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"The goods of sex are why Lucy saw sex work as a calling and why Amanda saw sex work as a career that gave her pride, meaning, and rewards: a career, in other words, that “renders work itself a source of self-esteem,” as Bellah et al. put it in their influential book introducing the job, career, calling model. Amanda worked as an escort for both financial and lifestyle reasons and felt good about herself while doing it. “I really enjoyed the sex work actually … I felt good about what I did, I treated my clients with respect, they treated me with respect and I felt like I was really fulfilling a deep personal need that people have, that that’s just a natural feeling of the desire to have affection, the desire to have some kind of intimate contact with another human being. I mean cause that’s what we’re talking about.”
Many sex workers believe they are selling a valuable service and that what they do involves much more than sex. Penttinen describes how sex workers spend a great deal of time listening to their clients’ problems, stating, “some said that being a psychotherapist or sex therapist made their work meaningful.” This thought echoes Hochschild’s work on women’s
emotional labour generally." (pp.146-147)
"As researchers Pia Konto and Alisa Grigororide write,
human sexuality is a basic human need. “Sexual expression is a universal
human need that transcends age and disability. It has many positive health
and wellness benefits, including the opportunity to experience pleasure,
decreased pain sensitivity and increased relaxation.”
Men get the goods of sex. They don’t need to be educated about the benefits of their own sexuality. Not one man who I talked to about this research wondered about what the big deal was about not having access to sex or about how his life would be negatively impacted if he didn’t have sex. Women I talked to would. Some people may genuinely be asexual. A former colleague of mine claimed she had never had sex, had no desire to have sex, and couldn’t understand what the big deal was all about anyway. Is this someone who just doesn’t know what she’s missing ? Or do some people just have no interest, as the rise in asexuality studies would suggest ? When Lucy and Anna claim that sex is just like food, shelter, and water, many people object that they are very different things. We need food and water to live ; we don’t need sex except in the sense that without reproduction our species will die off and so there is an evolutionary advantage to having sex. But it isn’t a driver in the same way as food. Perhaps. Though, perhaps, drives differ between people. We all know people who are very driven by their sexuality and those who couldn’t care less. Perhaps the women I met have very high testosterone and that explains why they like sex so much and why they don’t have a problem being sex workers. Perhaps it’s a problem that I keep trying to explain their behaviour – I wouldn’t ask myself why if it were a man who was selling sex. When I interviewed sex surrogates in Los Angeles, the man I met seemed genuinely interested in helping women with various sexual dilemmas and physical problems like vaginismus but nearly everyone else who the film editor and I talked to about male sex surrogates thought it was hilarious. In their minds, he was clearly out to have sex with women and making money was the bonus. Why not the same thinking for women selling sex ?
In reality the harm (and/or value) of sex work is intimately tied to the harm (and/or value) of sex. If sex were valued in our culture and if women’s sexuality were not hampered by the sexual double standard and good girl/bad girl dichotomy, then women would be able to demand the same rights to sexual pleasure as men. As Lucy says, “You know sometimes it’s just about having sex. I mean it’s, I think some people over romanticize it, for some of us it’s really just about sex you know.”
The escorts’ hope was that as the stigma about female sexuality declines, the value of sex might be able to come to the fore, and we might begin to really free women’s sexuality. And as women become clear about what they want and need in terms of sexuality, they will be able to hold men accountable for their behaviour. Sex won’t be an entitlement for men only but about mutual pleasure.
As I have discovered, once your mind has been opened to a different story, it is very difficult to go back and force a certain narrative on something you know just isn’t true. Once you know that not all women who engage in exchanging sex for money are victims and not all men who buy sex are aggressors – that many, rather than buying sexual subordination of
women are buying the goods of sex – then it is difficult to see what good comes of criminalizing one aspect of the sex trade, i.e., the “buyers.” When we see sex work practiced with respect and dignity, then it is easier to sort out when the objections to sex work are moral and ideological rather than based on empirical evidence, as many sex work organizations and activists have been trying to tell prohibitionists. When we can see how sex work is practiced with respect, shouldn’t we attempt to understand how it can be done more often with respect ? Surely the point should be to understand under what conditions sex work can be done with respect and dignity and to reject sex work that lacks these qualities. If someone doesn’t want to sell sex for money, as one of the interviewees put it, they shouldn’t do it, full stop. But, as importantly, those who want to do sex work should be given all the labour protections that other jobs have." (pp.148-149)
-Meredith Ralston, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021, 260 pages.
"The goods of sex are why Lucy saw sex work as a calling and why Amanda saw sex work as a career that gave her pride, meaning, and rewards: a career, in other words, that “renders work itself a source of self-esteem,” as Bellah et al. put it in their influential book introducing the job, career, calling model. Amanda worked as an escort for both financial and lifestyle reasons and felt good about herself while doing it. “I really enjoyed the sex work actually … I felt good about what I did, I treated my clients with respect, they treated me with respect and I felt like I was really fulfilling a deep personal need that people have, that that’s just a natural feeling of the desire to have affection, the desire to have some kind of intimate contact with another human being. I mean cause that’s what we’re talking about.”
Many sex workers believe they are selling a valuable service and that what they do involves much more than sex. Penttinen describes how sex workers spend a great deal of time listening to their clients’ problems, stating, “some said that being a psychotherapist or sex therapist made their work meaningful.” This thought echoes Hochschild’s work on women’s
emotional labour generally." (pp.146-147)
"As researchers Pia Konto and Alisa Grigororide write,
human sexuality is a basic human need. “Sexual expression is a universal
human need that transcends age and disability. It has many positive health
and wellness benefits, including the opportunity to experience pleasure,
decreased pain sensitivity and increased relaxation.”
Men get the goods of sex. They don’t need to be educated about the benefits of their own sexuality. Not one man who I talked to about this research wondered about what the big deal was about not having access to sex or about how his life would be negatively impacted if he didn’t have sex. Women I talked to would. Some people may genuinely be asexual. A former colleague of mine claimed she had never had sex, had no desire to have sex, and couldn’t understand what the big deal was all about anyway. Is this someone who just doesn’t know what she’s missing ? Or do some people just have no interest, as the rise in asexuality studies would suggest ? When Lucy and Anna claim that sex is just like food, shelter, and water, many people object that they are very different things. We need food and water to live ; we don’t need sex except in the sense that without reproduction our species will die off and so there is an evolutionary advantage to having sex. But it isn’t a driver in the same way as food. Perhaps. Though, perhaps, drives differ between people. We all know people who are very driven by their sexuality and those who couldn’t care less. Perhaps the women I met have very high testosterone and that explains why they like sex so much and why they don’t have a problem being sex workers. Perhaps it’s a problem that I keep trying to explain their behaviour – I wouldn’t ask myself why if it were a man who was selling sex. When I interviewed sex surrogates in Los Angeles, the man I met seemed genuinely interested in helping women with various sexual dilemmas and physical problems like vaginismus but nearly everyone else who the film editor and I talked to about male sex surrogates thought it was hilarious. In their minds, he was clearly out to have sex with women and making money was the bonus. Why not the same thinking for women selling sex ?
In reality the harm (and/or value) of sex work is intimately tied to the harm (and/or value) of sex. If sex were valued in our culture and if women’s sexuality were not hampered by the sexual double standard and good girl/bad girl dichotomy, then women would be able to demand the same rights to sexual pleasure as men. As Lucy says, “You know sometimes it’s just about having sex. I mean it’s, I think some people over romanticize it, for some of us it’s really just about sex you know.”
The escorts’ hope was that as the stigma about female sexuality declines, the value of sex might be able to come to the fore, and we might begin to really free women’s sexuality. And as women become clear about what they want and need in terms of sexuality, they will be able to hold men accountable for their behaviour. Sex won’t be an entitlement for men only but about mutual pleasure.
As I have discovered, once your mind has been opened to a different story, it is very difficult to go back and force a certain narrative on something you know just isn’t true. Once you know that not all women who engage in exchanging sex for money are victims and not all men who buy sex are aggressors – that many, rather than buying sexual subordination of
women are buying the goods of sex – then it is difficult to see what good comes of criminalizing one aspect of the sex trade, i.e., the “buyers.” When we see sex work practiced with respect and dignity, then it is easier to sort out when the objections to sex work are moral and ideological rather than based on empirical evidence, as many sex work organizations and activists have been trying to tell prohibitionists. When we can see how sex work is practiced with respect, shouldn’t we attempt to understand how it can be done more often with respect ? Surely the point should be to understand under what conditions sex work can be done with respect and dignity and to reject sex work that lacks these qualities. If someone doesn’t want to sell sex for money, as one of the interviewees put it, they shouldn’t do it, full stop. But, as importantly, those who want to do sex work should be given all the labour protections that other jobs have." (pp.148-149)
-Meredith Ralston, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021, 260 pages.
