
Cash/Consent: The war on sex work - Spellman
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/essays/cashconsent/
======
hlieberman
This war very much effects us as technologists, both directly as restrictions
on what we may build and operate, as well as indirectly through our ethical
obligations to act with the public interest in mind.

For example, it would be illegal for me to run a website which let sex workers
anonymously check a particular client’s phone number to see if someone had
previously reported them as violent. FOSTA/SESTA would expose me to both
criminal and civil liability, even if it wasn’t intentionally made with sex
workers in mind, if I didn’t act to stomp out any sex workers from using the
service.

~~~
dual_basis
On the other hand, I sort of worry about anonymously crowd-sourcing reputation
like this. Putting aside the notion of sex workers for a minute, suppose you
ran a site where people could report bad drivers by their license plate
numbers. (I believe such sites exist.) If someone doesn't like you, they go on
and file fake reports about you, and now you can't get a delivery job (etc).
There have already been issues with more public entities on sites like Yelp
which have caused people to lose their entire livelihood, and now you want to
bring that sort of thing to individuals?

~~~
erikpukinskis
Are you saying that should be illegal? Doesn’t that seem like a violation of
freedom of speech?

As it is, libel laws give you protection if you can prove the claims are
false, and you can get civil damages if you show harm. What would you say
should be legislated beyond that?

~~~
luckylion
When reports are anonymous, you'll have trouble suing for libel. When the
output of the site isn't a stated fact ("person x did y"), but a "calculated
probability" without actually producing any of the reports ... good luck
proving that the probability of you recklessly driving is below 50%.

It's not an easy decision, but I lean towards "should be illegal if done
anonymously and without proof".

~~~
erikpukinskis
So you’re saying if I wrote a post on NextDoor saying you were a bad driver
(no proof) and putting your license plate that should be illegal?

Would it be a civil thing where you could sue me for some amount, or would you
make it a criminal infraction?

~~~
luckylion
It's a thin line, but mostly I'd regulate the platform to not allow anonymous
slander. Between individuals, it's most likely a civil issue, I'm not a huge
fan of having criminal law creep into everything.

I'm pretty sure that "no anonymous slander" reduces the amount rapidly, so you
end up with a bunch of legitimate accusations that people are willing to stand
for because they can provide evidence. The whole "I don't like his hair, so
I'm going to make up stories about him" stuff goes away.

------
ralusek
I'll bring up the point I always bring up regarding sex work: why are so many
people focused on whether or not this actually produces better results for
people? Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is
driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives.

Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and
disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally
one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction
between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the
state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe
assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply
should not be legislating in search of outcomes.

In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of
violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted
pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you
might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would
vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence,
etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position.

It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of
it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction
which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.

~~~
llamaz
Consider the example of a highway robber that holds you up at gunpoint and
asks for your wallet on the threat of death. In this situation there is
typically consent by the victim in handing over her wallet to the perpetrator
- after all he has the _free will_ not to hand over his wallet.

In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of
not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a
prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the
streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that
it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.

I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and
whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_
choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the
streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz.
housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2)
does society provide these basic needs to all its members.

From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is
exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but
perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not
have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially
exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through
college. But not everyone is middle class.

What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less
criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the
conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of
an individuals creativity.

~~~
RomanBob
This is an absolute butchering of free will.

A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice
forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all
of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.

This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body
requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held
responsible for it.

A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes
her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve
her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and
giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
> A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually
> makes her life better

It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma?
What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate
daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker?
What about your wife or your mother?

~~~
factsaresacred
> _Does it also bring emotional /mental trauma?_

Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads
on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo
blockages in a Haiti slum.

The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work
as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.

In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of
Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for
free' as foolish.

They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of
value.

It's an entirely different perspective.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
> Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing
> heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers
> to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.

While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a
successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely
convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring
on an any different set of self worth problems.

> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.

I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange,
especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman
"decides" to let you have sex with her.

As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose
who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my
rent".

I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as
soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in
a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.

------
rhcom2
I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the
grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really
drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex
workers, you should _actually_ talk to sex workers and not make up feel good
bs that can harm people.

~~~
barry-cotter
Or if you hate sex workers you could criminalize the purchase of sex and use
eviction, making people homeless, as part of your repertoire of tactics to try
and destroy whores’ lives.

[https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-
_sex_workers...](https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-
_sex_workers_rights_-_embargoed_-_final.pdf)

> Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a “preventative policing”
> approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences
> as “stress methods” to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on
> those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how
> police sources “in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or
> ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the
> people in the market”. One example of this approach is “Operation Homeless”:
> an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on “promotion” of
> sex work – which makes it an offence to “let premises ... for prostitution”.
> “Operation Homeless” ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated
> the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of
> work and/or homes.

~~~
mehhh
So the police created homeless sex workers? How does this not worsen the
blight in the city?

~~~
bravoetch
It's a power play. Police are law enforcement through use of power. They don't
have 'make life better for people' in their workday.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate

       > They don't have
    

_Those police_ don't have

The ones where I live aren't like that.

~~~
birdyrooster
Wow, that's so informative.

~~~
cgriswald
It is. It’s informative because people like to talk about “the police” as a
homogeneous group of people who all think and act the same way; as if a rural
sheriff in Alaska is the same person as a beat cop in NYC or a camera operator
in London.

This sort of stereotyping is problematic, because you can’t fix problems if
you can’t differentiate between dysfunctional and functional. You can’t make
changes if you alienate the good with the bad. And you can’t make things
better if you’re making global changes without understanding local context.

~~~
birdyrooster
Right, but the comment I was responding to offered no such details and came
across as defensive. I appreciate you bolstering their assertion.

~~~
afarrell
cgriswold didn’t offer any real-world details, only 2 abstract principles. In
contrast, saying “the police where I live do act like they have ‘make people’s
lives better’ as part of their mandate” is an observation on a local reality

------
scarejunba
There are people who will say "I want to do this for this person in exchange
for what they're offering me". There are people who will say "You can't do
that. You're hurting yourself". Usually the people in the second group then
leave happy having done their job of saving the people in the first group.
Then the first group starves.

As a minor, I did all sorts of work over the Internet, and got paid
fraudulently over Paypal. Boy am I glad child labour experts didn't get in on
that shit. Moralists never really care to help.

------
redm
I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it.
It's was well worth the time.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed
personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way
feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to
some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing
screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling.

I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories
like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just
have it read off a list of declarative sentences.

To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts
totally divorced from human empathy, _especially_ idiosyncratic empathy for
individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive
biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives.

You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-
blanketiest possible way.

~~~
inimino
> To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts
> totally divorced from human empathy,

Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should
consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it,
there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order
to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to
minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures
of well-being or harm.

> “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.”

This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself
for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy
“abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say.

Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human
empathy. In fact, it is _because_ I care about human empathy that I don’t
attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large
scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are
actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people.

You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high
chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions
from idiosyncratic emotional journalism.

You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and
end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.

~~~
inimino
(First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and
"psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look
them up.)

Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being
"compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy
details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an
individual level.

> All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about
> rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and
> indiosyncratic to me.

You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as
having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you
apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences
read by a robot voice.

You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to
have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by
the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to
have an opinion about everything.)

What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your
insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're
exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure
that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those
same people when they tell you you're wrong.

Now honestly you probably don't _need_ to have an opinion on this topic, and
you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know
and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're
worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you,
then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and
talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in
exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't,
and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong.

Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole
like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that
rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few
things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen
to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done
incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of
"science".

------
randyrand
“Women only go into sex trade because they have no better option”

“We should ban sex work, because that’s best for women”

This always felt like an oxymoron to me.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
I think a lot of people are pro-sex work when it comes to commenting on the
theory of it, but a lot of people would also be remiss if their
daughter/wife/mother was a sex worker. On top of that, if you didn't want your
daughter being a sex worker, I would go as far as to say you also wouldn't
want her hanging out with any known sex workers.

~~~
DanBC
Never mind their wife / daughter.

A bunch of people in this thread are saying there's nothing wrong with sex
work, but if I offered £30 for them to give me a blowjob not one of them would
take the money.

There's a weird disconnect here: people think women selling sex enjoy it, and
they don't recognise that the vast majority of women are only selling sex
because they have no other option.

~~~
PeterisP
If you'd offer me to pay me the minimum wage for an hour of scrubbing toilets,
I'd ferociously decline, but that doesn't imply that there's something wrong
with janitor work.

I'd also not want my wife and daughter to work in _many_ professions that are
known to be harsh, exploitative physical work in abusive conditions that's
likely to bring in long term health conditions for measly pay. There are so
many jobs that objectively suck, and being able to refuse money because the
job is really bad is a privilege that most people don't have. So that criteria
also isn't really sufficient to distinguish sex work from many other options
that are and will continue to be legal.

------
rolltiide
I had read a discussion on whether Nevada could ever offer the decadent day
spa style that you see in Germany, and basically a bunch of sex workers in
this forum revealed how lazy they were and benefitting from the continent wide
prohibition.

Compare this to $75 day pass to massive grounds that would put anything on
Game of Thrones to shame. $150-$200 per hour to do anything private and
sexual. A budget Norwegian Air flight, accomodations and 10 hours of your
wildest sexual fantasies and you'll still have spent less than any of the
bullshit you'll encounter in North America.

I personally see that model over there and it seems pretty awesome, but people
are always looking for something wrong to rationalize their opinion on all sex
work, but most of whats wrong applies to any job in these regulated
environments. People talk to sex workers, and assume they are all being
coerced to say something positive.

------
mnm1
While the US is passing more and more stupid laws banning consensual sex
between adults, many countries in Europe and South America have legalized
prostitution and bettered the lives of sex workers. I'm sure that won't happen
in the puritanical, impractical US but it's something to think about for when
the idiots in charge here get replaced by slightly less idiotic idiots who
actually want to help people rather than pretend like they're on the moral
high ground while doing the same things they outlaw for others.

~~~
detcader
If you don't know whether the person you're paying needs the money to survive,
it's immoral to buy "sex." You don't know to what degree it's "sex" or they
are forced into it, which is called "rape." Banning the purchase (the "Nordic
model") is the same as banning other immoral acts.

It's the same with porn by the way. You don't know if the women you're
watching are on drugs, being threatened by men, or just needs the money to
survive. So what what are you watching? "Sex" or rape?

~~~
ahaferburg
That's not the point. Consider reading the article.

------
werber
I wish we could have something akin to the laws that protect people from drug
prosecution for bringing someone to an er for an overdose for sex workers who
are raped to come forward and prosecute without fear of prosecution while we
figure out how to inact realistic laws that actually protect victims of
trafficking and don't turn willing sex workers into trafficking victims or
criminals

~~~
alkonaut
Is there talk about changing the legislation? When Sweden flipped the
legislation some years back (selling is now decriminalized while buying is
illegal) I thought that was part of a global trend? To me it always seemed
like a rational change.

~~~
werber
I honestly don't follow it enough to know, but politics in my country (United
States) tend to lean towards the extreme instead of incremental, because of
what I see as, political posturing

------
throwaway87378
The economic exploitation underlying the need for women (and to a lesser
extent, young men) to prostitute themselves is central to the subject, and
highlighted well by this essay. Chris Hedges did a very moving interview with
Rachel Moran about her experiences as a prostitute that describes these
issues. Trigger warning:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-
Uoh6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I)

------
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
However people end up in sex work, their worst enemies are authorities and
dogooders. While suchlike pretend concern with sex worker welfare, they offer
SFA in the way of true help. The best way to help sex workers trapped in their
occupation, mostly by financial pressure and discrimination, begins with
decriminalization.

~~~
detcader
Why leave out the Nordic model as an option? It doesn't direct the authorities
to harm sex workers. If business suffers as a result, they aren't chained to
selling "sex" as a way to make money (and we should providing a UBI system
anyway)

~~~
tehbeard
The Nordic model stops the law abiding customers. It doesn't stop demand, it
just leaves the only customers being the abusers and actual criminals, those
with no qualms about illegality.

And there is never, ever, ever a UBI or "retraining"/"back to the workforce"
program paired with this to get them out of SW.

The Nordic model is at best ineffective virtue signalling and at worst
actively increasing the danger SWers are exposed to.

~~~
detcader
I don't understand the point of the first line: Murder is also only done by
violent people breaking the law but we still have laws against that.

The second line is also confusing... I wrote there should be UBI/exit programs
because there aren't.

~~~
CompanionCuuube
Who are these people who are taking money to be violently killed by other
people?

------
cies
The freedom to not be prosecuted for a victimless crime should be a
constitutional right.

------
alexandercrohde
The odd thing about this topic is that I think nobody has articulated the fear
of legalizing sex work well.

The reason most men don't want to make sex-work legal, deep down, maybe so
deep they don't realize it, is because sex holds such symbolic importance in
our society.

The fear is that legalizing sex work would have the side effect of morally
legitimizing sex work (i.e. making it less shameful), which in turn would push
us a bit more toward a world where we might see the people hiring numerous sex
workers as a status symbol rather than a shameful secret.

Imbalance in wealth is a loaded topic. But imbalance in sexual satisfaction is
a much heavier one, particularly for those at extremes.

That said, I don't have an overall opinion on the issue, this is just to try
to elevate the debate.

------
tempsy
Maybe I just had my head in the sand, but I only just discovered this whole
social media "findom" subculture last week. Apparently there are "master/dom"
type people who have social media profiles where they "dominate" followers by
asking them to send them money through Square Cash/PayPal/Venmo to pay for
things. They do nothing any more sexual than post pictures/videos/text.

Honestly, quite fascinating.

------
sershe
Somewhat relevant, about the "specialness" of sex work:
[https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-
you-w...](https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-wouldnt-
fck-a-grapefruit-for-money-i-dont-know-whats-wrong-with-you/)

------
rolltiide
I think the focus on the early 2000s doesn't provide enough history to
holistically address sex work in the USA. Yes, many more additional laws were
passed since then but a lot of them are based on the public health concerns,
not solely this one dimensional human trafficking idea. The public health
concerns can be addressed now.

Syphilis, for example, was a real debilitating problem 70+ years ago. Today,
its something everyone actively avoids, and also quickly treats.

So this particular public health issue isn't perpetuated by rampant diseased
sex workers.

Regulated sex workers are cleaner than the general population due to frequent
testing.

There is room for many state-level prohibitions to be challenged now, due to
the rationale that passed their old laws. Sure there are people that will cite
the law as preventing and criminalizing human trafficking, but go back to the
public policy discussions regarding the drafted laws and you will often see
public health issues that are no longer relevant today. The judicial branch
can easily then strike them down. Forcing the legislatures hand.

------
ilaksh
I wonder if some people's attitudes towards sex work may change if we get
realistic sex robots.

------
orasis
Wow, what a beautiful essay. This is the one piece anyone contemplating the
politics of sex work should read.

