Overview
On The Bob Zadek Show, sex work is treated as a category of voluntary exchange between consenting adults and as a case study in how criminal law is built on bias rather than evidence. Bob Zadek, an attorney and the host, frames the topic through the lens of private conduct: “if there’s any activity that’s private to the people involved, it’s sex work,” he says, asking who the victim is when the transaction is consensual “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022). Guests across the episodes agree that the harms associated with sex work flow less from the work itself than from its criminalization and stigmatization.
Categories of sex work
Cathy Reisenwitz, a guest on two episodes, lays out which forms of sex work are legal and which are not. Making pornography is legal, as is being an OnlyFans creator, a stripper or a phone sex operator. The main illegal category is full-service sex work — “a straightforward exchange of sex for money” — which is not legal in most parts of the United States and most parts of the world. Escorting occupies a gray area: it is legal in many places because the client pays for time during which sex may or may not happen, and sugar babying is likewise legal because the payment is for a date or a relationship The War on Sex (2022).
Regulation, Reisenwitz adds, reaches even the legal categories. Strip clubs face restrictions on where they may be located and on how naked performers may be, and some jurisdictions bar full-nude clubs from serving alcohol. Phone sex operators are regulated in what they may say, and can face obscenity charges for talking about certain acts. She identifies full-service sex work as the category she most wants decriminalized, because “the harms of criminalization of full-service sex work are so great and the case for decriminalizing it is so compelling” The War on Sex (2022).
The feminist divide
Zadek asks whether the women’s movement has generally supported continued regulation or criminalization of sex work, comparing the position to black rights organizations that oppose school choice. Reisenwitz answers that within mainstream feminism there are “strong strains” of what she calls sex negativity, in opposition to sex-positive feminism, which holds that sex is inherently morally neutral. The sex-negative view, she says, treats sex as magic: a woman can consent to cleaning a toilet or making a latte for money but supposedly cannot consent to having sex for money “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Reisenwitz grants that sex work is often exploitative, but argues that exploitation exists in all work and varies with the power a worker holds — a CEO is exploited less than a janitor, and a well-educated high-end sex worker is treated better than a survival sex worker working outside. What the sex-negative feminists ignore, she says, is that criminalization and stigmatization are what make sex work more dangerous and exploitative than it needs to be. Where decriminalization has been tried, she says, there are lower rates of exploitation, lower rates of violence and less trafficking. She refers to the feminists who take the opposing view as “sex worker exclusionary radical feminists,” or SWERFs “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
FOSTA-SESTA and its consequences
Zadek introduces the federal legislation known as FOSTA — the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act — and SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, describing them as sweeping laws enacted under the guise of protecting women by legislators with little knowledge of the subject. He calls the titles misleading and says the legislation illustrates much of what the country gets wrong The War on Sex (2022).
Reisenwitz describes a moral panic around sex trafficking driven by organizations with evangelical roots and funding, whose goal is to end all commercial sex in the United States, including online pornography. She says these organizations produce press releases and documentaries claiming millions of trafficking victims in Texas alone, based on data she calls worse than worthless, and that the best estimates indicate sex trafficking in the United States is very rare and, when it happens, a result of domestic violence or shaky immigration status. She notes that Cindy McCain reported an interracial family in an airport as an instance of sex trafficking The War on Sex (2022).
As Reisenwitz explains it, the law made online platforms liable for any sex trafficking that might occur on them. Platforms could not investigate every piece of sexual material, so they removed sexual content wholesale. In the wake of SESTA-FOSTA, which she dates to 2018, people lost private Google Drive files, sex educators’ materials were taken offline, and sex workers lost the places where they advertised and exchanged safety information, including “bad date lists.” Unable to screen clients online, they had to find and negotiate with clients in person, which she calls far more dangerous. She says rates of sex workers being murdered and taking their own lives rose significantly after passage, nearly all sex workers saw their incomes and quality of life decline, and by all indications sex trafficking rose while law enforcement had a harder time finding it — contrary to what law enforcement had told Congress before the law passed. She also says the law curtailed free speech rights and made it harder for competitors to the major platforms to arise The War on Sex (2022).
Decriminalization versus legalization
Reisenwitz distinguishes the two models and says sex workers by and large support decriminalization over legalization. Under legalization, she says, licensing is highly regulated, workers are forced into brothels, and there are generally few brothels to choose from, which makes the work more exploitative. The regulations on brothels, in her account, are often designed to keep incumbents out and are corporatist rather than tied to health and safety. Legalization also leaves a black market open: a worker who does not want to work for a brothel still faces all the harms of criminalization, and a large black market makes it harder to find and rescue trafficking victims The War on Sex (2022).
She points to New Zealand as a country that has done better, and says that in every place that has tried decriminalizing sex work, to her knowledge, rates of violence against sex workers and against clients have gone down, as have rates of STIs and human trafficking, and working environments are less exploitative. In the United States, full-service in-person sex work is generally regulated at the city level, and while the laws do not vary much, prosecutors do — they have wide discretion over whom to charge. She cites San Francisco, where the last prosecutor, not the current one, went on record saying he would not prosecute adult consensual sex work offenses, and says that when police work with sex workers rather than harassing and arresting them, that is one of the best ways to find true trafficking victims, because sex workers often know who is being coerced The War on Sex (2022).
On trends, Reisenwitz says she is hopeful: in 2020, for the first time, a majority of United States voters said they favored decriminalizing sex work. She notes legislation proposed in multiple cities, Scott Wiener’s proposal to decriminalize at the California state level, a decriminalization measure she believes Portland had, a statute proposed in Michigan, and an organization called Decriminalize Sex Work working on the issue The War on Sex (2022).
Enforcement and disparity
In the earlier episode, Maggie McNeill, a former sex worker and blogger of “The Honest Courtesan,” discusses the criminalization and social perception of sex work in America, including the arbitrary nature of prostitution laws and racial and class-based disparities in enforcement. She also addresses the hypocrisy of “Sugar Daddy” websites being legal while street work is criminalized Of Sex Work and Censorship (2020).
Across episodes
The topic is touched in three episodes: the 2020 conversation with Maggie McNeill, and the two 2022 conversations with Cathy Reisenwitz. The excerpts show no development in the argument between the earlier and later treatment — the same case against criminalization and for decriminalization is made throughout, with Reisenwitz supplying the detailed account of categories, the feminist split, FOSTA-SESTA and the decriminalization-versus-legalization distinction.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any prosecution or case, nor which constitutional amendment any challenge turned on. They do not give the founding dates or principles of the organizations named, the full text or provisions of FOSTA or SESTA beyond what the speakers describe, or the names of the states and cities beyond those mentioned. Where an excerpt breaks off mid-sentence, the thought is not completed in the sources.