Oh absolutely. I’ve actually worked across a spectrum in terms of legality and the difference is night and day.

And for sure, exploitation exists. It isn’t intrinsic to sex work, but it definitely exists, and that’s largely aggravated by criminalization. Criminalization instantly creates a vulnerable population with no protection or recourse, and that vulnerability is going to be hugely magnified by things like financial instability, housing insecurity, addiction, marginalized identity, etc. So the criminalization argument is typically that sex work must be illegal to protect people from exploitation, but sex work isn’t what’s creating that vulnerability to exploitation — it’s the criminalization.

There was this study done back in 1905 (ugh, this breaks my heart just thinking about it) where they were trying to determine whether to criminalize prostitution in NYC. They concluded that the best solution was to improve access to housing and healthcare and raise wages for women. But eugenics was rising in popularity at the time, and the eugenics model was to take prostitutes out of the population altogether by imprisonment. It could have gone either way but the criminalization approach won out. And that’s what we still have today. (I think I started writing about this a while back and set the draft aside because it felt so bleak.)

Sorry — that’s my really long-winded way of saying yes. (And thank you for reading it!)