Thursday, January 17, 2008

What if women like being sex workers?

The number of women who later retract these claims makes me extremely skeptical of any woman who tells me she enjoys being a sex worker. It's just as possible that she's lying to me out of shame at being victimized or that she's not emotionally stable and would hate what she was doing if she were to suddenly regain her equilibrium. 

However, even if the women who tell me they enjoy sex work are telling the truth, they don't speak for all women. Let's vastly underestimate and say that only ten percent of sex workers out there are unhappy, causing themselves emotional damage or will later experience intense regret at having been sex workers. 

If ten percent of the millions of sex workers worldwide are suffering the kind of emotional damage I’ve witnessed and lived, I would never be comfortable taking a one-in-ten risk of inflicting it on another human being. Anybody at all comfortable enough with those odds to go use a sex worker is necessarily a bad person, or at least not sufficiently empathic at that moment.

I'd say that the abolition of the sex industry as we know is it really the only compassionate response to any incident of this kind of exploitation.

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