Many years ago, I read the biography of a sex worker whose previous work had somehow been in politics, I think related to organizing and running political campaigns. After she voluntarily chose to become a sex worker in her late twenties, she turned her political background towards sex work.
She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better.
She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal.
Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
There's an distinction made between legalization and decriminalization in terms of sex work (that I think is the reverse of how they're used in regards to drugs). Legalization, to sex workers, implies regulation, licensing, additional taxes charged, etc. Decriminalization means no laws against adults selling sex (except perhaps any standard employment laws, etc.)
It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
I've repeatedly run into issues when I comment on this, so I spent some time at some point searching for stuff on the web. Dolores French makes the exact distinction you are making: that legalization means regulation and decriminalization means just leave them the hell alone and make no law forbidding it.
But when I've searched, different sources use decriminalization to mean what you and she called legalization, iirc. So I have really been given a lot of nonsense over the years by people seemingly affronted by a woman and former homemaker who is for decriminalization as the term was used by Dolores French. If they understand the term differently from how I use it, they pounce on this as evidence that I'm an idiot rather than acknowledging that it gets used differently in different sources and it was simply a misunderstanding.
Yes, I think this is about the gut reaction many people have that sex work is flat out immoral and should not be done. Period.
"Identity politics" -- ie details about who I happen to be -- seems to just make it a real hot button for a lot of people that I am willing to go on public record as being for the decriminalization of sex work. As a former homemaker, devoted military wife and full-time mom of special needs kids, I'm supposed to be some symbol of conservative goodness or something, it seems.
I've gotten more careful about how I talk about it. But my views remain the same.
I think "standard employment laws" may be an issue. Between sexual harrasment and bodily fluids, I cannot imagine most sex work being non criminal without some special carve out in the law. I can imagine a policy of non enforcement, but such policies have a tendency of getting reversed.
Also, it was mentioned in the article, but the porn industry's STD situation should be harold by free market conservatives as a triumph of self regulation.
I think the problem is that in most places the world over, whether it is legal or not, both laws and regulations surrounding sex work tend to have very misogynistic outcomes.
So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women.
But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished.
So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias.
In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point.
In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
Some of your arguments are used to justify the Nordic Model -- only clients should get arrested. However, it somehow always seems that it's the sex workers who suffer, even being arrested and gaoled for working/living together, etc. It's a rad fem authoritarian utopia that damages SWers routinely, and has had not noticeable impact on already-illegal trafficked SWer situation (generally from former USSR and the middle-East).
An awful lot of feminist stuff seems to grow out of the poison seed of an idea that the cure for the way the world hates on women is to replace policies that hate on women with policies that actively and intentionally hate on men.
It is a fundamentally broken mental model that I cannot support. It is a variation of what so many activists do where they decry the injustice of the current system and how it mandates that Group A is allowed to shit on Group B, but their proposed solution is "As a member of Group B, I want a mandate that Group B gets to shit on Group A instead."
If all you are doing is rearranging the pieces on the gameboard without fundamentally changing the rules, you are merely reassigning which parties get unjust treatment. You aren't actually creating a more just world.
Given that this often boils down to saying to privileged people in power "I would like to stop being the world's toilet and I would like you to virtuously volunteer to take my place as a toilet," it's really not surprising that so much activism gets aggressive pushback from those currently in power.
The path forward is to find a rule set which states "Shitting on people is bad and forbidden. We don't care who they are, don't shit on them. Please and thank you (and backed up with a big stick if polite requests don't work on you)."
Well, on the flipside, it should certainly seek, more than just regulate their work (the politically correct part) to protect them. How could the law succeed at either without input from the workers?
