“Sex work is work” has become a rallying cry among sex work activists for decades. What is the history of this phrase, and how has it changed the way we think about sex work in the 21st century? What are some of the key legal and institutional challenges sex work activists are addressing today?
Sex worker activist Carol Leigh, also known as Scarlot Harlot, first coined the term 鈥渟ex work鈥 at a 1978 workshop organized by the anti-prostitution group Women Against Pornography. Rather than viewing sex workers as victims of patriarchy, Leigh suggested 鈥渟ex work鈥 instead of 鈥渟ex use industry.鈥 This concept kickstarted a movement recognizing that sex workers are service professionals, and that sex work is work.
Today, 鈥渟ex work鈥 covers all kinds of temporary, professional, informal, formal, and entrepreneurial jobs, aligning these workers with other gig workers in industries offering emotional labor, entertainment, physical enjoyment, wellness, or therapy. Sex work today includes camming, full-service sex work in various contexts (e.g., street-based, brothel work, and independent online escorting), hostessing, phone sex, pornography, pro-domme work, stripping, sugar relationships, various adult content production, and a wide array of individual sexual entrepreneurship. We cover many of these in our book.
Like other gig workers, sex workers fight for labor rights in a time when labor rights are declining for everyone. They face challenges similar to other workers in today’s digital gig economy, including economic instability, discrimination, limited control over working conditions, and safety concerns.
Sex workers also fight for basic human rights like food, shelter, health care, and safety. Many operate within informal, underground economies, where inequality pushes already marginalized people out of traditional labor markets and cuts off access to housing, food, and medical care. They fight for the ability to work without exploitation and for legal recognition of their choice to work in the sexual economy.
These struggles are compounded by systemic inequalities and the stigma of sex work. That鈥檚 why the authors in our book use intersectional frameworks in the book to highlight how white supremacy, cisgenderism, ableism, heterosexism, patriarchy, and anti-immigrant sentiment overlap and intersect in shaping people鈥檚 experiences.
Too often, policymakers choose individualized solutions like increasing policing or victim blaming rather than addressing systemic inequalities. Our book highlights not only the labor of sex workers, but also their efforts to address broader social and economic inequalities. We hope this offers a better vantage point to understand contemporary labor, law, politics, and the intersections of race, gender, ability, and sexuality.
Digital simulacrums of sex workers — such as the AI sex worker described in the chapter on “cyberbrothels” — are competing with real people for profits. How are the internet and other technology changing the way people create and consume sex work?
It is fair to say that the Internet has revolutionized the sex industry, both by increasing the ways people can do sex work and changing how workers interact with potential clients. Platforms like Only Fans, and the emergence of camming, mean customers and workers may never meet face-to-face, thus reducing the potential of physical harm for both. Sex workers who see clients offline use the web to advertise, market, and sell services online, and vet and screen clients online. The web further democratizes erotic labor by allowing those locked out of studio porn because of racism, cissexism, ableism, and fatphobia, to make a living.
At the same time, working online requires that sex workers do more administrative labor, such as managing their content on multiple social media and fan sites in saturated and highly competitive markets. For example, modern sex workers 鈥渉ustle,鈥 creating pornographic content on clip sites such as Onlyfans, taking phone sex calls on NiteFlirt, camming on sites such as Chaturbate, posting escort ads online, and so on just to make ends meet. The authors, such as Val Webber in their analysis of how content moderation harms workers, document how sex workers are grappling with new aggressive Internet regulations, constantly changing terms of service, and the shrinking of sites hosting NSFW content.
Further, while such platforms provide space for workers other than the blonde, blue-eyed, cis playmate, they also reproduce social inequalities through algorithms that shadow-ban dark-skinned and larger-sized workers and other discriminatory practices. Chapters in our book talk about these issues, including the cutting edge of sex work and technology, such as the development of cyberbrothels and sex robots.
Many contributing scholars in Sex Work Today write about the nuances of intersecting, embodied identities among sex workers, such as race, disability, transness, and fatness. How do sex workers navigate the complicated interplay between their own bodies and identities, and their clientele? In what ways do they assert power and agency in these dynamics?
The book highlights how white supremacy, cisgenderism, ableism, heteropatriarchy, and fatphobia, overlap and intersect when shaping people鈥檚 labor experiences in capitalist markets. As the authors discuss, overlapping stratification systems shape sex workers鈥 interactions with law enforcement, state agencies, social service agencies, platform moderators, and other industry players in unequal ways. So, all the chapters use an intersectional framing, underscoring intersectional forms of disadvantage in contemporary erotic labor.
However, many do so from unique vantage points too-often underrepresented in the literature and mainstream discussions. For example, chapters explore how sex workers navigate and resist fatphobic sectors in the United States of America and New Zealand. Others center disabilities in their analyses of sex workers鈥 labor experiences and navigation of carceral systems that harm sex workers. Several chapters explore the experiences of trans and non-binary sex workers providing nuanced explanations of how gender, race, class, and sexuality converge in erotic laborers鈥 work lives and how workers challenge systems of power. Other chapters highlight the experiences of Indigenous sex workers, a group too often underrepresented in writing about sex work.
These are just a handful of examples, but all the authors are attentive to the intersectional nature of oppression and still hold space for not only how these systems of power and whorephobic institutions harm them but also how sex workers successfully resist them!
Late stage patriarchal capitalism is, according to many of your contributors, a guiding force under which many sex workers must labor. How do some sex workers deal with the paradoxof critiquing capitalism and exploitation, on the one hand, while still needing to earn money and working as entrepreneurs?
Capitalist labor is, by design, exploitative and built on the alienation and dehumanization of workers. Globally, people face devastating economic precarity fueled by policies that support and enable wealth accumulation among the few. Sex workers are acutely aware of these facts!
So, yes, sex workers are often independent entrepreneurs participating in late-stage capitalist sex markets that are regulated in ways that cause much harm. However, frequently, they choose to labor in erotic industries, as opposed to 鈥渧anilla鈥 ones, precisely because they provide them with autonomy and avenues to challenge various forms of capitalist alienation. Sex workers often have more bodily autonomy than other service workers. Most can set their own hours; decline to service particular customers; market their services as they see fit; set their own rates; wear what they want; take off to go to a kid鈥檚 PTA meeting鈥攁ll examples of choices many workers in services industries can鈥檛 always make.
Sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine who have so much to teach everyone about resisting labor exploitation and other forms of intersecting oppression through individual and collective resistance. The chapter on financial domination, or the consensual exchange of financial power for sexual purposes, finds that the dom obtains economic enrichment and often pleasure from the receipt of submissives鈥 money. As they argue, especially for racialized marginalized people, findom can even serve as a form of individual-level reparations for racial inequality.
Sex workers actively politically organize against the rampant oppression they face. Several chapters introduce readers to the complexities of contemporary sex worker activism, including lessons both for and from labor rights activists on how and where to fight for rights, reclaim language, and harness the power of social media to shift whorephobic perceptions and attitudes.
Your book works to address the overrepresentation of the USA in sex work research. How do different countries around the globe regulate (or decriminalize) sex work? How do sex workers live and work in different countries around the world?
Regulations around sex work in different countries generally fall into three categories: criminalization, partial criminalization, and decriminalization. However, these categories only partly cover the complex regulations surrounding modern sex work, especially as many workers operate in online or informal economies and face a range of barriers beyond national or local prostitution laws.
Some countries, like the U.S fully criminalize sexual services, intending to eliminate sex work through criminal penalties. This often leads to violence and exploitation, as sex workers are left without legal protections. Laws in countries like Canada and Isreal punish third parties, such as clients or managers, driving the industry underground, making conditions more dangerous and reducing workers鈥 ability to protect themselves.
Partial criminalization, like in the UK, legalizes some aspects of sex work but criminalizes others, such as public soliciting or brothel-keeping. Decriminalization removes all criminal penalties, treating sex work as legitimate labor. New Zealand is a key example, where sex workers have labor rights and legal protections, offering them more control over their work and safety. Workers can still suffer from discrimination, as chapters show, but they have more avenues to seek redress.
Most countries have a patchwork of laws. In some cases, while certain forms of sex work may be legal, barriers such as housing discrimination, exclusion from banking services, and platform restrictions continue to push workers into precarious situations. Anti-trafficking laws further complicate this by conflating trafficking with voluntary sex work, shutting down online platforms, discouraging advertising, and making it harder for sex workers to operate safely.
Despite these challenges, global movements like the NSWP and GAATW, and local movements fight for sex workers’ labor and human rights. Our book uses an intersectional lens to examine how these geopolitical forces and policies shape sex workers’ lives.
What do you think the average person needs to know about sex work? What do you hope readers will take away from Sex Work Today?
We hope readers of Sex Work Today take away a few key ideas. One, despite decades of sex worker activism, sex work continues to suffer from enormous cultural stigma, partially because participating in it is seen as a measure not only of one鈥檚 abilities, but character. Two, understanding that sex work is work helps dismantle this stigma, as many understand that most occupations have good and bad elements, as the essays in Sex Work Today highlight. Three, any policy solutions aimed to improve labor conditions and/or help workers exit the sex industry must include the input of sex workers. As sex worker activists insist, 鈥淣othing about us without us.鈥 This is because there is a long global history of politicians and religious leaders enacting problematic legislation to regulate or eliminate the sex industry. One example of this is FOSTA/SESTA, US bills aimed to reduce human trafficking by making online platforms liable for user-generated content that might facilitate sex trafficking. After FOSTA/SESTA became law, platforms began to censor sexual content. This reduced and removed online spaces for workers to connect with and vet customers, exacerbated misinformation about trafficking, and overall worsened labor conditions. Ironically, it also makes sex trafficking more likely since workers cannot as easily share information about dangerous customers. Four, sex work mirrors cultural hierarchies: the more minority identities a sex worker embodies, the more likely they are to suffer shadow banning, police harassment, receive lower wages, be fetishized for their minority status, and endure boundary violations. Finally, sex work is not sex trafficking. Policies and rescue industries that combine or confuse voluntary workers with victims of abuse have the following negative consequences: they cast all sex workers as victims, neglect the actual needs of sex workers to earn a wage, result in anti-immigrant measures, reinforce gender, racial and national stereotypes and support neo-colonialism.
Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Morehead State University. She is the author of The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers, and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays.
Barbara G. Brents is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the co-author of Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives and The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland.
Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. They are the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry and co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Book.