Kerry Howley

I should point out that had I set out to glorify “sex work,” I would have used more colorful phrasing. If I had set out to argue that sex work was “empowering,” well… I’m not even sure what it means to call sex work empowering. Sex work is work, and it strikes me as no more inherently degrading than many other kinds of physical labor.

My argument, made here, is: Criminalizing prostitution contributes to, rather than mitigates, limiting assumptions about the role of women. As practiced, it is an ugly and often brutal business that leads to all sorts of terrible outcomes for the women involved. It would be bizarre if this were not the case, given that we have collectively stigmatized the selling of sex, raising the reputational cost of sex work to near-intolerable levels for most people. It’s a last option because we made it that way, and we shouldn’t be surprised when marginalized activities attract those with few other choices. When working at all was shameful for women, it was the poor women who took jobs. To have said, at that point, “allowing women to work leads to bad outcomes” would have been morally obtuse.

Just as the drug war contributes to the broadly held assumption that young black men are inherently violent and must be restrained, the criminalization of sex work reinforces the idea that sexually active women are damaged and deranged. In both cases, the activities themselves are surrounded by all manner of tragedy, abuse, and violence. In neither case is the liberal humanitarian policy response: Ban it harder, further reinforcing our worst assumptions about entire classes of people.