The Sex Wars and Sex Work Criminalization
In Trade Associations, Industry Legitimacy, and Corporate Responsibility in Pornography, Georgina Voss illustrates how moral panics around the pornification of culture have led to pornography becoming “associated in the public eye with an array of illegal and deviant activities including child exploitation, human trafficking, and drug addiction” (Voss 191, 2015). Fear of child abuse and human trafficking has historically been encouraged by policymakers that seize the opportunity to use these issues as a rationalization for increased criminalization of sex work and sex workers. This manifests online in several ways, but currently, among the most significant and harmful are the House-bill ‘Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act’ (FOSTA) and the Senate bill ‘Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act’ (SESTA) which are “part of a widespread legislative strategy known as End Demand legislation. The idea is simple: end the demand for all erotic services to mitigate human trafficking into the sex industry” (Jackson & Heineman 74, 2018). Laws like FOSTA and SESTA criminalize operating ‘an interactive computer service’ with ‘the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person’ thus holding companies responsible for the content created by their users (Campbell, Rosie, et al., 2018). The article Risking Safety and Rights: Online Sex Work, Crimes and ‘Blended Safety Repertoires’ provides quantitative data that demonstrates the ramifications for sex workers living in the United States or operating online on platforms with US jurisdiction since FOSTA was enacted in 2019. Sex workers’ livelihood and safety have been disrupted by the policy changes that have limited or completely prohibited sex workers’ access to networking, which allows them to form a community of peers, an essential avenue for sharing information and screening clients for personal and community safety.
An initial impact survey of n = 260 sex workers who had worked online, was carried out by a sex worker rights organization in the USA (COYORE-RI 2018) and found 30 percent (n = 78) of participants reported having stopped screening clients, or having lowered their safety standards, 60 percent (n = 156) reported having taken sessions with less safe clients, out of financial desperation. (Campbell, Rosie, et al., 2018).
FOSTA-SESTA creates a loophole in its predecessor the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), particularly section 230 which previously allowed the internet to thrive off of user-generated content without legal implications for their host websites. Safiya Noble describes Section 230 as a policy created under the pretense of protecting children from online pornography, while also allowing for full freedom of expression for internet users. It does this by exempting companies and organizations such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Verizon, and AT&T from being held accountable for user-generated content (Noble, 2018). By making companies responsible for content uploaded to their platforms, SESTA-FOSTA pressures companies into further participating in the surveillance and criminalization of sex workers in order to protect their profits. Policies like FOSTA-SESTA make the internet an increasingly hostile place for sex workers to work and organize, pushing sex workers into situations where they may choose, or be forced to engage in in-person forms of sex work in order to survive. Sex worker organizer and co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, Danielle Blunt highlights that although SESTA and FOSTA were proposed as ways to protect people from online sex trafficking, what they actually have done is exacerbate challenges people already face when sex working online. Losing access to online spaces to work or advertise pushes people to do more work in real life which makes them more vulnerable to labor exploitation and human trafficking than if they were able to work online (Sage, 2020). The autonomy that increased accessibility to the internet once gave sex workers to be their own employers, background check clients, maintain anonymity, and set other work and safety boundaries, is being revoked by attacks on online freedom of speech taking place.
FOSTA-SESTA is the digital continuation of what I have mentioned as the long history of legislation targeting and harming sex workers despite its constructed savior narrative. ‘Save the children,’ ‘Save victims of human sex trafficking,’ ‘Protect women,’ and similar sentiments are used to attract support across political lines. Anti-pornography and sex trafficking policies are where antipornography feminists and conservative, Christian, and Catholic people’s interests align (Bracewell, 2019; Mac and Smith, 2020). In the mid-1980s, antipornography feminists and Sex-radical feminists were in the midst of a cultural stand-off debating topics including pornography, prostitution, and kink. “Despite pleas for both sides to come together to ‘create a movement that speaks as powerfully in favor of sexual pleasure as it does against sexual danger,’ the sex wars raged for decades, resisting any definitive resolution” (Bracewell 63, 2019; Vance, 1984). The religious right and antipornography feminists touted the dangers of porn, exclaiming that voluntary sex work is an oxymoron in itself, arguing that pornography put women’s physical, civil, and economic well-being at risk (Bracewell, 2019, Smith & Mac, 2020). Research that tackles the sex wars tend to only mention women’s safety and well-being, excluding men, trans men and women, two-spirit and non-binary folks who also participate in sex work. Conservative moral panics reinforce a heteropatriarchal expectation that sex workers are women who are being coerced or otherwise trafficked into working in sexually exploitative conditions. Such a narrative supports policies that call for protecting women and children while erasing other sex workers and their equally valid and complex lives. Despite evidence that most human trafficking does not involve sexual exploitation, but rather sex trafficking only reflects 19% of human trafficking cases compared to much higher amounts of trafficking that forced immigrants into agricultural or domestic labor (Jackson & Heineman, 2018).
The concept that women must be protected above others is infantilizing and denies adult women autonomy over their right to consent as the state and internet platforms decide to intervene. Women and children are often both characterized as needing to be protected and cared for by a patriarchal figure be it a father, husband, the police, or the state. With that, both (white) women and children are characterized as inherently innocent making it easy to both render them victims and restrict their autonomy by weaponizing safety as a means of protecting innocence. Further, as mentioned above, the intervention of algorithms takes consent out of the hands of the user and places it in the hands of AI and its pre-programmed and actively learned conceptions of morality. In Sex Work Criminalization Is Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Ine Vanwesenbeeck writes about how the commodification of love, desire, and sexuality is considered less than “authentic” love, according to sex work neo-abolitionist morality. Despite the prevalence and commonality of ‘transactional sex’ as Vanwesenbeeck illustrates, “Some sort of exchange is actually altogether quite common in many sexual interactions. Sex may be exchanged for intimacy, safety, love, partner appreciation, and relational security, keeping the peace, and averting wrath and abuse” (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).
A neo-abolitionist in this context is someone who believes that anti-trafficking legislation drawing from the Nordic model, which criminalizes clients purchasing services rather than sex workers for selling, will lead to the eventual abolition of sex work. Vanwesenbeeck characterizes sex work neo-abolitionism as a revival in anti-sex-trafficking discourses within discussions of sex work. This revival flattens sex work to be synonymous with trafficking, and in turn justifies punitive justice carried out vis-a-vis anti-sex-trafficking policy enacted by the state (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017). Sex-work neo-abolitionism can be seen as the continuation of the sex-negative position in the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s. Antipornography radical feminists have theorized that sex work and by definition, pornography, is in itself inherently violent towards women because of the assumption that it upholds and reproduces patriarchal violence. The idea that sex work is inherently patriarchal and therefore necessarily violent toward women has fueled sex-work neo-abolitionist policies (Dworkin, 1989; Mac & Smith, 2020; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).
Such a reductionist stance belittles the strides made by feminist pornographers and other folks in the industry who prioritize the safety of those involved in the production, practicing consent, safe sex, and celebrating sexual expression. There is pornography for just about everything. It is a genre that does not discriminate based on a socially constructed moral panic; indeed, holding a nuanced understanding of sex work that can account for the agency of sex workers, enables people in the sex industry to be critical of the specific conditions that can make sex work dangerous and/or exploitative. The phrase “sex work is work,” comes to mind, de-exceptionalizing and destigmatizing sex work would allow for candid discussions about workplace safety, comfort, disagreement and exploitation that can take place in other industries. In Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, Dr. Heather Berg brings up how porn workers’ critiques of the industry challenge liberal feminist discourse of enthusiastic consent. Some feminists have argued that if sex is not enthusiastically desired “for its own sake” (such as sex in exchange for money or any of the various other reasons people have sex), it is not consensual. Berg writes, “Sex can be instrumental, tedious, and even physically uncomfortable and still consensual.” performer Siouxsie Q adds, “‘Performing in porn is a job… and I certainly don’t need every scene to be the hottest event of my life.’ There are products to be made, and performers are working” (Berg, 2021). I want to echo Lorelei Lee, Co-Founder of the Disabled Sex Workers’ Coalition, sex work is work, but more importantly, sex workers are people (babylon, et al., 2021). Beyond recognizing the labor involved in sex work as equally valuable to other forms of labor, we should be fighting to recognize people, including sex workers, as valuable regardless of their ability to work or their productivity. The call sex work is work asks us to de-exceptionalize sex work becuase all workers under capitalism are vulnerable to labor exploitation. However, this flattens the way that trading sex is an exceptional job, and why many people have left traditional nine-to-five jobs because sex work can allow people to have flexible work hours, work from home, and be their own boss. These factors can be necessary when navigating disability, being a caretaker for other family members, or for many other reasons. Transgender people, fat people, disabled people, and people of color are gatekept from many mainstream jobs because of assumptions about their ability, competence, motivation, or deviance that justifies discriminatory hiring practices.
Debates around sex work continue to be concerned with sex as a symbol rather than the material impact of policy on the lives of women and other people who do sex work. This is called out in Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes, where the authors examine how the ‘prostitute’ is a symbol in the debate rather than being treated as a role embodied by people whose positions in society vastly differ. Binary viewpoints of whether the existence of the sex industry is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women necessarily objectify the people at the center of the debate. These binary viewpoints exclude sex workers from the conversation other than being deployed as a rhetorical tool by pro-sex feminists to whom, as the authors highlight, “Defending porn often meant defending watching it, rather than performing in it” (Mac & Smith, 2020). The Sex Worker is framed as a concept rather than as a person with a corporeal existence that transcends the fabled dark corners of the internet. The creation of the symbolic Sex Worker has a material impact on people participating in erotic labor in any number of ways and for any number of reasons. Algorithms, such as ones used for SNS content moderation, also function to categorically objectify people in order to assess their desirability or threat to the platform. Rather than interpreting sex worker users as people first who use the relevant platform in similar if not the same ways as average users, algorithms that conduct rigorous anti-sex content moderation reduce the human user to their assumed association to the sex industry. Not only does this disrupt sex workers' ability to participate in social media for work or pleasure, but it also creates barriers to popular sex education by censoring educational content thus having a material negative impact on young people’s access to comprehensive sex education.
