen to use as a model for its own future decisions regarding sex work.

What a lot of people don’t know is that the strict laws of the Swedish model are also applied to people living with sex workers. This has long been used as a way to prosecute exploitative
potential boyfriends or pimps. But the way the laws are written means that they may include uninvolved family members – and even sex workers’ children. There are already cases in which
sex workers’ children have been charged with pimping because they were living with a sex worker and not paying rent.

Meanwhile, in Canada, laws – and attitudes – are changing. Terri-Jean Bedford, a dominatrix whose brothel the Bondage Bungalow had been subjected to numerous
Canadian police raids, court cases, and appeals, finally prevailed in a legal battle that had been going on since the early 1990s.

‘It’s a great day for Canada. It’s like emancipation day for sex trade workers,’ Bedford said at a press conference in September 2010. ‘You can’t imagine how
happy I am today because I’ve been abused by the justice system for a very, very, very long time.’

After two decades defending her right to a livelihood, Bedford’s argument found favour with Ontario Superior Court Justice Susan Himel. Himel’s judgment ruled that prostitutes’
rights to ‘life, liberty, and security’ under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were being violated by aggressive policing.

Like in the UK, prostitution itself is legal in Canada, but many of the activities surrounding it are not. The ruling challenged three laws restricting those activities – keeping a
brothel, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and living off the proceeds of prostitution. In a 132-page ruling, the judge said: ‘I find that the danger faced by prostitutes
greatly outweighs any harm which may be faced by the public.’
¹⁸²

The government side argued that all forms of prostitution are unsafe, and making brothels legal would only attract sex tourists and human traffickers to Canada. But Himel rejected those
opinions, stating they were ‘issues that are, in my view, incidental to the case . . . ’ . She criticised claims made by Melissa Farley for the government’s case, saying,
‘Some experts made bold assertions without properly outlined bases for their claims and were unwilling to qualify their opinions in the face of new facts provided.’ In the summary,
Himel confirmed her judgment was supported by two decades of new research.

One of Terri-Jean Bedford’s co-complainants, Valerie Scott, said the ruling would allow prostitutes to unionise, protect health and safety, hire protection, and pay income tax. ‘We
are not aliens. We are ordinary people and now we have rights,’ Scott said. We can now pick up the phone and call the police and report a bad client.’

Historically, tolerance of prostitution has benefited women who
have no other routes to earnings and ownership. As with the failure of the ‘War on Drugs’ to
eliminate either the drug trade or the criminal elements involved in it, the available evidence suggests it is actually criminalisation of prostitution – not prostitution itself – that
harms people. Moving sex workers from well-lit situations into dark city outskirts puts them in danger. Decriminalised sex trades can actually drive down sexually transmitted infection rates.

And yet the messages, against not only sex work but also sex workers, suggest otherwise. Reading the arguments of those who want to criminalise prostitution, there seems to be a strong residual
streak of judgement and morality at work. While prostitution is thought by many to be a victimless crime, the people who oppose sex work keep claiming all sex workers are victims and that the only
solution is criminal punishment.