Why is Sex Work “Selling Your Body” but Manual Labor Isn’t?

A story of double standards that hurt everyone.

We all hear it from time to time: sex work is dirty, immoral, and wrong. It’s everything that’s wrong with America these days. You’re just selling your body to (mostly) horny men who do unspeakable things with the pictures and videos you post on those naughty sites.

I mean, in one sense yes, sex work is selling your body. You are literally selling pictures and videos of yourself with minimal or no clothes on, possibly performing a variety of acts that may or may not be sexual. You get paid to display your body for others’ enjoyment.

But what about the people that work a lot of the standard blue-collar jobs that we all love to glamorize? The auto workers and the people who move boxes around in the Amazon warehouses and all of the people who stock the shelves at Target or Walmart or whatever grocery store you shop at every day?

Those jobs are hard, and they will destroy your body. I have worked a few of them, and I can attest that spending a lifetime stocking shelves does terrible things to you. Your knees and back get wrecked, and if you regularly take painkillers to deal with it, so do your kidneys and liver. Plus, all the verbal abuse that you get from customers and/or managers takes a toll on your mental health.

How is that not selling your body?

Think about it. You are literally destroying your body physically and mentally for the sake of a company that probably doesn’t care about you, yet demands that you break your back for them. All of this is in exchange for a paycheck, one that probably isn’t that big compared to what some sex workers make.

People like to get all judgy about when ambulance drivers and teachers quit to become sex workers, but they refuse to pay those ambulance drivers and teachers proportionally for the jobs that they do.

Ambulance drivers and EMTs see horrible stuff every day and work incredibly hard, but they don’t make very much money considering the physical and emotional toll that the job takes. Teachers work thankless jobs and get yelled at regularly by parents, but often can’t make enough money to survive and have to take side jobs, and that’s on top of time spent out of school grading papers and such.

Honestly, if I was an EMT or a teacher and found out that I could make twice my pay for half the work by selling lewd pictures, I’d do it. If selling my body means posing seductively instead of destroying my back doing physical labor, sign me the heck up.

It’s more complicated than that, of course. Sex work is work, and it takes a lot of skill to do it well. Ensuring that your makeup and clothing are photo-ready takes a lot of effort, and you also need a semi-skilled photographer to take the pictures. But it’s generally less physically intensive than stocking shelves or lugging boxes.

There are other demands as well. Shooting professional (or amateur) porn requires different skills and mindset than taking sexy photos, and doing burlesque or stripping often has more physical requirements. Honestly, there is so much that goes into sex work that I have no idea about that I’m pretty sure that many of the people that speak ill of it couldn’t even handle doing it.

However, there is always a demand for those positions — sex sells, after all — and more and more people are discovering that it’s actually fun and empowering to do those things. As much as society likes to denigrate and look down upon sex workers, there is a constant demand for them, and more demand often means more money.

And yet, the “good, upstanding, blue-collar jobs” that everyone likes to crow about get overlooked and underpaid. Even as wages are being forced up by the current “Great Resignation,” I still wouldn’t break my back at McDonald’s or Walmart for $15 an hour when better options exist. Just as there is a demand for porn, there is a demand for a McChicken at 3 a.m., but for whatever reason, we’re not willing to pay the line cook much more than minimum wage.

There is a fundamental misalignment between what we consider “selling your body” and what actually constitutes that phrase. I am by no means saying that we pay sex workers less — again, sex work is work, and it’s hard, honest work to boot. I am saying that we should pay more for the back-breaking work that millions of people do in fast food, retail, and warehouse jobs.

Yeah, $15 an hour is great — if you’re in the year 2012 when the Fight for $15 movement started. These days, it should be the “Fight for $18.45,” and it’s rapidly approaching the “Fight for $20.”

So sure, sex work is “selling your body,” but so is warehouse work, retail, fast food, and a lot of other jobs. Why is it that we denigrate sex work as “immoral” and elevate blue-collar jobs as “good, honest work,” but we don’t pay the so-called “honest workers” an honest wage?

I say, if you’re going to sell your body, you might as well do it on your terms. And, if those terms mean you take off your clothes for strangers, more power to you.

But, if you’re stuck selling your body to a corporate overlord who underpays you for it, I think it’s time to re-evaluate what it means to do “honest work.” Thankfully, the Great Resignation has started that ball rolling, and I hope it doesn’t stop.

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