the right to safe working environment and push them into a criminal underground. Sex
workers are unable to report client, management, and police abuse without jeopardizing
their own income, safety and freedom. In a prohibitionist system where a sex worker’s
earnings are illegal, any recipient of those earnings, including the worker’s children,
lover, or family relatives, is defined as pimp. Compulsory STD/AIDS testing stigmatizes
prostitutes as “disease spreaders” without considering that male clients who refuse to use
condoms (and who are not required to do the testing) may be the actual culprits in hurting
the health of sex workers. Even in places like the Netherlands or Las Vegas that legalize
or tolerate prostitution, zoning policies protect the interests of the residents/tourists more
so than sex workers, while allowing the state, county government, and brothel
management to rip profits from prostitutes’ erotic labor. As sex workers are categorized
as “independent contractors,” they do not possess the right to “unemployment insurance,
sick leave, retirement benefits, vacation pay, and collective contract negotiations” like
In this way, as Levine indicates earlier, sex work is seen as equivalent
to, but also less than, “real” work.
Regardless of the global location where a sex worker works and lives, and despite
the power differentials among sex workers in different social locations, there is a
common imperative to break out of the universal whore stigma and reform its related
state policies that persecute, monitor, regulate, and exploit sex workers’ “low” bodies
without recognizing them as legitimate workers. The whore stigma runs so deep that
Samantha, co-director of COYOTE, points out that rather than focusing on building a
political movement, the organization has been shifting the objective to the fundamental
by gathering group of prostitutes each month talking to each other, just so that they can
finally assert that, “I’m a sex worker.”
As Doezema argues,
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Convention