The voices of sex workers The reality is different from what the moralists would like it to be.
Moralising, mostly right-wing conservatives love to emphasise that the sex trade is riddled with abuse and human trafficking. No one who does sex work would do it voluntarily, they claim. And on the left, confused feminists like Alice Schwarzer agree with them, with statements like "every act of prostitution is rape".
The nightmare of such people are the voices of the sex workers. Because most of them say something different.
Of course, one must not forget that there are tragic fates, human trafficking and abuse. Such extreme cases are presented in lurid press articles in order to further stigmatise sex work, together with the opinion of social workers and vice squads who logically know nothing other than problem cases. Officials have no access to the majority of sex workers because they do not need or want contact with them. That is why the picture given by these examples is very distorted.
It's quite different for me at the Domina School. Besides women of all ages who are interested in a change in their private relationship, many sex workers come to me for further education. None of them could be used as a tragic example. These women are self-determined and proud of their independence. They live here, come to Switzerland regularly for a certain period of time just for sex work or work internationally as escorts. In the theory course we also talk about their situation and their goals, and from this input I can answer the following prejudices:
You only do sex work because you are forced to! Most of my students clearly say that the alternative means working many hours for a low wage. This feels much more like slave labour to them. As sex workers, they are independent, working when and where they want. Even though not every client is always pleasant, they still prefer this work.
But it is also important to distinguish: Working in a club, on percentages or on the street is something completely different from independent work, where the sex worker only rents a room or is invited as an escort, pays for her advertisements herself and otherwise gives away nothing of her income.
You only do sex work because you don't have a higher education! Logically, the proportion of people without vocational training among sex workers is large. But I also know many women who do sex work after or during their studies, or who had enough of a stressful job (often in nursing or sales) and were able to start their own business thanks to sex work. For quite a few migrant women, sex work is a welcome stepping stone. But Swiss women also use it to finance their studies or training. For both, it can be a solution to escape the trap of low-wage work.
On the other hand, there are also all the internationally working escorts who often lead a life of luxury, travel around a lot and stay in expensive hotels. Many of them need a high level of education and good language skills to be able to satisfy their demanding clients as escorts.
Sex work is not done for fun! Here, eternal moralists can finally say goodbye to their misconceptions. Because it is not uncommon that my students are telling me they enjoy doing sex work and escort. That they feel attractive and desired because their clients pamper them in many ways. I have compiled some statements similar to those of my students from sex workers on Twitter (see screenshots below).
Clients are rapists! Sex workers are not dolls who are coerced and mounted by the john. When a client enters the room, the sex worker sets the tariff. She decides what she accepts and what she doesn't, says what it costs and sends the client to the shower first. A student once told me: "A customer at the bar wanted to go to the room with me. I saw his dirty shoes and refused. That doesn't work for me at all."
Clients are usually rather shy or even inhibited. After all, they come to their service provider with their most intimate thoughts and hope for understanding and affection.
Most clients adore their Lady, Trans or Boy. They respect them. They bring gifts. And more often than you think, they just want to talk or cuddle.
You're deluding yourself and you're just talking things up! Of course, there are also the kind of customers who are only looking for the cheap. On the street, with sex workers under pressure from alcohol and drug addiction, it might look different. I asked a colleague who works as a trans man on the street in Zurich. But he said that problems there are actually isolated cases. Of course. Social workers are also present at this place.
Here speaks an Escort Girl about her experiences (Youtube video).
And if you decide not to rent a room yourself by the week (if little goes on, you may earn less than you spent on the room), but to work for percentages in a brothel (usually for 50%), you may meet a brothel operator who puts on too much pressure. But then you don't have to stay there either.
Sex work under duress can happen in extreme cases. But also slave-like conditions exist in elder care. It is not what the industry is about in either case. But why is it only sex work that is stigmatised because of the extreme examples?
And what is meant by coercion? An organisation or local pimps who send women on the street are too easy to detect. Some well-known cases involve the so-called "loverboy", for whom a woman prostitutes herself out of love. More difficult to assess are criminal gangs that threaten to seize a migrant woman's family in her home country. Most cases of coercion, however, are of an indirect nature; such as the daughter who has travelled abroad and feels responsible to finance a better life for the family back home. The family does not know where the money is actually coming from. But they have expectations of the family member working in the rich foreign country and thus unconsciously put pressure on her/him.
Having sex is not a human right! This bogus argument is deliberately backwards. It is not about the right to have sex but about the right to offer sex. The argument is meant to distract from the moralists' true intentions, because at its core they are only concerned with suppressing women's right to self-determination.
The moralists are not concerned with protecting women from abuse or trafficking. In fact, there is only one reason why the issue of prostitution incites them so much:
Sex work combines exactly those things that conservatives want to prevent, namely the sexual and financial liberation of women.
Even many feminists have not yet understood this and instead still allow themselves to be instrumentalised by moralists.
I want to make one thing very clear here: When sex workers are treated badly, the cause is almost always stigmatisation and religious morals. Some people are so blinded by this that they don't see prostitutes as human beings; they think it is a justification to abuse prostitutes and exploit women. And the very people who are responsible for spreading such stigma and morality want to deliberately make the situation worse for sex workers with the sex purchase ban (Nordic model), under the hypocritical pretence of "doing something about abuse", when in reality their only interest is to enforce their morality - which in turn is the source of the abuse.
