theunitofcaring:

I think that sex work should just be legal, on both ends, it is legal to advertise that you are a sex worker and it is legal to solicit sex workers, and then whatever harms we expect to come of this, we should address directly. Teenagers are fleeing their abusive homes and then ending up doing survival sex work? That is awful, let’s have shelters and support for them so that they do not have to. People addicted to drugs are being abused and exploited? That is awful, let’s arrange them safe and legal access to the drugs they are addicted to so they don’t have to do dangerous things to get drugs. People are abusing sex workers? Let’s arrest them for assault. 

I follow some sex workers, and virtually all of them want full legalization immediately. This seems like a case of ‘listen to the people who are actually affected by this’ if there ever were one.

There’s a reasonable response to this, which is “okay, but live in the real world. The police are terrible, the law is terrible, the system is terrible, even if we legalized sex work we would not be taking any of those other steps. Even if legalizing sex work would be good in an ideal world that also sought to give sex workers more options, it might be bad in the real world, which doesn’t.”

But I don’t think this is true. Right now, sex workers who are raped or assaulted by clients can’t go to the police because they might get in trouble for sex work. Right now, sex workers are often raped or assaulted by the police. Right now, it is hard for sex workers to vet their clients because clients don’t want to give out enough information to vet them because they are breaking the law. Industries that are legal are not free of abuse, but they are better than sex work all by themselves. Getting rid of the negative effects that directly result from criminalization makes sex workers’ life better, even if we don’t go on to fix other problems. 

I also think that it’d be easier to get subsequent problems fixed if sex work were legal, because sex workers’ organizations could openly organize, openly lobby, and openly fight for their rights and protections if it were not illegal for them to be sex workers at all.

Legalization will lead to more sex work. That’s because currently there are people who would choose to do sex work if they weren’t risking jail for it, and people who’d choose to hire sex workers if they weren’t risking jail for it. If you think all sex work is exploitation and no other work that people do to pay their bills is exploitation, then yes, legalization will lead to more exploitation. I still do not think it’s okay to try to reduce the amount of sex work in the world by ruining peoples’ lives for it. 

Also, people are very different from each other. There are people for whom doing sex work would be very harmful; there are people for whom it’s great; there are people for whom it’s a shitty job that pays the rent and beats the other shitty jobs that pay the rent. The important thing is that it is not my business to decide which of those experiences are legitimate and then throw people in prison and ruin their lives for doing something that I think they should be prevented from doing. My business is giving people more options, and if I ever, ever find myself saying “people taking this option is harmful, so I will have cops break down doors with guns and stop it”, then I need to stop and figure out if I’m really sure about that.