Sex worker-exclusionary radical feminism

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“”Why then the insistence on calling themselves radical? When your attitude to porn is ban it, when your attitude to sex is only with the lights off and never with any acts that might not be papally approved, when your views are those that reinforce patriarchal tropes of the whore /madonna split, what is radical?

—Ann Tagonist

“”Claiming that a sex worker somehow transfers ownership of her own body to someone else would be farcical if it was not used so often, especially by those opposed to sex work. What they are actually saying is that once a person has sex for money with someone they lose all rights over their own body. Dig deeper into the “selling your body” trope and what you discover is people saying sex workers cannot be raped, cannot be assaulted, cannot be beaten up, because their autonomy over their own bodies ceases the moment money is exchanged. Tied up is the idea that we do not fully control ourselves in the way non sex workers do.

—everyday whorephobia

Sex worker-exclusionary radical feminism (abbr. SWERF) is a flavor of feminism that negatively impacts sex workers, as a result of its view that any sort of sex work is part and parcel of the evil patriarchy. Since sex worker-exclusionary radical feminism opposes pornography and prostitution, it overlaps with sex-negative feminism.

The term used to refer to adherents of this pseudofeminist ideology are better known as SWERFs. The designation "SWERF" is quite similar to TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminism), as both labels serve to identify self-proclaimed "feminists" who prop up outdated, conservative views on gender and sexuality while assailing disadvantaged groups in society, via purporting them and liberal attitudes towards sex to be detrimental to the cause of feminism. SWERFs are those who believe that sex workers are both victims and enablers of patriarchy. This ideology is quite present in radical feminism, hence the name.

It's not certain when the term "SWERF" came to be, but likely within the past decade. It flourished in sex workers' rights blogs (such as Everyday Whorephobia) for some time.

Examples

In 2018, the federal government of the United States passed a set of bills known as Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-SESTA is in violation of rights to privacy and jeopardizes sex workers, rather than sex traffickers. Despite sex workers perpetually speaking out against these laws, they have yet to be abolished. Consequently, those who supported FOSTA-SESTA were referred to as SWERFs.

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003 when the Parliament of New Zealand passed The Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), which seemingly is an anti-SWERF bill — till you realize it only was meant to aid sex workers with citizenship. If you are a migrant sex worker on a temporary visa, you aren't protected by PRA, thus you're subject to criminalization and feasible deportation if the police find out you're doing sex work. Putting on the no-bullshit goggles, this means that a lot of sex workers of color have their services criminalized.

Criticism

Prostitution

For more information, see: Prostitution

  Decriminalization - No criminal penalties for prostitution

  Legalization - Legal and regulated

  Abolitionism - Legal, but organized activities such as brothels and pimping are illegal; prostitution is not regulated

  Neo-abolitionism - illegal to buy sex and for 3rd party involvement, legal to sell sex

  Prohibitionism - prostitution illegal

  Legality varies with local laws

While SWERFs may argue that they simply want to help sex workers to find a life outside of sex work, the policies they advocate to do this often harm sex workers instead of even achieving what's intended. The exception is poverty reduction, which many SWERFs and sex workers seem to agree on, at least. Things would be a lot better off if SWERFs just went ahead and focused on that instead.

Prohibitionist model

The World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and The Lancet, for instance, recommend the decriminalization of sex work due to the impact that criminalization has on HIV/AIDS cases; sex workers who need not fear law enforcement will tend to experience better health conditions and safer sex.

Prostitutes may also face fines, jail time, and even sexual harassment from police. In places where selling sex is illegal, prostitutes may even find themselves added to sex offender registries if caught (their offense, after all, was sex related!), which has devastating life consequences. They can also face blackmail.

Neo-abolitionist model

But many SWERFs don't advocate criminalization for selling sex, merely the purchase of sex. This model goes by various names, such as the neo-abolitionist model, or Nordic model approach to prostitution — a title that's sure to lure in some social democrats. But the Swedes can't have everything right. This model is harmful as well, though significantly less so than a full criminalization model. Criminalizing buyers still contributes to the stigmatization of sex work, for example, which will have a negative cultural effect on women who do this for a job. Human Rights Watch puts it thusly:

The Nordic model appeals to some politicians as a compromise that allows them to condemn buyers of sex but not people they see as having been forced to sell sex. But the Nordic model actually has a devastating impact on people who sell sex to earn a living. Because its goal is to end sex work, it makes it harder for sex workers to find safe places to work, unionize, work together and support and protect one another, advocate for their rights, or even open a bank account for their business. It stigmatizes and marginalizes sex workers and leaves them vulnerable to violence and abuse by police as their work and their clients are still criminalized.

There is also significant evidence that criminalizing clients will increase violence against sex workers, as perpetrated by clients. The mechanism by which this is the case isn't necessarily intuitive, so to explain: by criminalizing clients, prostitutes are then pressured to cover for their clients. This can involve threats, or violence, to keep the prostitute from reporting the client to the police, if the client suspects that could happen. In one 2013 study, it was found that when clients were criminalized, prostitutes often had less time to negotiate sex conditions; they had to do so in shadier areas (e.g. dark alleyways) to avoid police detection. Beyond the increased risk of violence this poses, it was also found to recreate many of the health risks that come with a general criminalization of prostitution (i.e., rushed negotiations for sex meant less safe sex). Police in Sweden have seized condoms as evidence in prostitution cases, which has disincentivized their use.

Contradiction by sex workers

By the way, sex workers and their advocacy organizations are largely opposed to the neo-abolitionist model (and, in fact, some are opposed to full legalization as an alternative to simple decriminalization; legalization implies stringent government regulation they'd rather not deal with). This, for some reason, doesn't seem to be very important to SWERFs. Perhaps they simply aren't aware; such is a good example for why listening to those most affected by any given policy, to see if they have some significant insight that you don't, is probably a good idea.

Some more conspiracy theory-oriented SWERFs sometimes suggest that these advocacy groups for sex workers are merely controlled by Big Porno: brothels, pimps, and pornography companies. This claim does not appear to be well-founded. Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), for example, is a chapter-based group that has even had funding issues obstruct its campaigns in the past. They aren't the only ones: other sex worker organizations often lack the funds to lobby Congress. That isn't the mark of a network funded by big porn companies.

But it's hard to argue that it's all a Big Porno conspiracy when it comes to individual sex workers themselves telling you that the impact neo-abolitionist policy has on them is negative. In 2010, the Swedish government accepted prostitutes' testimony to the fact that the neo-abolitionist model was negatively impacting them. However, it openly viewed this harm inflicted against prostitutes as a good thing, stating that it "must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution."

Misrepresented evidence

For more information, see: Cherry picking

While research has pointed to the benefits of decriminalization and the pitfalls of neo-abolitionism, SWERFs do have some academic papers that they like to tout. As it happens, many of these papers are written by radical feminist activists themselves, such as Melissa Farley and Janice Raymond. Much of this research was also funded and promoted by the George W. Bush administration, including papers by Donna Hughes and Farley. Ronald Weitzer, a sociologist who specializes in criminology, has been critical of the "theory and methodology" behind such prostitution research, which he characterizes as tainted by a moral panic fueled by unscientific, absolutist ideology. A group of 18 academics wrote a 2008 commentary criticizing how this sort of research bias is, in practice, ethically and empirically unsound.

Susan Hidel, the presiding judge in Bedford v. Canada (in which Raymond and Farley were called as expert witnesses), found similarly. She stated:

I found the evidence of Dr. Melissa Farley to be problematic. Although Dr. Farley has conducted a great deal of research on prostitution, her advocacy appears to have permeated her opinions. For example, Dr. Farley's unqualified assertion in her affidavit that prostitution is inherently violent appears to contradict her own findings that prostitutes who work from indoor locations generally experience less violence. Furthermore, in her affidavit, she failed to qualify her opinion regarding the causal relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and prostitution, namely, that it could be caused by events unrelated to prostitution. Dr. Farley's choice of language is at times inflammatory and detracts from her conclusions. [...] Dr. Farley stated during cross-examination that some of her opinions on prostitution were formed prior to her research [...] Accordingly, for these reasons, I assign less weight to Dr. Farley's evidence. Similarly, I find that Drs. Raymond and Poulin were more like advocates than experts offering independent opinions to the court. At times, they made bold, sweeping statements that were not reflected in their research.

Commenting on research published by Raymond, Weitzer points out her use of "horror stories to arouse the reader's disgust and anger". He adds that one should "recall Rubin's (1984) criticism of those who present the worst examples of abuse as typical." Raymond claims:

The sexual service provided in prostitution is most often violent, degrading, and abusive sexual acts, including sex between a buyer and several women; slashing the women with razor blades; tying women to bedposts and lashing them till they bleed; biting women’s breasts; burning the women with cigarettes; cutting her arms, legs, and genital areas; and urinating or defecating on women."

Another paper, for which Farley (who is a psychologist) was the lead researcher, was published by the Journal of Trauma Practice in 2004: "Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries". To give you an idea of the kind of objectivity we're dealing with here, Farley (being in every other typical way a sex-negative feminist) has been arrested multiple times for destroying porn magazines in bookstores. She founded the anti-prostitution website Prostitution Research & Education, which she has for some reason also used as a platform to complain about "transactivist woke imperialism" despite the apparent irrelevance to the topic.

This perhaps serves as an explanation for the slanted language present in the 2004 paper. That paper reached the conclusion that decriminalization of prostitution won't reduce violence, despite the fact that it only ever discussed legalization, not decriminalization. They also only asked respondents about "legalization", not "decriminalization"; these are different legal models. Despite that, a significant sum of respondents (who were all current or former prostitutes) still said that legalization would make them feel safer. Somehow, there was no given number for how many respondents would feel less safe with legalization; perhaps it was intentionally omitted or not asked at all. It is somewhat hard to know, since Farley's research transparency has often left something to be desired. As Weitzer comments, it's "especially important to know the exact wording of questions, especially on this topic, because question wording may skew the answers." This isn't provided.

Weitzer was critical of Farley's "very selective" referencing style, often citing herself or other radical feminist academics, such as in her 2004 paper "Bad for the Body, Bad for the Heart: Prostitution Harms Women Even if Legalized or Decriminalized". She has also been accused, including by one of her research employees, of explicitly misrepresenting research results and skirting ethical review. One former sex worker discusses Farley in an interview with Reason:

There's a researcher named Melissa Farley who does an awful lot of these kind of studies to provide numbers for the anti-prostitution people. And on her site she traced this supposed [average number] of 13 [as the average age of entry into prostitution] to several old studies which all drew back to a study done here in LA actually in the early 80's—in '82. And that study found the average age of entry for underage sex workers—not for all sex workers, but only for underage ones—was about 16. In a different part of the study, they listed 13 as being the average age of first sexual contact. First kiss, first groping in a car, first whatever. Farley seems to have conflated the two numbers to represent that 13 as being the age not of first sexual contact, but of first accepting money for it. Even so, she still was only claiming that that was the age of origin for underage sex workers. Normal distortion, the gossip game syndrome, has changed that from underage to average of all.

See also

• BDSM § Feminist schism
• Contagious Diseases Acts
• Sex-positivity
• Sex trafficking
• NoFap, the other end of the horseshoe.
• Pornography
• TERFs

External links

• "Sex Work Facts: Literature Database"
• "No model in practice: a 'Nordic model' to respond to prostitution?", Crime, Law and Social Change.
• "The Effect of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime: Evidence from New York City", The Economic Journal (Oxford)
• "Amnesty International publishes policy and research on protection of sex workers' rights", Amnesty International
• "Brothel Jobs in Germany" — an old Torygraph myth parroted by some SWERFs is dissected by Snopes
• "The Nottingham Women's Conference, only 'good' women welcome", Everyday Whorephobia
• "What Feminism Can Learn from Sex Workers", Sex Work & Feminism
• "Why 'In this moment' are appropriating whorephobic shits", Everyday Whorephobia
• "It's Not Selling Your Body, It's More Like Controlled-Access Rental", Mother Jones
• "FOSTA Backers to Sex Workers: Your Work Can Never Be Safe", The Appeal
• "Anti-Online Trafficking Bills Advance in Congress, Despite Opposition from Survivors Themselves", about FOSTA-SESTA, from The Appeal