The Business of Pleasure
story by Lilly Montgomery, design by Lizeth Valdes
Sex.
Just seeing that word written here might make you uncomfortable. Often constrained to talks in hushed tones or clickbait articles on the internet advertising new ways to please your husband, sex and its many facets are frequently shunned from the limelight of conversation and awareness.
This unique aspect of human living has a range of definitions and classifications far broader than could ever be listed between the covers of this magazine. From gender designations to procreation, sex can mean countless things for different people—including work—and should not be something that we are afraid to talk about.
Sex Work is Work
Sex work is a trade that goes shockingly far back in recorded history, and continues to develop and expand today. There are a wide variety of professions and activities that fall under the umbrella of sex work and the adult sector, from stripping to the street trade, but it is important to delineate who exactly is engaging in this labor. A written statement to the United Kingdom’s Parliament by Gaye Dalton, who used to work selling sex and now champions the rights of sex workers, outlines four main categories of individuals that engage in this work.
Elective sex workers are individuals that make the choice to enter the sex trade for their own benefit. Crisis sex work is that which it is used as a shorter-term solution to help financial or other issues. Survival sex workers are the third archetype outlined by Dalton, and are individuals that enter into sex work based on survival-motivated viability. Finally there are coerced sex workers, who are entered into the business under duress from another individual. Many assumptions about people in the sex trade are made and broadcasted from all corners, often tinged with a glaring lack of information on the subject.
“We're seeing a sort of a backlash, or a resurgence of a lack of accessibility for knowledge about sex broadly,” M. Eliatamby-O’Brien, director of CWU’s women, gender and sexuality studies department and associate professor of English, says. Eliatamby-O’Brien has worked with community groups in places like Vancouver, British Columbia, where they have seen the impact of sex work and related legislation. Eliatamby-O’Brien has also taught courses discussing issues of sexuality and gender, including modern views on the adult industry.
One topic that Eliatamby-O’Brien highlights is a potential reason for the resistance that many people feel to the topic of sex work. “Stigmas that relate to trans bodies being sexual, fat bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies, those obviously add to the level of what people feel in terms of both discomfort when discussing sex work, but also a desire to minimize it, control it or see it as somehow unpalatable.”
The Prevalence of Pornography
The American Psychological Association defines pornography as “writings or images… with blunt, often exploitative sexual content designed solely to arouse a sexual response and to satisfy the sexual urges of the beholder.” With the proliferation of sites like Patreon and OnlyFans allowing for small-scale content to be monetised more easily, pornography and sex work can look very different than they did at their advent.
“Porn tells us something about ourselves in our social world, right?” asks Griff Tester, professor in CWU’s department of sociology and an affiliate faculty member in the women, gender and sexuality studies program. Tester has taught courses in queer studies and performed graduate research that discussed the comparisons of race and gender in lesbian pornography produced by men versus that produced by women for women. “What we click on and what we buy,” Tester says, “tells us something about that, but it also reflects those inequalities and those biases and those prejudices that reflect in our society.”
Tester goes on to mention one interesting facet that some modern pornography has begun to explore more often: consent discussions. Not traditionally included (and often not even taking place behind the camera) in mainstream video pornography, these interactions often include discussions of likes, dislikes and sexual limits between partners before a sexual interaction. These talks are vital to ensuring that all participants are actively engaging in and consenting to the activities in the scene. Tester says that video pornography is becoming more open to including these discussions as “part of the storyline, and what you see in the build up to other aspects of the sexual scene.”
Eliatamby-O’Brien adds that these inclusions of consent discussions and normal mishaps “disabuse people of the notion that everything always has to be one type of sexy.” Showing sex in media with this authentic of a context is something that is relatively new to produced pornography, and is opening doors to stigma reduction when it comes to porn and sex work.
The importance of accessibility also comes into play when discussing the sex trade. Not only does this kind of platform make content more readily available for adult consumers to find and engage with, but it offers an interface for a wider variety of creators as well.
“Platforms like OnlyFans can, don't always, but give people more autonomy over the production, right?” Tester says. “They're not performing for a studio who is telling them what to wear, how to wear it and then taking a certain percentage of it.” This flexibility allows for the creation of entirely self-driven content, but does not come without drawbacks.
“You have that access where individuals can make their content in their homes by themselves or with trusted friends, but at the same time, those platforms are still companies and businesses,” Tester adds. “That gig work, like we're seeing in other gig work, can be very exploitative as well in the sense of the percent they take, how they take that money, and then the control over who has access to the internet and can be safe in their home creating content.”
Opinions on porn carry just as much variance as the category itself. Some individuals believe that pornography is purely exploitative, while others believe that it is a form of art. According to Tester and Eliatamby-O’Brien, pornography can also provide a sense of positive power and control for many participants. “There's lots of ways in which it can be empowering,” Eliatamby-O’Brien shares, “or at least meaningful for people that care about representation, about spaces where a diversity of bodies are presented.”
Tester adds that diverse pornography can add to this empowerment, as it “expands our ideas about who's desirable and what is desirable and how it can be desirable.”
Predation and Persecution
As society continues its quick march forward, the adult industry will continue to grow and change with it. Already, changes are being made that impact sex work and the lives of those who are involved in it in massive ways. In 2018, Senate and House bills titled Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) were passed into law. These legislations outline a motivation to protect individuals from online sex trafficking, but their impact has fallen rather far from their intent.
The bill was in part intended to target a website called Backpage, an advertisement platform similar to Craigslist that had been used by some individuals to facilitate and perpetuate sex trafficking. The website has since been removed from the internet, but the effects of FOSTA-SESTA remain for workers in the sex trade, many of whom have expressed extreme upset and disappointment with the laws.
According to one sex worker consulted by the Anti-Trafficking Review, “[FOSTA-SESTA] was written to remind whores that our lives are dispensable, we are not protected, our work is unseen and irrelevant, to destabilize our ability to live with any degree of agency, to flaunt the murders and negligent deaths of our loved ones as a daily reminder that the world does not mind at all watching us die and forgetting our names.” This individual and others like them see FOSTA-SESTA as a direct target to not only their work, but their lives.
Sex worker rights advocate Gaye Dalton, discusses the ramifications of other legislation, in her letter to Parliament. While she recognizes that there are many different circumstances for sex workers to be operating under, not all being voluntary, Dalton maintains that “[c]riminalisation does not help people get out of prostitution and legalization does not trap them in it.” Others like Dalton advocate for ensuring that resources and education are readily available to members of the sex trade, and that legislation be put into place to safely regulate instead of restrict.
Amidst the effects of legislation and perpetuated prejudice, there is one thing that most people involved with these issues can agree is of the utmost importance: listening. “Listen to the people that are doing the work,” Eliatamby-O’Brien advises when asked how to better create safe spaces for sex workers. “I think that there have been so many choices made on behalf of sex workers that have had innumerably negative, impossibly negative impacts on the lives of people doing all forms of sex work, whether it's online or clubs or dancing.”
Eliatamby-O’Brien continues, “So many different things, so many safety resources have been removed because, people with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of anxiety about sex work, and conflating that with trafficking, have made these choices.” Allowing those without relevant knowledge or experience in the field to make decisions that impact sex workers and adult content creators is actively causing damage to the community. It is vital that guidance is instead handed over to the individuals whose lives will be directly affected.
Timeline
24,000–22,000 BCE: The Venus of Willendorf and other fertility carvings are created as symbols to bring luck in conceiving children; these may have also been early examples of pornography.
~800 BCE–~450 AD: Prostitution is a widespread profession in both Greek and Roman societies. Although the practice is generally accepted, those that work in this field are often slaves and looked down upon by others.
Late 1800s: Photographing technology becomes more readily available to consumers, resulting in the production and distribution of pornographic content.
1915: “A Free Ride,” one of the first surviving American films and an example of early video pornography, is produced.
Late 1990s: The worldwide web becomes widely available; things like studio-produced pornography and video chat rooms allow the adult entertainment industry to grow.
2016: OnlyFans, one several websites on which individuals can curate a targeted following, is developed. This and other websites quickly became popular among adult content creators for its paid subscriber-based format, allowing people to get paid for publishing content from the comfort of their home with little technology.
2018: FOSTA and SESTA laws enacted, placing strict regulations on sex work in a reported effort to stop sex trafficking.
