Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Volume 24 Issue 2

2017

Working Sex Words

Anita Bernstein
Brooklyn Law School

Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjgl

Part of the Law and Gender Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, and the Sexuality and
the Law Commons

Recommended Citation
Anita Bernstein, Working Sex Words, 24 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 221 (2017).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjgl/vol24/iss2/2

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 WORKING SEX WORDS

nita ernstein*

INTRODUCTION

Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls
on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You
need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a
law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with
the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employ-
ment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellec-
tual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic.1
In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and
purchase of sex, you have only one modest constraint: Omit a short list of
nouns. Describe paid-for sex as a regulated activity without using the words
“prostitute” (including “prostitution”), “sex work” (or “sex worker”), “legal-
ization,” “decriminalization,” “john,” “pimp,” “madam,” “trafficking,” and
“Nordic model” or “Swedish model.”
The premise of the exercise may be familiar from a game marketed
under two names, Taboo and Catchphrase. When competing, a member of
a team is told a word or phrase and then has to convey its meaning to
teammates from whom the word has been hidden. Rules constrain players:

The clue-giver is allowed to make any physical gesture and give

almost any verbal clue to get his/her team to say the word. But
you may NOT:

• Say a word that RHYMES with the word.

• Give the FIRST LETTER of the word.

* Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. This Essay
benefited from workshops at Brooklyn and Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos
Aires, and from the insights and suggestions of Heidi Brown, Jim Friedman, Katie
Holmes, Claire Wasserman, and Brian Lee. I acknowledge with gratitude the
research support I received from Brooklyn Law School. Extra thanks to Sarah Swan
and Mae Kuykendall.
1. See generally Vanessa E. Munro & Marina Della Giusta, The Regulation of Prostitu-
tion: Contemporary Contexts and Comparative Perspectives, in DEMANDING SEX: CRIT-
ICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE REGULATION OF PROSTITUTION 1, 1–5 (Vanessa E.
Munro & Marina Della Giusta eds., 2008) (adverting to breadth of legal approaches
to address prostitution).

221
222 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

• Say A PART OF THE WORD in the clue (i.e., shoe for shoe
horn).2

But why, you may reasonably wonder, would anyone discuss an issue
in American legal regulation by copying a game that demands dodging?
Evasion is anathema to regulation, an endeavor that references an activity
and then tries to give intelligible guidance about what participants in the
regulated sector must, must not, and may do. Playing Taboo/Catchphrase
about the law of sex-selling and -buying seems unproductive, to say the
least.
Bear with the game a little longer. In this Essay, evasion is the point.
Evasion showcases the extraordinary futility of American English with re-
spect to legal controls. Coming up with ideal language for constraining any-
thing is famously difficult, as the enormous secondary literature about the
dialogue between H.L.A. Hart and Lon Fuller over how to interpret a ban
on “vehicles in the park” attests.3 Adjectives written into regulations—“sub-
stantial,” “material,” “reasonable”—are often indeterminate.4 Persons
bound by rules might not comprehend them well enough to understand
what the law forbids them from doing. Quirks and unreliable heuristics
impede compliance. Law lives with these infirmities and others: it has no
choice.
But the problem with controls of sex-selling is more foundational.
None of the words needed to describe these controls can meet even minimal
standards of regulatory clarity. My exercise bans them not as a board game
stunt but to say they do not work. Every noun central to law and law reform
with respect to the selling and buying of sex, no exceptions, is at least one of
the following: ambiguous, misleading, too slangy to be serious, missing (in
the sense of nonexistent), or bitterly contested in a partisan divide. Prostitu-
tion, also known as sex work, has no words that law and regulation can use.
Every society that uses money regulates the buying and selling of sex,5
and one finds in the United States a federal system, whose law will occupy

2. Catch Phrase Instructions, HASBRO (1995), http://www.hasbro.com/common/in-

struct/CatchPhrase.PDF.
3. See, e.g., Frederick Schauer, A Critical Guide to Vehicles in the Park, 83 N.Y.U. L.
REV. 1109, 1110-12 (2008); Pierre Schlag, No Vehicles in the Park, 23 SEATTLE U. L.
REV. 381, 382–83, 387–89 (1999). The original articles are H.L.A. Hart, Positivism
and the Separation of Law and Morals, 71 HARV. L. REV. 593 (1958), and Lon L.
Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law—A Reply to Professor Hart, 71 HARV. L. REV.
630 (1958).
4. See Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld, The Lexical Semantics of Vague Adjectives in Normative Texts,
in VAGUENESS IN NORMATIVE TEXTS 157, 157 (Vijay K. Bhatia et al. eds., 2005).
5. See Introduction to ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PROSTITUTION AND SEX WORK, at xxv,
xxv–xxvii (Melissa Hope Ditmore ed., 2006).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 223

the observations of this Essay, multiple controls and prohibitions. Regula-

tors promulgate and enforce an extensive network of controls. Town and
county ordinances,6 state laws,7 federal statutory law,8 and international in-
struments (which American governmental actors will sometimes heed)9 ad-
dress sex-selling and buying, all the while lacking language to regulate
buying and selling sex coherently.
Governments have no choice but to regulate here, because abstaining
from interference with this activity is not an option—too many externali-
ties, or at least linked consequences. Child prostitution is the most funda-
mental of these ill effects. Any legal regime that might prefer to leave sex-
for-money exchanges alone still has to take a position on what to do when a
seller is underage. Numerous fields of law, as noted, intersect with criminal-
ized prostitution. Evidence rules cannot wait: they must take a position now
on whether a stash of condoms in a purse is or is not admissible to show
that a person was working in the sexual marketplace when arrested.10 Third
parties with no interest in paying for sex themselves or selling it need to
know whether the law will enforce a contract to exchange sex for money.11

6. See, e.g., STOREY COUNTY, NEV., CODE ch. 5.16 (2015), http://www.codepublish
ing.com/NV/StoreyCounty/#!/storeycounty05/StoreyCounty0516.html%2393 (de-
claring that brothels are permitted in the county and outlining regulations for them);
CODE OF TUSCALOOSA, ALA., § 17-36 (2017), https://library.municode.com/al/tus
caloosa/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=CDCITUAL (stating that “no person
shall own, operate, manage or keep any house of prostitution”).
7. See, e.g., NEV. REV. STAT. ANN. § 244.345(8) (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. Sess.)
(stating that in counties with populations larger than 700,000 the license board can-
not grant licenses to people seeking to operate “a house of ill fame or repute” or
another type of business employing persons for the purpose of prostitution); WASH.
REV. CODE § 13.40.213 (Westlaw through 2017 Third Spec. Sess.) (providing that
juveniles alleged to have committed prostitution offenses who have previously com-
mitted offenses can have their alleged offenses diverted if the county has a compre-
hensive program that provides safe housing and other services).
8. E.g., Mann Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (Westlaw through P.L. 115-46); 18 U.S.C.
§ 2421 (Westlaw through P.L. 115-46). See also Combating Human Trafficking Act
of 2015, S. 529, 114th Cong. (2015) (proposed legislation introduced in the
Senate).
9. E.g., G.A. Res. 48/104, Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women
(Dec. 20, 1993); G.A. Res. 55/225, United Nations Convention Against Transna-
tional Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto (Jan. 8, 2001); G.A. Res. 317
(IV), Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploita-
tion of the Prostitution of Others (Dec. 2, 1949).
10. Wilson Dizard, NYC to Stop Using Condoms as Evidence—in Some Cases, AL JAZEERA
AMERICA, May 12, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/12/sex-con-
doms-nyc.html (noting shifts in policy).
11. See Mark Pettit, Jr., Freedom, Freedom of Contract, and the “Rise and Fall”, 79 B.U. L.
REV. 263, 326 (1999) (giving illustrations of this need).
224 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

The problem of working sex words has multiple manifestations. Per-

sons who are paid for sex get labeled, but participants in the regulation
conversation cannot agree on what label to call them. A related difficulty is
the absence of any formal word at all for a couple of necessary categories:
buyer and fosterer-procurer. Confusion and disagreement obscure what key
terms mean, while a false veneer of agreement about one proposition—that
we’re all against “trafficking” (not so much, actually)—impedes regulatory
progress while purporting to advance it.
“Prostitution,” a noun laden with controversy and considerable histor-
ical baggage, may be the least-worst working sex word, the best of a bad lot.
Lay people understand what it means, and its usage typically does not of-
fend the listener. Once we leave this term for the phenomenon behind,
tougher trouble follows. Two leading candidates compete to mean sex-seller:
“prostitute,” the older of the two labels, and “sex worker,” which first
turned up in legal sources a couple of decades ago. It is hard to say which
does more mischief to any cogent regulatory agenda. I conclude that on the
whole “sex worker” is worse than “prostitute,” for reasons expounded in
Part II, but the question is close.
Next comes the vocabulary that isn’t there. Although the folk-anthro-
pology cliché “Eskimos have [some large number of] words for snow” is an
oversimplification,12 cultures do reveal their positions about conduct and
status by having or lacking nouns to describe an individual. Family relations
are prominent at this intersection of linguistics and anthropology. For ex-
ample, the presence of the “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law” in English
shows that the connection between a person and the spouse of another per-
son of the same generation is important enough to have earned nomencla-
ture and also that the distinction between the sibling of a spouse and the
spouse of a sibling does not matter as much. Brothers- and sisters-in-law sit
at the periphery of a natal family that came first. About how they joined the
natal family, English cares less. As for “sibling,” one hears this word less
often than “sister” or “brother,” suggesting an interest in gender as central
to a birth-family relationship.
Other languages show the possibility of different choices about words
for individuals with respect to the roles they play in association with identi-
fied others. Roma and Yiddish, for example, have a word for what one an-

12. David Robson, There Really Are 50 Eskimo Words for “Snow”, WASH. POST, Jan. 14,
2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-
eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_
story.html?utm_term=.C635d1c9e82a (reporting difficulties that impede attempts
to count; also noting that the Sami people of northern Europe use 180 words related
to snow or ice and have more than a thousand words to describe attributes of
reindeer).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 225

thropologist calls “a co-parent-in-law,” or a person whose child is married to

the child of the other person in the relationship.13 While evincing more
interest in this connection than does English, at the same time Roma ada-
mantly does not care about the difference between a nephew and a grand-
son, using “nepoto,” a Latinate noun borrowed from Romanian, to signify
both.14 The Native American language Upper Chehalis omits gender when
referring to an elder sibling but notes the gender of younger siblings.15 Up-
per Chehalis also uses different nouns for these relatives depending on
whether they stand in a first, second, or third person relation to a speaker: a
listener can tell from the word whether these people are the brothers or
sisters of the speaker, the person whom the speaker is addressing, or some-
one not party to the conversation.16 The Turkish kocamin cocugu means
“husband’s child.”17 English speakers can say “stepson,” but stepson doesn’t
mean quite the same thing as kocamin cocugu. Inclusions and omissions in a
language, in turn, indicate what matters and what doesn’t among those who
speak it.
For the law, as in life, these characteristics both teach and conceal.
And so it’s striking that in this genteel setting of a law review, where it is
customary for authors to speak politely, or at least formally, I write with
almost no alternative to a pair of loose terms. In place of “john” a writer can
say buyer or customer—I will take that path in this Essay when I can—but
how odd to have to do so when the other party to a sex-for-money transac-
tion gets labeled with a non-slang noun that, unlike “seller,” says what the
exchange sells and buys.18 Say what we might about the trouble with “sex
worker” or “prostitute” as a term for regulation and ordinary discourse—
and I will fill an entire Part in this Essay with criticisms19—unlike “john,” it

13. Werner Cohn, Some Comparisons Between Gypsy (North American ŗom) and American
English Kinship Terms, 71 AM. ANTHROPOLOGIST 476, 479 (1969).
14. Id. at 478.
15. M. Dale Kinkade, Kinship Terminology in Upper Chehalis in a Historical Framework,
34 ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS 84, 84 (1992).
16. Id.
17. Ruth C. Busch, In-Laws and Out Laws: A Discussion of Affinal Components of Kin-
ship, 11 ETHNOLOGY 127, 129 (1972).
18. [Sex customers] are invisible in the sense that they can go anywhere
and not stand out as buyers of women. They enjoy the true privacy of
anonymity. Linguistically, in most languages I have encountered, they also
have the dignity of an identity with no unique non-slang descriptor noun.
All the words that apply to them, such as customer or client or buyer, are
shared with non-buyer users of women. In the United States, he is given a
common real man’s name. We call him ‘john’.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality, 46 HARV. C.R.-
C.L. L. REV. 271, 281–82 (2011).
19. See infra Part I.
226 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

isn’t slang, and unlike “buyer,” it doesn’t mince words on what it is talking
about.
Respectable synonyms for “pimp,” the other word missing in action
for regulators, are harder to find than buyer or customer as an alternative to
“john.” The closest that polite English comes is “procurer,” a word that says
nothing about what this person does to achieve procurement, or—here dif-
fering from the neutered terms for our two principals, seller and buyer—
whether money plays a role in his efforts. American law has long disap-
proved of gaining income from the purchase and sale of sexual acts in which
others engage,20 and it does use status-nouns for sex-sellers: one would think
it would have words to describe people who get money that way and what
makes their conduct wrongful.21 Though not a legal term, “madam” is an-
other telling instance of English-language slang, a gendered way to say
brothel-keeper or –manager that has no counterpart for a man in the same
line of work.22
One might believe that for prostitution regulation there would be one
easy domain of naming: the international crisis of sexual trafficking. Sadly,
no. People may think they unite in condemnation against it; they don’t. For
the subset of reformers whose priorities occupy this Essay—those who want
more lenient legal rules than what current American law provides—what
about “legalization” versus “decriminalization”? More trouble. A crime that
proscribes buying but not selling sex ought to have a name: “Nordic Model”
does not quite work.
Thus, the accurate statement that “writing about prostitution presents
inherent difficulties” because “[n]o neutral language exists,” as Scott Peppet
says by way of introduction to a reform proposal,23 understates severely the
“difficulties” for anyone who wants to change, or even to understand,
American law on the subject of sex-selling. Professor Peppet adverts to chal-
lenges for a writer that are amply present. But more than writers suffer.
The difficulty of working sex words explored in this Essay is both
cause and effect of the trouble with working-sex regulation. Cause first: The

20. See Nicole Bingham, Nevada Sex Trade: A Gamble for the Workers, 10 YALE J.L. &
FEMINISM 69, 76 n.57 (1998) (surveying U.S. state crimes that proscribe living off
the earnings of prostitution).
21. Some jurisdictions have codified a crime of pimping, but “pimping” as an activity is
not the same as “pimp” as a status-noun. See, e.g., CAL. PENAL CODE § 266h
(Westlaw through Ch. 248 of 2017 Reg. Sess.); GA. CODE ANN. § 16-6-11
(Westlaw through 2017 Sess. of the Georgia Gen. Assemb.); IOWA CODE § 725.2
(Westlaw through 2017 Reg. Sess.); infra text accompanying notes 141–144.
22. See KATIE HAEGELE, SLIP OF THE TONGUE: TALKING ABOUT LANGUAGE 73–74
(2014) (observing that “madam,” along with “hussy” and “harlot,” started out neu-
tral and then joined other “gendered terms of abuse”).
23. Scott R. Peppet, Prostitution 3.0?, 98 IOWA L. REV. 1989, 1998 (2013).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 227

extraordinary absence of effective nouns impedes consensus and expository

writing on the issue.
Now, effect. Why does this problem persist? Shouldn’t better diction
be coined? That thoughtful, articulate, well-intentioned reformers have not
achieved this gain suggests that language difficulty may inhere in the
subject.
What makes working sex words not just a cause but a consequence or
symptom of a problem, I conclude, derives from a foundational disagree-
ment in this debate between two sides of a binary, both of which want to
lessen the impact of criminalization on sex-sellers. They have contrary an-
swers to a core question: Can the purchase and sale of sexual penetration of
a human body ever be acceptable?24
Disputants seem to agree that this activity is sometimes categorically
not acceptable. Most of them will readily condemn what they label traffick-
ing and child prostitution. But they have not united on whether the law
should ever tolerate the activity known as prostitution or sex work. Aware
that they will not come together on this fundamental, they try to talk to one
another using what Professor Peppet has labeled neutral language, but neu-
tral language remains elusive. Thus, instead of offering a path to resolution
through expression, working sex words compound the problem that law
reformers are trying to fix by obscuring clarity at every turn.
In other settings, people who disagree about law and policy sort their
description from argument. They can also state what they are discussing
and, from there, debate goals and strategies. Law reform in the arena of sex
work, however, never gets past the descriptive stage necessary to support its
future because it lacks a vocabulary of working sex words. Proposals to
change the law must use inadequate language. No surprise that they have all
failed. At the end of this Essay, I locate what may offer a little hope.25

I. SELLERS

A. Gender Unspoken

Most researchers agree that the large majority of persons who regularly
receive money for sex are female.26 A larger majority of persons who buy sex

24. By “acceptable,” I mean safe and voluntary enough for persons who participate in, or
are directly affected by, the exchange. See Aya Gruber et al., Penal Welfare and The
New Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, 68 FLA. L. REV. 1333, 1334–35 (2016).
25. See Conclusion, at 266.
26. See Elizabeth M. Johnson, Buyers Without Remorse: Ending the Discriminatory En-
forcement of Prostitution Laws, 92 TEX. L. REV. 717, 719 n.10 (2014) (noting the
difficulty of obtaining accurate data on the ratio of female to male sellers, and the
strong consensus that female sellers outnumber male ones).
228 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

are male.27 In contrast to girls and women, who do not sell sex dressed to
look like men, some male sellers wear feminine garb or otherwise present
themselves as transgender28 or female; their customers typically hew to mas-
culine-looking clothing and deportment. These patterns suggest that a noun
for sex-seller, not just a respectable one like “prostitute” or “sex worker” but
also the slangier “whore” or “hooker,” will put a listener in mind of a
woman. Yet one has to reach into the past to find a word set aside explicitly
as female: “doxy,” “floozy,” “harlot.” Quaint terms like those that are re-
served for women advert vaguely to loose morals, dodging the question of
whether money gets exchanged for sex.
Far fewer status-nouns for a buyer exist in English, and all of them veil
his identity.29 The lack of a singular noun fit for print in a newspaper or
statute implies that buying sex is just an activity or an episode for a man. He
can take it or leave it without changing who he is; we feel no more need for
a noun here than we need one for “movie watcher” or “spectator-sport
ticket holder.” Selling sex, by contrast, constitutes an identity for a woman.
Even while doing something else, or figuring to leave this line of work, she
is an X or a Z.

B. The Trouble with “Prostitute”

Calling a person a prostitute ascribes immorality, corruption, and deg-

radation to her. Any person might perhaps really be immoral, corrupt, or
degraded, but this bundle of status-associations does not necessarily attend
the conveying of sex for cash. Ascribed negative traits impede regulation by
enlisting the law in an attack on the identity of an individual for no obvious
reason.
Status-nouns carrying negative connotations are on the decline in the
law. Whereas in decades past a judge might use “idiot” as if it had a literal

27. See generally Salaiscooper v. Eighth Judicial District, 34 P.3d 509, 513 (Nev. 2009)
(discussing testimony from an earlier hearing, wherein Dr. Roxanne Clark Murphy,
a clinical psychologist and the Program Coordinator for the First Offender Program
for Men in Las Vegas, stated that buyers of sex are statistically almost always male);
JUDITH A. BAER, WOMEN IN AMERICAN LAW: THE STRUGGLE TOWARD ELIGIBIL-
ITY FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE PRESENT 280 (2002).

28. See Ginia Bellafante, N.Y. TIMES, Poor, Transgender and Dressed for Arrest (Sept. 30,
2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/poor-transgender-and-dres
sed-for-arrest.html (describing a loitering statute that equates feminine presentation
with solicitation); Ricardo Cortès, VANITY FAIR, An Arresting Gaze: How One New
York Law Turns Women into Suspects (Aug. 3, 2017), https://www.vanityfair.com/
culture/2017/08/nypd-prostitution-laws (describing the same statute and noting that
transwomen are especially vulnerable to its enforcement).
29. See discussion infra Part II.A.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 229

meaning,30 and a few American statutes still speak of illegal aliens,31 most
law-based condemnation today focuses on bad conduct rather than bad sta-
tus. A “felon,” “habitual felon,” “co-conspirator,” or “repeat offender” de-
serves her unpleasant label, we think, having earned the word through
action. Persons called prostitutes, by contrast, may not have done anything
to warrant an attack on themselves as persons.
This word has an arguably neutral-sounding etymology. It comes from
prostituo, meaning something more benign on the surface than corrupt and
immoral: “to fix in an upright position.”32 A prostituo is a statue-like thing,
in other words. But an ordinary human being sits and stands and walks
according to her will. Rather than exercise her autonomy, the prostituo is
controlled by other forces.33
Linguist Anatoly Liberman has assembled historical lexicography
about the strongly pejorative nature of a word related to “prostitute.” Nega-
tive connotations informed the arrival of “brothel” into Middle English.
Old French had come up with “bordel” for a house of prostitution by coup-
ling the German root -bord, meaning house, with the suffix -el, something
small. When English imported bordel from French, the word morphed to
brothel because, to English speakers, this word sounded familiar to the unre-
lated-to-sex briepel, meaning “worthless,” Liberman explains, and also
resembled terms of disparagement that ended in -el: “scoundrel,”

30. See Anita Bernstein, For and Against Marriage: A Revision, 102 MICH. L. REV. 129,
133 n.8 (2003) (citing Marvin v. Trout, 199 U.S. 212, 213 n.1 (1905) (“the guard-
ian or trustee of a minor, insane person, or idiot”)); id. (citing Thlocco v. Magnolia
Petroleum Co., 141 F.2d 934, 938 (5th Cir. 1944) (quoting an Oklahoma statute
stating that “[p]ersons of unsound mind within the meaning of this chapter are
idiots, lunatics, and imbeciles”)); id. (citing Lynch v. Rosenthal, 396 S.W.2d 272,
275 (Mo. Ct. App. 1965) (explaining that “there are three classifications of subnor-
mal mentality, to-wit: moron, low moron, and idiot; [and] plaintiff is a low
moron”)).
31. The ombudsman for the Washington Post consulted a State Department officer and
former U.S. consul, Chip Beck, who defended the usage of the phrase “illegal alien”
on the record, but the ombudsman explained that the Post uses the phrase “illegal
immigrant” because illegal alien “sounds like someone from outer space.” Deborah
Howell, Immigration Coverage in the Crossfire, WASH. POST, Mar. 2, 2008, http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR200802290333
2.html.
32. See JILL MCCRACKEN, STREET SEX WORKERS’ DISCOURSE: REALIZING MATERIAL
CHANGE THROUGH AGENTIAL CHOICE 99 (2013) (explaining the origin of the
word “prostitute”).
33. See id. (“The passive voice results in the construction of a prostitute as weak and
helpless, and this powerless position is equated with dehumanization because the
individual is not viewed as a person who is capable of making his or her own choices,
but is instead controlled by other forces.”).
230 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

“wastrel.”34 In this etymology, the development of English in the Middle

Ages actively wanted opprobrium for the prostitution-related words it chose
to import. Bordel or bordello, literally just a small house, did not deliver
enough condemnation.
Judgmental views of prostitution in the English language carry over to
legal judgments. One California decision issued in 1922 is notorious for
insisting on condemnation of what it called “fallen women.” “The most
casual observer cannot fail to see a vast difference between fallen women as a
class and the balance of the human kind. They stand apart,”35 wrote the
court in In re Carey: “No other body of malefactors constitute so distinctly a
class as do the fallen women. They present a greater single element of eco-
nomic, social, moral, and hygienic loss than is the case with any other single
criminal class.”36
A more recent and kinder-minded New York decision ruled that de-
fendants accused of prostitution had a right to a jury trial because the conse-
quences of being adjudicated a prostitute were so severe.37 U.S. Supreme
Court precedent provides that exposure to incarceration for more than six
months means that a crime is sufficiently serious to qualify for the constitu-
tional right to trial by jury.38 New York law set a shorter maximum sentence
for prostitution, but the court granted the jury trial because it shuddered to
think of what a conviction for being a prostitute does to a defendant.39 The
status label has far-reaching consequences:

[E]ven if there were no incarceration involved, a prostitution

conviction results in profound consequences for the person con-
victed. From biblical times and throughout the world today, to
mark a woman a prostitute is to designate her a pariah. Whether
she is described as a “hustler,” a “hooker,” a “bawd” or a “har-
lot,” a “biffer,” a “trull,” “pigmeat” or a “whore,” the prostitute
bears the opprobrium of “the fallen woman.”40

And more than just bad names befall the prostitute, the court contin-
ued. Attacks that permeate this word extend beyond what contemporary
discourse would call slut-shaming her. If her “badness” were limited to sell-

34. Anatoly Liberman, Front Page News: the Oxford Etymologist Harrows an International
Brothel, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS: OUPBLOG (Jan. 15, 2014), http://
blog.oup.com/2014/01/brothel-word-origin-etymology/.
35. Ex parte Carey, 207 P. 271, 274 (Cal. Dist. Ct. App. 1922).
36. Ex parte Carey, 207 P. at 274.
37. People v. Link, 107 Misc. 2d 973, 979–80 (N.Y. Crim. Ct. 1981).
38. Baldwin v. New York, 399 U.S. 66, 73–74 (1970).
39. Baldwin, 399 U.S. at 73–74.
40. Link, 107 Misc. 2d at 976.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 231

ing sex, that would be bad enough: By selling sex she threatens family stabil-
ity and spreads infection,41 but the word “prostitute” says she is even worse
than a homewrecker and disease vector. To call someone a prostitute “is to
denominate the creature” who gets this label as “unprincipled, a low life,
one who would sell out any loyalty, desecrate any covenant, and, literally as
well as characterologically as one willing to do just about anything for the
right price.”42
Words do change meaning over time. The judicial recitation in People
v. Link, expressed almost forty years ago, may overstate the force of prosti-
tute as a label. Even today, however, when an English speaker needs a quick
word to sum up compensation in exchange for doing something inauthentic
or corrupt—in particular, an action that misrepresents feelings or beliefs as
more supportive than they really are—and “sellout” is not harsh enough,
then “prostitute,” or alternatively the cruder “whore,” is the most likely
choice.
The current Oxford English Dictionary lists definitions for prostitute
as both noun and verb, adding “Obs.” for meanings once present in the
word but now gone. Today’s noun means only “A woman who is devoted,
or (usually) who offers her body to indiscriminate sexual intercourse, esp.
for hire; a common harlot.”43 And today’s verb “to prostitute,” according to
this leading lexicon, has three meanings:

1. “To offer (oneself, or another) to unlawful, esp. indiscrimi-

nate, sexual intercourse, usually for hire; to devote or expose
to lewdness. (Chiefly refl. of a woman.)

2. To surrender or put to an unworthy, vile, or infamous use

or purpose; to sell for base gain or hire; to defile, dishonour,
profane, corrupt.

3.c. To expose to shame; to expose, in a degrading manner to

public view, or for public sale.”

What remains in this lexicon of current usage of “prostitute,” in sum, is

only opprobrium that a speaker might not wish to endorse or include, and a
recipient might not deserve.

41. See Link, 107 Misc. 2d at 977 (“To great masses of people, the prostitute . . . They
associate her with organized crime, public indecency, family instability, the blight of
tourist and commercial areas, and the spread of venereal disease.”).
42. Link, 107 Misc. 2d at 977.
43. XII OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 673 (2d ed. 1989).
232 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

C. The Trouble with “Sex Worker”

This substitute for “prostitute” enjoys support in progressive quarters.

The activist who coined it said her goal in making up the term was “to
create an atmosphere of tolerance. . . .”44 “Sex worker” in place of “prosti-
tute” focuses on labor rather than a demeaned identity.45 International orga-
nizations favor it.46 One can understand its appeal. If “all feminists are in
agreement that sex workers should not be penalized for doing sex work,”47
then the “prostitute” label, which inherently casts aspersions, becomes an-
other punishment that better diction can avoid. Unfortunately, moving to
“sex worker” achieves no improvement.
“Sex worker” strikes a pose of neutrality. The “atmosphere of toler-
ance” that the term commendably brings to discourse, and from there to
law, tolerates not only human beings in a controversial line of work but also
refuses to specify who does what to or for whom. Like “prostitute”—but
arguably even more than “prostitute”—the phrase airbrushes buyers out of
the picture. Sex work could not exist without someone at the other end of
the transaction whose tastes and wishes influence supply patterns, but “sex
worker” takes note only of the seller and what she sells.
Persons claiming to speak as sex workers may work in the sex business,
but they can do different work. “Sex workers” as a descriptor can encompass
strippers, dominatrixes, and individuals who provide their services from a
remote geographic location typically unknown to customers, offering sex-
themed conversation over the telephone or exposure of their bodies via
video photography, for example.48 Managers in the sex industry can be

44. Carol Leigh, Inventing Sex Work, in WHORES AND OTHER FEMINISTS 225, 225 (Jill
Nagle ed., 1997).
45. See MCCRACKEN, supra note 32, at 100 (discussing sociologist Kamala Kempadoo’s
suggestion that “the term sex worker ‘suggests we view prostitution not as an iden-
tity—a social or psychological characteristic of women, often indicated by
“whore”—but as an income generating activity or form of labor for women and
men’”).
46. See Kat Banyard, The Dangers of Rebranding Prostitution as ‘Sex Work’, GUARDIAN,
June 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/06/prostitution-
sex-work-pimp-state-kat-banyard-decriminalisation (noting endorsement of this
term by the UN and WHO). See also Amnesty International Policy on State Obliga-
tions to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers, AMNESTY INTER-
NATIONAL (May 26, 2016), available at www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/
amnesty_policy_human_rights_of_sex_workers_-_embargoed_-_final.pdf [hereinaf-
ter Amnesty International Policy].
47. Janet Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to
Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Gov-
ernance Feminism, 29 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 335, 411 (2006).
48. See Sarah Ditum, Why We Shouldn’t Rebrand Prostitution as Sex Work, NEW
STATESMAN, Dec. 1, 2014, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/12/why-we
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 233

called sex workers too.49 Only some self-identified sex workers sell the op-
portunity to penetrate their bodies with a penis. Calling managers and own-
ers by this term groups them with people who earn income through much
more dangerous activities, and individuals who earn money from the com-
mercial penetration experienced by persons other than themselves have dif-
ferent interests from persons who sell penetration of the orifices of their
own bodies. When activists refer to themselves as sex workers while advocat-
ing for liberalization of prostitution laws, they could be speaking about of-
fering access to their own interior anatomy, but alternatively could want
legal change because they seek benefit for themselves as holders of capital.50
Another problem with “sex worker” as a descriptor comes from the
significant presence of underage sellers in this industry.51 Young people
whose vaginas are penetrated by strangers who pay for this access receive a
label that refers to what they are doing as work. In any society that prohibits
child labor for its deleterious effects on the public welfare, children are by
definition not workers and workers are not children. When a child regularly
does something dangerous in exchange for money from an adult, the “at-
mosphere of tolerance” that the coinage of “sex worker” in place of “prosti-
tute” sought to achieve is a problem.52
Further incompatibility between status as a child and status as sex
worker derives from the age preference of some buyers and procurers. Johns
and pimps alike have manifested interest in very young sellers;53 workers
seldom continue to be active in this industry into middle age.54 In a memoir
called Paid For, the activist Rachel Moran recalls that during the first of her

-shouldnt-rebrand-prostitution-sex-work (“So what’s wrong with saying ‘sex worker’?

For one thing, it’s a deliberately broad term. It covers street walkers and escorts,
strippers and phone sex operators, dominatrixes and dildo retailers, as well as their
respective managers.”).
49. Id.
50. A blogger known as Stella Marr omits her real name but provides links for her claim
that six prominent activists do not earn their living at the receiving end of penetra-
tion by strangers. Five of them were convicted of crimes codified to cover pimping
and promotion of prostitution, and one was the subject of a British documentary
that featured him as co-owner of a large brothel. Stella Marr, Pimps Will Be Pimps
Whether Male or Female or Posing as “Sex Worker Activists” & Other Conflicts of Inter-
est, PROSTITUTION RESEARCH & EDUCATION (May 23, 2012), http://prostitution
research.com/pre_blog/2012/05/23/pimps_will_be_pimps_whether_ma/.
51. RONALD B. FLOWERS, THE PROSTITUTION OF WOMEN AND GIRLS 15 (1998) (re-
porting an estimate of “between 300,000 and 600,000 female prostitutes under the
age of 18 in the United States”).
52. See supra text accompanying notes 44–45.
53. LINDA SMITH & CINDY COLOMA, RENTING LACY: A STORY OF AMERICA’S PROSTI-
TUTED CHILDREN 77 (2009).
54. Cf. Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job 150-51 (2013) (surveying long-
term health toll of this work).
234 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

six years selling penetration of her body, both in brothels and on the streets
of Dublin, she made it a point to tell buyers that she was 15 after she
learned they would ejaculate—and thus go away—faster if they knew.55
Providers in most lines of service emphasize their experience and track
records; consumers as a rule prefer to hire or work with someone who they
know has furnished the service many times. Discrimination against older
workers in sectors other than prostitution certainly occurs, but the more
common perception in ordinary age discrimination is that the worker’s
skills have lapsed. Sex customers have no reason to think that an older pro-
vider cannot do the job. Performing oral sex on strangers, or trading an act
of vaginal intercourse for cash, is in sum fundamentally different from work
as understood in American law and regulation. Except for the possibility of
high monetary gain—a reward that sellers do achieve sometimes, but never
with the reliability of an enforceable employment contract—this activity is
worse than other sources of income grouped uncontroversially under the
“work” rubric.
The trouble with sex worker or sex work as a noun-phrase emerges
when one looks at the comparators to sex-selling in the workforce that get
mentioned most often in discussions of prostitution law reform.
The low-wage, low-future job comparator. Work that pays little and of-
fers little to no opportunity for promotion appears to some observers as
either worse than sex work, because sex work generates more income for the
seller, or not meaningfully different, because both sex work and low-wage
jobs call for labor that can be repetitive, demeaning, and dead-end in the
sense of not offering any path to improvement through diligent effort or
skill. Fast-food restaurants are a common locus of comparison here.56
In the United States, the best-known fast-food business operates
through franchises rather than centralized management, which means that
no unitary document can describe the relationship between McDonald’s as
an entity and individuals who earn wage income in restaurants that go by
this name.57 Two documents available online titled “employee manual” and

55. RACHEL MORAN, PAID FOR: MY JOURNEY THROUGH PROSTITUTION 61 (2013).

56. See Raymond, supra note 54, at 63; Prostitution Must Be Legalized: A Former Sex
Worker’s Opinion, IDENTITY THEORY, Jan. 11, 2002, http://www.identitytheory.
com/prostitution-legalized (“If your options are to make four dollars an hour flip-
ping burgers, or $500 a day turning tricks, suddenly selling your sex doesn’t seem
quite so unreasonable.”).
57. CHARLES HILL & GARETH JONES, STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: AN INTEGRATED AP-
PROACH 418 (2007) (describing how founder Ray Kroc used the franchise model to
build McDonald’s).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 235

“employee handbook,” to which I will cite here faute de mieux, may or may
not accurately describe this employment relation in any of the franchises.58
They nevertheless provide specifics about the contrast between fast
food work and sex work. I daresay that no one reading—or writing—this
Article would want to take one of the jobs described in them: but if we had
to, these manuals promise us a modicum of decency in this workplace. They
include pay information,59 summaries of policies on sexual harassment and
complaints from workers or customers,60 and illustrations of how the
kitchen is laid out61 and what garb complies with the dress code.62 One can
obtain information about the responsibilities of cashiers, cooks, managers,
and drive-through window attendants who work for the franchise before
one signs up for this job.
Fast food restaurants also must follow state and federal employment
regulations that constrain what they do to their workers. The employee
manual does not say much about the tasks of workers, but a reader can
identify what people on the payroll have to do: listen to customers’ orders,
relay these orders to the kitchen, follow recipes and food-prep protocols,
and maintain cleanliness and decorum in the restaurant.
By contrast, work as a sex-seller may require three “skill sets” only,
writes the memoirist Rachel Moran:

“[1.] The ability to control your reflex to vomit.

[2.] The ability to restrain your urge to cry.
[3.] The ability to imagine your current reality is not
happening.”63

Certainly one individual does not speak for all sex workers, and it seems
likely that other people with experience selling sexual access to their bodies

58. The first “manual” by Ana Rodriguez, McDonald’s New Employee Manual (2014),
http://anakare.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/8/9/25891647/formal_project-_employee_
manual.pdf, appears to have been written as a class project and lists a McDonald’s
franchise in Texas. Id. at 2. It is not known whether or not the specific franchise
listed is aware of or has ever used this technical writing sample as its employee man-
ual. The second document, titled “Employee Handbook,” appears in the website for
a chain of six McDonald’s franchises in Texas on its Policies page. LUTITO MCDON-
ALD’S, Employee Handbook (2017), http://www.lutitomcdonalds.com/uploads/8/1/2/
7/81277052/employeehandbook-crew2017-pdf.pdf.
59. LUTITO MCDONALD’S, supra note 58, at 7, 9
60. Rodriguez, supra note 58, at 10 –12; LUTITO MCDONALD’S, supra note 58, at
20–21.
61. Rodriguez, supra note 58, at 6.
62. LUTITO MCDONALD’S, supra note 58, at 12–13; Rodriguez, supra note 58, at 2.
63. MORAN, supra note 55, at 225.
236 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

would draw up different lists of job requirements. Moran is on firmer

ground when she criticizes the notion that providers offer services in a mar-
ket. Skills are not for sale in prostitution, she argues: instead what sellers sell
is submission to being violated.64 If prowess mattered, customers would seek
it out. They don’t. Asking rhetorically what the skills of this occupation
could possibly be, Moran answers her question with more questions:

Opening your legs? Moving your hips rhythmically in order to

get him off? Any woman who’s ever fucked in her life knows
enough about men’s bodies to do the basic job of a prostitute.
And if she hasn’t? If she has no sexual experience whatever? All
the better, as far as the punter [U.K. counterpart to “john”] is
concerned—he’ll get a great kick out of putting paid to her sex-
ual naı̈veté. ‘Skill’ here is redundant. It is simply surplus to
requirements.65

Sex-sellers receive almost no occupational protection from the law.

Take sexual harassment, for example. The fast-food employee manual we
looked at tries to regulate it. For sex-sellers, it is an unremarkable fact of
working life.66 Unpleasant deviations from the exchange deal—for example,
hair pulling, choking, unambiguous rape, and refusals to pay—are not com-
plaints that Human Resources will hear. “In McDonald’s, you’re not the
meat,” said one former seller at a United Nations conference on prostitu-
tion, summarizing the comparison to fast-food restaurant work as she saw
it.67 “In prostitution, you are the meat.”68
The dangerous job comparator. Sex-selling endangers a seller, but so do
other jobs. Studies find a particularly high risk of death in a few occupations
held mostly by men: fishing, logging, farming, mining, and piloting air-
planes. Catching fish for a living threatens worker safety with heavy equip-
ment, severe weather, and enough water nearby to drown in.69 Hidden and

64. Id. at 195.

65. Id.
66. See Melissa Farley & Emily Butler, Prostitution and Trafficking—Quick Facts,
PROSTITUTION RESEARCH & EDUCATION 3 (2012), http://www.prostitutionre
search.com/Prostitution%20Quick%20Facts%2012-21-12.pdf. Activist-psychologist
Melissa Farley found that “95% of those in prostitution experience sexual harass-
ment that would be legally actionable in another job setting.” Id.
67. Raymond, supra note 54, at 63.
68. Id.
69. Jacquelyn Smith, Fishermen Face the Most Dangerous Work in US, FORBES, Sept. 4,
2011, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44329641/ns/business-careers/t/fishermen-face-
most-dangerous-work-us/.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 237

heavy branches fall on loggers’ heads.70 “There are three main factors that
make flying dangerous,” according to one news story: “the man, the ma-
chine and the weather.”71 Dangers in mines run from immediate traumatic
impact to slow poisoning by inhalation.72 Livestock injure the farmers who
own these animals; tractor rollovers injure farmers even more.73
Contrast the female worker endangered while selling sex. The risk of
violent death and nonlethal violence in this sector is far greater than that in
the next-most dangerous job for women, liquor-store cashier.74 An academic
study of mortality in prostitution found an extraordinarily high death rate
during the period of active work in this sector—probably an undercount,
the authors add.75 The study concludes that “no population of women stud-
ied previously has had a crude mortality rate, standardized mortality ratio,
or percentage of deaths due to murder even approximating those observed
in our cohort.”76 Men who die in dangerous jobs die accidentally—ma-
chines fail, nature ravages—but only 12 percent of women who die in this
female-dominated dangerous job category die by accident.77 A larger frac-
tion than the accidentally dead, 19 percent, are killed intentionally.78
Others die from drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and illnesses related to
HIV infection.79 What unites these varying causes of death for sex workers,
and distinguishes them from threats to human life in occupations like min-
ing and farming, is the probability that they originated in conduct prohib-
ited by criminal law (extending beyond criminalization of the activity itself).
Dangerous conventional work inflicts harm that, though unpleasant, is be-
nign compared to the harm of sex work.
The physical-appearance jobs comparator. Exploring the possibility that
sex-selling could be a regulated form of work, Adrienne Davis notes that
this activity shares characteristics with employment as a model or in an

70. Les Christie, America’s Most Dangerous Jobs: Logger, CNNMONEY, Aug. 22, 2013,
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/jobs/1108/gallery.dangerous_jobs/3.html.
71. Les Christie, America’s Most Dangerous Jobs: Airplane Pilot, CNNMONEY, Aug. 22,
2013, http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/jobs/1108/gallery.dangerous_jobs/4.
html.
72. James Lee, Fighting the Good Fight: Why the So-Called “War on Coal” Is Beneficial for
Pittsburgh’s Future, 14 U. PITT. J. TECH. L. POL’Y 95, 98–100 (2013).
73. Les Christie, America’s Most Dangerous Jobs: Farmer and Rancher, CNNMONEY, Aug.
22, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/jobs/1108/gallery.dangerous_job
s/5.html.
74. See John J. Potterat et al., Mortality in a Long-Term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women,
159 AM. J. EPIDEMIOLOGY 778, 783 (2004).
75. Id.
76. Id.
77. Id.
78. Id.
79. Id.
238 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

occupation where one’s physical appearance affects access to opportunity

and levels of compensation.80 Acting is especially notorious for ranking at-
tractiveness ahead of talent or successful experience, but any public-per-
formance work—singer, dancer, even comedian or lecturer—rewards or
punishes the performer in response to opinions of her looks. Sex-sellers, like
models and singers and dancers and actresses, have to work under continual
reassessment of whether they are attractive enough. Answers of No land
harshly;81 some of these judgments are cast almost literally in stone.82
Workers whose job fates depend on their looks experience employ-
ment discrimination that the law does not remedy. Just as an actor denied a
role in a play based on his gender, race, age, or national origin will not win
compensation for this loss, a person otherwise qualified for sex work who
gets turned down by a customer or the management of a house of prostitu-
tion cannot recover either, even if the reason for the rejection was invidious
discrimination. Race discrimination in particular has severe consequences
for sex workers.83
Sex work aligns poorly with employment discrimination law in other
respects, not just regarding rejection for a discriminatory reason. Professor
Davis has catalogued several of these gaps. She anticipates judicial rejection
if sex workers were to complain in court about a hostile environment in
violation of Title VII.84 She notes the likelihood of unremedied disparate
treatment of sex workers by managers in a brothel, including discrimination
in the allotment of “lucrative shift and private lounge assignments and refer-
rals to desirable customers,” and “expectations by employers and customers
that racial and ethnic minorities will perform racial fantasies that many find
degrading.”85 Title VII forbids an employer from honoring a customer’s
request for “a male librarian, flight attendant, or restaurant server,” she con-
tinues, but if it cannot lawfully honor the request of a sex buyer for a female
seller, then work in this regulated market might collapse.86 Similar difficul-

80. Adrienne D. Davis, Regulating Sex Work: Erotic Assimilationism, Erotic Exceptional-
ism, and the Challenge of Intimate Labor, 103 CAL. L. REV. 1195, 1269 (2015) (not-
ing that “sex work may exist on a continuum with other ‘appearance’ industries”).
81. Peppet, supra note 23, at 2011–12, 2033 (examining peer-to-peer ratings sites by
customers that comment unkindly on sex sellers).
82. See Anita Bernstein, Real Remedies for Virtual Inquiries, 90 N.C. L. REV. 1457, 1480
(2012) (noting that hurtful commentary can linger online).
83. See generally Vednita Carter & Evelina Giobbe, Duet: Prostitution, Racism and Femi-
nist Discourse, 10 HASTINGS WOMEN’S L.J. 37 (1999) (featuring reflections on the
intersection of racism and prostitution from two authors who retired from sex-
selling).
84. Davis, supra note 80, at 1223 (citations omitted).
85. Id. at 1262.
86. Id. at 1263 (finding this conclusion “intuitive[ ] to many”).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 239

ties exist in all appearance-focused employment markets, but work in which

an individual experiences repeated sexual penetration by strangers is extraor-
dinarily incompatible with law of the workplace.
Unavoidable regulatory difficulty. Redress for employment discrimina-
tion in the context of sex work illustrates a larger problem of treating sex-
selling as a form of employment amenable to regulation. Four examples of
the misfit between sex work and regulable work are workplace safety rules,
workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and the prohibition of
child labor.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) regu-
lates what it calls “occupational exposure” to hazardous substances.87 Semen
qualifies for the hazardous substance label because it can transmit not only
life-threatening HIV but other serious diseases like hepatitis from an ejacu-
lator-buyer to a receptor-seller.88 The philosopher Lori Watson has argued
that mandatory condoms for both oral sex and intercourse do not suffice to
meet OSHA standards.89 Condoms are too likely to break, especially when
used during anal intercourse, and too difficult for providers—be they man-
agers of a sex-trade business or individuals who sell access to their own
bodies—to demand from customers,90 at least in the current market.
“Mouth pipetting/suctioning of blood or other potentially infectious mater-
ials is prohibited” as a workplace condition, OSHA adds.91 Flat-out prohib-
ited: not rendered acceptable by the use of risk-reducing safeguards.
Performing fellatio as work does not become lawful with the help of protec-
tive technologies like gloves, masks, eye protection, face shields, gowns, and
aprons—all of which OSHA says are mandatory when needed to protect
the worker from infection. Sex work as now practiced is incompatible with
American workplace regulation.
Workers’ compensation, the insurance scheme that provides payment
for injuries incurred on the job in place of tort recourse against the em-
ployer, could in principle extend to sex work that occurs in brothels. In the
United States, private businesses supply this category of insurance. They
collect premiums from employers and pay out benefits when employees are

87. 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1030 (Westlaw through 2017) (“Bloodborne Pathogens”).

88. Chris Motyl, Note, Condom Sense: Regulating and Reforming Performer Health &
Safety in the Adult Film Industry, 32 HOFSTRA LAB. L. & EMP. L. J. 216, 244–45
(2014).
89. Why Sex Work Isn’t Work, LOGOS (2014), http://logosjournal.com/2014/watson/.
90. Id. (citing VICTOR MALAREK, THE JOHNS: SEX FOR SALE AND THE MEN WHO BUY
IT 232 (2009)) (“The WHO failed to understand that the very request to wear a
condom can get a woman beaten or even killed.”).
91. 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1030(d)(2)(xii) (Westlaw through 2017).
240 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

injured on the job.92 Insurance for sex work would be very costly, at least
initially, given the high level of injury in the sector. Moreover, many of the
injuries that sex workers suffer originate in intentional actions by buyers,
and American law is vexingly divided on whether workers’ compensation
governs, and preempts tort liability, when an employee is harmed by a vio-
lent attack.93 If the law forced employers to pay for workers’ compensation
premiums without gaining tort immunity in return, it would violate the
“grand bargain” that underlies the Progressive installation of this insurance,
and greatly increase the cost of doing business in the sector.94
As for unemployment insurance, workers in many countries receive it
when they lose their jobs but are willing to remain employed. These recipi-
ents are expected to manifest their interest in finding a new job: unemploy-
ment insurance does not purport to compensate individuals who stop
working because they no longer wish to work.95 According to one review of
regulated prostitution in the Netherlands, sex workers who leave this sector
for any reason other than their inability to do the job become ineligible for
unemployment insurance.96 They may seek transfer payments from the gov-
ernment, but only in the form of general social assistance.97 Regulators
might have no quarrel with this policy decision, but because the sector con-
tains a high proportion of workers who say they want out,98 that stance in

92. See generally Richard A. Epstein, The Historical Origins and Economic Structures of
Workers’ Compensation Law, 16 GA. L. REV. 775 (1982) (tracing historical trends in
workers’ compensation law and examining the exclusive remedy provision).
93. See generally Albert B. Randall, Jr. et al., The Exclusive Remedy Provision: State by
State Survey, A.B.A. (2009), http://apps.americanbar.org/labor/lel-annualcle/09/mate
rials/data/papers/087.pdf (surveying state laws on injured employees’ right to make a
tort liability claim against their employers).
94. See Bob Burke, The Evolution of Workers’ Compensation Law in Oklahoma: Is the
Grand Bargain Still Alive?, 41 OKLA. CITY U. L. REV. 337, 341–43 (2016) (provid-
ing a short history of the “grand bargain” characterization of what employers and
employees receive through workers’ compensation).
95. L. Nayim A. Shuman-Austin, Comment, Is Leaving Work to Obtain Safety “Good
Cause” to Leave Employment?, 23 SEATTLE U. L. REV. 797 (2000) (discussing the
“able, available, and actively seeking” criterion for receiving unemployment insur-
ance, a requirement imposed in all U.S. states).
96. Damián Zeitch & Richard Starling, The Flesh is Weak, the Spirit Even Weaker: Clients
and Trafficked Women in the Netherlands, in PROSTITUTION AND HUMAN TRAFFICK-
ING: FOCUS ON CLIENTS 67, 89 (Andrea Di Nicola et al. eds., 2009) (“Therefore, a
prostitute forced to end her profession because of reasons beyond her control is
eligible for unemployment benefit . . . . When prostitutes however decide to quit for
any reasons other than those beyond their control they are not qualified to obtain
unemployment benefit but can rely on social services . . . .”).
97. Id.
98. See Melissa Farley, Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not
Know in Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly, 18 YALE
J.L. & FEMINISM 109, 113–16 (2006) (finding that rates of rape and other forms of
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 241

unemployment insurance law would immiserate persons who no longer

wish to sell sex for a living and need money to support their quitting. Al-
lowing a quitter to collect unemployment insurance after choosing to leave
this sector is a kinder option but one that would build an anomaly in the
law and raise the cost of doing business.
More worrisome than refusing to pay unemployment insurance to
persons who abandoned this occupation is the possibility that, once it rec-
ognizes sex work as regular and unremarkable work, the law would order
individuals who became unemployed in a different sector to join these
ranks, if a brothel-keeper employer would have them. In such a regime,
persons who lose their jobs in a non-sex sector would have to either accept a
job where sexual penetration of their bodies by strangers is mandatory, or
forfeit their government benefits. One might defend the Dutch stance men-
tioned above on the ground that it simply holds a claimant to her earlier
occupational choice to exchange sex for money, but telling non-participants
they have to do this work would put state-backed financial pressure on indi-
viduals to take up an activity that they may find repugnant. Moreover, since
third parties do not generally want to hire men as objects of penetration,
only women would be pressured into this work.99
Does such a regime exist? A 2005 news story reported that when a 25-
year-old woman in Germany lost her job and could not find another in her
preferred field, information technology, she told a job center in Berlin that
she would accept employment in a bar or café, whereupon the job center
ordered her to apply for work in a brothel.100 When she tried to sue in
response, she was informed that under German law the center had to treat
brothels like any other lawful employer and send potential workers to
them—and that brothels could enforce this requirement through legal ac-
tion if the center did not penalize unemployed workers for declining this
job.101 Her experience might not represent a larger pattern, but it follows
logically enough from normalizing sex work.

violence, death, and sexually transmitted diseases are much higher for prostituted
women than for the general population).
99. See infra note 158 and accompanying text.
100. Clare Chapman, ‘If You Don’t Take a Job as a Prostitute, We Can Stop Your Benefits’,
TELEGRAPH, Jan. 30, 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ger
many/1482371/If-you-dont-take-a-job-as-a-prostitute-we-can-stop-your-benefits.ht
ml.
101. Id. This compulsion can be prohibited by statute, as the following prostitution law
reform in New Zealand illustrates with respect to government-funded social security:
Refusal to work as sex worker does not affect entitlements: (1) A person’s
benefit, or entitlement to a benefit, under the Social Security Act 1964 may
not be cancelled or affected in any other way by his or her refusal to work,
or to continue to work, as a sex worker . . . .
242 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

Last, child labor. An apparent consensus disapproves of the employ-

ment of children as sellers in this sector.102 Some definitions of trafficking
omit references to force and coercion when the persons recruited into selling
sex are underage,103 suggesting that irrespective of whether the law will per-
mit individuals to sell sexual access to their bodies, this activity ought to be
prohibited categorically when the seller is a child. But regardless of where
the law stands on children working in this sector, the Federal Labor Stan-
dards Act (FLSA) restricts children from participating in most categories of
work.104 Accordingly, a shift in the law towards regarding sex work as work
would require Congress to take a position on the status of child sellers.
It is not obvious what the federal minimum age for entry into this
occupation ought to be. The FLSA provides that “[n]o employer shall em-
ploy any oppressive child labor,” and identifies oppressive child labor as any
work that endangers a child.105 An example of a job that the statute regards
as too dangerous for a child under 16 is one that involves using a ladder.106
One might conclude that if climbing a ladder is too dangerous, selling sex
must also be too dangerous for a young worker under the FLSA. But maybe
not. The level of danger present in this occupation already exceeds that of
any other job that women do,107 and nothing about being an adult in sex
work seems to make sellers safe enough the way being an adult makes work-
ers careful enough on a ladder.
Recall also that for this sector youth is in effect a strong qualification,
in contrast to the prevailing tendency of employers to regard minors as less
qualified than adults but hire them because they are cheaper workers. It
could be rational for the sector to lobby Congress to seek exceptions to the
federal prohibition on employing younger workers, as exceptions already

Prostitution Reform Act 2003, s 18, pt 2 (N.Z.). For reformers in the United States,
questions remain. Is such a codified prohibition necessary to avoid pressing unem-
ployed persons into sex work? Congress could enact it to govern federal benefits, but
what about state-based unemployment insurance: are multiple state statutes needed?
Absent such a statutory provision, under the United States Constitution may a unit
of government impose financial detriment on a person who has refused to engage in
sex work as a condition of receiving benefits?
102. See, e.g., Gill Allwood, The Construction of Prostitutes and Clients in French Policy
Debates, in DEMANDING SEX: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE REGULATION OF
PROSTITUTION, supra note 1, at 67–73.
103. E.g. FLA. STAT. ANN. § 787.06 (Westlaw through 2017 First Reg. Sess.); IDAHO
CODE ANN. § 18-8602 (Westlaw through 2017 First Reg. Sess. of 64th Legis.); KY.
REV. STAT. ANN. § 529.110 (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. Sess.).
104. See Henderson v. Bear, 968 P.2d 144, 147 (Colo. App. 1998) (adverting to a “com-
prehensive enforcement scheme” installed by the statute).
105. 29 U.S.C. § 212 (c)(2014) (Westlaw through P.L. 115-45).
106. 29 C.F.R. § 570.33(g) (Westlaw through 2017).
107. See supra Part I.C.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 243

exist in the statute.108 Employers could draw an analogy between sex work
and acting to qualify for the exception.109
They might not even need an analogy, because sex-selling as work
presents no obvious bright line between an adult seller and an underage one.
“If there is nothing wrong with prostitution,” wrote Catharine MacKinnon,
“if this is freedom and equality and liberation, if it really can make a
woman’s life more autonomous and independent, if its harms are negligible
or occasional, what on earth is wrong with children doing it or seeing it
being done?”110 One might cite statutory age-of-consent minimums as a
good reason to forbid underage persons from selling intimate access to their
bodies, but age minimums are no less arbitrary than the prohibition of pros-
titution. These minimums of positive law originate in the same rationale—
protecting persons from themselves111—that proponents of the label “sex
work” consider to be unacceptable paternalism from the state.

D. Who Speaks for the Sector?

Not having a neutral noun to denominate persons who sell sex, as we

have seen, causes difficulty in debates about if and how to regulate sex-
selling.112 Because both sides of the progressive policy binary—those who
would ban this activity and those who want it to be lawful—purport to care
about the well-being of these individuals and disagree about whether the law
ought to tolerate their livelihood, it becomes desirable to consider first-per-
son testimony. Experience on the ground could generate information to aid
regulatory priorities. For example, lawmakers would do well to know why
individuals take up this work. Their motives and backgrounds might be
more, or perhaps less, diverse than non-participants realize. What do police
officers need to learn about the purchase and sale of sexual services? How do
sex-sellers negotiate terms with buyers and look out for their interests?
Which dangers feel most acute on the street or in a hotel room? People who
have sold sex have unique insights into the practice.
Researchers do ask questions like these and publish their findings, but
researchers also necessarily filter what they learn by imposing their prior
beliefs onto their data. For an illustration of how filtering alters the discus-
sion of this sector, consider the divide between “sex worker” and

108. See 29 U.S.C. § 213(c) (Westlaw through P.L. 115-45).

109. See supra notes 80–82.
110. MacKinnon, supra note 18, at 297.
111. See Greenman v. Yuba Power Prods., Inc., 377 P.2d 897, 901 (Cal. 1963) (noting
“protection from themselves” rationale for strict liability); Julian W. Mack, The Juve-
nile Court, 23 HARV. L. REV. 104, 107–09 (1909) (expanding on this rationale in
the context of child protection).
112. See supra Part I.
244 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

“prostitute” as terms: Writers who focus on oppression sometimes add “sur-

vivors of prostitution” and “prostituted women” as alternatives.113 Individu-
als who exchange or have exchanged sex for money, however, tend to
eschew all of these labels to describe themselves. “Sex worker” in particular
has encountered pushback.114 “During my career in the New York sex
trade,” according to one account, “the prostitutes I worked with used words
like working girl, call girl, hooker, hustler, and pro. We spoke about ‘the life’
when feeling clannish, sentimental, or philosophical—‘the business’ when
we were being practical.”115 Nobody defers to what people in the trade call
themselves. The activist credited with coining “sex work,” Carol Leigh,
praised ambiguity in nomenclature: she claimed that “sex worker” united
“peep show dancers, strippers, and prostitutes” so that “we could have some
solidarity.”116
Solidarity works well enough when members of a group want the same
thing, but it can make things worse when their motives vary. The English
journalist Helen Lewis puts a foundational question this way: “Listen to the
sex workers—but which ones?”117 Persons who work or have worked in the
sector have different views about it, and attacks on prostitution from people
who have done it tend to come from retired rather than currently active sex
workers. If only active sellers have high authority to speak about the issue
and those who choose to flee this line of work—joining the “survivors of
prostitution,” to use a label favored on the other side of the binary—are
necessarily more removed and thus less credible, then a sex seller forfeits an
esteemed status the minute she leaves the trade. Persons who continue to
sell sex may be more credible because their experiences are more current,
but it’s worth recognizing that they also may be under someone else’s
thumb.

113. Farley, supra note 98, at 114 (choosing “survivors”); Susan Kay Hunter, Prostitution
is Cruelty and Abuse to Women and Children, 1 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 91, 91 (1993)
(using “prostituted women”).
114. Tracy Quan, The Name of the Pose: A Sex Worker By Any Other Name?, in PROSTITU-
TION AND PORNOGRAPHY: PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATE ABOUT THE SEX INDUSTRY
341, 346–48 (Jessica Spector ed., 2006) (quoting several sex-sellers who express dis-
taste for “sex worker” as a label); Charlotte Shane, Calling My Work What It Is,
PACIFIC STANDARD, Sept. 12, 2015, https://psmag.com/calling-my-work-what-it-is-
6adbe494141e#.84bszwb8r (“Lots of people doing occasional or even regular sex
work don’t identify themselves as ‘sex workers,’ or think of their identity as tied to
their labor.”).
115. Quan, supra note 114, at 343 (emphasis in original).
116. Id. at 342.
117. Helen Lewis, Opinion, Listen to the Sex Workers—But Which Ones?, GUARDIAN,
Aug. 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/listen-to-
sex-workers-but-which-ones.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 245

With this problem, we approach the next Part, which considers “john”
and “pimp” as missing terms. John and pimp exist as words. I typed them;
you read them and know them. But they also manifest absences and omis-
sions. Before we proceed to Part III, it is worth noting that the “Who speaks
for the sector?” query makes reference to missing terms too, with respect to
sellers past and present. Just as English does not have anything better than
“prostitute” or “sex worker” as a noun to describe a seller, it also lacks a
past-present distinction for this activity. The distinction matters when “Lis-
ten to Sex Workers” guides policy reform.

II. TWO MISSING TERMS

A. Buyer

The most frequently heard American English term for someone who
purchases sexual services is mysteriously opaque. Accounts about the origin
of “john” are vague, but they agree that in contrast to “sex worker,” a phrase
that indicates what an individual does to earn money when she labors, and
“prostitute,” a term that judges the character of the individual labeled, this
synonym for sex-buyer bestows anonymity by avoiding both moral condem-
nation and any kind of specificity whatsoever.118 When this word for a sex
customer entered common discourse, John was the most popular—which is
to say the most generic—male first name in the United States and
Britain.119
John signifies everyman, but not as an ideal. A sex customer is not the
reasonable man of negligence law who never fails to exercise care,120 nor the
fiduciary whose decisions about money always track the choices that “men
of prudence” would make.121 Instead, john means unremarkable, anony-
mous by nature.122 This man has no identity that matters.
Veiled from attention, a john eludes law enforcement. Codified crimes
of prostitution in the United States classify buyers and sellers as

118. See Jill McCracken, Johns, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF STREET CRIMES IN AMERICA 220
(Jeffrey Ian Ross ed., 2013) (summarizing etymological sources of “john”).
119. Press Release, Ancestry.com, Keeping up with the Joneses—John and Mary Smith
Officially the Most Popular Names Since 1530 (Mar. 25 2016), http://www.ances
try.fr/corporate/international/press-releases/Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses—-John-
and-Mary-Smith-officially-the-most-popular-names-since-1530.
120. James Fleming Jr., The Qualities of the Reasonable Man in Negligence Cases, 16 MO.
L. REV. 1, 2 (1951).
121. Harvard Coll. v. Amory, 9 Pick. 446, 461 (1830) (trust management context).
122. Courtney Guyton Persons, Sex in the Sunlight: The Effectiveness, Efficiency, Constitu-
tionality, and Advisability of Publishing Names and Pictures of Prostitutes’ Patrons, 49
VAND. L. REV. 1525, 1529 (1996) (“The very title ‘john’ emphasizes the temporary
namelessness granted patrons in the context of prostitution.”).
246 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

approximately comparably culpable, but police officers arrest sellers much

more than buyers. Federal data for the year 2014 indicate that of all persons
arrested on prostitution-related charges, two-thirds were women.123 In pros-
titution arrests, sellers = women.124
Spokespersons for law enforcement have acknowledged how they sup-
port the perception of buyers as invisible. One officer testified in court
about a “general policy” in a Massachusetts town “that you don’t arrest the
male.”125 Police, regardless of their predilections, find women easier to arrest
because patrolling officers know of them as sex workers:126 sellers can be
rounded up more easily than buyers to meet an arrest quota. Switching to
use female undercover agents to solicit male buyers, a move that would re-
verse the dominant pattern where male undercover agents solicit female sell-
ers, looks to some police like unjust “entrapment.”127 Sellers are
conspicuous to neighbors and thereby generate complaints to the police.
John-Everyman, in contrast to these women, makes prostitution possible
while staying hidden in plain sight.
The missing descriptive content in the word “john” both evidences
and encourages indifference about the demand side of sex markets. Consid-
erable effort continues to go into learning why and how sellers enter this
industry, but research about the buyer side of the transaction has hewed
mostly to the nothing-to-see-here Everyman trope. In his monograph on
prostitution, sociologist Ronald Weitzer reports that “customers vary tre-
mendously,”128 which is to say that they are like their fellow men: “in age,
race, and social class; in their reasons for buying sex; and in their exper-

123. FED. BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES, 2014, https://ucr
.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-37) (stating that
11,735 men and 22,939 women were arrested for “[p]rostitution and commercial-
ized vice” in 2014).
124. This gender gap was once bigger. For example, during the year 1974-1975, police in
the city of Providence enlisted only male undercover officers for prostitution investi-
gations. Coyote v. Roberts, 502 F. Supp. 1342, 1353–54 (D.R.I. 1980), supple-
mented, 523 F. Supp. 352 (D.R.I. 1981) (finding that “[i]t was not unreasonable to
assert that the Department’s use of a predominantly male undercover force revealed a
design to ferret out the women . . . while ignoring the equally guilty men” and that
“[i]t was not frivolous to argue that discriminatory intent can be implied from the
facts that four times as many women as men were arrested, and possibly eight times
as many were charged . . . during the pertinent time period.”).
125. Commonwealth v. Unnamed Defendant, 492 N.E.2d 1184, 1186 (Mass. App. Ct.
1986).
126. See MELISSA HOPE DITMORE, PROSTITUTION AND SEX WORK 34 (2011) (“The
more visible the sex worker, the more likely arrest or other attention from law en-
forcement becomes.”).
127. Johnson, supra note 26, at 728.
128. RONALD WEITZER, LEGALIZING PROSTITUTION: FROM ILLICIT VICE TO LAWFUL
BUSINESS 19 (2012).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 247

iences during paid sex encounters.”129 Johns are everymen to the John’s
Voice project, an online forum established to articulate the needs and con-
cerns of buyers, and to a Department of Justice-funded study that examined
men arrested for prostitution crimes in San Francisco and Portland.130
Investigators occasionally resist the Everyman default and look for
something different that separates the population of sex buyers from men as
a whole. They need a hypothesis to start their work, an alternative to Every-
man. Deviation seems to be where they start. A research consensus holds
that most men do not habitually pay for sex,131 which means that buyers of
sex are deviant in that they violate the law and are a minority of the
population.
No study appears to have started from a premise that persons who
deviate in this respect are in any way better than persons who don’t. The
divide in expert conclusions is instead Everyman on one side and social
pathology on the other. One study commissioned for Safe Exit, a British
project opposed to prostitution, agrees with the Weitzer view on variety in
the buyer population, stating that “men who pay for sex are diverse in terms
of their demographics, circumstances and attitudes,” but then goes on to
reject Everyman as a descriptor when it adds that this cohort is “neither
socio-culturally deviant nor ‘everyman.’”132 Safe Exit asserts that the deci-
sion to become a sex-buyer originates “within dominant discourses of
gendered sexual mores and local availability of women who sell sex.”133
Sven-Axel Månsson, a Swedish social work professor, also starts with pathol-
ogy and finds it. Månsson lists five motivations or reasons for this purchase.
All appear unhealthy.134 An article in Scientific American duly concludes
that “Månsson believes that johns are usually psychologically disturbed and

129. Id. (citations omitted).

130. See About the Research, JOHN’S VOICE, http://www.johnsvoice.ca/ (last visited Sept.
16, 2017); Clients of Street Prostitutes in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco and Santa
Clara, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, 1996-1999, NATIONAL ARCHIVE OF CRIM-
INAL JUSTICE DATA, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/2859
(last visited Sept. 16, 2017).
131. ANDREA CAUDURO ET AL., PROSTITUTION AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING: FOCUS ON
CLIENTS 6 (2009) (surveying worldwide studies); Nikolas Westerhoff, Why Do Men
Buy Sex?, SCI. AM., Oct. 2012, at 2 (reporting an estimate that 16 percent of men in
the U.S. are in the buyer population).
132. MADDY COY ET AL., ‘IT’S JUST LIKE GOING TO THE SUPERMARKET’: MEN BUYING
SEX IN EAST LONDON 25 (2007).
133. Id.
134. Sven-Axel Månsson, Men’s Practices in Prostitution and Their Implications for Social
Work, in SOCIAL WORK IN CUBA AND SWEDEN: ACHIEVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS
267, 270 (Sven-Aex Månsson & Clothilde Proveyer Cervantes eds., 2005). The five
reasons are a “dirty whore” sexual fantasy; a taste for types of sex that the buyer
cannot obtain without paying for them; the lack of other women due to physical
248 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

in need of counseling and treatment.”135 This belief about mental distur-

bance present in persons who pay for sex might well be correct, but it is just
as hard to prove as the enduring Everyman.
Buyer, customer, and john all deny pathology. Any antisocial deviance
present in sex-buyers that an investigator might look for must first be pos-
ited, and there is no a priori reason to assume anything about these men.
Neither bland normality nor obedience to “dominant discourses of
gendered sexual mores”136 necessarily motivate individuals who choose to
buy sex. Researchers report what they suspect was already there. A non-slang
term for sex-buyer, if it could be coined, would permit investigation into
the current Everyman default.

B. Procurer-Fosterer

The word that American English lacks here is a respectable synonym

for pimp, a harsh plosive not welcome in polite conversation unless un-
avoidably necessary. “Procurer” is the closest we get. Returning to the Ox-
ford English Dictionary (“OED”), one finds pimp listed last out of four
definitions of the word procurer. The first definition says procurer means “a
steward, a manager, an attorney, an advocate, a defender, a deputy, a com-
missioner, a representative.”137 One seldom hears it used that way in Ameri-
can English. The second definition, marked as rare or obsolete, identifies a
procurer as an “instigator or prime mover.” Third: “one who procures or
obtains.” Last, and dating back to the seventeenth-century: “One who pro-
cures women for the gratification of lust; a pander.”138
Whereas john used as a synonym for sex-buyer is pure slang, pimp is a
noun with a literal meaning. The OED definition of pimp, prefaced by
“Origin obscure,”139 hews to the procurer understanding of the term. A
pimp is “[o]ne who provides means and opportunities for unlawful sexual
intercourse; a pander, procurer.”140
This definition of pimp as one who obtains release for a libidinous
clientele has some descriptive truth, but is too narrow for law and regula-
tion. Pimps do not foster the “means and opportunities for unlawful sexual
intercourse,” because “unlawful sexual intercourse” includes encounters not
involving money—adultery, fornication, statutory rape—while pimps are in

limitations of the buyer; the purchase of sex as a consumer product; and a desire to
dominate a woman due to feelings of lost masculine supremacy. Id.
135. Westerhoff, supra note 131, at 7.
136. COY ET AL., supra note 132, at 25.
137. 12 OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 560 (2d ed. 1989).
138. Id.
139. 11 OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 845 (2d ed., 1989).
140. Id.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 249

the sector to reap financial gains. Nor do pimps merely procure “women for
the gratification of lust.” What makes a pimp of interest to the law is his
connection to persons under his stewardship at least, if not his control.
Calling him a procurer focuses on the agent-principal relationship he has
with buyers while neglecting what might fairly, at least some of the time, be
called the master-servant relationship he has with sex-sellers. Especially in
the current century, when electronic technology makes it easier for buyers
to do more of their own procuring, the conduct of a pimp about which the
law ought to care is what he does to another group of people, those who
exchange sex for money with strangers in response to his orders, giving him
what he wants.
A few jurisdictions do formally condemn the actions of a pimp with
little evasion or euphemism except their avoidance of the word as monosyl-
lable. California and Georgia have made felonies of what their statutory law
calls pimping.141 In its codified crime named simply “pimping,” Iowa starts
with the familiar understanding of this term as procuring, with a prohibi-
tion of solicitation of “a patron for a prostitute.”142 The Iowa Code then
moves closer to the more pertinent conduct of a pimp by adding that a
person “who knowingly takes or shares in the earnings of a prostitute” com-
mits a crime.143 West Virginia has made the very rare choice to write “the
pimp” into codified crime.144
More commonly, however, state-level statutes use evasive gerunds
when they prohibit conduct relating to the sale of sexual access to third
parties’ bodies. Penal codes in the United States add to the ill-defined of-
fense of “pandering” a cluster of equally uncertain “-ing” words that speak
opaquely about the conduct condemned. “Inducing,” “exploiting,” “com-
pelling,” “promoting,” and “facilitating” in American statutory crimes re-
lated to prostitution provide little information about which actions on their
part put individuals at risk of prosecution.145
Uncertainty about which pimp-behaviors violate the law coexists with
scholarly uncertainty about who is engaged in this work. According to a

141. CAL. PENAL CODE § 266h (Westlaw through Ch. 859 of 2017 Reg. Sess.); GA.
CODE ANN. § 16-6-11 (Westlaw through 2017 Sess. of Ga. Gen. Assemb.).
142. IOWA CODE ANN. § 725.2 (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. Sess.).
143. Id.
144. W. VA. CODE § 61-8-5 (b) (Westlaw through 2017 Second Extraordinary Sess.).
145. MICH. COMP. LAWS. ANN. § 750.455 (Westlaw through P.A. 2017, No. 167, of the
2017 Reg. Sess.) (“inducing”); UTAH CODE ANN. § 76-10-1305 (Westlaw through
2017 First. Spec. Sess.) (“exploiting”); OR. REV. STAT. ANN. § 167.017 (Westlaw
through 2017 Reg. Sess.) (“compelling); KANS. STAT. ANN. § 21-6420 (Westlaw
through 2017 Reg. Sess.) (“promoting”); OHIO REV. CODE ANN. § 2907.22
(Westlaw through 2017 File 25 of the 132nd Gen. Assemb.) (“promoting”); N.D.
CENT. CODE § 12.1-29-02 (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. Sess.) (“facilitating”).
250 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

recent survey of the literature, pimps “may be the most hidden sub-
population of the entire sex work industry,” even though most persons who
sell sex are, the author reports, “pimp-controlled.”146 Similar to the
anonymizing function of the word “john,” which shrouds buyers in mystery
while maintaining focus on sellers, this passive-voice diction—saying that
sex workers “are pimp-controlled” rather than putting pimps up front as the
subject—suggests that although experts know that many, perhaps most,
sellers work under the control of other people, they know little about who
these controllers are or what they are doing to or for the sex-sellers they
work with.147
Sloppy slang in place of a precise noun that gets in the way of coher-
ent regulation is present also in “madam,” the closest that American English
has to a term for a female pimp. “Madam,” unlike “pimp,” stays silent on
whether this manager gains marginal income from each new purchase of
sex: her role in the business is vague. Offering another example of how
opacity in a working sex word both manifests and generates lack of clarity,
researchers rarely study madams.148

III. “TRAFFICKING”

At present, almost everybody in the prostitution conversation claims

to oppose one thing. A few brave voices refuse to join this chorus,149 but

146. Elisabeth Jandro, The Regulation of Sex and Sex Workers, in SEX, SEXUALITY, LAW,
AND (IN)JUSTICE 216, 226 (Henry F. Fratella & Jennifer M. Sumner eds., 2016)
(citations omitted). This summary gives a wide range for the number of sex sellers
who “are pimp-controlled,” 40-80%. Id. For larger estimates, see Celia Williamson
& Terry Cluse-Tolar, Pimp-Controlled Prostitution: Still an Integral Part of Street Life,
8(9) VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN 1074, 1075 (2002) (gathering data assembled in
the 1990s).
147. On the scarcity of research on pimping, see Ronald Weitzer, Prostitution as a Form of
Work, 1 SOC. COMPASS 143, 149 (2007). For one taxonomy of pimps understood by
how they manage sex-sellers, see Loretta J. Stalans & Mary A. Finn, Defining and
Predicting Pimps’ Coerciveness Toward Sex Workers: Socialization Processes, J. INTER-
PERSONAL VIOLENCE, Nov. 2016, at 1. The article names “macks,” who oversee
large numbers of sex-sellers and are “the most successful and respectful pimps;” “ten-
nis-shoe pimps,” who use drugs along with the small number of sex-sellers they
employ; and “gorilla pimps,” the minority who recruit sex-sellers aggressively and
resort to “brute violence.” Id.
148. See JACQUELINE B. HELFGOTT, CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR: THEORIES, TYPOLOGIES, AND
CRIMINAL JUSTICE 302–03 (2008).
149. LAURA MARÍA AGUSTÍN, SEX AT THE MARGINS: MIGRATION, LABOUR MARKETS
AND THE RESCUE INDUSTRY 8 (2007) (calling “trafficking” central to an unfortunate
“victimising discourse”); Noah Berlatsky, “Human Trafficking” Has Become a Mean-
ingless Term, NEW REPUBLIC, Oct. 30, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/
123302/human-trafficking-has-become-meaningless-term.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 251

unanimity about the wrongness of trafficking stands out singularly in a de-

bate where disagreement reigns. It turns out, however, that “trafficking”
shares in the general problem of working sex words—lack of clarity, tacit
reference to a consensus that does not exist, and a refusal to declare any real
commitments from the law—while adding new difficulties of its own.
Unlike rivalries between “sex worker” and alternative words for a sex-
seller, the unity of trafficking inside one word fends off challengers. Unlike
the slanginess of “john” and “pimp”—jocose choices that manifest lack of
regulatory seriousness—“trafficking” brings full formal officialdom to its
subject matter. We find this solemn gerund in American federal law, state
statutes, international and transitional primary materials, white papers, and
the agendas of important transnational organizations like the United Na-
tions and Amnesty International. The closer look at trafficking in this Part
finds divisions below the veneer. Agreement that trafficking is bad declares a
meaningless consensus when persons who claim unity do not share an un-
derstanding of the evil denominated by the word.

A. The Problem as Policy: What Does a Prohibition of Trafficking

Seek to Fix?

Suppose you could eliminate trafficking, either from the whole world
or the country in which you live. After you succeed in this work, what
would change? Your answer speaks to the disagreement that centers this
Essay. Rivals who agree about condemning trafficking disagree on whether a
sex-seller can ever have a nonproblematic relationship—one that the law
ought to tolerate: no judgments, no interference—with a person whose ef-
forts drew her into this occupation. This foundational disagreement leads to
difference on what to oppose under this rubric.
Any individual who seeks to eliminate trafficking necessarily must first
form an opinion about the exchange of sex for money. Such a transaction
could be categorically bad. From there, any effort to recruit or encourage
sellers by third parties is bad because (among other possible reasons) it en-
larges supply, and probably also demand,150 in markets of paid-for intimate
penetration. Alternatively, the exchange could be value-neutral or even de-
sirable, as long as both seller and buyer participate voluntarily.151 Should
you hold this view while condemning trafficking, you would have an ap-
proximate definition of trafficking as recruitment or management efforts

150. See Janice G. Raymond, Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution and a Legal Re-
sponse to the Demand for Prostitution, 2 J. TRAUMA PRAC. 315, 316 (2003) (arguing
that in this market, increasing supply causes demand to increase).
151. See AGUSTÍN, supra note 149, at 71–72 (so arguing, with reference to selling by poor
women).
252 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

too aggressive to comport with voluntary work. The two perspectives, at

separate ends of a familiar spectrum, are radically incompatible with each
other. And you might, of course, take a centrist position, disapproving in
some measure of sex markets but not wishing to abolish them.
No matter your view, after you succeed in ending trafficking, the
number of people in the population who sell sex for a living (never reliably
tallied by researchers152) would change. If you are in the first group, a cate-
gorical opponent of prostitution, your success in eliminating trafficking
would eliminate almost one hundred percent of the sector. If you come
from the second group, the one that regards sex work as voluntary by de-
fault, the total number of sex workers would stay relatively unchanged. It
could even increase if sex-selling does not, in fact, exploit the seller. Inter-
vention from the middle-ground third group would cause a reduction—less
than the reduction the first group would install, but more than the reduc-
tion from the second.
Understood as a bottom line, then, trafficking equates to sex-selling
itself. More trafficking, more sex work. Less trafficking, less sex work. Traf-
ficking eliminated, prostitution eliminated.
Such a bottom line sounds like nothing worse than redundancy, but it
demonstrates an active harm. Opposition to trafficking makes a false prom-
ise to address sociological pathology by finding common ground. We may
disagree about the sex trade, goes the conventional wisdom, but we don’t
disagree about trafficking, do we? We do. Disagreement about the sex trade
maps on to disagreement about trafficking. And the divide has been written
into the law, as we will now see through an examination of trafficking
crimes.

B. The Problem Codified: Force-Coercion-Deceit as Trafficking Criteria

Most, but not all, participants in the trafficking conversation distin-

guish between the sale and purchase of sex agreed to by a willing seller, on
one hand, and the imposition of pressures to enlist a person into this work,
on the other. Excesses in recruitment characterize trafficking, again to
many, but not all, who debate prostitution law reform. Several difficulties
follow from this implicit binary between (acceptably) voluntarily chosen
sex-selling and sex-selling that originates (unacceptably) in wrongful pres-
sure on the individual enlisted.

152. Ronald Weitzer’s esteemed monograph contains extensive data on the subject but no
estimates of how many persons work in the sector. WEITZER, supra note 128. The
aggregator prostitution.procon.org asks that question and also comes up with no
answer. See http://prostitution.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000095.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 253

Historical attention to international covenants on trafficking shows

that a focus on the voluntariness vel non of sex-selling, today so central to
the trafficking debate, arrived relatively recently.153 Older instruments like
the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of Trafficking in Persons and of
the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others and the 1933 Suppression of
the Traffic of Women of Full Age refused to acknowledge voluntary partici-
pation in prostitution, banning trafficking categorically even with the con-
sent of the sex-seller.154 The identification of sex-seller consent as a
condition that precludes liability for trafficking came into international law
only in the 1990s.155 It is certainly possible that contemporary thinking
about the possibility of free choice to undertake this work is more enlight-
ened, or otherwise desirable, than the older stance of categorically denying
that sex-sellers participate voluntarily. In either case, the record shows that
legal instruments can condemn trafficking without concerning themselves
with consent.
For another locus of disagreement below the surface about what con-
stitutes trafficking as a state-level crime, consider recitations of forbidden
behaviors in American criminal codes. These penal provisions overwhelm-
ingly name force and coercion as elements of trafficking.156 So far so good:
prohibitions are on the same page. But then these state crimes go on to
diverge about whether fraud or deceit directed to the targeted person will
suffice for trafficking liability.157 Recruiters of sex-sellers have committed,
and continue to commit, fraud. They gain cooperation by offering women
jobs outside the sex industry: as “maids, nannies, dancers, and models,” for
example.158 Offers like these when the work available in fact is to be sexually
penetrated can get the offerors convicted of trafficking in a majority of juris-
dictions, but not all.

153. Beverly Balos, The Wrong Way to Equality: Privileging Consent in the Trafficking of
Women for Sexual Exploitation, 27 HARV. WOMEN’S L.J. 137, 143–44 (2004).
154. Id. at 143–44, 148–49.
155. Id.
156. See, e.g., IND. CODE ANN. § 35-42-3.5-1 (Westlaw through 2017 First Reg. Sess.);
FLA. STAT. ANN. § 787.06 (Westlaw through 2017 First Reg. Sess.).
157. A U.S. government report asserts incorrectly that force, fraud, or coercion is neces-
sary for all trafficking, not just sex trafficking. CHILD WELFARE INFORMATION
GATEWAY, DEFINITIONS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING 1 (2016), https://www.childwel
fare.gov/pubPDFs/definitions_trafficking.pdf (published by the Department of
Health and Human Services). For examples of American statutory prohibitions of
trafficking that omit fraud or deceit as culpable conduct that establishes the offense,
see COLO. REV. STAT. § 18-3-502 (2014); 720 ILL. COMP. STAT. 5 / 10-9 (2014);
MINN. STAT. ANN. § 609.281 (2016).
158. April Riegler, Missing the Mark: Why the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Fails to
Protect Sex Trafficking Victims in the United States, 30 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 231,
236 (2007).
254 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

Even when a sex-seller entered this line of work at the behest of a

sponsor-recruiter who refrained from deceiving her and eschewed force and
coercion, severe poverty on her part may have diminished her volition. Of
the billions of persons in the world living in poverty, most are girls or
women.159 Large numbers of men are poor too, but men get recruited into
this sector at a much lower rate.160 The combination of poverty and being
perceived as eligible for enlistment puts women at a relatively high risk of
being brought into the sex trade against their will, even without overt force-
coercion-deceit.
Some prohibitions of trafficking evince discomfort with the problem
of voluntariness by attempting to split the difference. They provide that
when the putative victim is an adult, then a defendant must have used force,
coercion, or deception to be convicted, but when the putative victim is
under 18, then this showing is not necessary.161 This maneuver splits no
difference. It concedes nothing to the half of the binary that opposes sex
work and wants to codify a broad prohibition. Minors younger than the
jurisdiction’s age of sexual consent who have been enlisted into selling pene-
tration of their bodies are already understood to be victims without regard
to any expressions of acquiescence they may have made. Gaps of a couple of
years between the age of sexual consent and the age of legal majority do not
eliminate this problem because minors’ contracts are voidable, and prostitu-
tion as an industry cannot function if sex-sellers have no obligation to fulfill
their contractual promises.
Dropping the force-coercion-deceit requirement for sex-sellers below
the age of majority thus adds nothing to the law we already have. But insist-
ing on force or coercion, or alternatively force-coercion-deceit, makes a
criminal prohibition difficult to apply, regardless of whether the provision
exists only for underage sellers. It also fails to capture all the social harm of
this practice.
One might then conclude that force-coercion-deceit as a criterion
ought to go. Trafficking could be criminalized without this constituent.
From there we would have a new problem: If trafficking does not require

159. Sylvia Chant, The ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ and the ‘Feminisation’ of Anti-Poverty
Programmes: Room for Revision?, 44 J. DEV. STUD. 165, 168 (2008).
160. The International Labour Organization, an agency of the United Nations, estimates
the gender divide for victims of sexual trafficking as 98% female, 2% male. Interna-
tional Labour Office, ILO Global Estimate of Forced Labour 14 (2012), http://
www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_norm/@declaration/documents/publicatio
n/wcms_181953.pdf.
161. E.g., ARIZ. REV. STAT. ANN. § 13-1307A-B (Westlaw through the First Reg. Sess. of
the 53rd Leg.); VT. STAT. ANN. tit. 13, § 2652 (Westlaw through the laws of the
First Sess. of the 2017-2018 Vt. Gen. Assemb.).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 255

force or coercion or deceit, then what does the word mean? How can we
know it has occurred?
The best-known and most widely adopted formal condemnation of
this conduct tries and fails to answer this basic question. In the United
Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
especially Women and Children,162 ratified by 170 nations, including the
United States, after taking effect in 2003,163 sexual trafficking is at the fore,
even though this Protocol also covers nonsexual labor. Its definition of traf-
ficking regards force, coercion, or deceit as sufficient to violate international
law but not necessary.
Its language is hard to parse. See how many times you need to read
this paragraph to understand what it prohibits:

“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transporta-

tion, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the
threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of
fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits
to achieve the consent of a person having control over another
person, for the purpose of exploitation.164

This understanding of trafficking includes in its roster of wrongful conduct

“the giving or receiving of payments or benefits” to achieve consent “for the
purpose of exploitation.” What “exploitation” might mean is unclear. If it
means appropriation of surplus value from labor, then a large fraction of
nonsexual work runs afoul of this trafficking prohibition.165 Nouns in the
first line—“recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring”—are intelli-
gible enough, but what is “receipt of persons”? Furthermore, while it makes
sense that the UN Trafficking Protocol chose to condemn “giving” and “re-
ceiving” of payments, because presumably traffickers both give money (to
recruit) and take it (after their victims start doing sex work), this breadth
suggests that victims too are traffickers when they get paid—unless we

162. G.A. Res. 55/25, annex II, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, U.N. Doc. A/45/49 (Vol. I) at 31 (Nov. 15, 2000), https://treaties.un.org/
doc/source/docs/A_RES_55_25-E.pdf (entered into force Sept. 9, 2003).
163. U.N. TREATY COLLECTION, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Con-
vention Against Transnational Organized Crime, https://treaties.un.org/pages/View
Details.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-12-a&chapter=18&clang=_en.
164. G.A. Res. 55/25, supra note 162, Article 3(a).
165. Cf. Cynthia Grant Bowman, Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21st
Century, 49 CONN. L. REV. 117, 121–23 (2016) (exploring applications for femi-
nism from Marx’s work on the appropriation of labor by capital).
256 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

somehow can find enough content in “exploitation” and “having control

over another person” to excuse them.
As the UN Trafficking Protocol illustrates, open-ended compendia of
behaviors that can amount to trafficking capture a variety of bad actions at
the expense of clarity. Institutions and persons who work in or near sex
markets and want to be innocent of trafficking cannot know which paths to
choose or avoid. As members of communities and societies, they also cannot
clearly know whether people around them are harming others or experienc-
ing harm in violation of the law.
This gap around “trafficking” echoes the working sex words problem
expounded in Part II. Modern conversations about trafficking eschew the
noun “prostitute”: it sounds obsolete in this setting. For participants who
favor the passive adjective “prostituted,” force and coercion are always pre-
sent in this work. Conversely, if a seller is not a prostitute or a prostituted
person but a “sex worker,” then consent is her default and her hirer-pro-
curer-recruiter has committed trafficking only if he deviated from this de-
fault by coercing her. Regardless of which path one chooses, the basic
difficulty persists.

C. The Problem Expanded: Other Trouble with “Trafficking”

After participants in debates about prostitution reach an understand-

ing about the fundamental question of force-and-coercion vel non, they will
need to move to other definitional tasks not yet even fully identified, let
alone resolved, for the regulation of trafficking. They all matter much less
than the basic policy disagreement pervading this Essay—that is, whether
all sex-selling necessarily includes trafficking—and so will get only enough
treatment here to illustrate yet more indeterminacy present in this working
sex word.

1. Sex only?

Prohibitions of trafficking disagree on the centrality of sex-selling to

the evil they address. The UN Protocol, as noted, includes nonsexual labor
among the activities that a person can be trafficked into.166 Statutory law in
the United States manifests both approaches. The federal Victims of Traf-
ficking and Violence Protection Act is drafted to cover sexual and nonsexual
labor, but foregrounds sex trafficking and harms to women and children.167
All U.S. states have trafficking crimes on their books, but some follow the

166. See supra note 163.

167. See Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106-
386, § 102(b)(1)–(2), 114 Stat. 1464, 1466.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 257

separation approach while others fold sex trafficking into a larger category
of forced labor.168 The phrase “sex trafficking” might, but might not, imply
that trafficking can occur without sexual exploitation or sex work. The un-
explained and undefined role of sex in this much-repeated noun suggests
that participants in the dialogue may end up talking past each other.

2. Who Trafficks?

Irrespective of whether they require force or coercion or deceit, or

choose to criminalize trafficking that does not contain these elements, traf-
ficking statutes continue this Essay’s theme of confusion and unclarity by
failing to ask a basic question: Who ought to be legally responsible for traf-
ficking? Several actors who do not profit directly from sex work have ap-
peared plausible candidates for legal responsibility. Statutes that omit
attention to the evil they are trying to remedy confuse the issues.
A few states have drafted their trafficking crimes to make customers
liable when they buy sex aware that the sellers were trafficked.169 Tort and
restitution actions, if courts permit them, add civil liability to the risk of
prosecution.170 Organizations that support sex-sellers may run afoul of anti-
trafficking statutory law. For example, the Danish nonprofit Sexelance,
which seeks to lessen the danger of street prostitution by providing a con-
verted ambulance as a work space with well-wishers standing outside ready
to call the police in case of trouble,171 might be guilty of “harboring” in
violation of several American prohibitions.172 Same, perhaps, for the Chi-
cago nonprofit that gives free legal aid to persons charged with prostitu-
tion.173 To some localities and observers, landlords who rent to brothel-
keepers look guilty of trafficking.174

168. For a study of American criminalization of trafficking that explores differences and
similarities of these state-level provisions, see 2014 State Rankings on Human Traf-
ficking Laws, POLARIS, https://polarisproject.org/sites/default/files/2014-State-Rat
ings.pdf (last visited Nov. 27, 2017).
169. E.g., MONT. CODE ANN. § 45-5-705(1) (Westlaw through 2017); S.D. CODIFIED
LAWS § 22-49-4 (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. and Spec. Sess. Laws).
170. E.g., TSACHI KEREN-PAZ, SEX TRAFFICKING: A PRIVATE LAW RESPONSE (2013) (so
advocating).
171. Richard Orange, Copenhagen’s Sex Ambulance is Safe Space for Capital’s Red Light
Workers, GUARDIAN, Nov. 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/
nov/27/sex-ambulance-helps-save-lives-in-copenhagen.
172. E.g., MINN. STAT. ANN. § 609.321 subd. 7a(1) (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. and
First Spec. Sess.); OKLA. STAT. ANN. tit. 21, § 748(6) (Westlaw through 2017).
173. See SEX WORKERS OUTREACH PROJECT CHICAGO, http://www.swop-chicago.org/
(last visited Sept. 23, 2017).
174. E.g., N.Y. PENAL LAW § 230.15(1) (Westlaw through 2017); S.D. CODIFIED LAWS
§ 22-23-8(4) (Westlaw through 2017 Reg. and Spec. Sess. Laws); see also Arelis R.
Hernández, New Law Could Make Landlords Liable for Sex Trafficking at Their Rent-
258 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

IV. “LEGALIZATION,” “DECRIMINALIZATION,” AND “THE [SWEDISH]

[NORDIC] MODEL”

In contemporary debates over prostitution law reform, the three main

terms of art for what advocates desire and oppose—“legalization,”
“decriminalization,” and “the [ ]model” with “model” modified by “Swed-
ish” or “Nordic”—all fail to attain effective description. The first two terms
fail because an ever-enlarging discourse about making prostitution law more
permissive uses “legalization” and “decriminalization” differently from how
American criminal law and policy use these words. Because prostitution law
reform requires cooperation from legislatures, activists who want legal
change have to work with language familiar to state actors. This particular
confusion is not present in “the Swedish Nordic model.” Instability here
comes instead from the spread of it to national governments far from
Scandinavia.

A. Legalization and Decriminalization

Most of the time, “legalization” in the United States means changing

the treatment of an activity from unlawful to lawful, from opposition to
toleration. To legalize gambling, or abortion, or possession of marijuana, or
acts of homosexual intimacy between consenting adults, or the use of ster-
oids by professional athletes, is to cease imposing law-based penalties for
engaging in an activity. What one may not do without facing criminal pun-
ishment becomes, after legalization, an action one may take without facing
an adverse response from the government. “Legalization represents a roll-
back of the state’s regulatory authority,” the criminal law scholar Alexandra
Natapoff explains, as well as “the elimination of state power to punish cer-
tain individual choices, and the concomitant expansion of liberty and pri-
vacy zones.”175
Decriminalization, again most of the time, extends less liberality than
legalization. Individuals whose conduct is addressed by regulation cannot be
convicted of a crime when they engage in a decriminalized activity, but they
can suffer other state-imposed detriment. In contrast to legalization of an
activity, as Professor Natapoff continues, “decriminalization maintains the
full scope of the state’s intrusive powers, softening the consequences of vio-

als, WASH. POST, Nov. 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-poli

tics/new-law-could-make-landlords-liable-for-sex-trafficking-at-their-rentals/2016/
11/18/7d036756-ab6a-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html?utm_term=.1bf0682
04c46.
175. Alexandra Natapoff, Misdemeanor Decriminalization, 68 VAND. L. REV. 1055, 1066
(2015).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 259

lations even while validating the underlying prohibition.”176 One study of

the law covering traffic stops in the United States goes further. Even after
certain minor infractions that give reason for traffic stops are decriminal-
ized, individuals suffer from harms associated with law enforcement.177 State
actors who patrol the streets cannot, after decriminalization, initiate formal
punishment of the automobile drivers they stop, but they force individuals
into the criminal justice apparatus, an entry that makes them “vulnerable to
state-imposed privacy, liberty, dignitary, and physical harms that arise from
contact with the criminal justice system and actors.”178 Away from prostitu-
tion, the state stops imposing detriment on individuals who engage in an
activity when it chooses legalization. When the state chooses decriminaliza-
tion, it continues to impose detriment, only less of it.
Now move the discussion to prostitution. Legalization in contrast to
decriminalization takes on a different meaning, almost an entirely opposite
one. Here decriminalization becomes the more liberal alternative. In a
much-cited explanation of the distinction in the context of prostitution law
reform, Janet Halley and colleagues divide decriminalization into parts.179
When the state chooses complete decriminalization (in contrast to partial
criminalization, taken up below180), it eliminates more interferences with
prostitution than it does when it chooses legalization. Complete decriminal-
ization “involves the repeal of any special criminal legislation dealing with
sex work. Various activities involved in sex work can still be prosecuted as
criminal offenses” after decriminalization, but only “under generally appli-
cable laws,” not sex-sale specific laws.181
This understanding of decriminalization as laissez-faire abandonment
of state-enforced penalties for selling sex is widely shared by other legal
scholars182—and it is far from decriminalization as understood in American
criminal law of other activities like possession of marijuana and minor traf-
fic violations. In those settings away from prostitution, the state, having
opted for decriminalization, continues to burden participants with non-
criminal consequences for what they choose to do: fines, citations, adminis-
trative penalties.183 Advocates of decriminalizing prostitution want no such

176. Id.
177. Jordan Blair Woods, Decriminalization, Police Authority, and Routine Traffic Stops, 62
UCLA L. REV. 672, 677 (2015).
178. Id.
179. See Halley et al., supra note 47, at 338–39.
180. See infra Part IV.B.
181. Halley et al., supra note 47, at 339.
182. E.g., Nicole Bingham, Nevada Sex Trade: A Gamble for the Workers, 10 YALE J.L. &
FEMINISM 69, 90-91 (1998); Ane Mathieson et al., Prostitution Policy: Legalization,
Decriminalization and the Nordic Model, 14 SEATTLE J. SOC. JUST. 367, 378 (2016).
183. See, e.g., Woods, supra note 177, passim.
260 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

lesser measures in place any more than they want selling sex to be a crime.
Their goal is what Professor Natapoff would call legalization: “a roll-back of
the state’s regulatory authority.”184
Legalizing prostitution in contrast to decriminalizing it means impos-
ing legal controls aimed at making sex work more comprehensively regu-
lated, physically safer for both seller and buyer, and likely to produce tax
revenue for the state. One definition describes legalization as “complete
decriminalization coupled with positive legal provisions regulating one or
more aspect of sex work businesses. The typical options include labor law,
employment law, zoning of sex businesses, compulsory medical check-ups,
licensing of sex workers, etc.”185 This choice moves prostitution indoors, off
the streets. It is the regulatory posture taken most famously in the Nether-
lands, Germany and rural Nevada; it also exists in Austria, Denmark, Swit-
zerland, and the Australian state of Victoria.186
Noun-trouble in prostitution being what it is, “legalization” and
“decriminalization” do not define themselves as separate options for regula-
tors, and confusion ensues. For example, when New Zealand codified the
Prostitution Reform Act in 2003, undertaking reform by mostly repealing
criminal penalties, the statute’s preamble identified its goal as “to
decriminalise prostitution.”187 Fair enough—most of what the Act does is
take law out of participants’ way—but the statute also imposes new regula-
tory burdens on brothel keepers, in effect adding legalization to decriminal-
ization.188 The law in the Australian state of New South Wales closely
resembles that of New Zealand, with similar uncertainty about legalization-
like regulatory increments.
When in 2016 Amnesty International formally announced its stance
in favor of worldwide decriminalization,189 it appeared unsure of where it
stood on the decriminalization-legalization divide. First, it confidently said
it knew what it wanted: “Legalization is different to [sic] decriminalization
and it is not the model we are proposing. Instead of the removal of laws
criminalizing sex workers, legalization means the introduction of laws and
policies specific to sex work to formally regulate it.”190 Fair enough, though
utterly inconsistent with an American convention.191

184. See supra note 175 and accompanying text.

185. Halley et al., supra note 47, at 339.
186. Raymond, supra note 150, at 317–19.
187. Prostitution Reform Act 2003, s 3 (N.Z.).
188. Id. s 8.
189. Amnesty International Policy, supra note 46.
190. Q&A: Policy to Protect the Rights of Sex Workers, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Q8 (May
26, 2016), https://www.amnesty.org/en/qa-policy-to-protect-the-human-rights-of-se
x-workers/.
191. See supra text accompanying notes 175–78.
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 261

The organization continues, “Amnesty is not opposed to legalization

per se; but governments must make sure the system respects the human
rights of sex workers.”192 This concession implies that legalization presump-
tively oppresses sex workers more than helps them—a possibility that could
be correct, but for which Amnesty International renders no evidence in its
report. Whatever “legalization” may mean here, an important NGO has
used this working sex word to associate law and legal regulation with bad
consequences.

B. The Swedish Nordic [What Next?] Model

In 1999, Sweden enacted the world’s first national law providing that
receipt of sexual services in exchange for payment violates the criminal law,
whereas participation on the selling side of this exchange does not.193 After
Norway followed suit in 2008 and Iceland in 2009,194 the term for
criminalizing sex-buying but not -selling shifted from “the Swedish model”
to “the Nordic model.” This reform moved south to the United Kingdom
with Northern Ireland’s passage of a buyer-only crime,195 then across the
Atlantic when Canada revised its criminal law to exempt sellers while pun-
ishing purchasers of sex.196 In 2016, the French National Assembly enacted
this partial criminalization.197
With France’s population exceeding that of the other five countries
put together—not to mention that democracies, Nordic ones included,
always can repeal the laws they codify—a different term for partial criminal-
ization of the sex trade seems needed. This one contains built-in obsoles-
cence.198 It also contains “model,” a subtle affront to both sides of the
progressive binary. To call an approach a model is to imply that it is an
exemplar—like a model student, model minority, or a runway model. In
the United States, a model statute encourages state governments to read,

192. Amnesty International Policy, supra note 46.

193. LAG OM FÖRBUD MOT KÖP AV SEXUELLA TJÄNSTER (Svensk författningssamling
[SFS] 1998:408) (Swed.).
194. Almindelig borgerlig Straffelov 12. des 2008 nr. 1344 § 202a (Norway); Lagasafn,
Íslensk Lög nr. 54 27. aprı́l 2009, 206. gr. (Iceland).
195. Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Criminal Justice and Support for Victims) Act
(Northern Ireland) 2015 c. 2, § 1, sch. 2; § 2, sch. 15.
196. Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, S.C. 2014, c 25 (Can.).
197. Loi 2016-444 du 13 avril 2016 visant à renforcer la lutte contre le système prostitu-
tionnel et à accompagner les personnes prostituées [Law 2016-444 of April 6, 2016
to strengthen the fight against the prostitution system and assist prostitutes], JOUR-
NAL OFFICIEL DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE [J.O.] [OFFICIAL GAZETTE OF
FRANCE], Apr. 6, 2016.
198. Cf. Richard B. Stewart, Evaluating the New Deal, 22 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 239,
244 (1998) (locating built-in obsolescence in American regulation).
262 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER & LAW [Vol. 24:221

learn from, and defer to a text. This label gives substantive endorsement to
one half of the binary: advocates of full decriminalization do not presume to
call the result they want a model. But “model” also has unflattering conno-
tations for their antagonists who favor partial criminalization. The word
model sounds theoretical rather than realistic. It marks a hypothesis or a
construct, rather than the real interference with customer prerogative that
their side works to codify.
The Nordic-Swedish-What Term Next problem is the only working
sex word that can be repaired with relative ease: Substitute “buyer criminal-
ization.” Not a perfect term, but by omitting reference to the seller, it avoids
the difficulty present in prostitute versus sex worker;199 criminalization, for
its part, is notably clearer than “decriminalization.”200 And whereas “buyer”
as a less slangy alternative to “john” warrants criticism for not being candid
enough about what gets bought,201 “buyer criminalization” in the context of
prostitution law reform says what it means.

V. CONCLUSION: SENSE AND SENSIBILITY FOR WORKING SEX WORDS

In her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen created two sisters,
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and associated each with a separate ab-
stract noun.202 Elinor represents Sense: rationality, logic, prudence. Mari-
anne stands for Sensibility, a word that back in the early nineteenth century
meant what modern diction might call in touch with her feelings. Austen
approves of both nouns. They balance each other, she implies: for an indi-
vidual, the path to happiness requires attention to each of these opposing
inclinations.
The nouns of working sex words try to balance Sense with Sensibility.
Curing the trouble with “prostitute,” “prostitution,” “sex work,” “sex work-
ers,” “john,” “pimp,” “madam,” “legalization,” “decriminalization,” and
“trafficking” may appear at first to be a problem only of Sense. These
words, as the introduction to this Essay noted, are in the aggregate ambigu-
ous, misleading, too slangy or jocose, absent, or bitterly contested. Bad, in
short. Other words exist. Why not throw them out and choose better ones?
Rational reformers, acting in the mode of Elinor Dashwood, would know
what they want to say about the sex trade and speak accordingly.
Worth a try, and this Essay has made one move toward Sense, propos-
ing “buyer criminalization” as a substitute for “the Nordic model,” a
descriptor that replaced something else and is likely to continue unstable in

199. See supra Part I.

200. See supra Part IV.A.
201. See supra Part II.A.
202. JANE AUSTEN, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 10 (1811).
2017] WORKING SEX WORDS 263

the future.203 Going forward, it may be possible to repair the difficulties

present in “legalization” and “decriminalization.”204 The other working sex
words of this Essay, however—especially prostitute, sex worker, john, pimp,
and trafficking—have no prospects of improvement through the application
of Sense. The reason for their futility is their stubborn Sensibility, a com-
mitment as much felt as reasoned.
“Prostitute” and “pimp” are epithets suffused with hostility that speak-
ers cannot avoid, though they may not feel antipathy or wish to express it.
“Sex worker” and “john” have an opposite function. They shroud the per-
son they name in fog and imply “move along, nothing to see here.” As for
“trafficking,” it turns out to have no empirical content other than third-
party involvement:205 all it means, in the end, is some participation in the
sex trade that the speaker condemns and expects others to disapprove. These
terms all are rife with warring sensibilities.
It is telling that “the Nordic model” is the easiest working sex word of
this Essay to fix. This descriptor, like Marianne Dashwood, knows how it
feels and what it wants. “Legalization” and “decriminalization” also have
orderly goals in mind, though these nouns themselves lack clarity.
In contrast to these relatively clear terms, a person paid to accept inti-
mate penetration by strangers embodies a profound divide. Disagreement
about whether sex-selling and -buying can ever be an activity that the law
should tolerate is so fundamental that it has blocked describing, let alone
achieving, legal reform. Participants who work toward progressive ends in
this debate might do well to keep this fundamental in mind as they consider
what they can say productively to the other side of the binary. Until they
acknowledge not just their common interest in more humane law and regu-
lation but also their disunity, the working sex words that they now have to
use will continue to thwart what they do.206

203. See supra Part IV.B.

204. See supra Part IV.A.
205. MacKinnon, supra note 18, at 299–300.
206. Cf. Anita Bernstein, The Trouble with Regulating Microfinance, 35 U. HAW. L. REV.
1 (2013) (making a related agreement about the term “microfinance” as an object of
regulatory attention).