Is the Stigmatization of Female Sex Workers About the Money or the Sex?
A study out of my lab considers how people react to learning about a woman's sex life.
Key points
Women have often drawn harsher judgment than men for sexual activity, and some argue that women suppress one another's sexuality.
In a new study, researchers had people read vignettes describing 80 fictional women and rate each woman's "humanness," an indication of stigma.
The more sexual a woman's described job or activity is, the more dehumanized she is by women and (especially) by men.
One of the many absurd things about humans is the way people judge others for the sex they are having, or even appear to be having. Throughout history and across cultures, women have drawn harsher judgment than men. From purity myths, to concealing oneself behind a veil, to "slut-shaming" women for their sexual activity while ignoring or even venerating the men they sleep with, keeping a lid on the cauldron of human sexuality falls overwhelmingly to women.
One group of women draws especially strong judgment: female sex workers. Not only judgment; they are stigmatised and dehumanised by a surprising variety of people, irrespective of gender. Indeed, a considerable number of feminists – normally the first people to oppose double standards and the suppression of women – seem unable to countenance that women who exchange sexual services for money are not "prostituted" but can be, rather, savvy agents who have chosen a particular kind of work.
Who suppresses women's sexuality?
My research group and I grapple with the complex ways in which sexual suppression arises. It seems self-evident to many people that men are to blame. Both individual men and "patriarchal structures" are in the frame, and while I find the former quite plausible, I always find blaming vague shape-shifting structures a little lazy. That's not to say they don't exist, but rather that we need to know more about what they are and how they do their work, lest we just lapse into a shared but ultimately unhelpful understanding that lets perpetrators off the hook.
You may prickle with annoyance when I tell you that some scientists have argued that women suppress one another's sexuality. They have evidence. Not least the vehement opposition of a subset of feminist thinkers to sex work, pornography and ... sex robots.
A few years ago, Dax Kellie – at the time a graduate student with Khandis Blake and me – was thinking about how to test competing ideas about who suppresses sex and why. We came up with an experiment to test a number of ideas about the harsh judgments meted out to female sex workers and to women in general. The experiment, published in the journal Collabra1, allowed us to tell whether women or men are harsher judges, whether having some autonomy in one's choices affects those judgments, and whether it is the sex, the money, or some intoxicating mix of the two that animates anti-sex work feelings.
80 Imaginary Women
Dax created vignettes describing 80 fictional women, each with a name, full-time job, number of siblings, main hobby, and interests. In addition, each vignette described one thing the woman disliked about her job, family, or interests. He then added a sentence describing an extra part-time job or activity that involved either in-person sex (e.g. escorting, porn actress, casual sex), nudity manipulations (e.g., camming, nude model), sex-associated activity (e.g., sex tip column writer, Instagram model) or non-sex manipulations (actor, yoga instructor, hotel receptionist).
In each of those four categories, some vignettes involved payment for the extra job/activity, and others did not. Some extra activities included exploitation and others emphasized autonomy. That allowed us to tease apart how the level of sexual activity, whether payment was exchanged, and the level of exploitation or autonomy, affected – independently or in combination – the way the fictional women were judged. The experimental design was pre-registered and you can peruse all the vignettes at the Open Science Framework.
Here's an example vignette involving sex, payment, and autonomy:
Nicole loves being active and is an avid tennis player. Her main job is as an administrative assistant at a large food service company. She likes playing ping pong and she loves David Bowie. However, she doesn’t like listening to his final album because it reminds her of his recent passing. She has two younger sisters who she enjoys spending time with. To supplement her income, she is a part time sugar baby (i.e., she is in a sugar daddy arrangement where she earns money for providing sexual and companion services to an older wealthy man).
After reading a vignette, each of our online study participants answered questions about the woman described. Together, these questions indicate just how human the participant considered the (fictional) woman to be. This is an important measure because the tendency to dehumanise people is central to the kinds of judgments involved in slut-shaming and stigmatisation.
Sexual Activity Leads to Dehumanisation
Men tended to view the fictional women described in our vignettes as less human than did the women participants. Across the board. The more sexual the hobby or extra job of the woman described in the vignette, the less human she was considered to be – both by women and by men. The baseline (zero) in the figure is the measure of humanness attributed to the woman when the sentence about the extra job or activity is omitted. It seems that learning about a woman's sexual activity leads to dehumanisation by women, and even more so by men.
Earning an income from that extra job had no effect on how human a woman was considered to be. That includes earning an income from sex work. To be sure, none of our vignettes were about full-time sex workers. Every woman described in a vignette had another full-time job, too. I would love to revisit the study to see if full-time sex work resulted in more extreme responses. And I would not be surprised if it did, if only because the matching equivalent – unpaid sex that took up the same proportion of a woman's time – might be quite difficult to evoke in a vignette.
There was some indication that women were seen as less human if the vignette described them in ways that indicated they were exploited. This is perhaps not surprising, given the questions that went into the "humanness" rating included questions about how responsible the woman is for her own fate, actions, and feelings.
Only the beginning of the battle against stigma
This experiment suggests that the stigma and dehumanisation that create very present, real difficulties for sex workers gain much of their potency from the tendency to judge women for their sexual activity. The battle against slut-shaming and double standards is at least partly the same, whether or not any money changes hands.
I would stress that this narrowly focused study is not about sex workers' own experiences of discrimination, stigmatisation, and dehumanisation. The causes are likely far broader than the narrow possibilities explored here. But hopefully, this makes a small contribution to studying forces that have profound effects on women's lives.
Dax published a thread on Twitter, exploring the study and its implications in a more subtle and interesting way than I ever could. Of course, a single experiment cannot do much more than add a few threads to the tangled complexity surrounding social control, sex, and sex work. And yet we hope that this paper brings some progress in understanding the suppression of both women's sexuality and sex work.
That's an important project, as the lines between sex and work have long blurred, and they have grown blurrier as new technologies impact our social lives. Where does "sex work" end, and where do "sex" and "work" begin? The answers to that question will only become more nuanced as researchers disentangle the complex web of social control that people spin for one another. I hope that an improved understanding will lead to more tolerant, inclusive understandings of sex, sex work, and the lives people lead.
First published as “Are Men or Women Driving the Stigmatization of Sex Work?” in Psychology Today. Lightly edited for sense and reasability.
Dax J. Kellie, Khandis R. Blake, Robert C. Brooks; Prejudice Towards Sex Workers Depends on the Sexual Activity and Autonomy of Their Work, Hobbies and Daily Activities. Collabra: Psychology 4 January 2021; 7 (1): 24386. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.24386