Socialist Worker: Sex work—can it ever be liberating?
Sex workers strike in Soho in London on International Women’s Day 2018 to protest poverty and criminalisation, and to draw attention to their campaign for full decriminalisation (Photo: Flickr)
When Victoria was 18, she was on the minimum wage at McDonald’s, supporting her father and about to be made homeless.
That was when she turned to sex work.
“I just started escorting, advertising online for clients. It helped me put food on the table,” she said.
According to the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), stories like Victoria’s are becoming more common as the current cost of living crisis bites.
Economic compulsion drives women into the sex industry. It is “about women’s poverty and lack of choices, lack of economic choices, lack of other ways of earning money”, explains one ECP spokesperson.
But sex work is an issue that divides those who want to fight against women’s oppression.
Some feminists want to abolish sex work, seeing it as dangerous and degrading for all women.
Others argue that sex work is work just like any other job. They say recognising this is vital to supporting the sex workers when they try to organise.
And some activists go further, arguing sex work can empower women and erode sexism and racism.
What approach should Marxists take?
We should support decriminalisation and sex workers’ organising for their rights. One Scottish MSP recently attempted to introduce the “Nordic model” to Scotland, which criminalises the men who buy sex rather than the women who sell it.
This might appear to be a positive move, but evidence shows that this approach makes women less safe because it drives sex work underground.
As author Sophie Day argues, “Laws intended to protect sex workers from financial and other exploitation are used in practice to prevent women working collectively.”
Other campaigns, such as Scotland for Decrim and Decrim Now, are fighting for the full decriminalisation of sex work.
Decriminalisation means sex workers suffer less police harassment, less violence and less sexually transmitted diseases.
The sex industry is different to other industries. This is not a question of morality. In the 1840s, Karl Marx wrote, “Prostitution is a particular version expression of the universal prostitution of the worker”.
Capitalism commodifies all our bodies, our minds, our creativity and our emotions. The revolutionary socialist Alexandra
Kollontai railed against the “hypocritical morality of bourgeois society” and the way sex workers are stigmatised.
She said bourgeois society “encourages prostitution through the structure of its exploitative economy while at the same mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or women who is forced to take this path.”
Nor is sex work different because sex is a private or intimate activity.
Within capitalism, women’s bodies are used to sell all manner of commodities and to facilitate business relationships. And the state tries to regulate and criminalise our sexual identities. The sex industry is different because it both reflects women’s oppression and reinforces it. It embodies the idea that sexual pleasure can be bought—or demanded by men—and that women should be ready to please men.
Women’s oppression is essential to and is deeply entrenched in the system.
Sexist ideas are rooted in the institution of the family and the unique role it plays in capitalist and class societies. Its role isn’t just economic—saving trillions through domestic labour—but also ideological.
The institution of the family shapes our understanding of gender roles and what it means to be a woman. We are expected to fulfil the ideal as desirable sexual partners, or as nurturing, caring mothers. This affects all women regardless of their personal family situation.
Sex work has always included a huge range of activities—from street walking, to high-end brothels, from postcards and photographs, to striptease shows, film, phone lines and video cameras.
The political economy of sex work is changing, however, and it appears to be offering sex workers more control.
Subscription sites such as OnlyFans and Fansly allow sex workers to create their own content. OnlyFans hosts 4.6 million creators, has 380 million users and a turnover of over six billion pounds a year.
A few women become very rich as content providers—and are held up as success stories for the system.
But it is the big corporations behind these sites that are making the really huge profits from the objectification of women’s bodies.
OnlyFans, for instance, takes a 20 percent cut from every purchase. It posted revenues of over $1.4 billion in 2024 and profits of $684 million. Most creators earn on average $131 to $180 per month.
What content gets the most clicks, gets promoted on the site, and is most profitable, is shaped by sexist ideas about women and their bodies.
Many content creators, pitted in competition with one another, are pushed to produce what they think users will pay most for.
This is a far cry from a socialist vision of sexual liberation where everyone would be free to explore their desires.
Today’s debates about sex work have a long history—one riddled with hypocrisy and persecution.
From the 12th century onwards, successive Bishops of Windsor preached morality from the pulpit while raking in profits from the brothels of Southwark that they owned.
Historically, sex workers operated where men were isolated—in armies, navies or monasteries. They were often subject to state control and forced to live in designated areas. In the Victorian era, rapid urbanisation and destitution led to a proliferation of sex work in Britain’s towns and cities. It became known as the “great evil”.
Some politicians were happy to let the free market in women’s bodies flourish. And sex workers protected “respectable” middle class wives from their husbands’ onerous sexual demands. Others saw sex workers as a threat to social stability and demanded action. In the 1860s, the Contagious Diseases Acts were introduced to protect Britain’s imperialist armies from venereal diseases.
It stipulated that any woman living in designated towns could be forcibly examined and locked up. Thousands of working class women were subjected to this state violence.
Sex workers were increasingly condemned as immoral and degenerate, or patronised as helpless victims waiting for a middle class saviour. British prime minister William Gladstone wandered round London at night, looking for “fallen women” to “rescue”.
There were salacious newspaper stories about child sex workers, such as WT Stead’s, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. But historian Judith Walkowitz observes that very few Victorian sex workers were under 16.
Victorian culture depicted sex workers as “fallen women”, outcast and reviled. But most were active in their communities, served men of their own class, and often went on to get married.
In the 1880s, a new moral panic over “white slavery” mobilised concern for women’s safety to drive racism against migrants.
The question of sex work reemerged as a political issue during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s.
The term “sex work” was coined by Carol Leigh, a sex work activist from Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (Coyote). She demanded that women in the sex work industry should be treated like any other women workers.
Many sex workers also aligned with those fighting for LGBT+ rights and for political and sexual liberation.
From 1975 to 1980, “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women. The police investigation was flawed by horrific misogyny towards sex workers.
Detective Jim Hobson told a press conference, “The killer has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls.”
Revulsion against these attitudes fuelled solidarity with sex workers and calls for decriminalisation. The First World Whore’s Congress in 1985 demanded full legalisation as a step towards granting sex workers full legal rights and protections. The feminists who were hostile to all sex work and pornography, including arch-transphobe Janice Raymond, pivoted to demanding anti-trafficking laws.
Evangelical Christian organisations were eager to join this anti-trafficking movement. They wrapped up hostility to premarital sex, abortion and LGBT+ freedoms in the language of social justice and women’s rights.
This coalition was responsible for new legislation, including Donald Trump’s Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act 2018 and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000.
Far from stopping women being trafficked, the legislation intensifies the repression faced by migrant women and women of colour. They are far more likely to be treated as criminals than as victims.
Hostility towards sex work can lead in many reactionary directions—and we should always start with solidarity.
At the same time, we are opposed to the commodification of sex and sexuality and the encroachment of the market into all aspects of our lives.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Working and Peasant Women declared that the women now had equal rights and must not be “the object of buying and selling.”
The workers’ state created paths out of sex work through equal pay, decent housing and free childcare. This was linked to a broader project of beginning to uproot the material basis of women’s oppression. Sadly, those gains weren’t realised as the revolution degenerated.
But, like Kollontai, we want to look forward to a society where relationships develop free from capitalist commodification.