Where Do Sex Workers’ Rights Belong In The Labor Movement?
Sex workers possess many freedoms ‘The Great Resignation’ is demanding, but still find themselves criminalized, shamed, and in peril, even as the industry booms.
I want to be hopeful that we are closer to the decriminalization of sex work and that things will change in the labor force and that we can make some steps toward fairness, but I’m not really sure how that’s going to happen,” says Dabby, an erotic artist who was let go from their corporate HR job in Silicon Valley right before the pandemic.
In the wake of leaving, they began cobbling together different gigs from trimming cannabis to working as a painter. Dabby is non-binary, out and proud, having just completed top surgery and a hysterectomy; their working environment was slowly growing untenable.
“Doing that kind of work was requiring me to drive to my hometown — and that area is very conservative, very racist, very queerphobic,” Dabby says.
“My final straw was when I went to work with a different contractor that day and he was painting the homeowner’s house. He had a boombox and was playing conservative radio — blasting like anti-abortion propaganda and end-of-the-world Bible sermons. I was just like, dude, this is too much, am I on an episode of the Twilight zone? So I quit.”
Dabby decided to leverage their skills and knowledge in promotion as they work as an artist and performer themselves, and move into the adult industry full-time, helping sex workers and sex-positive business owners— from podcasters to therapists — run their social media as a virtual assistant.
As someone who has spent the last six years in adult entertainment from burlesque and stripping to performing on OnlyFans, Dabby has observed the evolving ideas — and policies — around sex work.
Dabby says the future of sex work in a country where it’s still largely illegal and highly scrutinized is still dubious and dangerous (Nevada is the only state in the union with legalized prostitution), but the droves of people leaving their jobs to seek out better rights and pay have given them some hope and complicated the narrative around sex work and the labor movement.
“Things are changing — we’re in the middle of this great resignation because people have had so much time to reflect on the state of the world. So many more people are waking up and realizing that the way things are happening just isn’t fair and it never was.”
Last month, Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize — a crucial first for the 1.1 million workers employed by the tech giant. This unionization is flanked by a powerful wave of other workers in various large corporations including Apple and Starbucks, as well as strikes across every industry the light touches from healthcare and manufacturing, to tulip growers, teachers, and grocery workers.
In short? Lack of liveable wages, paid time off, parental leave, access to healthcare, and fundamental rights and protections are fueling what is being dubbed “The Great Resignation.”
Sex work occupies a unique paradigm. It’s always been accompanied by a rare autonomy — the ability to work how and when you want to — that “conventional” jobs typically don’t afford people.
Sex workers have flexibility with their schedule, they work almost exclusively as freelancers, set their own rates, and have the ability to take time off whenever they want to.
In short, sex workers have enviable freedoms — they possess the opportunities the nearly 48 million people who quit their jobs are demanding — but still find themselves stigmatized and in a precarious position, operating illegally and sharply stigmatized.
Interestingly enough, pornography is a legal multi-billion dollar industry protected by the First Amendment as artistic free expression, while prostitution is defined by U.S. law as a sexual act given or received for monetary payment, and “directly contributes to the modern-day slave trade and is inherently demeaning.”
“Criminalizing adult, voluntary, and consensual sex — including the commercial exchange of sexual services — is incompatible with the human right to personal autonomy and privacy,” writes Human Rights Watch. “A government should not be telling consenting adults who they can have sexual relations with and on what terms.”
Decriminalizing sex work is both a human rights and worker rights issue.
Since I began as a CamGirl in 2017, the culture has changed, with more organizations fighting for the legalization of sex work; I believe this change in attitude is one of the biggest predictors of a changing economy and burgeoning rights. On May 2nd, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a law that grants sex workers in Colorado the right to report serious crimes — including human trafficking, murder, manslaughter, assault, false imprisonment, and stalking — without fear of legal consequences.
Decriminalize Sex Work is in the process of working to pass a bill that would decriminalize sex work in Rhode Island and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation et al. v. United States is pending in the U.S Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in an effort to overturn the hotly contested Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Senate bill Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, commonly known as FOSTA/SESTA.
This bill dangerously equates sex work with sex trafficking and leverages technology to prevent the selling of sex or sexual services. This bill is seen as the reason that the social media website, Tumblr, once rich in safe and consensual sex work, sharply decreased in popularity after they announced a new ban on “adult content.”
FOSTA/SESTA makes platforms liable for what is said and done by their users if those things are tied to prostitution.
Tumblr’s ban is a “treasure trove of problems,” writes Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“Filtering technology that doesn’t work, a law that forces companies to make decisions that make others unsafe, and the problems that arise when one company has outsized influence on speech. It’s also the story of how people at the margins find themselves pushed out of the places where they had built communities.”
I began doing sex work for a multitude of reasons — I was in college, the extra money was a bonus — but mostly I wanted to take my sexuality back after I was raped at a frat party in 2015.
I kept my work a secret until earlier last year when I started a position at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Foundation working on sex work decriminalization through a human rights and legal lens.
Like me, Bella D’Angelo has been in the sex work industry since she was 19. She currently works as a health and life coach, a sugar baby, and a content creator on Only Fans, but previously worked as a server.
And like me, Bella turned to sex work because she was a broke college student with bills to pay; she started on Seeking Arrangements to meet older guys looking for dinner dates for $100 and whatever she wanted off the menu.
Bella says she found serving hard on her body and even “thinking about doing it again makes me ache. Covid really did a number on the economy. The government made it very clear that poor people do not deserve nice things.”
Bella says she resents the fees that OnlyFans collects from every tip and payment, but feels the cost is worth the protection. “I would rather give them their dime for my safety.”
The Dawn of ‘Normalized Sex Work’
“More people are taking their own sexuality and using it to make a living,” says KayBayy, who utilizes OnlyFans and CamGirl websites and has been active for the last two years. “Women especially have always been sexualized and exploited for profit so it can be empowering to take that into our own hands and express ourselves.”
She’s not wrong. Like many teachers and autoworkers, strippers are also attempting to form unions. Recently, dancers in Los Angeles went on strike due to working conditions and workplace safety; after 19 out the 24 remaining dancers signed a petition asking for safety and other improvements to the club, the club owners locked them out.
And OnlyFans has seen a huge boo in business, rocketing from 20 to 120 million over 12 months, “as adult entertainers and their customers signed up during lockdowns to share X-rated content,” reports Business Insider.
Velma, a self-described “opportunistic sex worker” — meaning she is only working with veteran clients, not seeking out new work — echoed her support of the growing movement.
“Having studied and worked in communications (both organizational and strategic) I am excited to see workers standing up for their rights,” Velma wrote me. “It’s been a long time coming. Work life balance and feeling valued is greatly important.”
She has recently taken a step away from sex work to pursue her main career in communications; she mused that decriminalization of sex work and the formation of sex worker’s unions would have her reconsider her current career path. When I asked Velma if she had to choose between communications or sex work she told me:
“That’s a good question. I like being an entertainer and making folx happy. I also use a lot of my communications skills to do sex work and advertise myself. If it wasn’t for the stigma against it and there were more hours in the day I would just do sex work.”
The Enduring Danger of Whorephobia
While KayBayy believes that sex work is becoming more normalized and with the slow-burn of societal acceptance comes the accompanying policy and protections, Lara Lacey, a full-time sex worker who works part-time at a cafe, “just for the social aspect.” points out an important delineation. Online sex work is becoming more normalized (as opposed to in-person client work) and is often portrayed in a deceptively “glamorized and watered down” way that isn’t representative of what sex work actually is.
After the pandemic and OnlyFans boom, “StripTok” grew in popularity. A quick scroll through the hashtag will show thousands of videos of TikTokers who claim to be strippers waving stacks of cash and raving about their amazing time at the strip club. But in reality, that’s not how it works.
“The way it’s portrayed on social media, people assume it’s easy money and risk-free,” says Lara.
“Those assumptions have made more people turn to sex work for income without doing a lot of research on the industry or considering the repercussion of being labeled as a sex worker.
“Full-service sex workers have always been more highly criticized and faced more judgment than online sex workers but now as online sex work is being more accepted they are judged more because they are physically intimate with their clients when they could have the online barrier.”
Lara says that people assume full-service sex workers (FSSW) hate their jobs and are “debasing themselves” because they are physically intimate with their clients; she says the fact that online sex work is considered more digestible and less taboo has created a schism in the sex worker community and fostered false narratives that some sex work is more ethical or less “dirty” than others.
“‘I don’t even sleep with my sugar daddy he just gives me money because I’m beautiful or, I don’t get nude on my OnlyFans and I made enough to pay for a house at 18….’
“Those are the stories going viral and the ones that attract people to sex work. While those stories may very well be true, they are the exception and not the reality for most sex workers.”
In-fighting and whorephobia run rampant in the sex work community. Strippers who work together often disagree on the ethical and moral implications, in addition to the legal and physical dangers, and FSSWs often see themselves as being discriminated against in an industry where everyone is providing a sexual service.
But every worker I spoke to are hopeful about the possible positive changes and the vocal conversations surrounding sex work that people — and society writ large — are having. Only time will tell where this converging moment of destigmatizing sex work and labor rights will take us.
Dabby says the boom of online sex work has resulted in a blowback, with Instagram, Facebook and even Twitter becoming increasingly censorial and strict in terms of what sort of content is allowed, and “typically queer people of color and sex workers are experiencing the brunt of the sentence. Their incomes and their livelihoods and their representation on social media are what is being hurt by these laws.”
And sex worker accounts are getting “deleted and suspended, left and right on Twitter when, like a year or two ago, everybody knew that Twitter was a safe place to post explicit content.”
And now with Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, blood and curiosity is running high as to how his contradictory pledges for “free speech” on the platform (like reinstating Trump) will affect sex workers and their livelihoods.
“It’s a very volatile state right now for adult entertainers and sex workers on the internet,” says Dabby.
“I want to be hopeful that positive changes are coming soon and maybe things will go in a more drastic direction, but I’m not sure what that’s going to look like.
I’m just trying to be optimistic because at least now I feel like more people are talking about it and that’s where change starts. With these conversations, like the one that we’re having.”
