Cash/Consent

"I knew that needing the money did not feel the same as not choosing. I knew that taking off my clothes in middle-aged men’s basements and condos did not feel the same as being raped felt....

If you have never had sex for money, it might be easy to see this as a story about coercion and consent instead of a story about work. It would have been much better if I’d been rich and could have worked only when I wanted to. It would have been much worse if I’d had no work at all....

In the radical narrative, all sex trading is understood as trafficking and our ability to consent does not exist. In the competing liberal-libertarian narrative, those of us who have been publicly described as having “consented” to our work are categorically characterized as “empowered,” as “choice feminists.” Under these constructs, we have only two options: to be victims, which means we need to be rescued from our work—even if that rescue happens in handcuffs—or to be empowered sex workers, which means saying we’ve never experienced violence or constrained choice, that we love our jobs all day every day, and to be free we only need access to the free market. ...

The threat of further criminalization has pushed many people to publicly embrace the latter—to say, “I love doing sex work. I only want the state to leave me alone.” Often that seems like the most we could hope for....

After #MeToo was co-opted from Tarana Burke, when wealthy white women like Sorvino and Judd made themselves its public face, I thought: These women encouraging a mass speaking-out are the same people making it impossible for me to speak....

The things that sex workers do to stay safe are almost always the things civilians want to pass laws to stop....

I’ve been told that my story is unrepresentative — that anyone who does not want to be “rescued” from sex work is too much of an outlier to base policy decisions on....

The intention of sex-worker activists who have embraced the choice/coercion dichotomy, she [suprihmbé] writes, 'is to draw firm lines between sex work and sex trafficking....However, while doing it this way might protect sex workers who are actually sex workers by choice, it does not protect the rest of us who fall into that murky gray area in between....'

Similarly, instead of talking about consent, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith use the term “deliberate” sex work: choosing is not the same as doing something deliberately. The migrant sex worker collective Red Canary Song, formed in the wake of Yang Song’s death during a 2017 police raid on a Queens massage parlor, describes its work as led by and for “people who are trading sexual services for income or survival needs.” ..."