[Estimated reading time: 10 minutes]

People...I'm going to tell you something you may already know, so I'd appreciate it if you could look shocked. I used to be a licensed brothel manager. I know, and yes my mother is proud. Whenever I bring this little factoid up at dinner parties, I get one of two reactions. Mostly I receive an enthusiastic smile of surprise followed by questions (which I love). But occasionally I receive a purse-lipped look of disapproval, because that isn't the sort of thing an educated young lady should be doing with her life. Well, I guess I beg to differ.

Here’s something that’s said a lot, but people don’t really think about; sex work is the oldest profession.

Think about the implications of that for a moment. Whether or not we have the anthropological evidence to support this colloquialism doesn’t really matter. The phrase itself has been around long enough that most people don’t question the idea. This means most people have casually internalised the idea that for the past 50,000 years or so, sex work has existed in some form or another. That being the case, wouldn’t you have thought we’d all be a lot more chill about it by now?

Sex is something that we are (almost) all driven to participate in, as members of the human species. So if (almost) everyone wants sex, and the people participating in the sex are all consenting, then surely there’s no reason to be upset. What could anyone possibly complain about?

A lot, as it turns out.

Strange as it may seem, there are people in this world who don’t want you to masturbate or have sex. They don’t want to you do it with a condom on. They don’t want you to do it with a same sex partner. They don’t want you to do it outdoors. They don’t want you to do it with the lights on. And they certainly don’t want you to pay for it.

This means we have here a demand for sex (e.g. people who would like to have sex), people willing to supply said sex (e.g. sex workers who will have sex in exchange for money), but a seemingly arbitrary aversion to allowing it to be socially acceptable. As though, regardless of consent, once you provide payment for sex it suddenly becomes unacceptable or immoral.

Let’s look at it in another way - try and apply the same logic to a different industry. We have a demand for human touch. It’s a basic human need. More specifically, we want therapeutic touch; a massage. And there are people who are willing to rub someone else’s body, who want to supply this service.

I get massages. Sometimes I’m naked. Sometimes I’m naked and get slathered with oil. Sometimes I get it done inside a little hole in the wall in a shopping centre. I’m yet to get called names for getting a massage (okay, sometimes I get called a bourgie WASP, but that’s entirely justified). I can pay for strangers to rub oil on my naked doughy skin all day long and society is fine with that.

Now, the word ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’ are slurs. People who provide sexual services for money use the term ‘sex worker’ to remind people that what they do is real work. They are earning the fuck out of that money. But there are people who insist on claiming that it is not real work, who insist on using the term ‘prostitute'.

What really frustrates me about this attitude is that WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES! We prostitute hours of our lives to the highest bidder. We are literally trading weeks, months, years of our lives in manual or mental labour to corporations in exchange for a negotiated sum. If you’ve ever worked in manual labour, you were literally trading your body for money. If you’ve only ever worked in white collar jobs, does it make you feel any better to know that you rented out your mind instead of your muscles? This is capitalism. Hell, even in socialism or communism you’re trading your labour for something - safety, food, continued existence.

If you've ever been in a sexual relationship with another person, you were trading sex for something. Maybe you were trading your body for the pleasure the act of sex would bring you (e.g. orgasms). Maybe you traded sex for the opportunity to be physically intimate with another person that you had feelings for. Or maybe you did it because you knew it would lead to further emotional support or investment from your sexual partner.

Just as Mark Twain argued that there is no truly selfless act, I would argue that no sexual act is done without some form of “payment”. We always have a reason for having consensual sex, and that reason will pretty much always have a self-serving element…otherwise we wouldn’t do it.

For a moment, imagine every time you’ve ever had sex in your life.

Now imagine that every one of those encounters was with a stranger.

Sometimes you were physically attracted to the stranger, sometimes you were a little repulsed by them.

Sometimes you were intimidated by them, sometimes you rolled your eyes because they were a complete dropkick.

Sometimes it was their first time.

Sometimes they had a disability, disease or disorder.

But for each one of those strangers, you found something to love about them.

This is what a sex worker, a good sex worker, does. They look past the things that make their client “undesirable” and they find the redeeming quality that will help them love that person for an hour, or an evening.

Have you ever done that? Could you do that?

Having the skills to meet a stranger, to recognise what they need from you, and then to put aside a litany of socialised standards about what you’re meant to demand from your sexual partners (status, physical beauty, deep emotional connection, ongoing relationship, etc) so that you can bring them joy or happiness or satisfaction…I mean I don’t know about you but that impresses the fuck out of me.

I think it takes a pretty fucking spectacular human being to look at someone that, maybe, the rest of society might have rejected and say “I can love this person, for as long as they want me to.”

Not all clients are people who can’t find sex on their own. Many of them are simply time poor, or don’t desire emotional connection, or they simply prefer to employ a professional. Some clients are married or have partners who are unable, for whatever reason, to provide sexual fulfilment. And, like the clients at any workplace on earth, some of them are genuinely lovely people and some of them are asshats of the highest order. Every sex worker has the right of refusal, and they exercise that right judiciously - but they still end up having sex with a lot of people that you or I might outright reject. People who still deserve physical intimacy and connection.

And yes, there is monetary compensation. But how much money would you expect to be paid to fuck someone you’re not attracted to? Think about that last Tinder date or Bumble match that you totally unmatched with because you just weren’t interested. Or that person in your office who dresses like they found an OshKosh B’gosh store that stocked adult sizes. Or that family friend who is always single and no one knows how to tell them it’s because they have the charisma of a wet dishcloth. How much would you expect to fuck those people? Because for most of us, the answer is well above what the average sex worker charges for an hour.

Let’s say though, that you’re a bit skint and you’re happy to have sex for money - good on you! Well after you receive this money, don’t expect that your life will be the same. Because from now on you’re someone who had sex for money - and you will spend the rest of your life seeing media and hearing conversations that tell you that what you did was shameful and disgraceful.

Chances are you’ll be afraid to tell future partners, to tell family members, even to tell medical professionals. Because all of them will treat you differently now. Which means you have to lie. To the people you are supposed to love and trust. Because the world thinks that what you did was dirty and wrong. Because you got paid for it.

But the world is wrong. Sex work is not wrong.

If a person is doing sex work because they want to, and they enjoy the work, why on earth would it be wrong?

The truth is, not all sex workers love their work. And not all sex workers are good at what they do. Just like not all comedians, accountants or bus drivers are good at what they do. Some people are just in a job to earn money.

But not loving your work is not the same as being trafficked into the industry. It’s a crucial distinction. Human trafficking is an absolutely vile practice, one that would have a much lower prominence if we didn’t have social stigmas attached to specific types of work. We don’t traffic in accountants, because no one sees anything wrong with being an accountant, so therefore there’s never any real shortage of them.

My point is this; sex workers are human beings who do a job just like anyone else. But their job can involve doing something incredibly intimate with people the rest of us may or may not have deemed undesirable.

Instead of treating sex workers like they’re dirty, or like what they do is shameful, how about we start respecting them for being able to do the work they do. How about we accept that there’s nothing wrong with sex, and there’s nothing wrong with the people who make a living from it.

The next time you go to use the words whore, prostitute, or hooker, as an insult…stop. Use the word ‘accountant’ instead.

That is all.

You may go now.

The Oldest Profession