post-script: the text below was distributed outside the Women’s Library in East London on numerous occasions. Sex worker rights activist held several demonstrations outside the Women’s Library and arranged a large contingent of sex workers to visit the exhibition to demand the inclusion of sex workers voices. 

A red umbrella intervention (November 2006)

Our mobilization around the current exhibition and programme of the Women’s Library ‘Prostitution: what is going on?’ comes from our implication in struggles around gender, labour and migration as they happen in sex work and from the urgent need to create alliances across different working positions, nationalities, and class if we are to change the sex industry.

The Library’s programme of speaker events excludes sex workers, sex workers’ organisations, as well as anyone speaking from a perspective that considers their struggles in the UK and around the world. Speakers on migration and informal sector work are also excluded. The exhibition is patronising and offensive in its representation of sex workers and the sex industry. It gives the idea that sex workers are poor women victims (read: weak) of sexually aggressive men. And clearly, as too often, prostitution is only spoken about sex workers and not by sex workers.

What kind of space is given to represent sex workers as working women, men, and transgender people who attempt to individually and collectively struggle to improve our lives, be freer, move across countries, and work in better conditions? No space is given to analyse how the exploitation and coercion that do exist in the sex industry are due not to evil men but to precise and changeable laws, regulations, and discourses, which produce the criminalisation of the industry, the impossibility for sex workers to work together, to unionise and organise, the impossibility for most people in the world to migrate in a legal way, the impossibility for many people, traditionally but not only women, to make good (read: ‘highly skilled’ and male) money in legal and regulated areas of the labour market.

By choosing to represent and discuss prostitution in such a way, the Women’s Library has made a serious political choice, and inscribes itself in a larger strategy of exclusion of migrants, sex workers and allied activists around the world who try to organise to change conditions in the sex industry from a labour and migrants’ rights perspective.

There is more than one feminist position on sex work.

When feminism only sees prostitution as violence of ‘bad men’ against ‘innocent women’ it erases the complex experiences of many workers, including those who use the resources of sex to mediate a variety of financial problems and/or migrate, and find themselves in exploitative and abusive conditions. It silences the workers who consciously make the decision to work in the sex industry but who are at some point subject to abuse. The abuses we undergo, and our stigmatisation, are considered to be natural consequences of our willingness to work as prostitutes, meaning it is our own fault. This reinforces the classic dichotomy between innocent and guilty women, thus fostering the idea that ‘innocent’ women deserve of protection and ‘guilty’ ones can be abused with impunity.

When feminism denies sex work as labour it forces us to spend our time defending the existence of our work instead of struggling for its transformation. It forces us to deny any of the pleasures of our work, or to invent them.

When feminism contributes to and promotes the moral panic about ‘trafficking’ it makes itself complicit in the increase of states’ border control, restrictions to migration, worsening migrants’ dependency, police raids in working places and deportations. This discourse in effect becomes the legitimisation of state violence and of the creation of hierarchies of citizenship.

We are in the process of developing conversations and actions that disrupt this tendency within feminist theory and practice. We believe in a feminism which starts from and talks to the people for whom sex becomes labour. Selling sex is in many ways a labour process similar to other personal services exchanged on the capitalist market. At the same time, we recognise that the ways in which sex work exists are also deeply interrelated to the ways in which ‘female’ services such as caring, domestic, sexual and reproductive activities are supposed to be provided. The demand of money for sex in a transparent and potentially contractual way is often a break and significant shift in the way people, traditionally but not only women, are expected to give these services for no remuneration. Therefore, central to this feminist vision is the autonomy of all people of every gender employing their resources in the sex industry and/or moving across borders. Your browser may not support display of this image.

We ask the Director of the Library to include the present leaflet in the exhibition, and the IUSW banner, along with the Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto (2005), endorsed by a conference of 120 sex workers and the Declaration of Sex Workers in Europe (2005). Both documents were presented at the European Parliament by the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe on the 17th of October 2005.

A communiqué from the
The International Union of Sex Workers
23 November 2006
Protesting with us are:

x:talk: English classes for workers in the sex industry
London NoBorders
Sexual Freedom Coalition
ICRSE International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe
NextGenderation
TLC- putting disabled men and women in touch with responsible sex workers
NSWP Network of Sex Work Projects
ENS Education Not for Sale – Women