Recently, I saw an article about prostitution in Belgium that shocked me, because it reveals why prostitution, euphemistically called “sex work,” is not true work at all. It is trafficking in human beings and a degrading of the great gift of our sexuality. Here are four reasons that prove it.
1. Workplace discrimination laws.
Sex should always be freely chosen. If you don’t get to choose whom you have sex with, that’s rape. But prostitutes can’t freely choose whom they have sex with.
The article I read says that a new law in Belgium grants prostitutes health insurance, a pension, maternity and holiday leave, and unemployment benefits. It also requires that their pimps install a safety buzzer that the prostitutes can press that allows them to stop “sessions” whenever they want.
However, the law says that “one of the conditions on employees is that refusing sex acts more than ten times in a six-month period allows an employer to request government mediation.”
One of the slogans you often hear related to rape prevention is “no means no.” But prostitutes in Belgium can’t just say no if they need to. They will end up weighing whether saying “no” is worth it, since they can say no only once every two to three weeks without causing trouble at work.
The Code of the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals says, “I will not refuse service to any client based on disability, ethnicity, gender identity, marital status, physical build, or sexual orientation” . . . but people often refuse sex on these grounds and others like them. If you treat so-called sex workers like massage therapists, then they will be forced to have unwanted sex, which is rape, or else they will be convicted of workplace of discrimination.
Reason magazine, a libertarian organization that generally favors legal prostitution, says, “One of the slogans of sex worker rights campaigners is sex work is work—it’s a job, just like other jobs, and sex workers deserve the same dignity and rights. But that has to go both ways. And employees of other jobs can’t repeatedly refuse to do what they were hired to do without encountering at least some sort of intervention.”
So you can’t treat prostitution as sex work unless you’re also willing to throw out the slogan “no means no” for a category of women.
2. Personal protective equipment.
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the U.S. government, has universal standards to protect workers from hazards. One of their requirements is that workers who risk coming into contact with bodily fluids wear personal protective equipment like goggles, face shields, and full-length gowns.
In a non-sexual setting, a condom would never be considered sufficient PPE. And prostitutes could still go about their “work” while wearing goggles, gloves, and whole host of other PPE. But no brothel would be profitable if it did this, because those in the prostitution industry do not provide a legitimate eservice to society. They traffic in human beings.
This can be seen in how we put people in high-risk jobs only if doing so serves a proportional societal interest. Soldiers are given as much protective equipment as possible, but they are still at risk for a serious physical and psychological injury. The same is true of loggers, fishermen, police officers, and many other risky jobs. But the risks are justified because these professions keep society running.
Studies have shown that women who engage in prostitution have levels of post-traumatic stress disorder on par with combat veterans, and regardless of how you feel about the military, modern society has been able to function just fine while outlawing prostitution.
There is no good that prostitution offers that justifies the toll it takes on those involved. In his book The Porn Myth, Matt Fradd describes how
a female porn star that had been in the industry for a while had excessive anal intercourse and a piece of her muscle from her anus fell out on set while she was filming. Another said, “You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It’s never-ending. You’re viewed as an object—not as a human with a spirit.
Finally, in other risky jobs like coal-mining, the harm is related to the job but not the job itself. In contrast, prostitutes are harmed by the job itself. The entire purpose is to allow a man to dominate, degrade, and commit violence against real women who are paid not to say no to him.
3. Certification and experience.
Temp agencies help people find short-term employment. In 2013, a German temp agency got in trouble for sending a nineteen-year-old woman to a brothel for temp work. The position was only for serving drinks, but most people still found the agency’s decision wildly inappropriate.
Say the temp agency had sent this woman off to be a prostitute instead. If this is just sex work, why wouldn’t temp agencies suggest this to clients? Especially since you don’t need to go to school to learn how to perform the world’s oldest profession.
Unlike real work, there is no certification process for being a prostitute, or at least no premium on experience for those who lack professional certification. For example, masseuses go to school to learn their craft, and masseuse clients would almost always prefer a masseuse who had performed thousands of previous massages to a masseuse giving her first massage.
But prostitution is different, because you aren’t buying a service; you’re buying a person. Nobody calls a brothel and asks for the woman who has had sex with the most men. Many, if not most men would prefer to have sex with a woman who had never had sex before over a woman who has had sex thousands of times. This is confirmed by the unending amount of so-called “barely legal” porn on the internet.
There is also no real job you can do when you’re unconscious, but in many cases, prostitutes have to be drunk or high on drugs to be numb enough to provide their “service.”
Also, if prostitution provided a legitimate service, then it could be imported to other fields. For example, nurses often have to do unpleasant things like helping people go to the bathroom or cleaning up feces on a person’s body if the person can’t do that himself. There is no special “feces nurse” who does that for everyone. But if “sex work is work,” why can’t a paralyzed person in a hospital ask a nurse to sexually stimulate him if he says he needs that to feel better?
If you turn prostitution into sex work, then you also have to throw workplace sexual harassment laws out the window, especially for prostitutes, because sex is something they have to sell even if they don’t want to—yet unwanted sexual advances are the definition of sexual harassment.
4. Nobody wants this “job.”
It’s true that children generally don’t grow up thinking they want to be a dishwasher or a garbage man, but these jobs still validate the dignity of those who hold them, and they fulfill an important social function. A janitor might even bring his son along for “take your child to work day” because he takes pride in what he does.
But nobody except the most abused and broken people dream of growing up to be a prostitute, and it’s not a job for “take your kids to work day.” In fact, if you did bring your kids to this “work,” you should be in jail.
Nobody beyond a few broken people wants to do prostitution, so whenever prostitution is legalized, it creates a demand for illegal prostitution. Now, some people claim that if you legalize prostitution, that decreases the demand for supposedly less safe, illegal prostitution, since men will just pay for legal sex instead. But a study from 2013 that examined 150 countries showed that, although this happens to some extent—it’s called the substitution effect—it is outweighed by the scale effect.
Basically, when prostitution is legalized, more men than usual are willing to try it, because they no longer have the deterrent of being arrested or put on a sex offender registry. However, not enough women are willing to engage in prostitution to meet this increase in demand, so women have to be imported into the system through illegal human-trafficking operations.
Finally, I’ve avoided making explicitly religious arguments for outlawing prostitution for the same reason I don’t make religious arguments for outlawing abortion: protecting human beings from violence isn’t a religious issue. In fact, a clever critic could point out that St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both defended legal prostitution, saying it provided an important safety valve for society, lest it explode into lust.
We should have great respect for the Doctors of the Church, but they aren’t infallible. Moreover, some of their views on maintaining the social order should not be applied today, because we have better means of promoting the common good of society without tolerating violence being inflicted on other human beings.
And as unpleasant as it was to address this, we don’t do ourselves any favors by pretending Western civilization isn’t headed in this direction. So we should be prepared to call the prostitutes, the pimps, and the johns all back to a civilized and truly Christian way of living.