Sex work; it’s a topic that inevitably sharpens a lot of pitchforks, regardless of which side of the political debate you’re on. In the last several years (including pre-pandemic), the sex work is real work mantra has gathered a lot of steam on social media and society as a whole. The movement seeks to, among other things, remove the stigma against prostitutes, OnlyFans models, cam girls, strippers, gold diggers, and others who trade their dignity for dollars. However, there is a major point that neither side of the conversation is willing to acknowledge; these incentive-driven women have a lot in common with the mainstream American.
The Curbside Cathy’s do not get any federally mandated paid time off, paid sick time or maternity leave. Believe it or not, this is one of the truest indicators that what they do is in fact real work. Here in the Land of the Free and Home of the Whopper, polite-society employees also receive no such guarantees from the government. Mental Floss and Resume.io performed a deep dive in 2022 of 197 nations that rank how many days of paid time off per year that their citizens are legally entitled to, and to nobodies surprise, the United States ranked near the bottom. Maternity leave is a similar issue, in which the United States offers no guaranteed paid maternity leave for anyone. In this regard, sex workers are already treated like everybody else in this country.
The ones who truly hold the power (and hence make all of the money) are the producers, club owners, brothel managers, and talent agents; not the sex workers. However, this is hardly unique to the transactional female; this same power dynamic is in place for most of the American workforce, and to pretend otherwise is naïve and foolish. The former Queen of PornHub Mia Khalifa made peanuts from her actual porn paychecks and thus had to branch into merchandising to make her small fortune. This isn’t all that different from the typical employer-employee relationship that most of us live our daily lives in; the CEO hits his targets, investors get a healthy return on their capital, and the employees might get a 10% bonus, if their employer is generous.
The lack of long-term job security is another commonality between civil society and the nightwalkers. The median (my favorite metric!) job tenure of all employees in the United States is not all that great. Gone are the days in which a starry-eyed youth stayed with one employer, or even a single career path, for their entire working life. The adult film industry also features a high turnover rate, as evidenced in the amazing Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted. The savvy agent in the movie stated that his clientele/tenants typically only stay in the field for about three months, and that “best case scenario, a year, tops”. Job security is a myth in sex work, thus making it just like the work that the rest of us do.
Job security in the sex work world is kneecapped by a trend that most Americans face; saturation of the job market. As the shrewd landlord from Hot Girls Wanted quipped in the film “everyday a new girl turns 18”. There is a near-constant inflow of attractive women looking to capitalize on their good looks and questionable morals. An example of this was a young provocateur who celebrated her 18th birthday by starting an OnlyFans page (although, she should be thankful that she isn’t competing against Taylor Swift). As the angry mob approaches my front door, allow me to remind you that every year The Education Industrial Complex pumps masses of job seekers into the market (two million bachelor’s degrees in 2022 alone!). Younger, cheaper, and less inhibited competitors enter both sex work and the civilized workforce each year, thus saturating the market.
Thus, even for the women who do make a long-term career out of porn/stripping/flipping, they need to constantly evolve their market appeal and skillset. After all, a forty-something Brazzers actress must prepare for the fact that she’ll be offered very different roles than what she was originally scouted for as a twenty-year-old. Failure to adapt to the harsh realities of the market could be the Kiss of Death for her career. While everyone is sharpening their pitchforks, allow me to point out that the typical U.S employee also needs to constantly find new ways to deliver value to their employer and evolve their usefulness in order to hold onto their income. Virtually nobody in dinner-table-topic society is safe either; not even employees of Amazon, Meta, or any other Fortune 500 company.
The adult film actresses featured in Hot Girls Wanted revealed the astonishingly high rate of burnout in their chosen career field. This is due to many factors such as unreasonable schedule demands, laughably high expectations from employers, isolation, social stigma, and more. A 2019 CBS report chronicles more of the eroding mental health of porn stars in the modern age. However, we have to stop and ask ourselves what makes these employees that much different from the rest of us? The typical American also experiences burnout quite frequently as well, and many of the same culprits are to blame. Sex work is real work, because most people hate their jobs.
“All right Dan, I’m sick of being uncomfortable; you’ve clobbered me with way too much truth and it hit a little too close to home for me. Now, give me an opinion, and make it spicy!” a totally-real reader totally just asked me. I’m not in favor of legalizing sex work (spicy enough for you?). However, I am in favor of decriminalization, and that is not a fringe opinion either. We need to stop weaving a false sense of moral superiority into our legal code, and we can simply let the market sort itself out. With decriminalization comes access to banking and venture capital, especially in many of the supporting industries that would inevitably sprout up. Great entrepreneurial minds can then rush into the space and set-up shop; ideas such as apps that allow for the rating of prostitutes (like Yelp) and order a prostitute on-demand (like Uber) can finally get off of the ground, thus providing jobs to the American economy. We might even mint some new billionaires while we’re at it. So much like work that is performed by clothes-on society, needless government regulation is stifling innovation.
Sex work is real work because we’re all getting shafted.
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