Molly Smith is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM). She is also involved with SCOT-PEP, a sex worker-led charity based in Edinburgh, which is working to decriminalise sex work in Scotland. Ru Kaur spoke with Molly about ‘Revolting Prostitutes’, a book that she has recently published along with her co-author Juno Mac. The book provides an overview of the struggle for sex worker rights from the perspective of sex workers themselves. It considers the reality of different legal systems that sex workers operate in across the world and how these operate alongside existing struggles against racism, state violence, carceral feminism and work.
Ru Kaur A lot of the book refers to Federici and the decades-old campaign for ‘wages for housework,’ situated within the context of women’s work more widely. As you say in the book, if prostitution is recognised as work then at least people can access the terrain of struggle for labour rights. But this struggle is not without difficulty when mainstream unions remain inept at protecting the most marginalised workers.
Molly Smith I was re-reading ‘Wages Against Housework’ the other day, because I’m constantly re-reading it, and I’m always struck by the line: ‘we’re seen as nagging bitches, not as workers in the struggle.’ I think it encapsulates the way in which not recognising something as work limits people’s ability to organise against it and around it, and ultimately to refuse it.
Mainstream unions are so shit. At the moment we are involved with the ‘Decrim Now’ campaign – one strand of that is beginning to unionise within the industry, starting with strippers as they have identifiable workplaces and bosses that are not criminalised. This is happening within United Voices of the World union, which fits well because a lot of what they focus on is feminised labour by precarious migrant workers.
R Reading the book repeatedly led me to think about women in my life – working class migrant women working drudgerous jobs in factories, supermarkets, cleaning etc. I also found myself returning to Federici, who writes about how work under capitalism is exploitation and ‘there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being exploited.’ But of course there is a cultural obsession with ‘honest’ work, no matter how much it exploits you, versus the supposed degradation of prostitution. Inevitably, a lot of the moralism faced by sex workers comes from an overwhelmingly white, middle class feminist movement. Yet societal disapprobation of sex work means that you face judgement, rather than solidarity, from people whose work conditions are not so far removed from the sex workers that they oppose.
MS There is a popular belief that work is good, prostitution is bad work and all other work is worthwhile. But not all of us can get policy jobs at a feminist NGO. This ‘honest’ work is not enough to employ all the sex workers in London, let alone everyone doing other kinds of shit work that they hate.
It’s a very effective way to divide sections of the working class from each other by saying ‘well your conditions are shit, but at least you aren’t a prostitute.’ This makes me think about how other workers are pushed against sex workers but there’s also sex workers pushing back by saying, ‘at least I’m not cleaning toilets.’ So different types of exploited workers who are harmed by capitalism are weaponising their circumstances against one another. Anti-prostitution feminists seem to think that work is good and there is a whole strand of the sex workers rights movement that seems to believe that work is good, so you should defend prostitution on the grounds that it’s good work. We’re trying to challenge both these ideas at once.
R Very often we will see anti-prostitution feminists express outrage at the idea of having to pretend to enjoy sex for work, coupled with an unhealthy obsession with ‘orifices.’ Again, this can often come from a very protected middle class position, since they don’t appear to have worked in low-paid jobs where performing emotion for others who might mistreat you is very common. And prostitution is often reduced to the act of sex, erasing all of the work you actually have to do leading up to it.
MS Juno (co-author of Revolting Prostitutes) has a great line in the book about how sex work is devalued as ‘not work’ and one of the ways that this is done is by presenting sex workers as a body that is always available for penetration. This totally erases all of the hustle around it, which is really the work. And we can link that to the way that other women’s work is made invisible – I remember reading that and thinking ‘yes! *Italian chef’s kiss!*’
R You write about how migrant women, women of colour, LGBT+ people and drug users are often vulnerable to violence regardless of the legal status of sex work within a state – be that criminalised, legalised, or decriminalised sex work. I read recently that, within Europe, around 60-90% of sex workers are from a migrant background. Can you speak more about the needs of marginalised groups who do sex work?
MS Of course, it’s difficult to quantify migrant sex worker numbers because it’s often a hidden population, especially with undocumented migrant sex workers. But the proportion is high. In a way prostitution law is not about prostitution really, even though some of the anxieties are specific to prostitution. It’s just another tool for the state to target people that it wants to target anyway. It’s a self-reinforcing pattern, marginalised people are pushed into sex work by capitalism and the state. Then the state targets those people in prostitution with criminalisation and the most marginalised of that population are disproportionately targeted. It’s a cycle of harm.
Under the Nordic system there are raids on premises that are targeted ostensibly at clients, but the reality is that they pick up multiple sex workers and will not bother to prosecute them because they can deport the high proportion of migrant workers. Deporting people is seen as being ‘kind’ under this system because they are being rescued from the sex industry. And there is this fixation on stories about how people are being bundled into vans in Nigeria and smuggled entirely against their will and then they wake up in Sweden and say ‘this is horrifying, I hate this.’ So in that context, it becomes this incredible act of kindness to return those people to their home country and that is not what is happening.
R And their agency is erased. So people can, of course, end up being trafficked and exploited but the risks of precarious migration routes can still seem more appealing than alternatives.
MS And the word ‘agency’ is misunderstood entirely. Sometimes I think sex workers will counter anti-prostitution feminist claims about how all sex workers are trafficked with ‘agency’ and consider that the end of the argument, but that is not the point. The point of saying that people are behaving in agentic ways helps to clarify what the problems are. If people are intending to migrate, they are often aware that they will be selling sex upon arrival and that they are not going to love it. If the criminalisation of migration and prostitution are working together to worsen their conditions, then acknowledging that someone had agency within that situation suggests that the solutions are to change the laws around migration and prostitution to lift some, or all, of that criminalisation – either in a piecemeal way, or all at once in a revolution. It is not that you solve people’s problems by deporting them, because that is violent.
In the book, we attempt to be empathetic towards why people have politics on sex work that create harm for sex workers and that was quite useful for us. In a sense, a lot of what they are saying comes from a place of truth, it’s just that their solutions create harm. So they are correct in identifying the sex industry as a site of misogyny, racism, harm, exploitation and rampant capitalist bullshit. It’s just that you don’t solve that with more cops.
I empathise with why anti-prostitution feminists identify the archetypal figure of the client as this avatar of unadulterated male violence because he is, in many ways, the embodiment of patriarchy. And they pin the pain that they have legitimately experienced as women under patriarchy onto him. That becomes a deeply emotional experience, to want to punish him, and I empathise with that. Something that I have been thinking about recently is that obviously Mumsnet is a fucking hell hole and genuinely a portal to fascism for middle class white women, which is terrifying. But those women on Mumsnet who hate sex workers, they’re scared of sex workers because they believe that sex workers are going to steal their men and that is actually really possible to empathise with. As women under patriarchy, we are taught that our value is in our relationships with men and our economic security is tied up with our relationships with men, so what is more profoundly threatening to your sense of self than your own value and your economic security? And it made me think about how the prostitute revolution has to take these women with us, together we have to be unpicking the whole fucking system of why we’re all so economically dependent on men, whether that’s as husbands or clients.
R You write in the book about this idea of the ‘morally degraded’ prostitute, who creates a foil for women in secure, heterosexual and ultimately patriarchal relationships. These relationships entrench a need for men as providers and protectors of women. It seems it would be a powerful point of convergence for more women to unite and bring down this conception of the need of men.
MS And building something else. Like in ‘Wages for Housework,’ Federici says that she is not arguing for it because she simply wants women to get money for housework, she is arguing it because it is a fundamentally revolutionary demand so that even attempting to enact it will totally upend power relations.
R You explore some of how prostitute women’s bodies are treated as common property, which also has historical precedence. How have new modes of medicalised and scientifically-shrouded misogyny shaped contemporary iterations of this invasion of women’s bodies?
MS There is so much about fear and disgust of women’s bodies, which is enshrined in legislation. So in Nevada, if a prostitute leaves a designated legalised prostitution area for more than 24 hours, she is liable for mandatory STD testing – which speaks precisely to people’s anxieties about prostitution. In Nevada, women cannot be visited by male relatives in the legalised brothels and there used to be a law that prevented prostitutes from using public swimming pools, which existed well into the ‘90s.
I was talking recently with someone about when the Reformation pushed religion out of the public realm. So in the 1400s, you went to Church on a Sunday but people didn’t inquire as to your personal morality because religion is what happens in the Church. Then after the Reformation, religion is your personal relationship with God, meaning that your personal morality is increasingly on the line and up for discussion. There are these interesting parallels with the enclosure of land and enclosure and privatisation of women’s personal lives.
It also made me think about the economic dimension of how marriage props up capitalism and patriarchy, and all this free labour that mostly women do. I feel like a lot of anti-prostitution feminism is outraged at this idea that money and economics might be involved in people’s sex lives. But actually, money and economics are so deeply and profoundly entangled with people’s sex lives because marriage is a building block of patriarchy and an inherently capitalist relation.
There is this idea that, because we criminalised rape within marriage in 1991 and you don’t have to take your husband’s name anymore, that marriage is now a relationship of two equals. In ‘Pimp State,’ anti-prostitution feminist Kat Banyard quotes a misogynist punter that she has interviewed saying something like ‘you always pay for sex one way or another, don’t you? It’s either a date and a movie or you a pay a prostitute.’ So he is set up as a gross misogynist, which obviously he is in a million different ways, but the message is that this is an unacceptably bad logic that is outside the realm of feminist analysis. Therefore, talking about economics and sex together only happens in this anomalous otherised context, i.e. the sex industry, and other than that it’s horrible misogynist men being awful. But of course, capitalism is built on institutions such as marriage!
R It often seems as though there is this obsessive fervour among anti-prostitution feminists about how this core of their being is threatened by what prostitutes represent. You speak in the book about the abstractions of ‘exploitation’ and ‘sexualisation’ that anti-prostitution feminists will refer to when they want to universalise the struggles of sex workers to represent all women, only to then weaponise the negative aspects of sex work to support their own ideology. At the same time, they will aggressively define themselves against the figure of a sex working woman.
MS It is a really extractive position on the sex work industry. As non-sex workers, they will use examples from it, or invoke metaphorical uses of it, to fit a rhetoric about their struggles as women. Conversely, the struggles of sex workers are nothing to do with them, that’s to do with the ‘pimp lobby’ (a term that is often used by anti-prostitution feminists to dismiss sex workers, claiming that they are all bankrolled by pimps to push a pro-sex work agenda) or irrelevant, or you have to ‘break a few eggs to make an omelette,’ meaning that sex workers who might face harm are necessary casualties for the wider goal of abolishing prostitution.
Coming back to Mumsnet as an incredibly rich source for this, it is so fascinating how people will know that they’re supposed to talk about sex workers in a feminist way, but that will translate to pity for us. So they’ll bring up these tropes of having no dad, being abused as a child, or that all sex workers are trafficked etc. But they’re so angry, there is so much hatred and disgust for sex workers. So the same person, in the course of one paragraph, will flit back and forth between these positions multiple times.
R It seems ironic that contemporary liberal feminism celebrates work as freedom for women, but the tradition of sex workers fighting for autonomy and better work conditions has helped to create the possibility for women to be out in the world working. And yet, we see anti-sex work feminism actually entrenching patriarchal ideas of what women should rely on for survival, when sex workers are denied the right to work. So state welfare is also used against sex workers as a controlling figure of patriarchy.
MS There is this anxiety amongst sex workers, because so many people get into sex work to flee the welfare benefits system, that anti-prostitution feminists want to funnel them back into that system. They fear that this terrifying, abusive and punitive state bureaucracy will just eat them alive.
And then you look at the situation of migrant women, whose survival becomes dependent on these patriarchal actors. For if we look at the ‘right to rent’ rules, introduced under immigration legislation, make it harder for migrant women to rent a property without the right paperwork. If you can’t rent a property, who will be the go-between for you to do that? If the landlord says they want the rent and an extra £400 a month, for example, because they know that you are doing sex work from that property, then you have to pay that and it makes you more open to being exploited.
R You shed light on the use of managers for sex workers because obviously in class terms managers are bad, but you also demonstrate how they can be useful for sex workers. And it is possible to recognise these contradictions simultaneously because it can be useful to have someone organising the work on your behalf. Is the role of manager gendered in favour of men?
MS Not as gendered as anti-sex work feminists might imagine. Of the managers that Juno and I have worked for, 50% of them were women and often former sex workers. People can end up thinking that being a former sex worker makes a manager more sympathetic, but this can end up being the total opposite. Inevitably, there will be a gendered split because so many sex workers are women – so any proportion of managers being men will be disproportionate. Loads of people in management roles are women.
R Although the book draws upon sex worker organising in different places, such as Myanmar, Nigeria, India etc., I can imagine that you had a wealth of stories of sex worker mobilisation that you didn’t have space for in the book.
MS There is a lot of very inspiring sex worker activism that is not that concerned with immediately changing the law, but is concerned with improving people’s lives in really material ways immediately. Women in Bangladesh have regularly gathered to prevent evictions from the red light district, for example, and physically blocked attempted evictions until the bailiffs went away.
R There are a range of laws that affect sex workers discussed within the book. You reference activists such as Alex Vitale and Mariame Kaba, the latter of whom has spent years helping people to think through state and interpersonal violence, as well as those most implicated by both. Kaba often invokes a term that was coined by Andre Gorz around ‘non-reformist reforms,’ in talking about reforms to the current system that do not end up further entrenching the systems that we seek to abolish. You refer to similar concepts towards the end of the book. Other than decriminalising sex work, what other things do we need to target simultaneously, whilst we are on the journey of abolishing the state and capitalism?
MS I remember reading something by Mariame Kaba that was really great on this, where she says something along the lines of ‘if your reform is something that we will have to undo later on down the path to abolition then it is actually strengthening the carceral state.’
I don’t think that it is useful for us to envision achieving decriminalisation in one fell swoop and that it’s actually very possible to imagine achieving it in a piecemeal way on issues that harm sex workers, such as making the argument that criminalisation of sex work on the street harms people who sell sex on the street. In other ways, it’s really fucking hard because people hate street-based sex workers obviously. But it is certainly imaginable to win that argument.
Equally, it’s really imaginable to think of winning an argument about whether we continue to force sex workers to be working alone, or whether we push to change the laws so that sex workers can work in small groups together for safety. And then finally, when sex workers work for managers, should those managers be criminalised and, as a result, totally outside of the realm of labour law? Or can we at least bring those managers within the realm of labour law, so that their behaviour can be regulated to a degree? Again that is an easier argument in a way, rather than this wider symbolic argument about what we think about women, men, money, power, bodies, capitalism, sex and death – which are all the things at play when you say ‘we want to change all of prostitution law in one go!’
R Groups in the US have set up projects with an ideological underpinning to create alternatives to chip away at what people turn to the police for, such as Critical Resistance campaigning for first responder teams within cities to support individuals facing a mental health crisis. Is this sort of approach something you have had space to think through, in terms of how we begin to scale back the power of the police and the state to diminish harm against sex workers?
MS The starting point for an abolitionist politic around the sex industry would be an immigration amnesty, or some kind of commitment from the police – whether that is because they have been defunded in terms of their work, or because they have made some policy-level commitment that they will not be checking people’s immigration paperwork in the context of sex work. Decriminalisation doesn’t really protect migrant sex workers because if you are undocumented, you can still be deported. It is hard to make the argument that not only should we have decriminalisation, but that we should also have no borders and that will definitely freak out the likes of the New Statesman… But when you say ‘we want a moratorium on immigration raids associated with commercial sex,’ that is much more doable.
R It would need to target all the obvious violence of the immigration system and the inherent violence of the welfare system. You write about protections built into the New Zealand welfare system, where sex work is decriminalised, where you don’t have to wait before quitting sex work to access welfare support and you don’t have to prove how you left your employer. So looking at if decriminalisation happened here in the UK – you’ll be yet another person struggling against low wages, a crumbling welfare system, limited access to healthcare for certain issues and pathologisation in accessing healthcare – even if there is a statutory right to do this work lawfully.
MS In the 1980’s, New Zealand was very good at harm reduction around HIV and AIDS and the first to fund a needle exchange; it meant that they preempted a huge crisis in terms of an AIDS epidemic. As part of this they funded the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, who flagged that sex work criminalisation was an issue. It felt like so much just went right serendipitously. The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective happened to be working with an MP who won a ballot to bring forward a backbench Bill that year. Then in the debates a woman called Georgina Beyer spoke, she is a trans Member of Parliament in New Zealand and also happens to be a former street-based sex worker. She spoke really emotively about her experiences of violence in the sex trade and afterwards the Bill passed by one vote.
R Where are the possibilities for the left, however you want to loosely define it, to support sex workers in your struggle for rights?
MS In addition to supporting organisations like SWARM, SCOT-PEP and the ECP, people can definitely be supporting the ‘Decrim now’ campaign. So a range of organisations, including the NUS and Constituency Labour Parties, have passed a motion in support of decriminalisation and more are on their way to doing this. People can also support the campaign to unionise strippers through the UVW union.
If people are involved in their local Labour Party, a union, or any organisation where there are ostensible democratic decision-making processes, they should bring a motion to support decriminalisation. If they are not, then they can start talking to people around them about why, and how, they should support sex worker rights.
R How about that chasm that exists between people that want to support sex workers and others who want to abolish prostitution?
MS I think it is really easy to fall into a trap, and I do it all the time, but if we think about the world comprised as a scale from 1 to 100 then people supporting sex worker politics are on one end of the scale and people who oppose sex work and trans issues (the same groups often oppose both) are a small minority on the other end. And in the middle are people who are mildly one way or the other, then there are people who are fully in the middle. It can be tempting to expend your energy fighting the extreme, but it is still useful to educate people, for example, from a liberal pro-sex worker rights politics into a radical sex worker rights politics. That is much more doable than persuading someone who is anti-prostitution that they are wrong.
Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac (@fornicatrix) and Molly Smith (@pastachips), published by Verso Books, is now available | Ru Kaur organises against state violence in the form of immigration enforcement, police violence and other issues of race and gender | Photos by Juno Mac