Prostitution is Not a Choice
Poverty, racist lack of opportunity/education, targeting of marginalized women of color, those with disabilities, or those who have experienced prior sexual abuse and emotional and physical neglect—all of these factors channel women into prostitution, which is the business of sexual exploitation. Prostitution exists because of the male demand for it, and racial and economic inequalities render women vulnerable to it.
Source: Consent, coercion, and culpability: Is prostitution stigmatized work or an exploitive and violent practice rooted in sex, race, and class inequality?
Some pimps, some sex buyers and some governments have made the decision that it is reasonable to expect certain women to tolerate sexual exploitation and sexual assault in order to survive. Those women most often are poor and most often are ethnically or racially marginalised. The men who buy them or rape them have greater social power and more resources than the women.
Source: Very inconvenient truths: sex buyers, sexual coercion, and prostitution-harm-denial
Prostitution is Not just another Job
Where prostitution is legal, studies show approximately:
- 60% of women have been physically assaulted
- 40% have suffered sexual violence
- 40% were coerced into the commercial sex trade.
- Women involved in street prostitution are 60 to 100 times more likely to be murdered than are non-prostituted females.
Prostitution is:
- Sexual harassment
- Rape
- Battering
- Verbal abuse
- Domestic violence
- A racist practice
- A violation of human rights
- Childhood sexual abuse
- A result of unequal job and educational opportunities for women
- A consequence of male domination of women
- A means of maintaining male domination of women
Listen to Survivors
Thousands of us, mostly black and brown girls like me, are bought by men with money, like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft or Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein, but also your neighbor. Black women and girls represent about 7% of the U.S. population, yet by some measures are more than half of those in the sex trade.
Source: Legalize prostitution? Hell no
I don’t know one sex-trade survivor who would call prostitution safe, empowering or an act of agency or autonomy. Sex buyers don’t care whether the person they purchase is 18 or younger, trafficked or not, “consenting” or not. They just see us as disposable objects to satisfy their sexual needs. I can’t describe on this page what these men have done to me. Why would New York want to legalize indescribable violence?
Toward the end of Hot Girls Wanted, one of the more seasoned porn actresses hears about Duke’s new amateur star, Belle Knox, including her abusive scene for a porn site she, too, knows well. “Facial abuse is, like, extra degrading,” she exclaims. “Not everybody can come back from that. I can tell by the way that she talks about it. . . . I mean, she doesn’t talk about it. She was one of those girls who didn’t know what she was getting herself into.”
Source: The Porn Industry Is Abusive, and These Women Are Telling It Like It Is