Do not pity the prostitute. Instead, fight for her rights.
So runs the latest mantra on the cultural left, which has embraced people in the sex trade (sellers, buyers, pimps) as a key component of the omnicause.
No longer derided as hookers or harlots, mourned as fallen women or sugarcoated as high-end call girls, the “sex worker”—a job title that sounds like the handiwork of an Orwellian HR department but is considered by many progressives the most inclusive and respectful term—is a free-market operative like any other. “Sex work is work,” say those who see prostitution as a form of choice, empowerment and bodily autonomy, inextricably tied to abortion rights, human rights, HIV/AIDS advocacy, trans rights and the broader labor-organizing movement.
From the Academy Awards to TikTok to gender studies seminars, any suggestion that prostitution is something shameful, misogynistic or oppressive is dismissed as moralistic pearlclutching, the province of sex-negative “fundamentalist feminists,” right-wingers and SWERFs (Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists). A UCLA course describes it as “erotic labor.” At Tufts, “Sex and Money: Anthropology of Sex Work” interrogates “moral panics about ‘white slavery’ and ‘sex trafficking.’”
In an impassioned segment in 2022, John Oliver declared, “Sex work is inarguably labor. It is a job. And people do it for the same reason people do any job,” equating prostitution with making sandwiches at Subway. On a recent episode of “ Hacks ,” a woman would rather date a sex worker (in this case a man) than an aspiring magician; on the new Apple TV+ series “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” OnlyFans is a perfectly fine way to pay the bills.
This ideological reframing may have manifested itself most ardently in 2025, when Sean Baker, who won a best picture Oscar for “Anora,” dedicated his award to “the sex-worker community.” “My hope is that these stories humanize sex workers,” he told the audience several months before at the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s a career, a job and one that should be respected and, in my opinion, decriminalized and not in any way regulated.”
As Bill Maher put it , “Whores are having a moment.”
Like other left-wing theories (police abolitionism, “microlooting”), these attitudes seem to have jetted in from nowhere. But even on the left, the idea that sex work is a career choice is intensely disputed.
Many liberals, feminists and anti-trafficking organizations object to reframing prostitution as a liberating enterprise rather than an inherently oppressive system—yet another way men with money and power exploit society’s most vulnerable. In their view, Jeffrey Epstein serves as Exhibit A.
Their aim is to lower demand for prostitution by strengthening laws against pimps and buyers while treating prostitutes not as criminals but as victims, a framework referred to as the Nordic or Equality model, or partial decriminalization.
On the other side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.
Both sides condemn legalization, which exists in places like Amsterdam and which imposes a strong regulatory system—but for very different reasons: the first, because it normalizes exploitation and the latter because it limits free trade.
Engaging in this debate requires entering two radically different worldviews. Each side has its own set of experts and data and cites “lived experience.” Each argues that its approach increases safety while the opposing view exacerbates trafficking and violence. The two camps are so bitterly divided, they don’t even speak the same language.
‘Why Deny Poor Women the Option?’
At 17 and still in high school, Kaytlin Bailey began working as an hourly escort. Legally speaking, this made her a victim of sex trafficking, which includes anyone prostituted under age 18. But Bailey saw her work as exciting and empowering. In her 20s, she moved into “sugaring,” a patronage model in which a wealthier man offers financial support, gifts or services in exchange for companionship and sex.
“Older dudes are into, like, helping younger women solve their financial problems,” Bailey explained on her “Oldest Profession Podcast” in 2017. “You don’t even have to reveal that you’re a sex worker. That’s what the whole sugaring thing is about. They don’t want you to be a pro, but I mean, you are.”
Today Bailey is the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advocate for sex-worker rights. She takes a dim view of those who oppose decriminalization. “From the beginning of the feminist movement, there has unfortunately been a cohort of women who want to police other women’s choices,” Bailey, now 39, said in an interview. “It’s mostly white, mostly middle-class women…They often conspire with chauvinist, religious, conservative organizations that they believe will support their rights.”
Bailey’s views would once have been considered fringe. But what began as a radical movement in 1973 with a group called Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) and later raged throughout the feminist “sex wars” of the ’80s, ultimately gained broader cultural traction in the 2010s. A growing discourse in academia increasingly wrapped sex workers into the sweep of oppressed and underserved identities, often linked to HIV awareness and prevention, labor rights and LGBTQ issues.
Over the next few decades, a smattering of sex-worker-led groups in developing countries sprang up and won the support of NGO workers, progressive reformers and philanthropists. In 2002, prostitution was legalized in Germany and the following year, decriminalized in New Zealand. Human Rights Watch officially staked out a position calling sex work a human right in 2014. Soon it was followed by a bevy of other progressive organizations, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the World Health Organization.
“All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW from 1993 to 2022, tweeted in 2015.
“For me, human rights in essence is about human agency,” Roth said in an interview. “It’s about respecting the individual to make his or her choices as much as possible. The sex worker can choose to do sex work, or she can choose something else.”
Whereas traditionally, women’s rights organizations viewed prostitution as a form of commercial sexual exploitation and a crime of abuse steeped in male power on a continuum with domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape, this new framework meant that prostitutes weren’t victims, they were trailblazers.
“A Sex Worker Explains Why Sex Work Should Never Be Illegal” ran one headline in Refinery29, a website aimed at millennial women, in 2016, chastising Hollywood celebrities such as Anne Hathaway, Lena Dunham and Kate Winslet for opposing decriminalization. “Why LGBT and Sex Worker Rights Go Hand in Hand” HuffPost explained that same year. “Why Sex Work Is Real Work” Teen Vogue told its third-wave feminist followers.
These views have prompted outcry among anti-sex trafficking groups and many women’s rights groups. When Amnesty International updated its policy in 2016 to consider sex work a matter of personal agency and implied consent, critics included Jimmy Carter . They noted Amnesty’s historic failure to apply a gender lens, pointing to its longtime delay in considering female genital mutilation a human rights violation. In a statement, Amnesty said its position remains unchanged.
“Historically, the human rights movement has excluded the real lives of many women by supposing that ‘sex work’ was acceptable—as if women selling their bodies were freely chosen,” Gloria Steinem told The Journal in a statement. “It seems to be long past time to delink ‘sex’ and ‘work.’”
In the U.S., the decriminalization model is connected to left-leaning efforts against policing and incarceration and in favor of marijuana legalization. Funding comes overwhelmingly from progressive organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Oak Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, which in 2015 published a report , “Ten Reasons to Decriminalize Sex Work.” Between 2018 and 2023, Open Society dispersed $8.9 million in funds through 97 grants to sex-worker rights and through a spokesperson said it takes pride in “advancing the rights, health and dignity of marginalized communities, including people involved in sex work.”
MacKenzie Scott has also focused on sexual and gender-based violence, giving millions to multiple organizations that advocate for decriminalization and support sex-worker rights. In 2022, for example, Scott gave $20 million and an additional undisclosed grant in 2025 to Mama Cash, a nonprofit whose numerous aims include decriminalization .
In 2019 Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley became the first member of Congress to introduce legislation calling for full decriminalization of prostitution. Advocating for sex-worker rights has become a way to prove one’s progressive bona fides, and it’s part of the party platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. On the other extreme, the Libertarian Party likewise supports decriminalization as part of its belief in deregulation. The uniting vision is freedom and choice.
‘I Defined Myself as a High-End Escort’
If you’d asked Ava Kamdem whether she was a prostitute during the three years she spent having paid sex with men as part of a large-scale trafficking ring, she would have scoffed at the suggestion. “I defined myself as a high-end escort,” Kamdem, who is now 30 and a 2025 graduate of Columbia University, said in an interview. Not a sex worker either? “If someone asked me that I’d have said, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’ I’d never heard that term at the time.”
Her buyers had no way to know that she was a victim of trafficking. “We were trained by our trafficker from day one to tell buyers, ‘I’m in this by choice. I don’t have a trafficker. I don’t have a pimp. It’s just me,’” she said. “It’s a veil buyers like to hide behind.”
Those men are kidding themselves, Kamdem says now. Over the years, her johns beat and raped her repeatedly, held her at gunpoint and threatened her life. (Data varies, but between 45% and 92% of prostitutes experience violence on the job.) Though her trafficker assaulted her multiple times, she saw the trafficking operation as offering a degree of protection, she said. “I perceived the real threat to be the buyers.”
While prostitution is still illegal in most of the country, in the past five years, several states have come down harder on demand. California, Louisiana, Maine and New Hampshire have increased penalties for sex buyers while in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina, the purchase of sex acts has been made a felony first offense. According to an analysis by World Without Exploitation, an anti-trafficking group, 20 states are currently considering legislation to elevate penalties for buyers.
In 2023, Maine went even further, becoming the first state to introduce the Nordic model, also enabling women previously convicted of selling sex to seal their records.
Recent efforts to decriminalize prostitution in the U.S. have been less successful. In March , such a measure was abandoned in Colorado the week before it was slated for a vote. Last year, similar bills in Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island and Illinois also failed to pass.
In New York, two opposing bills—one decriminalizing prostitution, which was supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani when he was still an assemblymember, and the other enacting the Nordic model—are still under consideration.
State Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat and longtime advocate for LGBTQ and women’s rights, has been excoriated by some progressives for supporting the Nordic bill. Having heard from prostituted people about the abuse, drug addiction and rape they endured, Krueger said in an interview, “How could I ever justify supporting a system that was forcing people into horrible lives?”
Key to the Nordic model, now implemented in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Ireland and Israel, is creating an exit strategy for prostituted people. In France, which includes social services for people leaving the sex trade, data shows that of 2,102 people who have gone through an exit program since 2017, 91% are now employed elsewhere. Under the new law, 11,491 men have been fined for purchasing sexual acts through 2025; between 2016 and 2023 1,243 men were arrested for doing so with minors.
Advocates of total decriminalization argue that removing laws that regulate and criminalize prostitution helps combat trafficking. They say ready access to the commercial sex reduces the demand for sex-trafficked persons and enables sex workers to assist law enforcement in cracking down on sex traffickers and other bad actors.
In fact, some research indicates that when prostitution becomes decriminalized or legalized, the market expands, increasing both demand and the flow of trafficking. In Germany, sex tourism has boomed with an estimated one million men buying sex each day , coming from all over the world as sex tourists, a 30% increase in the market. Berlin now has over 500 brothels. Sex-trafficking cases also increased significantly in Germany following legalization.
“The relevant question has never been about whether women have a right to sell their bodies,” said Yasmin Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, an advocacy group. “It’s always been about whether men should have the right to use their agency and enormous privileges—which are currently on display for the entire country and world to see—to purchase sex acts from some of the most vulnerable in our society.”
Bekah Charleston, 44, was sexually assaulted in fifth grade, raped at 14 and trafficked at 17. For the next decade, she worked both as a sex-trafficked person and then in prostitution.
“You don’t just magically get out at 18,” Charleston, who is now an anti-trafficking advocate, said. “Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.”
