The Difference

"Isn't sex work just like any other job?"

It is a question that is asked often on the internet when discussions of pornography or sex work occur. There are plenty of arguments rooted in philosophy floating around, many of them hinge on hypothetical future situations. I wanted to take a more practical approach to the question.

One huge practical difference between sex work and most other forms of labor is the astronomical rate of infectious disease transmission. Legal sex work, such as work in pornography, offers workers damage control rather than prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Those are the best case scenarios; workers who have actual rights as workers in the sex trade. The majority of pro-sex work people I run into argue about how to improve the lot of sex workers so that they are protected from diseases and stigma. Those are both worthy goals.

However, even in the ideal situation (free mandated condoms, no prejudice against sex workers) I do not see how it could come close to being satisfactory.

As someone who works in the medical industry I know that sex workers aren't the only people who routinely handle bodily fluids that pose infectious disease risk. Laboratory workers, surgeons, nurses, etc handle them all day long. The difference is the level of protection afforded to workers; there isn't an acceptable level of disease infection of medical workers.

It means that if a lab worker was to open a container of bodily fluid (which is housed in a primary and secondary container for worker protection) they would need to wear a lab coat, gloves, closed toe shoes,and use a splash shield or face shield before opening the sample. This is done to reduce the chances of a splash or aerosol exposure.

If a worker was splashed with a potentially infectious substance they would be promptly tested, so would the source patient, and they would be tested again at various intervals for diseases. The worker is usually offered counseling for the emotional problems that can come from awaiting the test results. Generally the rest of the department is given a refresher on PPE (personal protective equipment) if the accident was caused by failure to use proper PPE. Sometimes workers are fired for failing to use PPE (the exact opposite of what sex workers go through). If the problem was with the equipment then an investigation is launched into if the equipment is faulty or if there is some better way to protect workers. It is a big deal because exposure to diseases is not considered acceptable within the health care industry, the standard is to perform a job thousands of times without ever being exposed by using engineering controls and extensive training.

These guidelines seem, to me, like the baseline of humane treatment for workers who can get infectious diseases from their occupation. They are afforded reasonable protection against disease and taken care of if they do have an accident. If sex work is to be treated like "any other job" these are major practical problems to contend with. Very few kinds of sex work could exist if equal standards were in place.