Why Women Buy Into 'Sex Work Is Work'

Denial is a feature, not a bug of liberal feminism.

I didn’t watch the Oscars this year and, were it not for the video of best actress winner Mikey Madison circulating online, would not have known anything about best picture winner Anora. A quick glance at Wikipedia informs me it’s a comedy-drama that tells the story of a stripper who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, a sort of modern-day de-Disneyfied Pretty Woman. As I’ve not seen the film, I’m not going to pass comment on its quality nor Mikey Madison’s performance. In any event, it’s her acceptance speech rattling cages.

In it, she '“honoured and recognised the sex worker community”, avowed to continue to support and be “an ally” to them. Meeting women from “that community”, she said, was “a privilege” and “highlight” of her filming experience. You can watch the full speech here.

It’s sparked controversy for seemingly glorifying sex work. During a virtual panel discussion on the subject on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, broadcaster Esther Krakue said the following:

“[We have been] collectively lobotomised. The people that can sit there and glorify sex work don’t have any actual clue of what basically renting out the orifices in your body is like for 99.9% of women who are [air quotes] ‘sex workers’. They’re being pimped out by a bunch of misogynists and treated like holes for hire […] If you are a women and think there’s anything desirable or respectable about sex work, you are just missing reality. It’s horrible!”

Krakue’s assessment is brutal, damning…and absolutely correct. There is perhaps no better argument for patriarchy, in its true definition, than sex work, better known by its pre-Girlboss name of prostitution. The world’s oldest profession? Try the world’s oldest form of oppression - as a woman who escaped the horrors of the sex trade put it to an audience of feminists at FiLiA in 2023.

So why do so many self-proclaimed feminists, especially in the younger generations, tout so-called ‘sex work’ as legitimate a job as shelf-stacking or accountancy? Or, as Madison suggested, a ‘community’ that should be supported and empowered, even celebrated. Why is Esther K’s viewpoint controversial in liberal feminist narratives? The answer, much like her summary, is pretty painful to hear.

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There’s a bit in Gareth Roberts brilliant book Gay Shame: The Rise Of Gender Ideology And The New Homophobia where he gives a (very diplomatic) theory as to why so many women have gone along with selling out their sex to placate trans-identifying men’s desires.

“Looking at the women joining male genderist mobs, many of whom describe themselves as feminists […] acknowledging the truth about the genderist movement is extra hard for them. It means admitting to oneself that a group of women-hating men have run rings around women, have subverted and upended feminism. This is a terrifying thing to even consider. It would make you feel helpless and, worse, a helpless fool. No wonder they’d rather wave the flags, chant the chants, keep smiling, keep the chaps happy. It’s safer - and it’s better to be safe than sorry.” (Chapter two, hardback page 43)

The unspoken word here is humiliation. And, is, in my view, the same thing that drives much of liberal feminism’s relentless commitment to the slogan ‘Sex work is work’. Much like genderism (Robert’s word for gender ideology), the implications of how much our understanding of women’s rights and dignity have been corrupted by the glorification of sex work, are devastating. As has been pointed out by many feminists, including Julie Bindel, no one benefits more from women buying into ‘sex work is work’ than pornsick men. To have it embraced this a feminist principle is a gift to them and a thoroughly humiliating mistake to have to admit. The fact is a great deal of highly-educated women who are - or who think of themselves - as intelligent, independent-minded, fierce feminists have been complicit in doing misogyny’s bidding. We TERFS and SWERFS have been banished from the elitist feminist table and inevitably, misguided ideas have gone from bad to worse and been double-downed on. Some may feel sorry for such ‘feminists’ having been so cruelly manipulated against their own sex by misogynists. Some may castigate them for letting themselves be manipulated. Either way, it shatters the illusion of infallible agency on the part of women.

Many young women who have been weaned on these slogans (TWAW, sex work is work) are in passive rather than active denial. So much of liberal feminism’s stranglehold on intellectualism resides in language, not just in the ill-defined buzzwords and phrases but in the unquestioned virtue and empowerment they represent. Anecdotally, a while ago I was having coffee with a female millennial friend and we ended up having something of an argument over the modern state of women’s rights. At one point, I used the word ‘prostitution’ when talking about statistics about MVAWG. She batted her eyes in near-outrage before correcting me primly that, what I meant was “sex work”. Unbeknownst to her, at the women’s rights conference I attended in 2023, I had borne witness to the testimony of traumatised women who had actually escaped the sex trade - all of whom implored women to stop using the phrase ‘sex work’ as it sanitised their oppression. My friend interpreted me using the word ‘prostitution’ disrespecting such women, rather than doing the exact opposite.

‘Sex work’ sounds far more palatable than ‘prostitution’ because it gives the veneer of dignify - ‘work’ even indicates status. But this is linguistic smoke and mirrors in the same way ‘cis’ is (the sentiment that there are male women and female women sounds ridiculous because it is, but pop a fancy Latin prefix on the word ‘women’ and hey presto, you’re an inclusive intellectual!). A bigger problem is that for the tiny minority of sex workers who make a great deal of money and consider themselves to be empowered, savvy businesswoman, killjoys like me are threatening their brand and illusion of status. It gets filed under the “my body my choice” school of feminist thought, how dare I suggest they’re debasing themselves by selling pictures of their feet for men to masturbate to! Women can love sex and watching porn too, you know! I’m probably just jealous of their success!

The infamous Lily Phillips case last year forced the hand of ‘sex work is work’ true believers. On a surface level, it was entirely her decision to bed 100 men in a single day, so why did it send ripples of shock, discomfort or disgust through so many? This was the ultimate demonstration of female sexual agency (right?) Some argued Phillips was vulnerable and damaged and being exploited by men lining up to bed her; some argued she was the one doing the exploiting of (implicitly pathetic, lonely) men. Whatever side you take, there’s no denying her endeavour exemplified the absolutely broken and confused sexual culture we have created and normalised.

Put bluntly, ‘prostitution’ has so little dignity as a word is because is there is no dignity in the act of, as Esther K put it, ‘renting out the orifices in your body’. It sounds hideous because it is hideous. The thought of a women, penniless and abused, having to resort to such degrading work for survival is unbearable. The thought of women gaslighting ourselves to cope with the disparity of sexual power it represents is just as bad. How much control and influence male sexuality wields over culture is, to borrow Roberts’s word, terrifying.

A handy deflection liberal feminists like to use - as well as their male ‘allies’ - is to conflate criticising of prostitution (and other forms of sex work such as stripping/online porn) with looking down on the women/people forced into the trade, which no decent feminist - try no decent person - is doing. It’s easier to frame to speakers of inconvenient truths as propagating ‘hate’ and ‘bigotry’ rather than facing up to the scale of the oppression that needs dismantling and challenging.

(As an aside, I am in no way saying the solution to liberating women - and men - trapped in the sex trade will be remotely simple or easy. I’m at a loss beyond, at least, stopping valorising it. If we cease championing the delusional idea sex work isn’t based around sheer exploitation - including self-exploitation - we can at least begin the horribly difficult conversation about the task ahead on an honest footing.)

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Women - especially millennial and younger - have been led up the garden path by a lot of ‘feminist’( or gender) theory promising them liberation and utmost bodily autonomy while, in actuality, denigrating femaleness by denial of its significance. Realising that not only messes with your pride, but your trust in society and people you formerly looked up too. I know first hand that I was happier in my liberal feminist days back at university, when trans women were women, sex work was work, and the reason I found Judith Butler unreadable was because she was a genius, not a moron wrapped in a charlatan. I could enjoy RuPaul’s Drag Race without giving any thought to the deep sexism behind the art form. I was blissfully ignorant about the stomach turning-realities of things like autogynophilia and the extremes of fetishism. Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda music video was a celebration of the power of female sexuality, rather than capitalism’s power to exploit it. Misogynists and sexists looked like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, not the left-wing male ‘feminists’ I knew as lecturers and friends. Prostitut- sorry, sex workers, had AGENCY, they just needed, like, a union or something. I knew everything because I knew f**k all.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t for a second regret my liberal feminist bubble bursting. As I wrote in my essay for The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht anthology “There is unparalleled relief in living life with integrity and rising above those who try to stop you”. Nonetheless, I’d be lying if I said that it hasn’t come at a price - to my health and everyday happiness. There’s a reason TERF and SWERF go hand-in-hand as slurs. Both terms demonise and vilify women who dare to point out the realities of exploitation and dehumanising of the female body at the hands of the male sex drive and ego. Misogynists hate us as it holds the scale of male entitlement to account. Liberal feminists spurn us because the reality of womanhood we’re underlining is something they find too depressing to contemplate.

As I’ve written before in my 2023 Critic article on liberal feminism, the product stinks but the branding is very good. Selling women the idea that liberation from the frankly excruciatingly unfair physical disadvantages and vulnerabilities female biology encompasses is a great business pitch. Especially when it comes with cool merchandise. Messy, unequal sexual and reproductive reality is harder to dress up in neat slogans or base an Etsy business around.

Nonetheless, I have tentative faith that within the next generation, the cheap, glittery plastic lib fem venture will fall apart naturally. A simple seed of doubt is all that’s required to being growing a new anti-porn, anti-prostitution mainstream feminist movement. For what it’s worth, I am in full agreement with Mikey Madison that we should listen more to the voices of the sex worker community prostituted women. This powerpoint is a good place to start. Send it to the next self-proclaimed feminist who tries to lecture you with a slogan.

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