this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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it does seem like there are a lot of problems with sex work - it poses a lot of risks to women, and serves men while catering to clearly misogynistic fantasies ... it does make me think this is one of those topics I need to educate myself a lot more on. I got far enough to move past being sex-negative and sex-worker-exclusionary (radical) feminist (SWERF), I stand with sex workers and support them.
Staying focused on the well-being of women is important, and resorting to right-wing alliances and solutions like criminalization usually just hurt women more. The SWERF response of rationalizing women as somehow deserving the harm that comes to them seems like victim blaming and treats women as though they are never coerced and operate entirely independently of the social pressures applied to them that so often lead to becoming sex workers in the first place.
That said, I'm sure there are really educated and intelligent people focused on this exact problem who have much more nuanced and considered perspectives, so my impulse is to start there to inform my views. So I guess I feel I'm in a uncritical, pre-educated state on this topic, and in that case what is most likely to fill that void are uncritical thoughts and reactions, there is a lot of anger, misandry, victim-blaming, and feelings that are probably come from a reasonable place but go to unreasonable extremes. So probably I need to spend some time refining those views and rooting them in evidence and good reasoning.
Misogynistic fantasies is a really good way of putting it, they really are. What's interesting is looking into legal brothels, they're well maintained, staff and clients are treated well and nobody is at risk. As soon as something is underground it gets dangerous.
Criminalising sex work is bad for the reasons you said. Criminalising clients not providers is bad as well, cos clients are then unwilling to provide information for safety checks eg copy of passport. It's definitely something that research could shed light onto