Sex Work Is Not a Bullshit Job

During the coronavirus pandemic, the nature of work and how we perceive different jobs has come under renewed scrutiny. We applauded those newly deemed to be essential workers whose jobs, it became clear, were vital to the function of our society, despite their frequent low pay and lack of prestige.

Sex work – a term that encompasses a range of services including companionship and intimacy, as well as nonsexual role-playing, dancing and stripping – has often not been afforded the privilege of being recognised as so-called real work. Indeed, for those of us in the industry, “sex work is work” is a rallying cry that has endured for decades. It demands recognition of our labour as valid and our inclusion in society; for banks to accept our income, accountants to assist us in paying our taxes, landlords not to evict us for doing our jobs. It rejects attempts to dehumanise and delegitimise us, as the unrelenting criminalisation of our work on a global scale enables this time and time again.

The changing nature of work.

But what we might even consider a typical day’s work has been drastically overhauled during the last century. Technological advances and automation have obliterated swathes of manual jobs, and, in their place, the administrative sector has exploded. Between 1910 and 2000, workers in professional, managerial, clerical, sales and service positions tripled to dominate 75% of the total employment market.

In 2013, the late David Graeber, a US anthropologist and critic of economic and social inequality, wrote an essay about this phenomenon. Graeber argued that the majority of these newly created jobs were completely unnecessary, and had been created purely to keep people in work in a rapidly changing world that no longer required their labour. It was this work and these positions that he gave the seminal label of “bullshit jobs”, those that exist for the sole purpose of ensuring people continue to participate in a capitalist system.

Graeber himself was unprepared for the strength of the response to his article. He received hundreds of emails from people who recognised their own experience in what he described, whose own sense of their occupations being pointless had left them downcast and demoralised. The desire to find meaning at work is touted as a primarily millennial preoccupation, but research suggests it is shared by nearly three-quarters of the workforce.

Sex work is real work.

Sex work may be many things – indeed sex workers’ workplaces and working arrangements are often quite diverse – but it is not a bullshit job. Sex worker roles carry a societally-inflicted stigma, but they have not been contrived or orchestrated by government job creation schemes, sprawling regulations or corporate bloat. A demand persists without it needing to be manufactured into existence.

Putting an end to that demand is the current preoccupation of sex industry opponents. Marketed as a more humanitarian approach for targeting those buying sex, rather than sex workers themselves, policies that criminalise clients are growing in popularity across Europe, and in the UK, several unsuccessful attempts have been made by Labour party members to introduce such policies in this year alone.

Often referred to as the Nordic model due to its Swedish origins, this client criminalisation model has failed spectacularly to live up to its humanitarian ideals. While its proponents claim that sex workers are decriminalised under it, Nordic model countries openly continue to penalise them. In Ireland, sex workers are forced to relinquish earnings when clients are arrested; in France, they continue to be arrested and fined under municipal law. In almost every adoptive country, working together from the same premises as other sex workers is a prosecutable offence.

We need a Universal Basic Income. 

Failed implementation aside, the notion that criminalising something ever stops it from happening is demonstrably false. More importantly, the “end demand” mantra is crucially flawed in failing to recognise that demand – as with any labour exchange – comes from both parties; the worker also needs to earn a living. The imperatives to make rent and pay grocery bills do not suddenly evaporate from sex workers’ lives when their clients do, having had the misfortune of being targeted by supposedly progressive laws. If anything, this demand is far stronger on the worker side; it is inarguably easier to stop paying for transactional sex than it is to lose one’s livelihood.

In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber expanded on his viral essay to argue for abandoning needless job creation schemes in favour of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Graeber believed in detaching livelihood from work entirely, guaranteeing a reasonable standard of living independent of one’s job. He was, in his own words, committed to “expanding the zone of unconditionality”, to ensuring that people had the means to survive with a baseline of human dignity, without any requirements or expectations.

A UBI would largely eliminate the most desperate demand from the side of the sex worker; those who engage in survival sex work or rely on it to meet basic needs. Of course, this would not eradicate sex work completely – the demand from the side of the client remains, and those who genuinely enjoy sex work will be able to participate in it without financial pressure looming over their decision.

When it comes to countering exploitation and risk in the sex industry, a UBI would be far more effective than any criminalisation proposal. This holds true for any other form of survival labour – and it is survival labour that we should be seeking to end, not the demand for a type of sustaining work that some disapprove of. Graeber’s politics of compassion are a far cry from a supposedly humanitarian model that sees sex workers targeted, fined, arrested and deported. All workers should be empowered to do their job safely and free from exploitation, and sex workers are no exception.

After all, sex work is work. Perhaps more so than a litany of bullshit jobs.

Marin Scarlett is a writer and activist. She currently works for Umbrella Lane, a sex worker wellbeing project based in Scotland, and volunteers with the English Collective of Prostitutes.

This is the second instalment in our series exploring the life and ideas of David Graeber on the first anniversary of his death.

Part one is here: David Graeber Was Right: A Debt Free World Is Possible