The affirmative’s position on the question of “sex work” and “prostitution” is not based in liberal modes of affirmation but a direct challenge to the representational economies that sustain the taboo and pathologies that govern ideological reflexives when topics such as sex work is brought into deliberative spaces. Those reflexives of anxiety, protection, fear and taboo also sustain predatory economies outside of the confines of the illicit and shape all modes of coercion and violent subjectification.

I write this as a woman who has survived financially by the wisdom of her risk-taking and the resources of men with disposable income, obtained with something as autonomous as personal choice and as inherent as a body. I also write this as a Latina, as a person of color who has grown up poor, who has not enjoyed the same privileges of empowerment as white women or the “educated,” who has not been stereotyped as a minority who has something good to model. For me, sex work has not been easy. As a young woman I experienced my unfair share of hostility and violence. But none of these dangers or issues of racism or classism were created by prostitution and none of them would disappear from the world or even my life if I were to simply exit the sex industry. As a matter of fact, I was experiencing these things in painful ways long before the thought of prostitution ever entered my mind. I posted my first ad on craigslist because I was exhausted from struggling financially, I entered prostitution in order to escape the oppressive force of limited options. I entered in order to have access to money, and therefore resources. So I acknowledge that there are obstacles and I acknowledge the concerns of people of color regarding prostitution, not only because they are valid, but because I have personally lived them. The very idea of prostitution as illicit pushes it further underground, causing the women who work within this trade to become isolated, leading to forms of increased exploitation. My lived understanding of the sex industry is that isolation and violence go hand in hand. The exchange of sex for money has been portrayed as so forbidden that the great majority of prostitution occurs out of plain sight. Many laws created around prostitution are directly influenced by this fear of prostitutes. As a matter of fact during the emergence of the HIV test in the mid 80s, policies that were supposedly created in order to safeguard public health did not take into account the civil and human rights of groups of people who were stigmatized (black people, gay men, trans women, and prostitutes) and therefore blamed for the spread of HIV. These communities were immediately marked as a threat to public health rather than as part of the same public these laws were seeking to protect. This is one of the many ways in which the stigma and subsequent silence around prostitution has played a part in halting practical and actual attempts to educate, treat and reduce the spread of HIV In this way we as a society use “delinquent”communities as scapegoats. When we scapegoat women in prostitution (or any other group) as the “cause” of disease, drug abuse, poverty or any other societal “ill,” and we don’t really address these issues. In HIV prevention many years were lost policing and criminalizing women who were seen as tainted and therefore worthless. These are years we will never get back that could have been better utilized in understanding the needs of entire communities and addressing the spread of HIV by “how” it is actually spread, rather than “who” is spreading it, something that experts in HIV prevention are now beginning to address. In recent years these same experts are beginning to see sex workers as a valuable resource for developing and improving safer sex education and the prevention of STIs. In this way a deeper understanding of women in prostitution is essential in addressing not just HIV, but a great many other issues with the understanding that criminalizing people tends to push behavior underground and does more harm than good.