Quimps [he/him]

I think we should believe people when they speak of their situation. I think it’s infantalizing to sex workers to tell them that they’re victims inherently and they just don’t know better when they talk of their own experiences. Sex work is exploitative in the way that all work is exploitative, and they are therefore in a technical sense engaging in sex under duress, but just as the best way to approach a worker to talk about their exploitation and unionization efforts is not to immediately compare them to galley slaves and make a 1:1 comparison between chattel slavery and your shitty job, it is not actually helpful to discussing the actual problems inherent in sex work to frame it this way unless we are actually discussing those who have been trafficked or who are in a particularly exploitative situation, and in that case the immediate thing to do is treat this as a distinct criminal case rather than as a discussion of the dignity of sex work. I realize that my perspective as a cishet white man is inherently limited, but the only people I know who have engaged in prostitution (I don’t know any former sex workers who did not engage in prostitution, and therefore cannot discuss the experiences of cam girls, porn actors, phone sex operators, strippers or any other kind of sex workers. Also these women were all white and uncoerced by anything except economic circumstance into taking the job. Which also limits their experience of course, but it is still superior to mine) have done so as a part time job they have either found pretty fulfilling or at least no worse than any other student job. I myself would feel gross “buying” the consent of someone, due to the fact that I don’t want there to be an open question of whether I am engaging in sexual exploitation of any kind when I engage in sex, and I find the question of whether you can truly consent to sex under economic duress a valid question. But I trust women when they speak of their experiences.