the sex wars (continued).

*exhausted sigh* anti-sex work arguments are boring, dangerous, & usually smell like rich people.

art by Mel Octaviano.

Before last week, I knew next to nothing about luxury watches. I knew Rolexes existed and that they were very expensive. Like it is for a lot of working-class people, “very expensive” is nebulous to me. But last week, with the help the new Jon Hamm show Your Friends & Neighbors and an article in The Cut, I got numbers and new names: a Patek Phillipe retails for $70,110; an Omega Seamaster for roughly $46,000; and a Richard Mille for upwards of a million. In Your Friends & Neighbors, Hamm’s character has recently lost his hedge fund job, but still has the house and expenses that went along with it. Instead of falling from the circles of the mega-rich into something close to middle-class, he decides to steal from his wealthy friends. The watches, his voiceover reports, won’t be missed; they are set aside in drawers for inheritance. So he swipes them (the Patek Phillipe and the Richard Mille) from the forgotten nooks, as the camera shows us millions of dollars worth of accessories just lying around. My rent for a decade, my college debt, a downpayment for a house, I think as I count the watches. 

I learn about the Omega Seamaster the same week from a different source. It’s an article in The Cut titled “Addicted to OnlyFans: Men are spending tens of thousands of dollars to text with their favorite creators.” My first thought is to heavily sigh at the use of “addiction,” since the concept of porn addiction has been widely debunked. My second thought: sounds like some great clients! Anyway, in the article, a man named Eric describes his unhealthy relationship to OF, explaining: “I spent thousands on it. Enough that I feel a visceral horrible feeling in my gut. I could have bought an Omega Seamaster.” The journalist clarifies that he’s “referring to the high-end watch brand worn by James Bond.” 

I’m sharing this story as an entry point into an essay I felt like I needed to write in order to push against the growing resurgence of anti-sex work rhetoric from both the Left and the Right. (This is also the impetus of my forthcoming book.) Last month, an essay on Substack went viral titled “Sex work will never be feminist”; Andrea Dworkin books are getting reissue bumps; Project 2025 proclaimed a plan to outlaw porn (and connected porn to “transgender ideology,” for a little extra heinous flame stoking); and the general vitriol and criminalization that sex workers have experienced for centuries persists. I begin with the story of the watches because I think it illuminates some of the biggest problems with anti-sex work politics: the violence of stigma; the cognitive dissonance about what constitutes “harm” regarding what we buy and sell; and, if I may be so bold, the fact that the vast majority of anti-sex work sentiment seems to be expressed by people who have money. 

I’ll explain more on that, but first a brief primer that explains how exhaustingly old this debate has been, especially amongst feminists: the Feminist Sex Wars, also sometimes referred to as the Porn Wars, began in the late 70s and intensified throughout the 80s. The tale tends to be told like this: the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a disappointment for women. Sexual freedom overwhelmingly benefited men over women, as was evidenced by the continued problem of gender-based violence, rape, and sexual assault. Feminists—now fully into the second wave of theorizing, organizing, and community-building—were in a prime position to tackle it. 

Unsurprisingly, a movement with so many differing ideologies had different thoughts on both the causes and solutions to sexual violence. One of the loudest and best organized factions was the antiporn feminist contingent which asserted, unequivocally, that the most urgent task of an anti-violence movement was to eradicate pornography, sex work, and BDSM. “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” feminist (and trans-antagonist) Robin Morgan famously declared. Andrea Dworkin — the most prolific antiporn feminist writer and activist — agreed: “any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.” For Dworkin and the other feminists who made up groups like Women Against Pornography (WAP), sex in porn was always already a violent violation. Dworkin made sure to differentiate the burgeoning radical feminist sexual politics from others on the Left: “the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.” For these feminists—whom we would now refer to as SWERFs (Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists)—the first step to ending sexual violence was abolishing the sex trade, urging a cessation of BDSM practices, and outlawing the making, selling, and viewing of pornographic content. 

On the other end, the tale is told, were the Sex Radicals. These feminists were a mix of academics, activists, and sex workers, who disagreed with the antiporn feminists’ analysis. For starters, sexual violence existed before the mass mediated distribution of pornography. Additionally, a lot of these women understood sex work to be work, a job, not inherently more or less exploitative than any other. It was after a panel about the “Sex Use Industry” at the 1978 Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media conference, that Carol Leigh suggested that they rename the panel the “Sex Work Industry.” The conference organizers didn’t make the change, but Leigh took the term and spread it to her fellow sex worker and feminist circles, arguing that “sex worker” helped destigmatize the job, and hoped that would make feminists more inclusive of women in the sex industry. After all, Leigh knew that she herself and many sex workers like her, didn’t feel like they were being raped while on the job. That in fact she, and many sex workers like her, felt like they had agency in their work life. A commitment to emphasizing agency would remain a sturdy backbone to this side of the feminist split; the sex radicals believed adamantly in emphasizing women’s agency to choose and act—not as dupes, but as fully thinking autonomous beings—within and in spite of social structures. 

While the antiporn feminists doubled down on the (mostly) single-issue focus (to eradicate pornography, kink, and sex work), the sex radicals formulated more of their thoughts on the issue at the pivotal Barnard Conference on Sexuality in 1982. The panels and papers at the Barnard Conference ranged from the positive aspects of SM culture in lesbian communities; ambivalence around cultural shifts seen in magazines like Cosmopolitan which seemed to both celebrate women’s agency but also objectify them; questions about the role of the state in feminist change (and how the antiporn feminists were quick to collude with it); why women are being drawn back to the Right; bringing race and class into the debates around sex and porn; feminism’s relationship to psychoanalysis;  and many, many reflections on female sexual pleasure. 

So the story usually ends with this: the antiporn feminists lost, and the sex radicals won. We got third wave feminism, and unbridled internet porn. 

Of course, it’s never so tidy or complete. Missing from the two-sided tale is the reality that there were more than two sides, including the voices of women of color feminists who had a unique perspective to bring to conversations around autonomy and exploitation. Clearly there was not a unanimous Black or brown feminist position, but the fact that people like Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Hortense Spillers are not as widely evoked (on this subject) as the names of Dworkin and (on the other side) Gayle Rubin is a testament to the whiteness of the Sex Wars history. 

Additionally, the collective memory of what each “side” represented is incomplete and/or unfair depending on who is doing the telling. The idea that the antiporn feminists “lost” ignores the ways in which their legacy of carceral responses to violence still persists today; Dworkin yelled so #MeToo—for better and for worse— could scream. On the other end: those who suggest that sex radical feminism led to shallow “choice feminism” are right and wrong. Certainly “sex positivity” of the third wave was co-opted into a hollow version of “girl power.” If the sex negative feminists seem to deny the possibility of agency, choice feminism (which we could also call liberal feminism, or white feminism) seems to purport that there is nothing in the way of it. For feminists who rely on “choice” as the marker of feminist success, it becomes easy to label politically incoherent actions—from getting Botox to being the first woman to drop bombs on a foreign country— as “empowering.” This framework often ignores completely the role of systems of oppression and is often either devoid of anti-capitalist analysis or even supportive of capitalism. But to blame choice feminism on the sex radicals—as the writer of the viral essay does— is an insult to the anti-capitalist, revolutionary politics of the vast majority of the OG feminists who defended agency not to enable consumer girl power, but to motivate organizing, strategizing, rebellion. Sex radicals like Amber Hollibaugh were queer communist revolutionaries, committed to working against the state and finding sexual liberation outside of hegemonic constraints. 

Today, we are left with these ghosts to grapple with: the spectres of the antiporn feminists offering us a fierce and righteous commitment to ending sexual violence, but also one that makes strange and dangerous bedfellows with the Christian Right, the law, the prisons. And the hauntings of the sex radicals, which lends us a commitment to considering not just sexual violence, but sexual pleasure. This is also a haunting that, in the wrong hands, can morph itself into neoliberal empowerment, one that ignores or even bolsters the status quo power systems.

There is so much wisdom to be gleaned, so many mistakes to offer guidance, so much lineage to honor here. I’m afraid that what I’m seeing is simply reinventing the wheel of a battle that hasn’t gotten us a world without sexual violence. The antiporn feminists will blame this on the proliferation of pornography and the negative aspects of sex positive culture. Both the changing shape of porn and the problems with shallow sex positivity are important to grapple with, but to point to these things as the root cause of harm is too simple—and it puts sex workers in more danger.

Any radical take on sex worker liberation will tell you this: the criminalization of sex work is the absolute most dangerous thing that could happen for all sex workers and trafficking victims; also, sex work and sex trafficking are different things!; sex work has some unique challenges that lead to increased risk (potentially violent clients, threats from law enforcement prime among them); sex work also has many unique benefits (including making your own hours (excellent for navigating disability and childcare), the potential to make a decent living on fewer hours and therefore having more time for other aspects of life, legitimate pleasure from dates and sex with clients, etcetera); and, that stigma can be deadly. 

SWERF arguments that regurgitate the idea that sex work is anti-feminist create as much stigma as the Christian Right. They also create a strawman of a monolithic movement of pro-sex work feminists who defend sex work on the grounds of “choice”, when actually, so many of us are like our Sex Radical elders, and are in fact committed to the abolition of capitalism and the white supremacist state. Just because many sex workers identify as feminists doesn’t mean we defend sex work as feminist, the same way I would never describe my job in the university as feminist (I teach feminist theory, but my exploitation as contingent faculty is terribly dehumanizing, and the college funds genocide!). Ostensibly neutral articles like the one in The Cut, simply reporting on the ‘facts’ of OnlyFans addiction, do the same, going so far as to amplify a man who suggests that spending money on a bullshit watch (full of unethically mined materials) would be better than paying a working-class femme for real human connection. 

This is the other thing that’s too often missing from the anti-sex work arguments: the voices of those of us who make our living from it. The absence of our voices means people don’t get to hear things like my friend Alison Rose Reed said recently in a beautifully written piece that echoes a lot of what I’m trying to say here: 

“Not every interaction is soul-crushing. My nights don’t actually revolve around some kind of sick dick worship. I’m not discounting the fury I feel about the club’s hierarchy, the mundane misogyny and the professional managerial pimp payout to the ones profiting off my exhausted body (so, like, any job), all of which of course demands scrutiny. But as a former professor who resigned in the face of escalating whistleblower retaliation making my job not to mention life unbearable, another thing that bugged me about academia—aside from its fealty to the old boys’ club gaslighting survivors of sexual violence—is its minimizing of mundane interactions that defy grand narratives and statistical soundbites.” 

It ignores people like my friend Jessie Sage who writes: 

“I could certainly tell you about the clients who have pushed my boundaries to the point that I had to cut them off, or who scared me, annoyed me, or otherwise behaved badly. Every sex worker has these stories to share. However, I could tell you just as many stories about my experiences in academia that match those descriptions.

I would rather tell you stories of clients who treat me kindly and want to see me thrive.

I want to tell you about my autistic client who feels safe not masking with me because he knows that I have both a partner and a son who are also autistic. Every time we part he tells me to say hello to my nerds at home.

I also want to tell you about the client who saw me complain on Twitter about the crab grass in my yard and sent me money to hire a lawn service and instructions on what treatments I need.” 

SWERFs (who are often also TERFs) refuse to trust transwomen, like the late, great Cecelia Gentili, who said: 

“Fascists claim that no woman (cis or trans) could ever choose to engage in sex work as a form of survival because they see women as powerless. But sex work is the ownership of your body and of your pleasure, and it’s a way to make money and create longevity and stability for you as a trans person. Trans people and sex workers refuse the gender roles capitalism requires to maintain itself, and that’s very threatening to capitalists.”

It erases sentiments like this from longtime sex worker activist Tamika Spelman who says in response to SWERFs: 

“People do not like it when you spout facts back at them. The biggest portion of our opposition are coming from the anti-trafficking side. They are solely dependent on the relationship with the police and they do not want any interruptions in the way this system is set up….They do not do outreach. They do not have any concrete resources to help people. They want to say, ‘Oh, we are rescuing all these victims of sex trafficking and sex work’, and in all actuality, those who are unfortunately in trafficking have a missing set of resources they need to enable them to walk away or get out of trafficking. So I hit those who oppose full decriminalization with the facts: Where is your housing that is not a group home? Where is your financial support for these people who want to move on? Where is the education and the job training with a real job that you have made communication with a business or industry that will take these people on? They don’t have any of these things set up but they are all throwing in their little angles on why decriminalization is bad.”

Spellman’s last point brings me back to the watches. What do we consider harm? For me, the most harm I’ve endured has been from the poverty conditions I experienced for periods of my childhood, and the way that economic disenfranchisement has impacted my ability to have a secure life as an adult. I’m also a survivor of multiple instances of sexual violence (only one of those several experiences was with a client). I want an end to the trauma and violence of both capitalism and of patriarchy, but I know for certain that eliminating sex work isn’t the answer to the latter. Abolishing all wage labor will be part of a post-capitalist world (see: “the problem with sex work is work”), but in the meantime, I am more distraught over the mining practices for luxury watches than I am about the client who sends me pictures of flowers and random gift cards (even years after I stopped working). I am more concerned over the unchecked sexual violence that takes place, as I’ve written about before, in other jobs: in academia, in the service industry, in prisons. I am more concerned that sex work is treated, somehow, as more anti-feminist than the military, than the government, than the police. No feminist with an actually radical analysis will argue that any job is feminist, why is this the boring question we’re focusing on? (Often, I want to respond like this.) 

And outside of concern, I am excited: I am excited about the deep pool of wisdom sex workers have cultivated, and how beneficial our skills are to this moment of growing authoritarianism and climate collapse. Sex workers know how to survive—and to demand pleasure —even as a criminalized, hustling class without access to state care or protection. Because of that, we know how to take care of each other: through gossip networks and private blacklists, through mutual aid, and militant community-defense networks, and tech security. As more and more groups are criminalized—trans people and the doctors, teachers, and parents who support them; pregnant people, and those who miscarry or end their pregnancy; immigrants; Palestine liberation activists; and whoever they decide next —it will be vital to not only tolerate the skills of sex workers, but to validate and amplify them. SWERFs are doing the opposite. 

Perhaps it’s this total ability to ignore quickening collapse that makes me feel like most anti-sex work writers come from money. I can’t help but wonder: do they have a Patek Phillipe waiting in Daddy’s will? For those of us who don’t, we hope Daddy skips a fourth luxury watch and instead hires one of us to help pay our bills.