Sex Work | Philosophy Tube

hi I'm Molly thorn just wanted to come out before tonight's show begins and assure you that it's gonna be strictly educational and completely aboveboard like it's suitable for classrooms classrooms with cool teachers but yeah we are going to be talking about some heavy themes including sexual assault and police violence but there's absolutely no graphic imagery it'll almost certainly get D monetized by YouTube which is partly why it's sponsored by its Skillshare and if you like it you should check out my patreon okay Showtime [Music] are you watching closely with the right magic words anything can disappear people money even ideas are you watching closely first things first sex work is a broad term covering all sorts of jobs you've got dancers adult film stars webcam performers escorts phone sex operators fetish and domination workers and even within full service providers that's people who have sex with private clients for money you've got street workers you've got people who did out of a flat you've got people who got a hotel rooms we call it sex work rather than prostitution because sex work covers that wider umbrella whereas prostitution specifically denotes a crime sex work is a big industry with people of all different genders and races and classes doing all kinds of different jobs some of which are criminalized some are legalized and some are decriminalized and here's the first big point of the day decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing if something is legalized then it's allowed within tightly controlled spaces like smoking is legal but there's rules about who can do it and where if it's decriminalized then it's just allowed like as of 2003 gay sex is decriminalized in England you have to be over a certain age and you can't do it in public obviously but you don't need to apply for a gay sex license it's just the same as any other kind you might have thought it was a little earlier than 2003 but group gay sex was illegal till then so sometimes things are partially criminalized and partially not and it can be a little murky so if only I could conjure some kind of expert well I guess let's get started for those who aren't familiar would you mind introducing yourself and telling us a little about what you do hi I'm I'm an adult performer and I'm also the chair of AIPAC via double former Advocacy Committee which is a labor group by and for adult film performers AIPAC works in conjunction with other sex work organizations a lot because honestly a lot of sex work overlaps many adult film performers also escort also webcam also dance and any legislation that affects one group of us often will affect all of us I imagine all have a lot of people saying you've not spoken to anyone who's really representative of the industry but I guess something that I I've been finding was the impression I get is that it's so diverse that nobody could really be like the one perfect representative of it who's who do you see leading discussions about sex work and voices would you like to see amplified more largely I see discussions about sex work at least in the public eye being led by white feminist celebrities who are interested in stopping sex trafficking there's very little public discourse about sex work as labor rights at all lately that's been changing I've been so excited to see the words worth entering popular usage and leftist spaces this work is a sex work excluding radical feminists that is a very very recent term and it is only been in the past few years that I've seen non sex workers proudly stand up for sex work as valid labor some sex workers play the game because they enjoy it but a lot do it because they need the money and the deck is very much stacked against them in England it is legal to buy and sell sex but if you do it in a flat with somebody else that's technically brothel keeping which is still illegal if you do it outdoors you might be charged with solicitation which is still illegal if you advertise depending on where you do it that might be illegal if you help a sex worker book gigs because they can't use a phone if you borrow money from a sex worker if you're a driver or a bodyguard for a sex worker then you are profiting from somebody else's sex work and technically that's pimping which is still illegal so if you need the money how much are you willing to gamble because working in a flat with somebody else will be safer but it's against the law it'd be great to have a security guard but technically it's illegal if you are working outdoors you're going to want to talk to clients about prices and condom use before you get the stranger's car but better hurry up because if you get spotted you could be charged with solicitation or hit with a prostitutes caution which will show up on a background check and we're not done playing yet in Northern Ireland it is legal to sell sex and criminal to buy it but because that transaction is a crime if I utter the magic words proceeds of Crime Act 2002 all your money can disappear if the police suspect not prove suspect that you got that money selling sex and it's illegal to rent a flat to a sex worker because profiting from somebody else's sex work is pimping so if you are caught selling sex in Northern Ireland you face a potentially unlimited fine and eviction from your home all without trial for doing something that is completely legal I think some of us have this image of being arrested where it's a gentle knock on the door and they say I'm terribly sorry mr. thorn we've just seen some of your tweets from 2007 I'm afraid you're gonna have to come with us and then they lead me away stoically whilst my wife cries softly on the doorstep and wonders just how many more dark secrets this quiet coastal town can hold when in fact if you've ever even come close to being arrested you'll know it's a humiliating unpleasant and often quite painful experience as research for this episode I put out a call on Twitter asking sex workers all over the world to share their stories several officers who had been watching the building for a few hours and presumably knew that I had no clients in just work as a management Burstyn held me against a wall separated all the workers and basically terrified everyone all of our details were taken down so immigration checks could be done which now means we'll all on record with the police as prostitutes they then start us down and informed us that the whole thing was a welfare check that was carried out for our benefit which is ironic given that if they had decided we were trafficking victims then we would have been put into immigration detention my friends had iPhones laptops and cash savings wrongly confiscated under the proceeds of crime act several of which still haven't been returned the Metropolitan Police invited press photographers to the raids and purposefully did not let people get dressed before they were taken into custody I'm still scared I'll come up in some of those photos and be outed at my day job several friends were taken from custody to immigration proceedings there's an unspoken assumption I think that arrest imprisonment or threatening somebody with those things is morally neutral but I would invite you to consider those things as forms of violence when somebody is arrested or detained they are harmed by that and so the question is this harm justified which it might be is always gonna be worth asking in England solicitation and advertising our summary offences meaning they don't have to prove it in court if the cops say you've done it then that's enough which is supposed to streamline things but obviously the police a lot of power often whether or not you get punished is that the officers discretion which can be questionable when it comes to sex workers in the u.s. full-service sex workers criminalized almost everywhere and in several major cities you can be arrested for intent to commit prostitution if they find that you're carrying condoms that's enough sometimes depending on who you are I was actually in New York recently and carrying condoms and I'm not even American but they're not gonna profile me as a sex worker and stop and search me are they I could have walked up and slapped de Blasio on the ass and then I got hey I love this guy you want a free hot dog you want to hold my gun in her book playing the whore journalist and former sex worker Melissa Grant notes that since the 70s and earlier many sex workers have consistently identified the police not clients as the major source of violence in their lives which has led some thinkers to suggest that there might be some kind of trick going on here some people on the receiving end of this violence have said it doesn't feel like you're arresting me for solicitation because walking around with condoms is legal after all it feels like you're profiling me and arresting me for being trans it doesn't feel like these laws are there to protect people because they clearly don't it feels like you just want to see a lady disappear so I guess this kind of leads us quite quite nearly onto decriminalization like what is it to you what is it to the people that you work for and with I see a lot of people conflating it with legalization as well decriminalization would allow sex workers to operate without fear of arrest but relatively independently and without a lot of infrastructure whereas legalization would probably require a lot of licensing maybe specific venues and tends to lead to sort of a brothel system I've heard from some people that legalization can create like a like a two-tier system where if you don't have the money to like afford the license or the right like ways in which that if you can't jump through the hoops for whatever reason then you kind of still still come all right so the the most marginalized people could still be criminalized under legalization if they can't afford all of those licenses and fees for the most marginalized would be forced to work for some guy who had the money to own a brothel and pay for all their licensing in exchange for them to be under his thumb which I don't like I think the biggest goal of all of the sex worker organizations I talked to is the full decriminalization of full-service sex work and that's not just of selling sex itself it's of buying sex it's of helping people who are selling the sex it's of creating homes where you can work cooperatively and sell sex because I understand in the UK the selling of sex itself is the problem but all of the parallel activities are still criminalized which leads to workers still living under this kind of threat of constant police violence you're still forced into a black market situation which is always more unsafe for labour decriminalization puts the power in the hands of the workers and in the hands of labour and legalization in many cases requires you to have some wealthy capitalists who can pay for all of your licenses and the legalized brothel who is going to take a large percentage of your money and control the way in which you move through the world because it's supposed to keep people safer decriminalization is supported by Amnesty International and the World Health Organization and if that's the name of the game then it makes sense to look at New Zealand where sex work has been decriminalized since 2003 mostly I say mostly because it's still illegal for migrants to sell sex there whether documented or not so all that violence we talked about the raids and the deportations without trial is still going on just targeted mainly at sex workers of color despite some people worrying that decriminalization would increase the number of sex workers in New Zealand clear that that's happened we'll come back to that at the very end for our philosophical purposes though if you think that more sex workers is intrinsically a bad thing then you would need to argue why and we'll come back to that later as well decriminalization isn't a magic bullet though as mentioned migrant sex workers are still being disappeared people still get bad clients and have bad shifts and if they have management management doesn't always handle it well social services are still underfunded and LGBT people especially trans people are still being discriminated against for other jobs and homelessness has not yet been eradicated by abolishing landlords so some people still choose sex work because it's that or poverty and as with all wealthy nations that poverty does not have to be there it's there because gambling with people's lives is more profitable than actually taking care of them yay capitalism total decriminalization is incredible and it's so important that it happens everywhere it's allowed us to work openly to have some protection against police violence and to even seek the help of police for necessary in fact there have been a number of legal cases where clients have been taken to court by workers because they violated the terms of their service that said it's my opinion that it just no sex work and having many of the same flaws as any other job because we need to work whatever form that takes to survive people get trapped in it just like any other dead-end job especially there is about other career opportunities access to higher education of the like I talked to several people in this industry that do it just to survive I don't issue down the idea of decriminalization but I also think alongside that would need to talk about the wider structural problems of how we work in general decriminalization is one approach let's take a look at another one the Nordic model it's been used in Sweden Norway Iceland Northern Ireland Canada and a number of other countries where selling sex is not illegal but buying it or profiting from the sex work of somebody else is sometimes referred to as ending demand and exit services are set up to try and help get sex workers out of the industry it's seen by many as a very progressive very feminist very Swedish way of protecting sex workers but in their book prostitution policy in the Nordic region scholars may lend skill brian shall Arthur Holmstrom say there isn't really such a thing as the Nordic model like an IKEA cabinet it seems sturdy at first but there's a suspicious number of pieces left over in Sweden there's a zero tolerance towards prostitution stance and some social workers have been reluctant to do things like give out condoms to sex workers because they might be seen as endorsing it but in Denmark and Finland it's very different the punishment for buying sex also varies quite a lot and those sorts of differences are maybe to be expected but are you watching closely if you are traveling from outside the EU to Denmark Finland or Sweden you can be stopped at the border if they suspect again not prove that you are intending to sell sex in other words non EU citizens can be refused entry if they are suspected of intending to do something that is legal for everyone else I mentioned evictions in Northern Ireland already if you're a sex worker in Oslo the cops will contact your landlord and threaten to charge them with pimping if they don't evict you even though you haven't done anything wrong Norwegian law says he's supposed to have three months notice before you're evicted but according to a report by sex workers rights group I on hundreds of sex workers have been evicted illegally without notice losing rent and deposit money and the cops - noting the presence of sex workers in public is often treated as a nuisance even though again they haven't committed a crime almost all the police attention is paid to women who sell sex to men outdoors as opposed to anybody of any other gender doing it anywhere else and almost zero attention is paid to Nordic citizens who go abroad to buy sex one of the suppose if advantages of the Nordic model is that pimping is illegal which sounds like a noble goal but as we saw earlier landlords and Friends of sex workers are vulnerable to pimping charges because profiting from somebody else's sex work the law can't distinguish between third parties who are helping and third parties who are hurting moreover even if we say we just want to catch the bad guys the way law enforcement do that is by arresting sex workers and searching through their phones which is obviously an understand vision of their privacy but also more to the point doesn't help them pay the bills all of which seems pretty inconsistent with the idea that these laws are about protecting sex workers seems like we're still trying to make them these inconsistencies make more sense if we think of the Nordic model less as a legal approach and more as a philosophical one in Sweden in particular supporters tend to think of sex work as something done to women by men as opposed to something that people of all genders and negotiate a decision to engage in because they need money we see this sort of approach to the legal sex industry - in the UK an anti sex work group recently went into strip clubs in Manchester in Sheffield and secretly filmed the dancers without their consent to try and catch them doing something illegal to get the clubs shut down it was billed as trying to save women from exploitation but it wasn't consensual and it exposed the dancers to the danger of being outed and losing their jobs which again seems like it's more about making them disappear although public health is often a concern when it comes to sex work it's usually approached only in terms of the risk of sexually transmitted disease there isn't often much chat about police violence deportations evictions and poverty all of which are pretty hazardous to your health which suggests that it's less about the health of the workers themselves and more about the imagined health of the community the narrative leaves no room for discussion of disability or gender accessibility of the work immigration issues and especially the reasons trans women engage in sex work and no room for discussing and processing trauma and violence we face on the job from clients police landlords parents banks etc lest it be used against us to further painters as victims to be saved against our will working into the Nordic model is extremely frustrating because I'd rather move on from proving in our best for myself to actually improving rights for sex workers and improving sexual and mental health in general sex workers are experts in our field and yet we've been relegated to justifying our existence sex work has a lot of symbolic baggage attached to it the bodies of sex workers can become bargaining chips and conversations that are really about who are we are the neighborhood or the nation Sweden in particular has a reputation for being clean and orderly and equal for given values of those words that many public figures in Sweden and elsewhere want to maintain goddamn virtue signalling sweets I mean I kid but also like yeah the Swedish youtuber Mia Malda has said that all kinds of people invoke an ideal of Sweden for different reasons but it is just a country parts of it and ice and parts of it aren't the magic word Sweden can be a kind of misdirection especially when conversations about sex work are being used to smuggle in something else Sesa and FASTA are federal bills in the United States that have criminalized certain kinds of sexual speech on the internet basically what they've done is made it illegal to talk about sex or sex work on online platforms and they have made the platforms liable for that speech so if someone were advertising sex work on Craigslist or talking about sex work on YouTube in a way that could be seen as trying to sell it they could be criminalized the platform's themselves YouTube are Craigslist that's why Craigslist has shut down their personal ads section and that is why tumblr is no longer a place where sex exists like everyone was very upset when they lost sex off of tumblr and I don't think they realized that it was a direct domino effect from something that was designed to stop sex work under the guise of wanting to stop trafficking not only do they lose the online spaces where they advertise that keeps them off of the street and out of the arms of pimps they also lose the ability to gather and congregate online to screen clients the places where people put up black lists and/or screening mechanisms that would help them know if people were bad or unsafe clients got removed under foster cesta as well and made everyone's lives more dangerous foster ancestor and a lot of anti sex work legislation is sold as a way to combat trafficking and when I hear the word trafficking I think of like the movie taken which if you haven't seen it Liam Neeson plays a man called whose daughter is kidnapped and sold into sex slavery but surprised like he's actually special agent and he asked a rescue his daughter by killing all the brown men in Paris so in that movie trafficking means kidnap and rape that crosses international borders but the word trafficking is often used to describe situations that aren't like that let's say that you live in Brazil and you want to move to Madrid cuz you want to see the world and travel or maybe you're LGBT and Brazil is not the most friendly place for you right now but you can't afford it well you can't get a visa so you go to a people smuggler and they say yeah we'll get you into Madrid obviously you're gonna owe us though and you're gonna pay off your debt when you get there by doing sex work and you say alright that's probably not gonna be my favorite thing in the world but in her book sex at the margins anthropologist Laura Augustine talks to a lot of people who have made and continue to make those sorts of decisions for themselves when you get to Madrid if you're caught your smuggler could face charges of sex trafficking and you might end up arrested but there is a bit of a difference between that situation and the Liam Neeson situation because you wanted to be in Madrid the cops will say that you're a victim of trafficking who's been rescued and a g'sten says just watch out cuz words like trafficking and rescued can be a magician's misdirection what might have actually happened is you've been arrested imprisoned your wages have been confiscated and you've been deported back to a country that you didn't even want to be in often without trial or even charges meanwhile the police will say that they're feminists and say look we helped all these poor people give us more money for anti trafficking operation now sometimes you might get to Madrid and find that the debt is a lot bigger than you were told all the working conditions are terrible exploitation definitely happens and in that situation you can't go to the police because you're an undocumented migrant and a sex worker and they will be violent and deport you and what you really want is to stay in Madrid but just improve your conditions so again some migrants and sex workers and migrant sex workers say the big threat is actually the law the youtuber Jim sterling once said something absolutely brilliant if you want to cut down on video game piracy you've got to provide a better service than pirates if you don't want people to download music off YouTube make it faster to buy it off iTunes if you don't want people to have dangerous back-alley abortions give them convenient abortion access and Mac and Smith say if you want to cut down on migrant sex workers and migrant workers of all kinds being exploited and endangered decriminalize human movement some people see that as a utopian idea some people get scared by the words open borders but what if we said okay if you're bringing guns into the country or you're moving a lot of money without paying tax or you are wanted for a crime then the border is there for that but other than those things human movement is decriminalized no more detention centers no more visas no more language tests or income requirements we're just not doing that anymore that would be less work and it's save a lot of money but for our philosophical purposes it also represents a completely different way of thinking about borders one where we put individual people's safety and Happiness first I think a big thing people miss who are against sex trafficking is that even if sex work were fully decriminalized sex trafficking would still be illegal even though agricultural work is legal trafficking people into it is illegal labor rights violations are labor rights violations and if we decriminalize sex work we can begin to treat the violations that occur under it as just that and people will be able to come forward and report that yeah because I guess at the moment if people come forward and reported them they run the risk of being deported or being arrested for a brain a sex worker can't come forward and file something with the labor board about the way in which her pimp is managing her money under criminalization at least because I know that I know a newzealand that has actually happened under do criminalization people have actually like brought legal cases against management and another thing is under partial decriminalization like the Nordic model a worker could come forward with complaints but a client couldn't for example if a client were to see a worker and realized that she seemed scared uncomfortable and perhaps underage he would have no one he could report that to I that that has happened I know someone who works for a decriminalization organization in Florida who had someone calling her from I think Sweden saying I saw a girl and I think there's something wrong but I can't call the police help me we've heard a lot about decriminalization now let's look at the other side some people say that sex work whether it's full-service or whatever is violence and therefore it should be criminalized now sex work is violence is not the same point philosophically speaking as the sex industry features violence and this might seem Jordan Peterson levels of pedantic but the reason it's crucial is that if we say the sex industry features violence then we can have a chat about what's the best way to reduce it Mac & Smith acknowledged absolutely there is violence and exploitation we've been talking about police violence for ages and they still support decriminalization as the best way to reduce it or at least mean that you're not also gonna be running from the cops whereas if we say sex work is violence then the implication is that no amount is ever okay and some kind of criminalization is the only answer radical feminist Julie bindle and many many others argue that sex work is bad in itself they give examples of women who've suffered violence whilst working in the industry or interview former sex workers some of whom it must be said support criminalization or the Nordic model but there's a magic switcheroo going on here are some people traumatized by their time in the industry yes do some people who do it want to stop doing it yes could a lot of the people who do it use help yes and some sex workers acknowledge all of that and still argue for decriminalization as the best way to reduce them if you want to be an abolitionist it's not enough to show that the sex industry features violence you need to argue that sex work is violence there's a common argument which says that if money is changing hands then you cannot consent and therefore all sex work is rape if you wouldn't do it but for the cash then that's not exactly enthusiastic consent is it and it's just adding insult to injury if you also have to pretend like you're enjoying it a lot of people take this line including many supporters of the Nordic model and I myself used to be very persuaded by it until I realized that I actually a living counterexample I'm a professional actor in mine on YouTube life and occasionally when you're an actor you get asked to do a love scene I've never been asked to have full sex with somebody for a role but I've done a lot of scenes where I've been physically intimate with people that I wouldn't want to were it not my paid job and even one or two that I didn't enjoy in July I'm hopefully gonna be playing tour do in a tour of Shakespeare's much ado about nothing if you follow me on Twitter you can find out when that is and come see it and there might be some intimacy required for that so as an actor I get physically intimate for money without always enthusiastically consenting I pretend to enjoy it and that's okay and you might say well it's completely different but many of the things I do in my job like kissing someone getting naked with them pretending to be into them sex workers get hired to do I'd say it's not a totally different cocktail it's just the of them is quite a bit stronger than the other now if I was doing a passionate kissing scene with another actor and in the middle of it they just grabbed my dick and we hadn't agreed to it that's assault but there is a legit difference between sexual intimacy that is my job and sexual assault in my workplace and a lot of sex workers say the exact same thing labeling all of those experiences rape erases the truth my reality and my agency it also means as many sex workers have pointed out when dealing a prohibition is propaganda that my yes and my no well I'm working equally meaningless so there were no difference between my experience for client respects my boundaries and one who doesn't as an adult human being I assume responsibility for my own best interests sometimes I decide those interests best sir by freely consenting to unwanted sex maybe 20 percent of the time I truly hate sex 20 percent of the time I like it and the other 60 percent is tolerating it argument number two against decriminalization Alexander mikhailovna : tie was a communist and I don't mean sexy online communist she fought in the Russian Revolution she was also a feminist when the Bolsheviks first took power they made a big push to get Russian women literate equal wages voting proper sex education and so on and : Thais spearheaded a lot of that she was sympathetic to the fact that many sex workers choose it to avoid poverty but she still thought they shouldn't do it it's just not appropriate for some people to leech off others without producing anything like landlords they don't make anything useful for society they just take other people's money so they need to be given other jobs after the Russian Revolution a lot of sex workers tried to form trade unions the Bolsheviks didn't like that and did basically the same thing that we do now detained them in detention centers and placed them in rehabilitation programs but productive work is maybe not all that clear-cut like a factory worker obviously produces something and a landlord obviously doesn't but there is a gray area does a therapist do productive work does a masseuse they don't really make products but they do provide services that people need a lot of sex workers say that their job dovetails pretty neatly into that service economy like when you go to a bar they say how are you enjoy your drink the guy who cuts my hair he's always like hey how's the YouTube going how's your wife I'm like she left me after I got arrested for tweeting and he's like I wasn't paying attention at the start of the video because I usually just put them on in the background or watch them at double speed when I'm doing something else so I don't really know what that's referenced and that emotional aspect is all part of the job thinking of labor only in terms of products and manufacturing is very well it's very Bolshevik argument number three against decriminalization is that it sends the message that women's bodies are for sale to men and obviously this ignores all the women who pay for sex and all the men who pay for sex with other men and all the people who pay sex workers for things that aren't really sex but alright alright there are some women who say that they enjoy sex work and I find it empowering and they choose to do it and the response is that just because a woman chooses to do it doesn't mean that it's a feminist cause if you are choosing to buy into this very patriarchal very misogynist industry you are reinforcing the idea that women exist for male consumption which isn't just an abstract concern about optics it's an idea that regularly gets women of all backgrounds harassed and even killed the journalist Megan Murphy is very critical of the sex industry and she says that choice can sometimes be a magic word choice for some may equal repression of others this concern about sending a bad message is definitely one I can sympathize with there is some evidence that when you create a market in a thing you change the way people think about it what this criticism misses though is that you can only play the hand you're dealt a lot of sex workers say yeah in an ideal world my job wouldn't exist but what are the alternatives when I put out that call on Twitter multiple people in the UK got in touch to tell me that sex work was easier and less degrading than trying to get the disability benefits that they're entitled to with persons Employment Support Allowance I would be expected to live in about 400 pounds a month putting myself through all that from money I can make a one really good brothel shift just seems completely pointless sex work is the only job where disabled people can almost always accommodate our disabilities and make enough money in the short hours we manage to have an acceptable quality of life if somebody gets criminalized and then gets ripped out of that like put in prison or whatever or deported then like that's somebody who has done what Mark and Smith say - is okay if you want to talk about women making choices that hurt other women let's talk about women who choose to become cops who choose to work for the private security companies that run the detention centers who choose to become lawyers who put sex workers behind bars all of the examples Megan Murphy gives of harmful choices are like full-service sex work and stripping and she doesn't talk about those other ones so much because those are still seen as respectable professions I mean if we want to talk about women making choices that other women Julie bindle and Megan Murphy it boats had some pretty horrible things about trans women and that doesn't mean that we can't play the harmful choices card but if we are gonna play it we should do it consistently Colin Thai said a man who buys the favors of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights he sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers state the contempt he has for the prostitute whose favors he has bought affect his attitude to all women very similar to Megan Murphy they're only in communist language but the way : ty puts it it's much clearer that this is actually a problem with men the issue she's describing is that men even communist men can be sexist and that definitely is a problem but sex workers say that criminalization and the Nordic model make them collateral damage in the effort to tackle that it's interesting that even through very different ways of looking at the world similar arguments against sex work get produced who is perhaps the original intersectional insult I always tell people the worst thing about sex work is the stigma and a lot of them are shocked people think I'm going to tell them things about sleazy agents or terrible producers or bad clients the worst thing about sex work is the stigma that is heaped upon you from the outside world stigma loses people their loved ones it loses people their families they get harassed and trolled and stigma also strips people of resources that they need I just had a friend who does fully legal sex work who does porn we got served an eviction notice for having poor known pornographers come and go from her apartment and that they were making too much noise that's interesting because that means that whoever whoever reported that must have recognized but many people who face that kind of discrimination simply have to leave and not make trouble because they don't know their rights and they'd rather not stand in fight so they end up losing their housing they could be kicked out of their homes they could lose their banking they could lose online platforms even if they don't post anything lewd on them they could be denied access to mental health care certainly on sigmat eyes mental healthcare and let me tell you how hard it is to find a gynecologist who will have an honest conversation with me I think a lot of breaking down stigma has to do with humanizing sex workers and I think that work is happening bit by bit in online platforms and social media in which sex workers have more direct contact with folks I know for porn stars we have become so much more humanized through the world of Twitter and people being able to talk to us people will say things to us we don't like and will say oh no I'm a person and you cannot speak to me that way but I am glad you enjoy my work please continue masturbating to it but don't be that way your hand on your dick it's like it sort of ties into the stigma thing of are you gonna see a magic show and they're like make somebody disappear it's not just that it happens so fast that you can't see it it's like on some level people want people want to believe that that person really has vanished and isn't just like stuck in a tiny box under the stage yeah but we are we're stuck in a tiny box and I'm I have enough respectability politics and privilege on my side that I can come out here and scream at the top of my lungs for everybody house sex workers are everywhere we're your neighbors we brush past you in the street our kids go to the same schools as yours we're behind you at the self-service checkout with baby foods and a bottle of Pinot Grigio people who sell sex having your staff cafeteria your political party your after school club committee your doctor's waiting room your place of worship sex workers are incarcerated inside immigration detention centers and sex workers are protesting outside them although we are everywhere most people now listen about the reality of our lives many people want to stop us from selling sex or fix the world so we don't need to or just to ensure that they don't have to look at us but we have notoriously hard to get rid of at least through criminal law one thing that I didn't have time to touch on tonight that I would have liked to is who gets to be an expert on sex work how our data gathered and research budgets assigned because it turns out that even trying to answer a relatively simple question like how many people sell sex in Sweden is incredibly difficult to do and how different groups go about trying to do it reflects their opinion on sex work generally and speaking to people doing things that they might not otherwise enthusiastically do because they need the money this video was sponsored by Skillshare no but for real it actually was I had to learn a few magic tricks and how to do things like hold the deck of cards so that it looks halfway decent and I did actually use Skillshare they're an online learning community for creators they've got like twenty five thousand different videos they can teach you how to compose a shot how to edit and in exchange for them sponsoring this video you can see all of that stuff for free there's a link in the doobly-doo and the first 500 people who click it get to three months of Skillshare premium and for everyone else it's like 10 bucks a month woo thanks very much to Riley Reyes for being in this video I'm gonna put the full interview with her up on patreon for all my patrons and thanks very much to you watching [Music] [Music] daddy [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 960,811

Rating: 4.90376 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, education, prostitution, sex work, philosophy tube, oliver thorn, riley reyes, misha mayfair, borders, decriminalisation, ethics, Nordic Model, trafficking, FOSTA, SESTA

Id: 1DZfUzxZ2VU

Length: 43min 55sec (2635 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Trekky0623]

The part about open borders I had never considered before, but it makes sense.

[u/ThePlacebroEffect]

Just watched this. Gives great overviews of how policing and laws, even those that target things around sex work and not the sex workers themselves, make things harder and more unsafe for them to carry out their jobs. Also goes into how these issues intersect with other structural issues like poverty and human movement across borders because those are often driving forces of sex work. The philosophical issues around concepts like consent and our definitions of work at the end were great too.

The research, arguments and production that went into this makes this for me his best work yet. Thanks Olly <3

[u/[deleted]]

Olly might be one of my favorite humans alive

[u/ThatOneGuyIsYou2]

Love Olly (all homo)

[u/[deleted]]

So just to point out the obvious: turns out capitalism, where labour is a commodity, is gross and dehumanizing, but only in the context of sex do we recognise this because that's where we're not used to it (and also patriarchy). In a way it reminds me a lot of this point in Contrapoints' Gender Critical video, as again we have the most marginalized groups in society being blamed for trying to survive in the system that constrains them.

[u/frickshamer]

Never watched this guy before (dont hurt me!!) but at someone who doesn't see this topic talked about enough, I'm glad to see a greatly sourced and seemingly well produced episode. Even in leftist circles the opinions towards sex workers are murky at best and it's always left me with a sour taste in my mouth. So glad to see an indepth video that isnt just "I DID 10 MINS OF RESEARCH, NORDIC MODEL!!!!" because it's a lot deeper than that, especially when you hear the words of real sex workers :) Thanks for the link!

[u/Pollinect]

Fantastic video. As much as I liked the last one I think this one did a better job at balance style and substance. It was also nice that he had someone else on to speak from her own experience. I was pretty familiar with the legalization vs. decriminalization debate before this, however this brought me more firmly into the decrim camp. I was worried that decrim was taking a very libertarian deregulation stance that would leave sex workers without legal protections, however it seems that in New Zealand it has actually led to sex workers being able to pursue legal action.

[u/TheRainbowPlague]

Before this video I knew almost nothing about the reality of sex work: now I've got a whole new perspective. In my view, probably his best video in terms of raw education and the amount that it has shifted my perspective and illuminated one corner of this world.

Another brilliant video, god bless Olly Thorn.

[u/tonytonychopper228]

"hey Hows the wife?"

"oh she left me for getting arrested for tweeting."

"I wasn't paying attension at the start of the video because I usually just put them on in the background while I watch the mcDouble speedRun while I'm doing something else so I really don't get the know what's that a refrence too."

I can't believe he personally called me out.