#1241 Jessica Flanigan: The Ethics of Sex Work

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctor Jessica Flanagan. She's the Richard L. Mori Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond. Where she teaches leadership ethics, ethical decision making in healthcare, critical thinking, and today we're going to talk about another one of her interests, the ethics of sex work. So, Doctor Flanagan, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone. Thank

00:33 Jessica Flanigan: you. It's great to be here.

00:36 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so first of all, and of course, whenever I talk with the philosopher, I guess it's always a good idea to start by defining some terms. So, what is sex work or how do you approach it?

00:50 Jessica Flanigan: Um, I just think of sex work as any work that involves the sale of sexual services, so it's just a subset of the labor market, where the labor that people are doing is socially coded as like sexual labor, and so that would be stripping, or exotic dancing, um, or the provision of sexual services is like, That some people call prostitution, but also like sex therapy, uh, is part of sex work, um, or like erotic massage, it's all of that. But I think it's probably the most helpful to just focus on the direct provision of sexual services in a lot of the conversations because that's the part of sex work that's the most controversial in terms of like legal debates, like a lot of the other stuff is already legal, and so when people are talking about sex work, They're usually just focused on like the sale of sex.

01:41 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm, YEAH, I, I mean pornography is also a little bit controversial.

01:47 Jessica Flanigan: Yeah, I guess, yeah.

01:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, so, uh, I mean, how do you approach sex work philosophically and do you have a sort of a feminist approach to it or not?

02:00 Jessica Flanigan: So, I think of my approach as a feminist approach, but it's a corrective to a trend that I've noticed in other feminist philosophy, which is very suspicious of markets, or very um quick to allege that women who are making decisions that affirm men's preferences about female labor, that those women have adaptive preferences, that those women aren't really choosing, that they don't really make that decision. Um, AND so, though I also think of myself as a part of feminist philosophy, some of my arguments are really aimed in a way that targets a lot of what I would say like mainstream feminist philosophy views. But if you're asking if I think of myself as a feminist philosopher, absolutely, because I think that the arguments that I'm making are in favor of the equal status of women. And I think that that's kind of the core commitment of feminist philosophy, and so I think of it that way. Yeah,

03:02 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, and I mean, there are also a sex positive or sometimes people use that term sex positive feminists, feminists who are in favor of sex, work, pornography, and all of that, correct.

03:16 Jessica Flanigan: Right. I mean, I also think you can say like, and I do think that it's a really a valuable labor market, but I don't think that you have to necessarily go so far as to say, every part of that labor market is great, non-problematic. Um, I think there's parts of that industry, but of the sex industry that are really helpful to people, and it's like meaningful labor that it's like a mutually beneficial exchange. Like any labor market, there's parts of it that You know, arise from conditions of injustice, there's parts of that labor market where there is like criminal activity or people are being mistreated in ways that are quite wrong. But that's true of all labor markets, there's nothing distinctive. And so sometimes, um, advocates of sex work will say things like, sex work is work, and when they say that, They're not trying to make a tautological claim. They're trying to say, We don't need to defend sex work as being great and amazing. We just need to say that sex work is like other jobs. And so, sometimes it's great and amazing, sometimes it's like really boring, and then sometimes it's problematic, and like, that's all labor. So that's that's just how work works.

04:30 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so I mean you approach sex work as just another form of work, right? Or is, is there anything special about it?

04:40 Jessica Flanigan: I do think that there's a social meaning that a lot of people attach to sex, and so, for example, people who are married or people who are in monogamous relationships. They're going to view sex as a different kind of activity than other things. And so I think sometimes people who really care about monogamy or monogamous marriages, they find institutions of sex work very threatening, because it increases the availability of their partner purchasing sex from somebody else, it makes it more difficult for people to maintain monogamous relationships, but in those cases, Sex is special because the people in a monogamous relationship think of it as special, and the place where it goes wrong, where people are paying for sex, isn't that they're paying for sex, it's that they're You know, violating an agreement that they made with their wife or partner, like that's the issue. Um, SO I totally think for a lot of people in a lot of subcultures, sex will carry this very strong social significance, and people will want to treat it very differently, but I don't think that's the kind of difference that should be entrenched in legal institutions, because not everybody is in a monogamous relationship, and even if someone is in a monogamous relationship, I don't think it should be illegal to cheat, and so. I don't think we should go back to pinning scarlet letters on people for adultery, and so there is a lot of taboo around sex, and I don't deny that. But I don't think that that's the kind of thing that we should promote, and I think it's interesting that a lot of that taboo around sex comes from conservative or religious subcultures. And yet at the same time, on the left, among some branches of like feminist, progressive subcultures, we see a similar adherence to purity culture from people who would otherwise be very suspicious of norms and taboos that would reify the monogamous nuclear family. And so, there's kind of this horseshoe where there's a purity culture on both sides of this ideological spectrum, and I think Fine, if those cultures internally want to endorse a bunch of purity norms, but I don't think that they're entitled to impose it on everybody else.

06:53 Ricardo Lopes: Right. Um, DO you think that sex work raises issues surrounding sex equality in any way?

07:04 Jessica Flanigan: One thing that people will often say is that they think that the sex industry is presumptively suspicious or that it has less merit or fewer feminist credentials, less merit from progressive standpoints, because

07:19 Ricardo Lopes: what does that mean exactly?

07:21 Jessica Flanigan: Yeah, so they'll think like, oh, we should be like on guard about the sex industry. Like, here's a red flag about the industry, like we should be like a little worried about it from a kind of left wing standpoint. And the reason is because men are primarily the buyers of sex, and women are primarily the sellers of sex. And so, it's a labor market that already entrenches a gender and sex-based difference in that labor market. And they'll say similar things about You know, pornography for sure, because a lot of times the things that's depicted in pornography will sometimes be depicting subjugation of women, um, And I think We shouldn't necessarily think of it that way, because, um, here's another like very risky, dangerous job that I find to be like a really fun source of entertainment for me, is I love watching um the Baltimore Ravens, which is an American football team. I love watching them play football. There are no women that play pro football, they absolutely couldn't. It's a super dangerous job, it's potentially very objectifying. You see these men who are like, maxed out athletically, like they are physically on like the very like top 1% of some spectrum of like, how fast you can run 40 yards or something like that. Um. And then all of us, you know, every Sunday, watch it en masse, and we're like, we love this gendered labor, we're gonna celebrate this gendered labor, and it's dangerous, and it could be exploitative, and like some of the people who participate in that industry. Do bad things sometimes, but then some of those people are great, and it's like such an achievement. And so I sometimes think when people worry about pornography, for example, saying like, oh, this is like, women's feminine bodies are being objectified and viewed this way by men, and it's like the male gaze and they're performing for the male gaze, that that sort of represents like a kind of internalized misogyny, that we think that there's just already like, nothing kind of interesting or admirable about like the way that Women can perform as women, and that we've kind of already like assume that that's going to be a degrading form of labor, but then like very male coded labor, we're like, oh, that's like athletic excellence, or another industry on the flip side that you might think of as similar to like prostitution would be um like men fighting various, very dangerous jobs and like commercial fishing or private security contractors, where they're going to be subjected to violence, potentially. Um, AND those jobs are not high status like being in the NFL, and they select based on the physical traits of the worker, and by selecting based on the physical traits of the worker, primarily they're gonna be selecting for men, and they're really, really dangerous, difficult work, um, and In that way, like, I don't think we should think that that's like a presumptively, like, sexism against men, or that men are being mistreated in some way. It's just that men have a comparative advantage in selling those types of labor, and the buyers of the labor have a preference for purchasing it for men. And so, It was kind of a long way. So when you say like, oh, is there an intrinsic gender equality in the sex market? Yes, there is, but there's gender equality the other direction in other dangerous markets or entertainment markets, and we don't really call that out as a problem.

10:52 Ricardo Lopes: Right. Yeah, we will probably also come back to that when later we talk about the issue of uh trafficking, but I mean, one thing that I find very interesting and referring again to the more sort of conservatively minded people and the and the feminists who fall more on the sex negative end of the feminist spectrum. Uh, IT'S, it's, it's very interesting to me that they, or at least it appears to me that many times they approach, particularly women who work in sex work, um, in a sort of, uh, patronizing or paternalistic way because they tell them. That or they say they claim that uh they uh no woman really ever chooses to be a sex worker and I mean they sort of remove some of their agency in the way that they assume that there must be something wrong in their circumstances or something wrong with them psychologically to engage in such work,

12:03 Jessica Flanigan: right. Absolutely, yeah, and. I understand what people are saying about that because it, it is true. So Peter Demarov wrote a book, making a paternalistic case for regulating sex work and for prohibiting some kinds of sex work. And part of his argument was, a lot of sex workers say that their time in the industry was very bad for them, and that it was difficult for them to maintain relationships while they were in the industry, even after being in the industry, or that they experienced trauma from being in the industry, and that was psychologically damaging. Or they only got into the industry because they had underlying psychological problems. All possibly true, like, I grant all of that. However, People have a lot of career choices that they make that could have significant difficulties for them. So, you know, there's difficult work being a divorce divorce lawyer, that might also, like, change your view of marriage a bit, and it can be very difficult work being a daycare provider, because then you're also dealing with Bodily fluids and, you know, difficult people because of toddlers all the time, and the hours are really hard and the pay is much worse. Everybody who is in the labor market is making a difficult decision under trade-offs. I have a great job, I love my job, but even I wonder sometimes, like, am I making the trade-off right between work and family? And I know women who are stay at home moms, and they wonder the same thing, and they think, am I only a stay at home mom? BECAUSE, like, I've been culturally pressured into thinking that my best role is being a wife and mother, and then I think to myself, am I really missing out on something by going to work every day and not becoming a wife, like it's focusing more on being a wife and mother, cause I have a lot of kids and I would like to see them more, um. Everybody is in that position where they're making a difficult trade-off, and they're doing their best, making the trade-offs about the kind of job that they're in. And a lot of times people who are going into a certain industry will be in that industry because they have some underlying tolerance for it or ability for it, that they're trying to optimize, but the negative outcomes in the industry are actually Reflecting the same things that got them into the industry in the first place. And so, I think a lot of the negative outcomes that we see in the sex industry is likely selection effects, um, people who are getting into it in the first place. So, for example, it's a dangerous industry in a lot of contexts, so that means that more risk tolerant people are likely to go into the industry. But more risk tolerant people are also more likely to have risky lives in all other parts of their life as well. And so then you look and you say, oh, look at all these risks associated with women who work in this industry, but it's very hard to separate whether or not that tolerance for risk is the reason they're in sex work, or if they got into sex work and then they're exposed to more risk. And so, I'm, I'm not denying the data, but I'm denying a bit of the causal story that's attributing the risks to being in the industry, instead of saying that they're both kind of driven by the same factor, um. And then I also kind of think like, even if you buy all of that stuff and say that it's bad for people, making it illegal just makes it worse.

15:26 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, we'll come back to the legal aspects of sex work later in our conversation. Um, I mean, but from the data we have, I'm, I'm not sure if we have actually good data on that, but, uh, does sex work tend to be associated with, uh, poverty or a lack of other employment opportunities.

15:50 Jessica Flanigan: Um, It's again, it's tricky to figure this out, so, In terms of hourly wages, It's all over the place. So like, some sex workers are making extremely low wages, um, so people who work on the street, street sex workers, that's a very low wage structure, um, and then often if there's a third party involved, the wage is even lower, and so that's very difficult work and it does not pay well. Um, AT the higher end, you know, performance, stripping, dancing, cam girls, all that, um, you'll see a bigger range. People on OnlyFans also, very low wages, um, for the most part, like 90% of people who are doing online sex work are like not making good money. Um, SO, The wages aren't super great. Why would somebody do it if they're not making like a ton of money at that kind of bottom end? Well, again, people are making trade-offs, and there are advantages to having that kind of a workplace. So if you think of people who do online sex work, one advantage is be your own boss, or flexible hours, you can work around other kinds of commitments, you could take on a second job. Um, IF you can't make it to work for some reason, that's OK. Like, you, you're, you could fully bear the price of your own, um, not being able to show up or whatever, so people who have things going on in their life where they're gonna have a preference for more inconsistent hours or more workplace flexibility, they might trade off in those ways. Also, At the higher end, people do make higher wages, and then I do think that there is like, probably a little bit of like, People might have a preference, all else equal, for like, not having to go through like an institutional employer, we have to like show up every single day in that way, um, and like that's like it's just an advantage across the board that we see in a lot of um illegal labor markets, that people will sort of select out of institutional employment because Some of the restrictions that come with institutional employment, they don't wanna do, um, and so like, it's kind of all over the place in that way, yeah, and you say like, well, is poverty the thing that's like driving them into it. Look, everybody works for money. Like, it is true that some people might become sex workers because were they not employed, they would not be able to meet their basic needs. That's also why people become baristas. That's also why people, you know, work at a grocery store, like, everybody who's showing up to work is showing up to work because they need to make money to pay their rent. And so, Yes, in a sense, but like, That's just how work is. That's just labor.

18:35 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I wanted to ask you about how sex work tends to be stigmatized in society. So earlier, for example, you mentioned how, uh, some, uh, uh, I, I'm not sure if, um, most of them, but at least some sex workers have a hard time, uh, in their own personal relationships, particularly probably romantic relationships because of the kind of work they do or the kind of work they did. Um, I mean, do you think that, uh, the stigmatization of sex work might also play an important role in, um, the negative effects that sex workers might suffer psychologically, that, I mean, perhaps. Some of it does not necessarily have directly to do with the work itself, but rather with how society treats the work and treats sex workers, and where do you think that stigmatization stems from?

19:38 Jessica Flanigan: Oh my gosh, I'm so happy you brought that up. Yes, I do think that one of the primary harms. That sex workers experience is the taboo surrounding being a sex worker, and it's just that we have these stories in our head that we tell ourselves that are very damaging. To the sex workers, of course, but I think that sometimes sex workers themselves tell themselves that story. They kind of tell themselves the story of their own deviance or something, and that can make it hard to feel kind of self-acceptance, that's very difficult. Like, if you're in an industry where everybody is saying that you're doing something wrong, we see this in a lot of industries. You know, think of like police officers, who after there was a lot of criticism of police officers, then police officers said, it's very hard for me to do my job because I feel like when I tell someone I'm a cop, everybody's judging me. Or like when troops came home from Vietnam in the United States, they said, wow, like I went through this very difficult job, and now nobody even appreciates that. People think that I'm doing something bad. Sex workers have a similar thing where They'd say like, oh, people think that I wouldn't be a good mother. In some cases, sex workers can have their parental rights imperiled because They're participating in the legal industry, and then judges will look disfavorably on that, and so there's this kind of collective. Negative judgment, a collective stigma against them, and just living in a stigmatized state like that can be really hard on a person, I completely agree, um. And I also think that You know, so part of it is like the stigma does make The job worse, um, people's attitudes around sex works make the job work. I think that the stigma also applies to the men who pay for sex, um, because I also don't think that should be stigmatized, and You know, there's a lot of reasons that men might pay for sex, and A lot of women are choosing their sexual partners based on financial considerations, even if they're not sex workers, and those women are not stigmatized, and I think men get that, and I think sometimes men might have a preference for sex work for reasons that, like, it's it's better with their lifestyle, or they can't find a willing sexual partner without paying them, and, you know, they're maybe like low status men. Or men who kind of don't have as much money might be able to like access sex work in a way that's like, You know, if you're really rich, then a person might want to be with you for your money, like Donald Trump or whatever, even if you're not, like, a great looker, you're not super charismatic, you know, we can still see women marrying those guys for money, but men who have less money, less disposable income, less of ability to set somebody up with life. It could be really hard for them to find an intimate partner who's willing, and if they're paying for a sex worker, that's also really stigmatizing, and that's also a real harm against them that they feel like people are judging them or that they can't be open about. How they find intimate partners, and so it goes both ways. I think that the stigma is so harmful to the sex workers, the people who pay for sex. On, on both ends, like.

22:47 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and at the end of the day, probably what we should care most about is whether uh the interaction there, I mean the transaction wherever you want to call it is consensual,

22:59 Jessica Flanigan: right? Yeah, and I think that um, You know, think about massage therapy. Like, have you ever like heard a person be like, Oh, I gotta like, uh, skip happy hour after work cause I'm gonna go get a massage. And you would never be like, OK, weird that you told me that, that you're just gonna like go pay somebody to like touch your body for 45 minutes, like, uh, you know, like, we would never, we'd be like, OK, yeah, like I saw a chiropractor or whatever, and like people will say all the time that they're like paying people to touch their bodies or to do bodily services that they find pleasurable or improve their life or their mental health in some way, going to therapy, and we're all totally open and fine with it. Um, AND so I kind of think. For sex work, it will never be the same because of the things they said about institution of marriage and monogamy and how people feel very threatened by their partner potentially seeing a sex worker, but I would like it to be more like massage therapy.

24:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and sometimes we go to the doctor or we are hospitalized, and the doctor, he or she or the nurses have to touch us as well to take care of us.

24:13 Jessica Flanigan: Right, yeah. And if you found out that somebody, you know, did a job like that, where they were doing physical labor to provide intimate services to somebody with, you know, reproductive medicine, for example, something like that. Yeah, that's very helpful to people. That's a valuable service. You wouldn't stigmatize it. I personally think that If someone like, I don't understand, people will sometimes say like, oh well, like imagine, like if someone you knew, like your sister were a sex worker, like wouldn't you be like, oh, that's so gross, like, she's just like seeing all these men all the time. I think this all the time when I go to the dentist, that like, People who work at dentists, they're just like putting their hands in people's mouths, like 15 miles a day, and they're just like in there, and it's like uh, like I get like such an ick from dentistry, and I can imagine like a bizarre world of aliens could look at Earth and they're like, oh my God, there's these offices on every corner in strip malls all over. The world where people just show up and pay other people to just like put their hands in their mouth and like move things around and like oof and like pull stuff out and it's like, oh that's so gross. And then they would see like sex work and they're like, oh look, and like those people are having a good time, like it's like if we just look at like all of our history of like sexual taboo out of our heads, it's definitely not the grossest kind of work. That's dentistry.

25:49 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I mean I think that of course, but Yeah, and of course I think that people, of course they can have their own eks, their own their own personal preferences, that's perfectly fine, but going from there to stigmatizing whatever kind of activity you find gross or disgusting or even wanting it banned from society, I mean, that's not OK.

26:17 Jessica Flanigan: That's my view. I'm not trying to make dentistry illegal. I'm, I myself go to the dentist. I just couldn't be me.

26:25 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, right. So let me ask you another thing that because this is an argument that we hear very often from, uh, again, people who are against sex work. They claim that sex work is always exploitative. Uh, WHAT do you reply to that?

26:44 Jessica Flanigan: The word exploitation is such a distraction in my view, because there's two ways we could think about it. One way you could think about exploitation is anytime that there's a really significant asymmetry in bargaining power in an economic exchange. So, like one person really, really, really needs the exchange to happen, and then the other person has a huge amount of power that that one that exchange is gonna make a difference to them, take it or leave it, kind of. Um, SO on that view, You know, if I have a life saving anti-venom, and you've been bitten by a snake, and I want to sell it to you, even if I sell it to you at a pretty fair price, I can't help but exploit you, because you need the anti-venom so much more than I need to sell it to you. I don't need it at all. I haven't been bitten by a snake. Um, AND if you think of that kind of power asymmetry definition of exploitation, then it's gonna be very hard to differentiate. The kinds of markets that we really, really want there to be, like markets in emergency medical services or pharmaceuticals, from Exploitative markets. It's gonna be hard to have any structural feature of a market that's exploitative, that's gonna differentiate the kinds of markets we really want to incentivize because people really, after all, do need emergency medical services and things like that, and the ones that we want to discourage like payday lending or sex work or things like that, where we feel like people are being exploited and it's not actually in their interest to have access to this exploitative market. So, that's one definition, and that's just gonna rule in a bunch of. SEEMINGLY markets that we want to have. Another way sometimes people will define exploitation is they'll say, no, no, my theory of exploitation just is moralized. It's a market where participating in the market, if you're the less advantaged person, means that your rights have been violated, um, because, for example, you had a right to assistance, or you had a right to have your basic needs met, but then, if you think that that's what's going on with exploitation, that it's like, someone has some Other unjust material deprivation. They can't meet their basic needs, they can't pay their rent, something like that. They're below a standard of sufficiency, and then the exploiter swoops in and says, I'll give you a title loan or a payday loan, or I'll let you work in my sweatshop, or I'll let you be a sex worker or something like that. Um, THEN the wrongfulness of exploitation is not, in my view, located in the exploiter who's doing more for that person who is below the standard of sufficiency than anyone else in society, it's located in the fact that that person is unjustly below a standard of sufficiency, and then you wanna ask, who's worse for that person, the sweatshop owner who swoops in and says, work in my sweatshop, or The payday lender who says, I'll give you a high interest loan, or the person who owns a brothel that says, oh, you can come work and sell sexual services, or everybody else in society who's doing absolutely nothing for this person. And so, even if you think that it's really bad that some people are unjustly below a standard of material sufficiency. The person who's exploiting them is doing more for them than literally everybody else, and so I don't think you should blame that person.

30:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so we've already discussed whether sex work is a choice or not. Another kind of argument that I hear from people who are against sex work is that it objectifies women. Uh, WHAT do you reply to that?

30:20 Jessica Flanigan: So, it might. It might objectify women, um, in the same way that like the NFL might objectify NFL players. So when we think, what is the bad thing about objectification to treat somebody as an object, it's not that you're treating them as a means, because of, again, all labor is gonna treat someone as a means, it's that you're treating them as a mere means, that like, the only thing that you're really focusing on is what they can do for you, is their instrumental value. Generally, If you're treating someone as a mere means, like you're only caring about their instrumental value. That's a red flag because it's gonna prompt you to treat them in a way where you don't treat them like a person, and you don't care about their consent, and you don't care about lying to them, and you don't care about whether or not it's fully voluntary, like, you know, you don't really care about anything about where they're coming from, um. And so people will worry about objectification sometimes because it's a red flag or it's a The thing that correlates sometimes with their rights, a person's rights are being violated because the person who's doing the objectifying isn't paying attention to the rights at all. On the other hand, if you have the assurance that there's no rights violation happening, or sometimes a person could be objectified and they don't even know that they're being objectified, like they're totally unaware of it, they suffer no harm from it in any way, um, and they fully consented to whatever the conditions were, then I kind of think like, OK, like no harm, no foul, cause it's like nobody was treated in a way where their rights were violated, it's fully consensual, they weren't deceived in any way. So all of the stuff that goes along with treating somebody fully instrumentally, where you're not tracking whether they're a full participant, all of those concerns have already been canceled out. And so then if you're treating somebody in the objectifying way where it's like, you don't really care that much about them, um, But none of their rights were violated. I kind of think like, yeah, like it could be like not a great way to interact with people, but I don't think that it's immoral, it's just that like you should really kind of consider that they're a person and like, you know, want to like, keep that top of mind, but the real problem with objectification is usually that When you treat someone like an object, you don't treat them like a full participant, and they're not consenting, and in sex work, I'm assuming that the kind of sex work I'm defending. Person's not being deceived, they are fully consenting, and so even if it's objectifying in a sense. I don't think that the problems that go along with objectification are still there. There is a philosopher, Ray Langton, who says, no, no, it can still be there, because if people get really used to viewing women as sex objects, then it'll make it so that they're not paying attention to women's consent. That they stop hearing women, even if a woman says no, they hear that as performative, or they hear that as not really saying no, because, you know, a person might have watched a lot of objectifying pornography and then gone into the habit of like not hearing women as being full agents or full authors of their lives. And so she thinks that, If there is an industry like pornography, is her case, that really fully objectifies women, it could make it so that people tend to view women as objects more generally and treat women as objects without caring about their consent. That seems to me to be partly an empirical hypothesis, that's not true, um, but even if it were true, the thing that you would say is that you should have very strong protections for women's rights and women's consent, um, not that you should ban the porn necessarily, like you, you wouldn't want to limit the thing that causes the bad behavior, you'd want to prohibit the bad behavior. It's a similar structure of an argument when people say, oh, like when people do drugs, they don't show up for work, they steal your TV. Their bad boyfriends, so we should prohibit drugs. But it's like, well, wait a minute, just fire people who don't show up for work, break up with your bad boyfriend. Arrest a person for stealing people's TVs, like, it's like, it might be that a practice is correlated with unethical behavior, but That doesn't mean that that's a reason to focus on the practice. You could still hold people accountable for the unethical behavior.

34:40 Ricardo Lopes: And also I don't know what you think about this, but when I hear this kind of argument regarding objectification, um, the impression I get is that the issue people have here is with sexually objectifying women, but doesn't that also happen at least to some extent even in our romantic relationships? I mean, we, we are also attracted to our partner's body, right? It's not just. Their personality traits or whatever. I mean that's part of the deal, I guess so objectification, uh, it's not always a matter of just uh reading the other person of all their rights or their humanity. It's sometimes it's just a matter of including some sexual attraction or something like that, right? And that's there's nothing wrong with it.

35:39 Jessica Flanigan: That's a good point, and I mean, there's some research and people who will suggest that a lot of women, their own sexual desire will be very responsive, and so, women will want to be viewed a little bit as a sex object by their partners, they want to be viewed as primarily sexually res desirable, and like, their own desire for men is responding to the men viewing them as a sex object or as a person who's beautiful or something like that. And so, you might think that if a person is like very, very strong responsive desire, that they might really value being seen in that way, like, and so online sex work might select for people who have very strong responsive desire and want to be viewed in that way. And in that case, they would have a taste for that kind of labor, that could be like a a thing that they really like about the industry.

36:30 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've heard, uh, for example, porn stars and other kinds of sex workers actually saying that uh they like the idea of of being seen nude by other people and stuff like that, so it's just their own experience,

36:49 Jessica Flanigan: I guess. I know, and I think a lot of people have that in different forms, like, you talk to a lot of professors, a lot of professors are performing their own intelligence. And like, a thing that they really value about their job is that other people will ask them to, like, come on a podcast and tell them that they're so smart, and I'm like, they'll get to be seen as smart by other people, and they have responsive desires to be viewed as objects of intellectual. Wisdom or intellectual capacity like to be viewed as good in this way, um, and no one thinks like, oh my gosh, it's so gross that like, Everybody is just viewing you as like a, a cake factory, like, you know, no, I don't think that, like I think like everybody is performing some trait of themselves that they value, and so I don't think it's wrong for sex workers to perform a trait that they value about themselves.

37:42 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, it's like, oh my God, nobody cares about me, they only care about my ideas.

37:47 Jessica Flanigan: I know, right. Yeah,

37:51 Ricardo Lopes: OK,

37:51 Jessica Flanigan: so Peter Singer, he's just being used for his interesting takes on animal rights, yeah.

37:58 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so let's get into the more uh legal aspects of uh sex work here. So, Do you think that the possibility of selling and buying sex should be treated as a matter of rights?

38:15 Jessica Flanigan: Yeah, I do. Oh, OK,

38:18 Ricardo Lopes: so explain, please.

38:20 Jessica Flanigan: So, in the past, it was illegal for people to have um homosexual relationships. And sex outside of the marriage context was illegal in some places, or oral sex between heterosexual couples was prohibited. Um, AND even,

38:41 Ricardo Lopes: even interracial marriage,

38:43 Jessica Flanigan: interracial marriage, there's all sorts of sexual taboos that we used to entrench into our law that made it so that people couldn't choose their sexual partners or they couldn't do certain kinds of sex acts voluntarily between people and Even the government would sort of take a stand on like what the reasons were for why people were having sex, just make sure that they were only having sex for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons, so app procreative sex was the right kind of a reason, recreational sex was the wrong, that's why, you know, people wanted to make have sodomy laws or make oral sex prohibited, things like that, um. And I feel like all of those laws were such an incursion on people's rights to privacy, and their freedom of association, and their rights to make just like the most intimate decisions about your own family. Also, throughout the past, there's been a lot of censorship of things that were seen as seditious or lewd, people's ways of expressing themselves were censored, how people could dress was censored, and here again, I think that that was such a violation of a person's just general right of self-determination, the right to say what they want, freedom of conscience, the right to do what you want with your own body. And so, I think we've made just an incredible amount of progress over the last 200 years, this kind of liberal democratic revolution and respecting people's privacy rights when it comes to intimate choices, and then their freedom of association and conscience to like make whatever decisions they want with their own minds and bodies. Great. I think sex work is one of the, you know, a few others, but it was one of the last areas where those old taboos really still have a grip on people, and it's absolutely just none of their business. And so, I think that a person has a right to accept money from another person, a person has a right to give money to another person, a person has a right to choose who they have sex with and under what conditions, and you put those three rights together, and now you have a right to sell sex and to pay for sex. That's it.

40:46 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SO, uh, uh, perhaps this will be a good point to introduce this question because earlier we also talked about, uh, feminism and how you also have a feminist approach to sex work because sometimes I get this sense that, uh, you know, people who are against sex work, um, what they are against more broadly, I, I'm not saying everyone is like this. But at least some people, what they are against more broadly is uh the free expression of women's sexuality and women having uh the right and the possibility of er um having sex with whom they want when they want either in and out or outside of marriage because many times um the same people. Who present themselves as being against sex workers are also the same who talk against hookup culture and against casual sex and all of that. I mean, as a feminist, do you get that idea that perhaps being against sex work is more broadly against uh being against um the free expression of female sexuality?

42:06 Jessica Flanigan: I do think that sometimes there is that where um And we'll see this both on the left and the right. So, you know, people on the right will say, you know, when I was a kid, they, they used to wear purity rings, like, you know, encouraging women to save themselves for their husbands, that kind of thing, and that was against hookup culture. And then on the left, people would be against like Girls gone wild and fraternity culture and um. You know, the way that hookup culture objectifies women by making it so that women feel more pressure to have casual sex with men, so that they could maybe rope in a partner, that kind of thing. Um, SO you see it kind of on both ends. I actually think both of those sides kind of have a good point in some ways. Um, I think that We can see cultural equilibrium when it comes to the culture behind sex. It's gonna depend a little bit on like sex ratios and what Men and women and heterosexual couples are interested in, and so I think it's plausible that for women, and I teach on a college campus, for women on college campuses, they would have a preference for less hookup culture, but when there's like a sex ratio where there's fewer available or eligible men relative to the supply of women, then the women feel pressured in that context to like, be more sexually available or to signal more sexual availability. Because they're competing with other women for culture, for for men in that culture, and so it's like the men have more bargaining power, and it is gonna like lead to a kind of more sexually permissive. Uh, HOOKUP culture, and like, I don't think women collectively. I think collectively women are causing this as a kind of collective action problem, and then it's, you know, they would all prefer to have more restrictive norms, or not all, but a lot of them would prefer to have more restrictive norms, but they feel kind of pressure to like, get men and it's, it's just tough. And I have a friend who teaches a religious college, which is the opposite, and the men, you know, they, they don't prefer that, they, they, they wish that it was more permissive towards casual sex and that they didn't have to marry somebody first. And so, You know, that we see that across cultures that the sex ratio is gonna determine kind of what the sexual norms are internal to the culture, and there can be these collective action problems where everybody wishes it were different, but here they are in this competition for partners, and like, That's their situation, um. And so I, I am sympathetic to when people say like, oh, like hookup culture is a problem for women, and purity culture is a problem for women or a problem for men in some cases. I totally get that, um. But I think that a lot of times when people find themselves in those difficult choice situations, The thing that they need are just more options, and so, you know, men also have like a lot of um Difficulty with the current dating equilibrium, you know, they'll say like, online dating is so hard, women are selecting on a very narrow range of traits. If I don't have that very narrow narrow range of traits, a lot of those women are competing for a narrower pool of guys, and they're just ruling out a bunch of other guys that would have been great, um, and like, they're also struggling out there, and like, I see those guys too, and I'm sympathetic. For all of these people, I'm like, what you need is more freedom. It's like, you just need more options, like, you need to get off campus. If you, if you really hate the dating equilibrium in your environment, it'd be really great if you could access, like, a different possible pool of partners, like, that would be wonderful for you. And so, I'm sympathetic to the people that think that there can be, like, better or worse. Equilibria. Sometimes people who defend sex work will say they'll say that they're sex positive, and then they say that they should be like sex maximalists, like, everybody should get over monogamy, like people shouldn't be so prudish, like, everybody should just like be more liberated in this way. I don't think everybody wants that. I think a lot of people will have a preference for more monogamy, a slower pace in the relationship. That's OK, like that's all right too. Like, that's not, I don't want to pathologize that and say that that's like sex negative or that that's like, It's just people have different preferences. Um, WHAT I want is for everybody's preferences to, like, be able to be more out in the open, for them to have as many options as possible to find somebody that will meet them where they are.

46:44 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, getting into legal approaches to sex work, what do you make of the Nordic model, because many people who want to I don't know, at least regulate sex work to some extent, defend the Nordic model. So what do you think of it?

47:07 Jessica Flanigan: Yeah, my co-author Laurie Watson in the sex workbook, she defends the Nordic model, and the advantage of the Nordic model is that Ideally, if it's ideally enforced, it will protect women who sell sex from experiencing criminal penalties for selling sex. And so, you know, if you wanna help women by prohibiting sex work, It would be weird to do it the way that we do it in the United States, where women can be arrested for selling sex, and so it's a strange way to help somebody by taking away their kids, making it so that they can't work, and putting, putting them in jail. Like, that's not helpful. The Nordic model takes that insight and says, no, no, we're not gonna criminalize the sale of sex, we'll only criminalize the purchasing of sex, we'll criminalize the men, um, because they're the ones who are exploiting women or potentially mistreating women, but I also think if you think that sex work is bad for women, A thing that's not gonna help them is making it so that the only men that they can find as available clients are men who are willing to violate the law, and who are, you're gonna select or structure it in a way where you're setting those women up to have a much more risky, risk acceptant clientele, and that's definitely gonna shrink the size of the sex market, because if you make something illegal, fewer people will do it. And so, fewer women will become sex workers because it'll be more competitive and less lucrative, and there will be less of a market for them, and so you will reduce the number of women who become sex workers who otherwise You know, would have chosen that choice in a more permissive model. Um, BUT the remaining sex workers, of which there will be fewer cause the market will be smaller, will have a much more dangerous job. And in addition to that, Often, if something is still an illegal or gray market or criminalized industry, the people who are participating in that industry are going to be involved in other illegal activity, and then it is the case that the women in that industry are going to still be subject to more discretionary interference by law enforcement. And so, if the goal of the Nordic model is to protect women from criminal penalties or being interfered with by law enforcement, it doesn't fully protect them, and there still are going to be disincentives for them to, for example, call the police if they're assaulted or somebody steals from. The, because to do so would be to maybe put the people that they're working with in danger, or to give the police some pretext to investigate them for other kind of illegal conduct, or it could threaten their parental rights or their housing situation. And so, I don't think that the Nordic model really achieves its goal as being better for women than the criminal model that we have in the United States. Instead, I think it should be more like New Zealand, where it's a Regulated bodily service industry.

50:02 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, TELL us more about that. You defend decriminalization, correct? So, uh, could you explain your position?

50:10 Jessica Flanigan: Um, SO, if we think about sex work as full fully decriminalized, um, a good analogy would be exotic dancing, as it has somewhere, or pornography, um, where, where it's legal to make pornography, or massage therapy. Like, all of those are industries that have some kind of erotic service, which are regulated based on some occupational health and safety, which I even don't like myself, but if you want it, take it, um. But there's a path, there's a path for this to just be a normalized legal industry. And even in, you know, New Zealand, there's a case where a woman was working at a brothel and was able to successfully sue her managers for sexual harassment, though she was a sex worker, because the terms and conditions of her labor included sexual labor, but didn't include sexual labor with respect to the management. And so, those types of, like, workplace protections that I view as kind of like, You know, some of the occupational health and safety regulations, I view myself as overly paternalistic, but if the thing you really care about is occupational health and safety, having it fully regulated, like other kinds of industries, and like fully into the normalized economy, that I think is like a really good step of just giving people the assurance that they can call the police if they're assaulted, if someone steals from them, they can, you know, sue their manager for violating labor law, whatever the labor law is. Um, SO I think that that's a That's a better approach for people. Just make it like other kinds of work.

51:45 Ricardo Lopes: And I mean, what would you say are the main differences between people who defend the Nordic model and people like you who defend the criminalization, because it's, it also seems to me that people who defend the Nordic model come from the position that sex work is bad and ideally it shouldn't exist, and people who defend the criminalization. Uh, I mean, don't think there's anything wrong with sex work necessarily,

52:19 Jessica Flanigan: right? Yeah, I mean, the goal of the Nordic model is sometimes stated as abolition, where they just think there shouldn't be markets in sex, like people shouldn't, um, be buying or selling sexual services, and I don't think that abolition is a feasible goal, and I don't think it's a good goal. And another thing about the decriminalization approach is that The Nordic model, because it has this kind of gender asymmetry between the buyer and the seller, it really is saying that it's wrong for a man to pay for sex. But I don't think that it's wrong for a man to pay for sex. I think men have rights to pay for sex, because I think men have rights to also choose their partners and to give money for their partners. And so, everywhere allows sugaring, which is men, rich men dating women, I guess, in exchange for presents and gifts. Sugaring pays less than sex work, it's a worse job for women, but everybody permits that because it's seen as within the purview of dating rather than in the purview of industry. Um, WOMEN who do sugaring, they're not paying taxes on it, they have few legal protections, as, you know. Workers because they're not viewed as workers. At that point, like if a man can pay a woman in that way, I think you should have a right to Just pay a sex worker directly, and I think that men, some men really benefit from having access to that, and so, I don't think we should like pathologize or stigmatize men. I don't think it's wrong for a man to be a buyer of sex, and so because it's not wrong, it shouldn't be illegal, like it is in the Nordic model.

53:55 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, one last topic that I would like to ask you about because it is brought up a lot and of course it's a very important issue to discuss. Um, WHAT do you make of sex trafficking associated with sex work? First of all, I mean, I know that um sometimes, I, I mean that there's data that uh uh I mean, sex work itself doesn't cause as much sex trafficking as people think, or at least some legal approaches to sex work like decriminalization would reduce sex trafficking instead of other approaches like the Nordic model. I mean, I've heard arguments like that. Um, I mean, what do you think about that and how do you think we can best fight it?

54:49 Jessica Flanigan: I mean, anybody who says that they have good data when it comes to human trafficking and sex work is not telling the truth. Like the data we have is like, It's very poor. A lot of the studies are gonna come from people who are like rescued from sex trafficking, but then, of course, those people will often have incentives from the people who are helping them to say that it was sex trafficking and to really play up the magnitude of this. There is definitely some Forced labor, you know, coercion, people who can't leave, people who have their passports taken, and then they're pushed into sex work. That comes from a constellation of like horrible injustices, like immigration restrictions, partly, that's one, The fact that it's illegal, which means that people have a lot of fear going to the police, they're dealing with a criminal clientele, people who, you know, select into that industry, it's very difficult for people to get out. Um, SO that does happen, and people who, you know, disagree with me, people who are proponents of criminalization or the Nordic model, they are right that if the size of the market for sex decreases. In general, then the proportion of the market, which is trafficking, might stay the same, but the net amount of people who are trafficked will also decrease because there's just less of a general sex market in this society, and so, because fewer people are paying for sex, there's fewer sex buyers out there, there's less of an incentive for people who are trafficked to enter into that industry. On the other hand, The more regulated an industry is, like, the more restrictive the regulations are, the harder it is to monitor, prevent, and punish trafficking. And so if you're looking for like missing and exploited children, if you're trying to get people to come out and prosecute people who have coerced them in some way, All of that enforcement stuff is gonna be much more difficult if you don't permit sex workers to screen clients online, to have dual verification, to have facial recognition of all sex workers online, so that you can screen to look for missing and exploited people and on these online markets, marketplaces, and so, it's sort of tricky cause it's like, yes, like if you shrink the size of the market, then there will be a the proportion of people who are exploited or trafficked. Might go up, but the net number of them will go down because the market's smaller. However, finding those people will become, like, much more difficult, deterrence becomes much more difficult. And so, it's just like kind of a trade-off system where, like, no one really knows what the perfect institutional arrangement would be to fully limit trafficking. And it's also tricky in places like Europe, especially, because of the border system, where people can kind of move around, there's different enforcement regimes. So, if you're an island like New Zealand, it's much easier for you to prevent and punish and track all of this. But if it's a place where there's a porous border, it's like, you know, tricky to track people down across the borders. Yeah, like, that is a legitimate concern, that is tough. Um, AND there's labor trafficking, you know, agricultural labor, all sorts of other kinds of human trafficking for labor. It's a really difficult problem, and I'm not like discounting that in any way. I think Because there's a minority of the industry that does have severe coercion, like non-voluntary human forced labor. That is awful, but I don't think that that fact is a reason to ban the entire industry for everybody else. Um, THAT'S a different kind of activity that should be criminalized, but you shouldn't criminalize the whole industry because a subset of the people in that industry. ARE having forced labor. So think about knowledge of agricultural labor, there's a lot of human trafficking in agricultural labor as well. People, you know, they think they're going to do one thing, someone takes their passports, they can't get out, they're not getting the money, it like escalates, they can't get a ticket home, now they're in a ton of debt, people back home are going after their family, the whole thing, everything we hear with the sex trafficking, we also see in agricultural labor. But nobody would say, We should ban Blueberry farming and almond farming in California, because there's a lot of people who are victims of human trafficking within that industry. Like, it doesn't fall like that's the fact that it's blueberry picking or almond farming or whatever, it has nothing to do, the problem is that somebody was kidnapped and their passports were stolen and that they can't leave, like, that is a crime, not the almond farming, you know, like that's like a different thing, um. And so I don't want to discount the possibility of trafficking. I think it does happen. Another thing that does happen though, that's not human trafficking is sometimes. People who talk about sex trafficking will have a very, very, very permissive definition of what sex trafficking is, that's not the kind of sex trafficking that you probably have in mind when you're thinking about it. So sometimes people will say, if there's a third party who profits from the sale of sex, then the sex worker has been trafficked. And that definition is supposed to get rid of like pimping and like brothel owners and all that other stuff, and No, it's kind of saying like, if, if a sex worker is giving some of her wages or is like beholden to a person, then we're going to define her as being trafficked. But sometimes the sex worker is giving a person their wages in exchange for security, or screening and vetting clients, or because that's a romantic partner of theirs, or because there's like substance use disorder issues and there's some kind of exchange related to substance use that's also motivating the person to sell sex. And so, all of those situations, I don't think we should call those things trafficking, because imagine that a woman, you know, has a boyfriend. And she's paying the rent, but there's some kind of like substance issue, and she's paying the rent by going out into the world and working as a barista at a coffee shop. Now it is true that like, You know, there's a man who's like living entirely off of her labor, doing barista work, and she's paying the rent, and she's only with him because there's this kind of like substance issue that like he's a supplier of hers or something, but we wouldn't say that the coffee shop where she works is like complicit in her being trafficked into forced barista labor because there's a third party living back at home who profits from the sale of her coffee making services. Like that's not. The way that we should generally think about how forced labor works. And so, I do think that it's true that there is sex trafficking, but I also think that the definition of sex trafficking that some people use does inflate the magnitude of the problem by defining any third party profiting from the sale as being a trafficker, and that's not true.

1:02:10 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, and I think that the point that you made there, uh, when you mentioned that for example we can also find cases of, uh, very unfortunate, of course, human trafficking in agriculture, in construction, and so on. I mean, you never hear, or at least I've never heard anyone making the case or making the claim that then we should abolish construction or abolish agriculture. Or some completely weird thing like that. I mean, I, I think that when it comes to sex work, uh, they are already motivated to, because of their own moral values to, uh uh I mean they've already arrived at the conclusion that sex work has to be abolished because of how they moralize it and then they come up with the sex trafficking argument just to support their conclusion.

1:03:10 Jessica Flanigan: Yeah, that's my thought.

1:03:12 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. OK, so, uh, Doctor Flanagan, uh, just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet? Sure,

1:03:22 Jessica Flanigan: it's Jess Flanagan.com. It's my website, my work up there. Yeah, check it out.

1:03:28 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I will be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and thank you for the fascinating, fascinating conversation.

1:03:38 Jessica Flanigan: Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. It was great talking to you. Those are such good questions. Appreciate it.

1:03:45 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognon, Michel Jonathan Labrarinth, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka, Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltonin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel Pan Scortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophanus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Di Acosta, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlomon Negro, Al Nick Cortiz and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.