SIO310: Banning Sex Work and Sex Work Websites Is Bad and We Should Stop Doing It

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 310. I'm Thomas. That's Lindsey. How you doing?

0:00:18 Lindsey: Fantastic. How are you?

0:00:20 Thomas: Doing great. Fun to be excited to be doing sex stuff with you. Shoot. Cut. Edit. Excited. Let's do some sex work.

0:00:30 Lindsey: I've been making that joke a lot for the past couple. Yeah.

0:00:34 Thomas: Let's make some porn conversations about porn happening. So, listeners to the show, will recall that we've done a couple episodes I guess I did interviews with Eli and Tom talking about the OnlyFans oh no sorry back then it was the Pornhub conversation and uh there's a lot a lot of response to that um and if you go back and listen to Eli on that specifically I think in retrospect a lot of what he says has been I don't want to rehash the whole thing but anyway Anyway, yeah, yeah. And then also then, gosh, there's so much behind this. Then Then recently, there was a whole OnlyFans thing, which was like somehow they were going to take away the porn part of their site, which is like Google

0:01:07 Lindsey: It was very prescient. Yeah Yeah, which was all of it.

0:01:21 Thomas: Taking away the search part of Google.com. I don't know what. Then it's just what else is there? I can't. Apparently, there is like a chef on there who takes one picture of food. It would just be one account. Count.

0:01:28 Lindsey: One would Nobody would know the name OnlyFans if it hadn't been for the adult content creators. It was pretty shitty.

0:01:37 Thomas: I'm not even making a joke. I actually thought it was just that. Is there something other than that? And I don't mean it in a bad way. It's a good place, I thought. I was like, all right, people can just, you know, yeah, sell their stuff.

0:01:41 Lindsey: I did too. No No. Yeah. No, no. I my impression is that that was designed to be more like Patreon. Generally, it wasn't designed to host adult content, but like that's who made it successful.

0:02:02 Thomas: All right. Anyway the whole point is I guess only fans could be for something other than porn apparently but I thought it was just porn, but so that we were going to talk about that, like, oh, you know, maybe I was going to get Eli on to talk about that or whatever. And then they reversed the decision. I don't Know what is happening. But I also asked Lindsay to maybe look into some of the research on sex work, and et cetera, to be more informed about this. And I am so excited to hear about what you found.

0:02:29 Lindsey: No, this has led me down many, many rabbit trails. This has been a lot, um, because I, I you know, I I didn't know much about this literature at all, right? Sex work, pornography, there are big academic literatures on these things, and I knew nothing about them. Um, I did realize that I had a lot of assumptions about sex work that I have not inspected. They were probably because of my conservative upbringing. But no, this has been a really interesting journey for me. But yeah, initial question that I set out trying to answer here was about the evidence regarding how restrictive or suppressive policies affect sex workers, right?

0:03:08 Lindsey: So do punitive laws and other suppressive polices actually do what they're are purported to do, which is to help protect people from exploitation, or do they actually do exactly the opposite of that?

0:03:08 Thomas: Mm hmm. Hmm.

0:03:18 Lindsey: And so again, this led me into a bunch of nooks and crannies about analyses of sex work from like a sociological perspective and a labor perspective, which is really interesting. I tried to find something that would give me stats about trafficking, but as you're wrong about covered, they, yeah, so I'm not going to rehash.

0:03:31 Thomas: Well, yeah. Yeah. Did you know 70 million children an hour in my house are trafficked?

0:03:41 Lindsey: That's correct.

0:03:42 Thomas: Did you know that?

0:03:42 Lindsey: Statistically. Yeah, I did.

0:03:44 Thomas: If anyone's listened to that, I highly recommend both the show you're wrong about, but also specifically the human trafficking episode is pretty mind blowing because they and what what again, I know we've already talked about this, but what blows my mind about those or those kinds of like, you incorrect assumptions that we all come to as a culture or something is that I get it on one level. It's like in the popular I don't know, in the zeitgeist, in whatever, it's like oh, human trafficking, big problem, big program. What blows my mind is how much the police are like in on that or also, you Know, I guess what I'm saying is it would be one thing if it was like you or I were like, yeah, did you know like millions of people are trafficked every day and blah, blah, blah. And then a police officer would be like, yeah, but that's bullshit. Like I work on this and I don't see any of that. That can't be. But instead, it's the opposite. Like police

0:03:44 Lindsey: I did Yes. It is. Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:04:32 Thomas: Are like, did you know a hundred million people are trafficked every day? And then people ask like what the source is and nobody has a source for that claim because it's completely made up. Yeah.

0:04:42 Lindsey: Because it doesn't exist. Yeah exactly.

0:04:44 Thomas: Mind-blowing.

0:04:45 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, yeah, so I recommend that one too, that was that, that was pretty mind-blowing. And another, another, again, you know, I shared this assumption with, I think, a lot of people that this was a real threat, a real thing that was happening, and yeah, it's about as real as as literal Satanism. So, So for that reason, yeah, it was kind of tough to find analyses on the percentage of sex workers who are being trafficked, because apparently they're not being trafficked. So I'm not going to rehash that territory. I think that they covered all that really well. But I did find a lot of really interesting work about the conditions that do put sex workers at more risk of exploitation, which we'll talk about.

0:05:06 Thomas: Interesting. Also, even even more recently, there was a, another, Eli sent me this and said like, you know, Oh, New York times does it again. Um, because in addition to what's to Nicholas D Christophe, who again, as I, as I said, I've, I'm, enjoyed his work. I've respected his work for such a long time. I specifically, uh, donate to the, uh charities that he recommends every year. Um I've I really have liked that guy, except when it comes to this, he seems to be a church mom. And I think it's led him to trust the wrong people in terms of sources and et cetera, et cetera. I know Tom from Cognizant would probably disagree with me on this, but I feel pretty vindicated. And along with Eli, of course, I think he's been pretty vindicated by what's happened with all this nonsense. It's BS. And he never backed down.

0:06:08 Thomas: No matter what the response was, he basically single-handedly took out, you know, millions of dollars worth of business for this website, which, again, not to defend Pornhub as a company or whatever, but, like, as I think, anyway, go back and listen to the Eli one if if you need to, but but with a stroke of a, not with a stroke of a computer, you know, caused this entire ruckus. And now they're, as Eli predicted, there are knock-on effects and places that are, again, doing legitimate work, doing, you know, better than your average porn tube site, which may be doing terribly in its monitoring of all that stuff, are also going to have the rug pulled out from under them by credit card companies who are, you know, not terrified of offending the church ladies of the country. So, yeah, it's, and anyway, Eli sends me another. This is dated September 6th, was a guest essay, and it turns out it's by Catherine McKinnon, who's actually a pretty, I think, famous feminist legal scholar and stuff, but she is an anti-porn feminist.

0:07:10 Thomas: And there are, you know, I mean, it's an interesting thing. Like there are hardcore feminists who are, a ton of great work, continue to do a ton, ton of good work, but look at porn in the same way that a Christian fundamentalist does, weirdly, maybe probably for different reasons. Like I'll get to give them credit. Like I don't think they care about the same things per se, but there can be a lot of overlap. And just as an example, I thought it might be interesting to read some of this article. What do you think?

0:07:38 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, right.

0:07:40 Thomas: Because the way, frankly, like the way she talks about porn is I find it laughable. Like I find it just not even, well, let's get to it, um, the title of it is "Only Fan," and this was kind of in in response, response to that whole controversy. "Only Fans Is Not a Safe Platform for Sex Work, It's a Pimp" is the title, um, think, opening paragraph: "We are living in the world pornography has made." By the way, pornography, that's very broad. Right?

0:08:08 Lindsey: Wow.

0:08:08 Thomas: Off the bat, this was kind of about OnlyFans, but nope, just pornography. For more than three decades, researchers have documented that it desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths and other lies about women's sexuality. In doing so, it normalizes itself, becoming ever more pervasive, intrusive, and dangerous, surrounding us ever more intimately, grooming the culture so that it becomes hard even to recognize the harms. That's the opening paragraph there.

0:08:32 Lindsey: That's A lot of claims, yeah.

0:08:35 Thomas: Yeah, all right, I'm going to read this, it's actually the second paragraph, it is a little bit longer, but bear with me because I think this will be just about all that I have to read. "One measure of this success is the media's increasing insistence on referring to people used in prostitution and pornography as sex workers. What's being done to them is neither, neither sex in the sense of intimacy and mutuality, nor work in the sense of productivity and dignity. Survivors of prostitution consider it serial rape, so they regard the term sex work as gaslighting." When the job of, oh, this is a quote from somebody. "When the job of prostitution is exposed, any similarity to legitimate work is shattered," write two survivors. "Put simply, whether you're a high-class call girl or a street-walking hoe, when you're on a date, you got to get on your knees or lay on your back and let that man use your body the way, any way, he wants to, that's what he pays for. Pretending prostitution is a job like any other job would be laughable if it weren't so serious." So can you sub that with any other fucking job? How

0:09:41 Lindsey: Yes, you can.

0:09:42 Thomas: About working on an Amazon line where you have to pee in a bottle because you can't take a bathroom break? Oh, that's, that's not a job because someone demands you do something with your body. Like, what are you? I mean, yes, absolutely.

0:09:53 Lindsey: That is that is a labor problem, it absolutely is, uh,

0:09:58 Thomas: And like, of course, I hope it doesn't need to be said that none, there's going to be horrible cases of any of this. And that doesn't, the people being quoted here may very well be absolutely be victims of rape and sex workers get sexually assaulted all the time. That's something that happens. And I'm sure we're going to get to that. So this is not to say it's a blanket, you know, all sex work is great and all, whatever, no, but, like, that language, the idea that because you're doing something with your body and I guess because it's for someone else's gratification, that it's no longer work, like it can't even be called work, that just strikes me as laughable. I mean, what about you? I get sports massage for my horrible back problems, um, that, a, the person has to use their body to try to work out, like, my back problems, you, that's using their body, I'm demanding their body be used in a way that I like, like, what, I mean, come on.

0:10:49 Lindsey: I totally agree with you, and and, uh, even though I do think that the feminist scholarship on this question that's, that's coming at at sex work from this perspective, that it's inherently exploitative, I think that you're right that the motivations are different, but I actually think that, uh, the intuition is so persuasive because of sort of the puritanical roots of this country.

0:11:09 Lindsey: Like it's, it's just because we have these sort of ingrained attitudes about sex. I, that's, you know, I'm sure some people will disagree with me on that, but yeah, that's, yeah.

0:11:17 Thomas: And I again, I can't say it enough, I'm not, this wouldn't be a defense of every single, you know, case of individual transactions of sex work, but the idea that by definition doing you know, any kind of sex work is both rape and not work, work, as this paragraph very explicitly lays out, is just nonsense to me. I mean, go work in a fucking coal mine. I think it was a Twitter meme that went around a few years back, but yeah, which is more selling of your body? Especially because OnlyFans, a lot of the accounts on there, they're just selling pictures of themselves. You're barely even using your body. You know, you're not, what?

0:12:04 Lindsey: Right.

0:12:04 Thomas: I mean, there's regular modeling. How is that different? Ahead. Sorry. It's just so outrageous to me.

0:12:08 Lindsey: Totally agree. I'm really glad that you read these two quotes because it actually sets up perfectly several things that I want to talk about. I mean, because there is exploitation in sex work. That's absolutely true, right? There are people who have horrible experiences. But the question, I think, is whether that stems from the nature of the work itself, which is what she's saying, in which a lot of these abolitionist groups that are conservative and religious, that's the point that they're making too, that it's inherent to sex work, or is it a labor problem that's exacerbated by things like criminalizing sex work? And so that's kind of at the heart, at least of the first part of what I want to talk about. Oh, the second thing, and this was from the first paragraph, where she just sort of makes the sweeping claim that researchers have documented for three decades that pornography desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths. That's a very broad claim.

0:13:00 Lindsey: And that's one that I want to come back to as well, right? Because that refers to claims about the effects of pornography on consumers, which is an entirely separate set of claims that I ended up reading about because of the rabbit holes.

0:13:13 Thomas: Not to mention, as we've already said, and I'm sure you're going to get to, very broad claim, pornography. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, maybe there's some awful, horrendous pornography that if you showed it to somebody or somebody got addicted to it could absolutely do harm to them psychologically. Sure. Uh, but pornography, what about when we were all in fifth grade and we drew the two circles with like the nipples on it? And like, that was the, that Was our porn back in the day before the internet as kids. And like we didn't even know what it was exactly that.

0:13:42 Lindsey: Or when you spelled out boobs on a a calculator. Yeah. Yep.

0:13:45 Thomas: Nope. That's also pornography, pornography, technically. So that also desensitizes us to violent, like, come on, that's a wide-ranging thing, like, geez.

0:13:47 Lindsey: But But That that is, that is a claim that they, a pretty large number of studies have made, that it's actually about pornography in general, it's not about like specifically violent pornography, but pornography itself has these effects, and we will debunk the hell out of that one. Yeah.

0:14:11 Lindsey: Right, but Before that, um, yeah, so I read, I read really widely, this turned into a much bigger sort of prep than just sort of this labor analysis, but that is the first part of what I want to talk about. But here's the crux overall of what I think I've prepped for this discussion, right? So groups of religious activists have been working for a very, very long time to criminalize as many aspects of sex work as they can. And what they can't criminalize, they try to stigmatize and regulate out of existence. And that's what we are seeing in these recent stories. It's just another instantiation of that. Over the history of this campaign, these abolitionist groups have tried different strategies toward that end of criminalizing and regulating out-of-existence sex work. And so they've used arguments about negative effects on society, like corroding the moral fabric of society.

0:15:03 Lindsey: They've tried arguments about negative effects On sex workers, and they've tried arguments about negative Effects on consumers. And the evidence that they've been able to to marshal for these claims is virtually non-existent. But the campaigns have actually been pretty successful. Meaning, Yeah, they, meaning that they have caused and will continue to harm, or they've, they've caused harm to a lot of folks, and they have continued, or they will continue to cause harm to the public. And both people who buy and sell sex content. Right. So, as I said a minute ago, I realized when I was doing this reading that I had a ton of bad assumptions that were exclusively rooted in sort of this puritanical upbringing that I had, and that they're not supported by strong evidence. And it's not just me, right? So I don't know if people haven't listened to The Butterfly Effect, which is this cool Audible series that John

0:15:18 Thomas: I'll say, yeah.

0:15:53 Lindsey: Ronson did, who I love.

0:15:54 Thomas: I love them too. I listened to that right when it came out.

0:15:57 Lindsey: Good...

0:15:57 Thomas: It's good.

0:15:57 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah. It's a great series. And primarily what he's exploring is the effects of these free streaming porn sites insights on sex workers, right? Or on workers in the pornography industry in particular. And so much of the focus is on the fact that people who work in pornography have had to shift the way that they work to cater to more personalized experiences for people, right? The kind of things that OnlyFans is probably doing, right.

0:16:22 Thomas: Well, And it, by the way, that, the, again, we don't have time for all of this, but like, yeah, that is a very real thing, that these like hub-type, whatever you want to call them, tube-type porn sites are probably very harmful and like have made it so that, you know, it's harder and harder for people to, you know, make porn in a regulated kind of more legitimate way. Um, it's kind of a race to like the bottom in terms of how cheaply and easily you can do it because there's no margins in it anymore because it's so freely available, right.

0:16:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Or the model has to change, right.? I mean, it's, yeah, it doesn't.

0:16:53 Thomas: And that's like OnlyFans, right? Yeah.

0:16:55 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly.

0:16:55 Thomas: Like that. Sure.

0:16:56 Lindsey: Right. And that's changed a lot of things. And we'll talk about some of the ways that it's changed the game. But I think it's It seems to me like it's probably mostly a positive, like sites like OnlyFans.

0:17:05 Thomas: Interesting, interesting.

0:17:06 Lindsey: So that was most of the series. And that stuff was all really, really good. And John Ronson is a great journalist. But he also devoted one episode, I think, I don't, it was an entire episode, to this claim that pornography essentially poses a public health risk. And he interviewed some people that were claiming that there's like this epidemic of sexual dysfunction among young men, like in their 20s, and that that is caused by the unprecedented, unprecedented availability of free porn, and that that's making actual sex less appealing and less exciting to them, and that too appears to be a claim for which there is no good evidence, and the origin of those claims, just like all these other claims that we're going to talk about, are these anti-porn abolitionist groups, and they don't have good evidence on their side, so for any of our listeners that might have similar backgrounds to me and might, you know, have some of these, these assumptions kicking around their head, I hope that this episode is, is helpful to you, as it was to me, because This Is this Is A lot, oh,

0:18:01 Thomas: And I will just echo like behind the scenes, like, I can vouch for the fact that I, you, this isn't, you, this isn't BS that you're saying, like, I had these, like, you really did kind of approach this and have your mind changed based on, you know, my, my interactions with you and stuff like this, this you legitimately seem to have been coming from a different place than you ended up, right?

0:18:19 Lindsey: Absolutely, I mean, after listening to the, the two episodes that you did with Eli and Tom, like, I was, I was heavily leaning toward Tom's position, and I, and I still understand where he's coming from. I just think that like the assumptions that both of us were operating from were wrong.

0:18:34 Thomas: Wow. Oh, I can't wait to get to it.

0:18:37 Lindsey: Okay, we should do it.

0:18:39 Thomas: I'm going to skip ahead to get there faster. You just did. I'm hitting 15 seconds skip a couple of times. So I'll be in the different timeline than you. It's cool.

0:18:47 Lindsey: Okay. Okay, that sounds good. Let me know how it ends up. So so we're gonna attack two broad questions. So one.

0:18:49 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, oh, that's a great point. No, sorry. Okay,

0:18:59 Lindsey: So we'RE gonna attack to broad questions, the first is whether sex work is inherently bad for workers, right? Is this kind of work inherently exploitative? And we'll talk specifically about about how the internet has changed working conditions for sex workers. And also under this question, we're going to talk about whether pornography is inherently bad for consumers. So that'll be the last part of the stuff that we cover. And I think that you can consider this episode just the reference section for Eli's claims. Because yeah, I think what I found really vindicates everything that he said.

0:19:32 Lindsey: Okay, so here's where I want to start. I read this paper by Perry. It was published just this year, 2021. And this paper, in the background section of the paper, Perry traces the history of efforts to ban porn in the U.S. and shows how the arguments to ban pornography have morphed over time. So originally, advocates for outlawing pornography, who were, again, primarily conservative religious leaders, were citing pornography's contaminating social and moral effects. So the sort of puritanical condemnation of, you know, sexually explicit imagery. Over time, that rhetoric changed, even though the mouthpieces for it have not changed. It's still coming from conservative religious leaders. But instead of citing this sort of moral corrosion argument, which has become less persuasive and less popular, anti-porn rhetoric has begun to take on sort of like a more secular tone.

0:20:26 Lindsey: So they're citing scientific studies that have supposedly documented all these harms of producing and consuming pornography. So this is where we get the rise in concern about both the exploitation of people working in the pornography industry, as well as concerns about the consumption of porn, like its potential for addiction. We're going to debunk that, by the way, um, and the effects of porn consumption on, like, psychosocial health and sexual health. So the research question that Perry is exploring in this paper, which I thought was really interesting, was whether there is now in the United States more secular support for banning porn than there used to be, or whether it's just the anti-porn rhetoric that is changing to become more secular because it's more persuasive now, compared to the older religious arguments.

0:21:05 Thomas: Interesting. Okay.

0:21:07 Lindsey: Yeah. So in other words, he's saying that historically, the people who've supported anti- porn policy have tended to be religious folks. He's studying whether the demographics of anti-born sentiments have shifted to be more secular and more pro-science, which he thinks could be an indicator that, you know, maybe we have some new legitimate arguments based on, you know new scientific evidence to ban porn, right?

0:21:29 Thomas: Hmm.

0:21:30 Lindsey: Maybe, yeah, so maybe we've accumulated new evidence that would have been persuasive to people who otherwise would have had no problem with porn.

0:21:39 Lindsey: Alternatively, Perry says that it could be the case that the people who want to ban porn today are demographically the same as they always have been, meaning highly conservative religious folks who object to porn on moral grounds, but they're just using scientific rhetoric in order for their arguments to appear more legitimate. So in order to investigate this question, he analyzed responses over a 30-plus year period from 1984 to 2018 from something called the General Social Survey, which is this nationally representative survey of U.S. adults on their social attitudes, in order just to shed light on whether the characteristics of individuals who support outlawing pornography have shifted over this 30-plus year period. So are they more more secular? Has the relationship between confidence in science and anti-porn sentiment changed?

0:22:24 Lindsey: And what his results suggest is that across this 34-year period, it has remained true that people, as they become more religiously conservative, are also more supportive of porn bans. That's no less true in recent years than in past years. And if anything, some of the associations have gotten stronger. So for example, belief in the literal truth of the Bible is now an even better predictor of anti-porn sentiment than it used to be. And on the other side, people who are more pro-science are actually less opposed to pornography. And paralleling that religiosity finding, it appears that Americans who have confidence in science have actually become less supportive of banning pornography over this 34-year period. So I know that, yeah, yeah I know, like none of this is really like earth-shattering stuff, right? But I think it's interesting because Because these results suggest that modern anti-porn sentiment is still what it always has been, which is heavily religiously conservative.

0:23:17 Thomas: To me. Yeah. No, I think that that makes sense. And that's important to note. I mean, like, as you say, it's not absurd on its face, by the way, the idea that porn might be harmful to consumers or makers of it. I don't think it's like a prima facie stupid. In fact, I'm really curious for the section on consumption of porn for probably later, probably part two. I don't know. Know, because like, I would have thought there's got to be some amount of like, you know, desensitization or too much or whatever. So like, just the point is, and if that were true, if the research, um, if the arguments were good, then I guess you would, they, you would have expected this researcher would have expected that it wouldn't hold so tightly to, you know, religious people think it's bad.

0:24:01 Thomas: You know, non-religious people tend to think it's fine, okay.

0:24:03 Lindsey: Exactly, right?

0:24:04 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:24:05 Lindsey: Yeah, so that was exactly his logic here, and he's finding exactly the opposite, right. It still seems like it doesn't look like more secular people have actually been persuaded by evidence. It looks like people who oppose porn now oppose it for the same reasons they always have, which is religious and moral reasons. But again, they're using the scientific language to prop up those beliefs so that they seem more legitimate rather than making these overtly religious arguments. It's very reminiscent of intelligent design to me, right? I mean, they are starting with the conclusion that they want. And then to the extent that they can use science to maybe make that conclusion seem more legitimate, they do. But it's not as though the hypothesis of an intelligent designer has actually become more scientifically plausible.

0:24:42 Thomas: I was gonna bring up that, that's great example. Yeah. Hmm.

0:24:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. So I just I wanted to talk about this paper first, because I think that that background of this, this history of argument kind of frames everything else that we're going to talk about, which is how virtually everything bad that people think is true about sex work or is actually true about sex work is in some way to blame on these anti-porn propaganda groups or anti-sex work in general, I should say. Right. So there are, you know, some of these alleged problems that are just not true. They're manufactured, right, like trafficking. There are some problems in the sex work industry that are real, but the evidence suggests that they're actually products of the stigmatization and the criminalization of sex work. And then there are still other problems in the sex industry, like the distribution of revenge porn, which are real problems, but they just wouldn't be addressed by the policies and things that are being pushed by these abolition groups, and it appears that these groups are just using things like revenge porn as an excuse to make it harder for for sex workers and adult performers to make living. So that's cool, okay.

0:25:45 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, revenge porn is obviously terrible in a whole different way than any of this. I mean, to by analogy to, as we were comparing this stuff to other jobs, I mean, of course it's going to be a bad thing if people are using your content without your permission, or some way that you don't, you know, it's like if I, again, if I hire someone to do something and then I make them stay there and not get paid, it's like, yeah, that doesn't mean that person's job is flawed. That means that like you got to stop this kind of abusive, you know, behavior.

0:25:46 Lindsey: Of course, yeah, exactly. Right, and and these policies are not really really targeted to do that. I mean, obviously, they're not targeted to do that, and that's, yeah, that's the real problem, I think, in these arguments, is that they're passing it off as though it is. Right, so first thing to tackle here is this question of whether policies that suppress sex work actually do what these activist groups claim they will do, which is protect women and prevent exploitation. So where I want to start is what are the challenges and risks that sex workers face? And And there are a number of these. So, you know, obviously, if we're talking about direct sex work, sex workers run the risk of being exposed to sexually transmitted diseases, right? And there's potential barriers in terms of access to health care. There's risk of pregnancy for certain types of sexual behavior, right.

0:27:01 Lindsey: There's also the risk of encountering violent and exploitative clients. So some clients will refuse to pay. They'll demand that the sex worker do things that they're unwilling to do. There might be violent coercion in those situations. There are also risks in terms of privacy. So clients threatening to blackmail or extort sex workers by exposing their identities or maybe covertly recording materials and threatening to distribute them. And there's the risk of violence and exploitation from employers. And I really tried to find a nice 2021 word for pimp. I was unsuccessful.

0:27:37 Lindsey: It feels like there's got to be a newer word for this.

0:27:37 Thomas: You would think.

0:27:40 Lindsey: Yeah. But that's a, you know, that's potentially exploitative relationship, right? So there's that. Then there's also social and cultural stigma. That's a risk. So even in areas of the world where some forms of sex work are legal or decriminalized, the stigma surrounding this industry can still have a variety of negative effects on sex workers. And finally, there's a documented risk of harassment, of violence, as well as lack of access to justice from law enforcement officers among sex workers, right?

0:28:08 Thomas: I wonder why that is.

0:28:11 Lindsey: Yeah, I wonder, right. So, against the background of those risks, right, how does suppressive legislation, that is, legislation that criminalizes the buying and or selling of sex, affect those challenges? Because supposedly, again, these criminalization laws are designed to prevent these kinds of problems, prevent exploitation. And this is the same argument that's being made for other kinds of crackdowns, like this thing with with Pornhub and OnlyFans, right, that create these really prohibitively restrictive guidelines for online platforms. Forms. The weight of the evidence here suggests that suppressive legislation and other forms of suppressive policies absolutely do not prevent exploitation. And to the contrary, they seem to exacerbate or in some cases directly cause many risks that would otherwise not be there for sex workers.

0:29:03 Thomas: Wouldn't you know it?

0:29:04 Lindsey: Yeah, this was the overwhelming conclusion in virtually everything that I read. So I'll give you one example. I read a meta-analysis by Platt and colleagues from 2018. This was a meta-analysis of 134 studies, some quantitative, some qualitative, that examined the relationship between legislation of sex work and various aspects of sex workers' well-being. And so the studies they analyzed were published between 1990 and 2018. So this is almost 30 years of research on this topic. And their analyses of the quantitative studies suggested pretty clearly that repressive policing of sex workers was associated with an increased risk of a variety of problematic consequences.

0:29:49 Lindsey: So violence from clients and from other parties, increased risk of HIV and other STIs, and increased risk OF unsafe sexual behavior, like condomless sex. So, for example, they they talked about one study, for instance, that included, that it analyzed data from over 7,000 women sex workers across 10 sub-Saharan African countries. And the study suggested that increasingly punitive laws were associated with greater prevalence of HIV infections. Yeah.

0:30:18 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:30:19 Lindsey: Yeah. So I was like, why would that be? And it's like, what would the mechanisms be there? And their analysis of some of the qualitative studies, which primarily feature interview studies with people that work in the sex industry, may shed some light on why these associations exist. So, first of all, their analysis of the qualitative studies suggests that criminalization leaves sex workers vulnerable to conflict with police, including arbitrary arrest, extortion by police, physical and sexual violence, failure to provide access to justice when sex workers have a violent or exploitative client. All of those are more likely in areas where there are more punitive laws in place, right? Right. And the way that this connects to the STI finding is that police harassment had a number of other secondary negative impacts that can drive up STI rates, including like in areas with particularly punitive laws against sex work. Workers' access is diminished to services that specifically cater to the health and well-being of sex workers because organizations like those that provide those services are targeted by police. So if you go to one of those services, you're risking police harassment, essentially. Um, another indirect effect that I, I wouldn't have thought of is that punitive laws can discourage sex workers from carrying things like condoms, because if they're randomly stopped in search by police. Yeah.

0:30:21 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Oh interesting.

0:31:38 Lindsey: Um, yeah, a random stop and search, they find a bunch of condoms and that can be used as evidence that you're engaging in criminal behavior.

0:31:45 Thomas: Just uh just date night. No no no. I'd come up with something. My go-to would be, you you know, I do some amount of musical theater. They always, they put condoms on the mic packs. It's actually pretty smart, you know? Cause you get sweaty actors. You strap that mic pack to, to, you put a condom around that bad boy. That'd be, that'd be my go-to. Oh, I work at a theater. So that's all these condoms.

0:32:11 Thomas: Why am I currently giving someone a handjob?

0:32:14 Lindsey: Packs too.

0:32:14 Thomas: That's a different thing. But, but, you Know, sorry, not to make light of the fact that like, Like these are documented findings that it sounds like the significant relationships here, right?

0:32:25 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. And so, yeah, police harassment, which you get more of if you got really punitive laws, right, pretty direct impacts on sex workers' abilities to engage in proactive measures to protect their sexual health. Pretty... And this paper, meta-analysis, also reviewed studies conducted in areas where sex work is decriminalized. And these studies suggest the converse, that under those conditions, sex workers have greater negotiating power with clients.

0:32:51 Lindsey: They have better access to justice because they aren't operating outside the protection of the law.

0:32:56 Thomas: I mean, it's so basic, but obviously if you're already doing something that is illegal, you're going to have, you know, you want go to police. You're not going to be able to tell the, you know, the person who maybe if it's like, you know, uh, you, you are a sex worker and someone sexually assaults you, it'S going to be much harder to want to report that. Um, or or like be able to say no, put it, do all these like, so much of it. It strikes me as so much more dangerous if it's done in sort of a, like, what we've set up as like a black market kind of way.

0:33:21 Lindsey: Mm-huh. That's exactly it, right? Right. And then, they, again, there's a bunch of evidence for all the things you just said, in places where, where punitive, where laws are more punitive around this stuff. Not only do sex workers say that they experience violence from clients more often, but as you just said, they are way less likely to report it. And so violence against sex workers is way less likely to be punished in areas where sex work is criminalized.

0:33:54 Lindsey: So I don't know. This is this is is pretty persuasive to me that punitive laws against sex work are not only unlikely to prevent violence and exploitation, they're actually, they are specifically creating conditions that make it more likely. And that was just, I mean, you know, that was a meta-analysis of close to a hundred studies, but that was just one. Like, I read a bunch, I read a bunch of, of things. There's overwhelming support for, for this being the case. Okay. So there, so there's that angle, right? But some might ask, like the Catherine McKinnon, right? Isn't sex work inherently exploitative? If we pass legislation that is more permissive of sex work, and it's making working conditions safer for sex workers, aren't we just facilitating an industry that is still at base exploitative and harmful? And I, yeah,

0:34:40 Thomas: Quit your sex working job because it's exploitive and go do something like driving a thousand miles an hour between Amazon deliveries and running as fast as you can, dying, dude. Go do that like like, uh, you know, like a non-exploited person.

0:34:50 Lindsey: That sounds pretty good. Exactly. Yeah. Or an an adjunct professor, right? They're certainly not exploited.

0:34:57 Thomas: To make another comparison. Yeah.

0:35:00 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah. We still need to do an episode on that. That's really terrible stuff. Yeah. So is sex work inherently exploitative? I read a number of studies here that persuasively argued otherwise. And so here's one example that I thought was really interesting. So this is a study by McCarthy, Janssen, and Benoit. It was published in 2021, just this year. And the title here is "Job Attributes and Mental Health: A Comparative Study of Sex Work and Hairstyling." This is fun, right? Yeah.

0:35:29 Thomas: Because, I, off the bat, I'm like, how do you do a study of this? I'm very, I cannot wait to hear the Lindsey signature breakdown of the study. Okay.

0:35:37 Lindsey: No, this is this is pretty cool stuff. So, like many of the articles that I read, these researchers were taking a labor perspective to analyze in the costs and benefits and vulnerabilities to exploitation in sex work. And their primary question was whether sex work in particular is associated with, they were looking at poor mental health outcomes, or whether poor mental mental health health outcomes that have have been documented among sex workers is actually just another consequence of it being criminalized, right? Because, not only does criminalization open up direct risk of being arrested, it also creates conditions for greater job insecurity and promotes cultural stigma, and those are not great for mental health. So they compared a sample of sex workers to a sample of hairstylists and analyzed the relationships between job attributes in these two service industries and mental health outcomes for workers in both industries. And I just thought this was a super interesting comparison, because, you know, as they argue in the paper, you know, there are some differences between these industries in terms of level of stigma and legality, obviously. But these professions also share a number of similarities. So they both have, on average, relatively low earnings. They're both relatively low prestige jobs. They have similar rates of self-employment, right, because many stylists work as like independent contractors.

0:36:53 Lindsey: They rent out space in salons, but otherwise they're recruiting and managing their own clients. Both industries experience relatively high job insecurity and, and I thought this was an interesting point, they both centrally require emotional labor, meaning that their livelihood, yeah, it depends on creating these sort of positive, rewarding interactions that facilitate generous tipping and repeat clients and all that good stuff.

0:37:14 Thomas: Chat them up.

0:37:15 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, so again, so the logic of this comparison is that if there's really something uniquely harmful about being a sex worker, as opposed to just being in any frontline service job with similar features, then we should be able to observe it in a comparison like this one. And so McCarthy and colleagues collected longitudinal data, which I thought was pretty impressive. So this means that they surveyed the same participants four times over five years. And their sample comprised 212 people in sex work and 181 people who cut and styled hair. And these samples came from Victoria, Canada and Sacramento, California.

0:37:56 Lindsey: Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. So they asked workers in these two industries questions about their job attributes and their mental health. So in terms of job attributes, they asked during all four points of data collection, whether the respondent was self-employed and what their income was during the past month, right? And again, they measured this four times and this allowed researchers to to look at variation over time for each worker, which was cool. They also assessed five other job attributes only once, right? They did this during one wave of data collection. And so the other features that they assessed were client hostility, stigma, which they assessed via a few different questions that I thought were interesting. So they asked things like, had the participant ever been refused rental housing that they could afford or been denied a bank loan?

0:37:56 Thomas: How

0:38:44 Lindsey: Whether medical providers had ever made comments about their occupation, how frequently they feel that people look down on them, how frequently do they feel that medical providers, families, and other people treat them with respect, right? So I thought that that was an interesting range of things to put into a stigma composite, right? They also assess job insecurities. This is questions like, do they feeling at risk of losing their job? Had they had prior experience with layoffs? Do they feel their job is secure? And then they assessed something basically boils down to autonomy. They called this decision latitude, but it boils down to autonomy in their job and ability to make their own decisions in their Job. And finally, they assessed psychological demand. So this was like mental workload related to their job and the demandingness of their work. And then for mental health, they asked two pretty general questions just about the quality of their mental well-being during the four months preceding the data collection.

0:39:37 Lindsey: I thought it was kind of weird just to use these very broad, It was literally like, how has your mental health been, right? But they said that, you know, this broad measure has been validated and that it correlates with more granular measures of mental health. So I was satisfied with that. So here are the most important findings from this study. In all but the last wave of data collection, income did not actually significantly differ between these two professions. So across the waves, the annual or the average income range between $20,000 to just over $30,000, so not a lot. In wave four, for some reason, the income of the sex workers was about $10,000 less compared to the stylists. I'm not sure why that was,

0:39:43 Thomas: Are you? Yeah. Yeah. Jeez.

0:40:18 Lindsey: But in general, what was it? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. In terms of other job attributes, stylists reported having better job experiences than sex workers in most respects. So sex workers reported more autonomy in their jobs, and there was no difference between the two industries in terms of psychological demandingness. But otherwise, stylists reported experiencing less customer hostility, less stigma, and less job insecurity. Security, right? And then in terms of mental health, on average, all workers reported being between good and very good on that mental health scale, but stylists reported significantly better mental health compared to sex workers. It wasn't a huge difference. It was about half a scale point on a five-point scale, um, but it was, it was a significant difference between the groups, right?And then finally, and this is, this is sort of the, the culmination, in their main analysis, they used regression to examine why mental health was worse among sex workers, and their findings indicated that the greater job insecurity and stigma for sex workers explained the difference in mental health.

0:40:19 Thomas: Tough times. OK.

0:41:20 Lindsey: When they controlled for those variables, it did not seem to be the case that being a sex worker per se uniquely contributed to poor mental health." So is sex work uniquely exploitative or harmful to workers' health? Studies like this one suggest that it probably isn't. These researchers concluded that sex work, like all other forms of labor, as you point out, can be more or less exploitative and more or Less satisfying.

0:41:44 Lindsey: And they suggested that if we decriminalize sex work and worked on reducing cultural stigma around it, that would probably go a very long way in improving labor conditions and in turn mental health outcomes for sex workers.

0:41:57 Thomas: So I just to try to poke holes in this, maybe is there some sort of selection effect going on? I mean, it strikes me as pretty easy to find just your average hair person to talk to. Strikes me as maybe more challenging to find your average sex worker, you know, like who know, like if the, let's say the uh puritans or something, or whatever these first wave feminists slash puritians are, right, and it's like super exploitive, wouldn't it be harder to find the people to talk to who might represent that more, I don't know, downtrodden kind of uh demographic, yeah.

0:42:33 Lindsey: No, I mean, I think that that's a, that's a reasonable point. It's possible that the people you would have access to would perhaps be the ones that are experiencing somewhat better mental health or better job conditions or something. But what I would say, if I can extend beyond the study for a second, is that, you know, like, I mean, talk about like the trafficking argument again, right? If that was really a pervasive problem, right, then at the very least, we would have some evidence of that from interview studies with sex workers sort of reporting on other sex workers, I don't know if that actually is that addressing the thing or

0:43:16 Thomas: I think So. So I think that's right.

0:43:18 Lindsey: Um, yeah, so I, I don't know, it's, I, I take the, I take the uh the criticism that this, this could have been sort of selective in some ways, but so again, so like my, my position, based on, you know, again, this was, was one example of a study that has sort of taken this labor approach to analyzing working conditions, and my position based on reviewing this research is that punitive laws and regulations that are purportedly designed to prevent exploitation are not just ineffective, but they are actively creating and perpetuating sort of the most harmful conditions that are, that are actually leaving sex workers vulnerable to violence and exploitation, right?

0:43:51 Thomas: So don't do that if you want to help sex workers, basically. Do the opposite of that if You'd Like to Help, I think, is a safe conclusion.

0:43:54 Lindsey: That's, that is my, I, that, That is what I would suggest. Yes. Right. Okay. So next thing here is, is about the role of the internet in sex work. And the key questions here for me are about, uh, how the internet has changed the landscape for sex workers, right? So how is the internet being used in sex work and is it making working conditions safer or is it facilitating exploitation for sex workers? And then the second question is how have these regulatory crackdowns affected sex workers who use the internet in various ways to facilitate their livelihood, right? Crackdowns like the ones that shut down Backpage, which you and Eli talked about, and those abolition groups that are lobbying regarding OnlyFans and all these things. Okay. So in terms of how the internet is being used in sex work, several of the articles that I read, including two that were published just this year, one of them was by Cohen and Colosi, and the other one was by Zhao and colleagues.

0:44:55 Lindsey: Several of these articles focused on the benefits of websites that allowed direct sex workers, meaning those who actually meet clients in person and engage in physical contact, to meet and vet clients online instead of having to do that on the literal street. And so the bottom line from these articles that I was reading seemed to be that being able to use the internet to meet and vet clients have made working conditions incredibly safer for sex workers in a variety of ways.

0:45:18 Thomas: That makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

0:45:21 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Like having to find and negotiate with clients on the street leads to a variety OF vulnerabilities, like being harassed by law enforcement, having less ability to secure payment. That's a big problem for people refusing to pay, having less time to assess clients because you're trying to avoid being harassed by law enforcement officers, right? All of those things are completely removed by being able to use sites like Backpage to do that vetting ahead of time, right, and when workers started using these sites, they did in fact experience reductions in violence from clients, they had better ability to ensure payment from clients. They had more income stability, and they were less vulnerable to police harassment. So when exactly

0:46:01 Thomas: But we went ahead and helped him by banning all that. So that's good. Pat on the back, America. Great job. Great job, yep.

0:46:07 Lindsey: Um, yeah, so when Backpage was shut down, right, again, again, in the name of protecting women from exploitation, what it actually did was make working conditions work for worse for sex workers.

0:46:16 Thomas: And that's something that Eli said, right? But this is like, as you say, the reference section for that. Yeah. Well, and it seems like such a strong parallel to the whole pro-life bullshit where it's like, we will do everything we can to make sure you can't get an abortion. The minute your child is born, fuck your kid. Like, we don't care. We're not going to help you feed it. Like it doesn't actually help anybody. It's just like a thing for the sake of like some morality or whatever that they think they have doesn't

0:46:47 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. No, so, so that's, that's one way in which the internet makes sex work safer, or could, if we would stop shutting these pages down, um, but another way that the internet has changed the game for folks that work in the sex industry is the possibility of exclusively online sex work. And so we're talking here finally about like cam performers, these subscription platforms like OnlyFans, and, and this is such an interesting form of work to me, uh, because it shares some, some features with direct in-person sex work and some features with pornography because these performers are making a living from this sort of like personalized, tailored kind of experiences with subscribers. And so it's offering something that really isn't available from these free streaming porn sites like Pornhub. But because all the interaction happens over the internet, performers aren't physically vulnerable to clients like they are in direct sex work. And additionally, this is important important, I think, too, it's much easier for cam performers and adult content producers to be self-employed as opposed to working with a facilitator, right? Whatever the 2021 word for pimp is, again, somebody can tell us.

0:47:55 Thomas: Regional Manager, uh, yeah.

0:47:58 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, so that gives them much more job autonomy and flexibility, and it removes another potential risk of exploitation. So there were several articles that I read. Some of them – actually, most of them were sort of these interview studies with cam workers or analyses like sort of naturalistic observation studies where they were – the researchers were sort of watching interactions during cam sessions and things, things. And takeaway from the stuff for me is that this form of sex work really has made things better for people that are interested in working in the sex work industry for all of the reasons that we just outlined. All right. So I think that you could reasonably make the prediction that crackdowns on platforms that are facilitating this sort of new form of online sex work that has emerged, just like we saw with the direct sex work, are actually not going to stop forms of exploitation, right, that people are arguing for. They're just going to make it harder for performers to make a living.

0:49:02 Thomas: Predictable and so frustrating. Really, it really is. I mean, I, it does sound like, at least with respect to this stuff, Eli was just right on. And, and I think a lot of his sources were actual sex workers, you know, writing their perspectives and stuff. And so, you know, it makes sense.

0:49:20 Lindsey: Yeah, which was another thing that I appreciated about a lot of these, these things that I was reading. I mean, there were quantitative things where they were just sort of, you know, measuring these variables about violence and stuff. But a lot of the, a lot of the work in this area does involve direct interviews with sex workers that are getting their direct experiences, and I did really appreciate that. There were a lot lot of studies that sort of used both approaches in the same study, which I thought was nice.

0:49:42 Thomas: That is. And it also feels like the, you know, the other side, it really seems like what they do is they find some people who probably for all we know, like, it could be completely earnest, can, could be completely legitimate, but we're either abused or, you know, had, had a horrible experience or what, or whatnot. And they use those kinds of anecdotes to make broader points about every single sex worker is, is what it seems like. And it's like these studies seems like it's like, OK, let's talk to a cross section of sex workers and and go from there. Just it's so frustrating. So we are out of time and you have so much more. I can I can feel it. What are we going to talk about in our part two?

0:50:29 Lindsey: Yeah, so here's, here's where we're going in part two. We're going to talk about revenge porn and how the arguments about, you know, cracking Cracking down on these sites in order to try to diminish, you know, the distribution of non-consensual sexual material is, yeah, I don't think that those two things actually connect as much as people think that they do. And then we're going to talk about these arguments about the harms of porn consumption. And I'm really excited about that part. That literature is like back squarely in my wheelhouse. A lot of psych studies on that. Um, so yeah, so that, that ought to be fun.

0:51:09 Thomas: Well, looking forward to that. Already a great part one and looking forward to a great part two. Thanks so much for listening. By the way, put all your questions in that Patreon Q&A thread. I'm sure there will be a lot about this, and thanks so much for listening, everybody. Um, please support the show and please tell a friend, and uh, please note that trying to ban sex work is not a good idea. All right, we'll see you for part two.

0:51:39 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.