JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Kaytlin Bailey about the evolutionary sociology of sex and the institutional prejudices and systemic oppression of sex workers.

SPENCER: Kaytlin, welcome.

KAYTLIN: Thank you so much for having me.

SPENCER: How do you feel about how sex workers are treated in this country?

KAYTLIN: I think it's a travesty, and it's why I've dedicated my life to trying to change the social and legal status of sex workers, not just here, but all over the world.

SPENCER: And what's a travesty about it?

KAYTLIN: I think that we've been really wrong about the oldest profession for a long time. First of all, full-service sex work is criminalized in the overwhelming majority of the United States, with the exception of a few rural counties in Nevada. Even legal licensed sex workers are discriminated against across technology and banking platforms, and the criminalization and stigma against sex work leave all of us more vulnerable to all kinds of predation and personal violence — being exploited by landlords, lovers, or employers — both in and out of the sex trade. Criminalization and stigma against sex work have led to a lot of suffering.

SPENCER: When you refer to legal, licensed sex work, what are you referring to there?

KAYTLIN: Sex work is a really broad umbrella term that means a lot of different things. It includes escort work, full-service sex work, no matter where that happens, whether it's a hotel or on the street. It also refers to stripping, creating erotic content, foot fetish models, BDSM practitioners, and a wide variety of erotic content or services that are not directly criminalized. In the few licensed brothels in Nevada, you have legally licensed prostitutes that have to register.

SPENCER: And you mentioned that you think that this hurts a lot of people, not just the sex worker. So can you tell us about that?

KAYTLIN: Sure. I think that we're starting to experience now the kind of cascading consequences around focusing so much of our efforts on eradicating the oldest profession. We are losing the free internet because we are trying to erase sex workers off of it. This presents real problems, massive privacy concerns, our collective freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, because the way that you police prostitution is you police, functionally, who people have sex with and why. When you're willing to do that, you erode a lot of foundational freedoms that are meaningful for all of us, whether you've ever sold or bought sexual services or not.

SPENCER: Can you give some examples of ways that actually erode privacy or freedom?

KAYTLIN: Sure. So there's a landmark law in 2018 Donald Trump signed, SESTA-FOSTA, or Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and like many anti-trafficking laws that have come before and since. This was sold to the American people as a way of protecting vulnerable women and children from sexual exploitation, but it did no such thing. Instead, it created an exception to Article 230 that holds platforms liable for what people post on it, specifically sex workers who were using platforms to schedule and screen their services, platforms like backpage.com or Craigslist erotic services or Rentboy. What this has done is created a lot of incentive for all kinds of platforms to proactively censor or remove anything resembling not just sex work, but sexual or sexual-adjacent content. I think in the immediate aftermath of SESTA-FOSTA, on Instagram, the hashtag #woman was removed for fear that some sex workers might slip in. Platforms have had real anxiety around this, and it's created real problems for users and platforms alike. Most notably, and this has been well documented, sex educators have been swept up in this, so it is harder than it used to be to find experts that are able to tell people helpful things about how to have sex or how to prevent STIs, or how to engage in various activities safely.

SPENCER: And did you mention limitations on freedom of movement?

KAYTLIN: Absolutely. So you see this a lot in countries that have adopted the Nordic model or the criminalization of demand. But you also see it in places that have criminalized sex work. One of our first anti-prostitution laws in this country was also our first anti-immigration law. That's the Page Act. People are stopped at the border, not for having a criminal record or having been caught doing sex work, but because facial recognition technology has connected them to their sometimes perfectly legal online content.

SPENCER: So you're saying that they do legal sex work online, but then they...

KAYTLIN: But their status as a sex worker prevents them from being able to enter a country. This was a real problem a couple of years ago because the United States hosted an HIV/AIDS conference, and there were multiple people who were prevented from presenting at that conference because they were known sex workers. Our anti-immigration policies prevented them from attending and speaking at and sharing their knowledge with other experts in the field. That's just one of many examples of how our commitment to trying to eradicate prostitution undermines our efforts to improve public health and safety.

SPENCER: Do you think that sex work is too big a category because it includes too many different types of activities, or is it useful to think of it as one thing?

KAYTLIN: I think it's useful to think of it as one category because although there are a lot of different labor practices, locations, and risk levels with various kinds of sex work, we all suffer from the same stigma, and it's that stigma that really leads to all of these bad laws and policies.

SPENCER: It's pretty undeniable that many people have a stigma against sex workers. Where do you think that stems from?

KAYTLIN: I have a lot of theories about this. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. I actually believe that whorephobia is the foundation of misogyny. We became obsessed with who women have sex with around the time that we became obsessed with paternity. In a matrilineal society, it matters less who the dads are. But once you start controlling female reproductive choice and partner selection, you build a society really invested in controlling our movement and our access to public spaces. In fact, if you look across history, when places say they are cracking down on prostitution, they are often cracking down, literally, on public women, and many of the policies pursued in the name of reducing either the visibility or the prevalence of sex work have real consequences for whether or not women or queer folks are able to move freely in society.

SPENCER: It seems that many people have a gut feeling that if a woman had sex with a lot of partners, it somehow devalues them. Do you think that traces back to the same ultimate feelings that you're talking about? Or do you think that there's something else going on?

KAYTLIN: I do.

SPENCER: It's interesting to think about from an evolutionary standpoint whether this fear of being cuckolded, of raising someone else's child, is sort of ingrained in human nature. Do you think it is part of human nature, or do you think it's more of a cultural phenomenon?

KAYTLIN: I personally think that it's a cultural phenomenon. But you certainly see this behavior, and also lots of different mating and social strategies in our closest relatives. So bonobos are a famously matriarchal, promiscuous, super social species of primates, whereas chimpanzees, who are also promiscuous and also super social, are a little bit more chauvinistic. There you see mate guarding behavior where mid-status chimps will try to socially isolate or guard a female chimp that they've had sex with while they're in estrus. There are a couple of things about human biology that make that a little bit more complicated. First, we have hidden estrus. So when human women are ovulating, it's often a mystery to ourselves, our partners, and our communities. If we were wired, or if we evolved for mate guarding, then it would just be logistically easier if it was more obvious when we were fertile. Because that is not the case, I think that this is evidence that transactional sex was maybe one of many survival strategies that our ancestors deployed. I definitely think that sex in exchange for something of value, like food or shelter materials or even social support, predates us as a species. We see this behavior from penguins to primates, and we certainly see it in our earliest ancestors. When you're thinking about how males evolved to compete with each other, if violence, whether overpowering unwilling female partners or a lot of inter-male violence, to directly compete was the winning strategy, then we would look really differently. Men would be bigger with bigger teeth, for example, and probably smaller balls.

SPENCER: [laughs] Why bigger teeth and smaller balls?

KAYTLIN: Well, when you see different mating strategies in primates, different mating strategies are different. There is no paternal uncertainty among gorillas because you only have one mature male in a group, whereas there's lots of paternal uncertainty among bonobos and chimpanzees. Gorillas, because they're not competing with other males, are only having sex with the mature females in their community when they're in estrus, so they only have to ejaculate a little bit. Chimpanzees, however, often have to literally — and I apologize if this is crass or disgusting — dislodge other chimps' sperm from the female in order to give his swimmers the best fighting chance. So chimpanzees and bonobos have much larger testicles because they literally have to ejaculate more because competing with other males is a part of their strategy. So they have to have more sex. We have sort of medium-sized.

SPENCER: It seems to me that humans have many different strategies, and it's a little bit harder. You look across cultures, and there are some highly monogamous cultures and some less monogamous cultures.

KAYTLIN: We've really only been monogamish as a species.

SPENCER: Yeah, I guess it depends how you define it. Because even in monogamous societies, there's a lot of cheating.

KAYTLIN: Correct.

SPENCER: Yeah, well, it's interesting. That also suggests that there may be different kinds of evolutionary strategies among individuals. There are individuals that would never cheat in a million years, and then there are others that pretend to.

KAYTLIN: But in most human societies, you see examples of both promiscuous males and promiscuous females, and promiscuous females are often using transactional sex as a survival strategy, sometimes in response to the social isolation of that promiscuity.

SPENCER: How do you think that Christianity fits in here? Because obviously Christianity and many other religions have really strict edicts around sexual activity, generally banning it outside of monogamous, permanent marriage.

KAYTLIN: I feel like all of the Abrahamic religions are sort of equally guilty on this. You see very similar stories in Judaism and Islam, but patriarchal religions that hold beliefs around women's place in society seem to care a lot about who those women have sex with and why, and prostitution is often a flashpoint for those intense conversations. There's been a lot of time, talent, and treasure spent over the last few millennia on trying to contain, control, and eradicate prostitution in the name of God.

SPENCER: It's interesting that Jesus actually protects a sex worker, does he not?

KAYTLIN: Yeah, it is interesting to me that if we are asking the question, "What would Jesus do?" Then, according to Scripture, the answer is, "Be nice to sex workers." Mary Magdalene, of course, is the most famous example but unfortunately, she was not, in fact, a sex worker. The reason that she is known throughout much of the Western world as being sort of a reformed prostitute is the cultural role that she plays. Pope Gregory I actually mixed her up with a different Mary from the Bible during an Easter sermon in 591. And because of that reading comprehension problem, the church and the larger society adopted Mary Magdalene as this figure. But even outside of that one example, Jesus was known to spend a lot of time with sex workers, with the downtrodden, and seemed to have much stronger opinions, for sure, about tax collectors than people that have sex for money.

SPENCER: I've heard about Christian education — I think I've heard about this in a Mormon context in particular — where they'll do this thing with kids, they'll chew on some gum, and then they'll give the kids, they'll say, "Hey, who wants this gum now?" And then they'll use this as a metaphor for having sex outside of marriage. You could easily see this kind of extending to sex work as well, that they're almost evoking a disgust reaction around what would you really want this thing that's been used before? To me, this seems like, even though it's very silly, it actually seems like a core intuition that a lot of people have.

KAYTLIN: Sure, we're about the same age. So I came of age during George W. Bush's abstinence-only education program. I went to a public school, but that still meant that there was a religious leader who was brought in to give a presentation to our school auditorium, where they put glue on a piece of paper and then stuck another piece of paper to it, and then tore it apart. And was like, "This is what happens to your body when you have sex with people; you leave pieces of yourself all over them." But that purity message seems to really only apply to women. We talk about women's bodies being degraded or devalued by exposure to sex, or sexual thoughts or ideas about sex, where you don't see a corresponding devaluation around men. So if this was really about public health or controlling for STIs, then you would assume that that stigma would be held equally, but it's not. So, this idea around women's purity really has a lot to do with women as property. And this goes back to Hammurabi, who wrote some of our first laws around rape. Rape was first conceived of as a property crime committed against either a father or a husband. Why? Because it didn't matter if a woman was seduced by or violently attacked by another man. Once she lost her virginity or her fidelity was questioned, her value, not as a person but as a piece of property, was reduced.

SPENCER: You mentioned sexually transmitted infections; that would be another potential explanation for why people have really negative feelings about sex work. Would you think of that as an explanation?

KAYTLIN: Well, I think if we're thinking empirically, sex workers are way better at preventing STIs and transmission than the general public. Sex workers, in our role as professionals, because we are often sharing harm reduction information with each other — yes, latex condoms are a relatively recent development — but sex workers have always traded information around harm reduction with each other in brothels or traditional gathering places where sex workers could exchange information. That's going to be a lot better at reducing disease transmission than, say, a domestic worker who is being sexually harassed or assaulted by her employer. She's isolated. She can't share information with anyone else, and so she is more likely to contract an STI than a professional sex worker. So we have this reputation as being vectors of disease. But I think if we're looking at populations that spread illness, specifically sexually transmitted illnesses, then soldiers and moving armies are a much more guilty culprit than sex workers across history.

SPENCER: So you don't think that there's some truth to the idea that sex workers spread STIs?

KAYTLIN: I absolutely think that sex workers are more vulnerable to STIs. And specifically, before condoms, it's likely that as a sex worker, getting a sexually transmitted disease is one of the risks that you take. But that's not unique to sex work. People that have sex are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, and sex workers have always taken more precautions than civilians.

SPENCER: I imagine they do take more precautions because they have a lot more to lose, but if they are infected, they are also much more likely to spread it to many people.

KAYTLIN: Yeah, so I definitely think that sex workers are more vulnerable to STIs, and I do understand that the nature of our work makes it so that if we're infected, we might spread that to lots of other people. But again, the people that are spreading venereal disease are people who are having sex. And that is certainly not limited to people who are charging for it. There's nothing about the exchange of money that makes it more likely that you would transmit or acquire STI, and there are absolutely examples of promiscuous people of all genders who have never been paid for what they do. The reason that mandatory STI tests don't actually reduce sexually transmitted diseases is that when you create mandatory tests, you create a population of people who are doing this work illegally, either because they are unable or unwilling to take those tests. For example, in Nevada, every legally licensed sex worker at every legally licensed brothel has to take a mandatory STI test. But the overwhelming majority of sex work happening in Nevada is happening outside of those brothels. So creating tighter restrictions doesn't reduce the impact of transmission; it just pushes more people further underground. Whereas, when you decriminalize sex work, you make it more likely that sex workers will tell their doctor the truth about the work that they're doing because they won't face repercussions for doing this work in a criminal market. So that alone makes health care more accessible to sex workers. When you decriminalize, people are more likely to use condoms and they're more likely to seek out treatment, testing, all of those things. But when sex work is illegal, not only are sex workers less likely to seek care, they're less likely to tell their health care practitioners the truth about the work that they do, and because they are members of a criminalized class doing this work illegally, they are more vulnerable to being bullied or pushed by clients who want to have unprotected sex. Sex workers want protection. And when our negotiating power is raised, we demand it.

SPENCER: Do you think that people have uniquely negative feelings towards sex workers independent from the amount of sex that they have? For example, do people feel worse about a sex worker who has sex with 100 people a year than about a person who has sex with 100 people a year for fun?

KAYTLIN: Both of those people are called whores which is part of the problem. The word and the stigma have proven themselves to be sticky and flexible. It meant everything from single women to divorced women to women making a point that a guy didn't like. The slut shaming certainly has an impact, whether you're being paid or not. I do think that there's a cultural narrative around women specifically profiting from our sexuality that rubs people the wrong way. And I think that's true whether you're selling sexual services or making music videos. Women are sort of punished for capitalizing on our own beauty and sexual appeal.

SPENCER: Yeah, I would agree that there seems to be an additional element. People do feel negatively about people who have lots of sex, but there seems to be an additional element if they're getting paid for the sex that causes people to devalue them

KAYTLIN: Sure.

SPENCER: So would you be up for talking a little bit about your own experience with sex work?

KAYTLIN: Absolutely.

SPENCER: If you're comfortable sharing, when did you start?

KAYTLIN: So I was practically 18 years old when I became obsessed with sex workers from history — courtesans and the stigma around promiscuity — since, really, for as long as I can remember. I Googled, "Escort Raleigh, North Carolina," in the early 2000s and found a message board that sex workers were using to schedule and screen their clients. I got a feel for the culture of hosting. I read the FAQ section, I understood the safety protocols that were laid out for me. I reached out to other sex workers, met for coffee, and had some conversations, and then I posted my first ad. I was overwhelmed with the response. People that didn't fulfill my screening requirements were quickly deleted. I started conversations with several people, and then it became a logistics issue. I remember my first appointment; before I crossed the threshold, I checked his ID, I called a friend of mine in front of him, and so before I walked into the room, my client knew that someone knew where I was, who I was with, and what time to expect to hear from me.

[promo]

SPENCER: You mentioned screening and other sex workers I've spoken to; this seems like a really big and important part of their work. Can you talk a little bit about how that operates?

KAYTLIN: Sure. Because sex workers are a member of a criminalized and stigmatized class, we have to depend on ourselves and each other to keep us safe. We don't have access to law enforcement, and so sex workers, for literally all of human history, have been trading tips and tricks for how to do that. Although technology changes, the core issues really don't. If you are an independent sex worker, which is what I was, then it can be risky for you to see a client who has never seen a sex worker before. You don't know how they're going to act. They don't know how they're going to act. One method for screening would be to ask somebody to give you the name and contact information of a different sex worker that they've already seen. In my case, I asked for two, reached out, and tried to hear back from folks. You're often hoping for, "Oh, I don't remember that guy, but let me look it up." "Oh, yeah, we saw each other. Nothing to report." That's perfect. Sometimes you get off-putting information, like, "You know he's safe, he pays, but he's a dick," and that's good to know going in. Then sometimes you get feedback like, "I can't believe that he used my name. I would never see him before. After telling me he didn't have any cash, he gave me a check, and it bounced, causing all kinds of problems." You want to hear from other people who've already had this experience. You also want to confirm that the person you're seeing has some ties to the community. You want to check, "Who are you employed by? Are you listed on their website? If I call your employer and ask for your name, do they know who you are?" That way, when you check that person's ID, all of the reference checking that you've already done isn't for somebody else. It can be an involved process. But of course, every individual is different, and every community is different. The basic point is that sex workers have been sharing with each other how this is done for a really long time, and that's one of the harms of trying to remove us from message boards or places that we post, because it's through those communities that we're able to connect with each other and share this really critical information.

SPENCER: You mentioned that you long had an interest in the topic. Is that what primarily motivated you to try sex work, or was it mainly money?

KAYTLIN: For most people, the motivation is money. There are absolutely people who feel called to this work in the same way that there are people who feel called to act or to write or to whatever. For me, I was driven by curiosity at first. I come from an upper middle-class background. I had access to resources and education. I had a generous allowance. I could have gotten another job. I had no immediate bills to pay. Later, I returned to sex work to subsidize my early career in stand-up comedy and as a writer.

SPENCER: Overall, how would you describe your experience?

KAYTLIN: Overall, my experience was positive. I brought all of my privileges to this job and every other job. The same reason that I felt very comfortable telling restaurant managers what my boundaries were is the same reason why I felt comfortable telling my clients what they were too. Vulnerabilities sort of compound and cascade on each other. If I had less privilege, if my circumstances were more dire, if I was not a citizen, all of these things make everyone across labor sectors more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. That's as true in sex work as it is in agriculture, domestic labor, mining, or any other place where people are sometimes exploited.

SPENCER: I imagine that even with screening, there's kind of a range of clients, ranging from good clients to bad clients and potentially dangerous clients.

KAYTLIN: Sure.

SPENCER: Was it often that you encountered clients that you actually felt were dangerous or did you just have a bad experience?

KAYTLIN: Sure. The worst it got for me was sort of unpleasant. There are absolutely predators who pretend to be clients and actively prey on sex workers. There have been multiple serial killers and serial rapists. The Long Island Serial Killer was just identified after decades of explicitly and exclusively murdering sex workers, but he's not a client; he's a predator posing as a client. That's like somebody pretending to be a patron of a liquor store and coming in and robbing it. You don't describe that person as a customer. I experienced a lot more sexual violence, out-and-out chauvinism and misogyny, and felt actively unsafe in my recreational dating life than I did as a sex worker. Part of that is because of the tools that I had access to. If a client was really bad, I had his legal name. I could create a pretty anonymized Google-able post about him, especially on these message boards that I used to use. I could tell the rest of the sex worker community in that area that I had a bad experience and what this guy's identifying information was. So really, my experience was that the overwhelming majority of my clients were kind, generous, and on their best behavior because they wanted a good review too.

SPENCER: One concern that comes up for people who care a lot about sex workers is that they're being harmed by doing these actions, even if they do it willingly, that they're paying sort of a price for it. Did you ever feel psychologically harmed by engaging in the work?

KAYTLIN: I felt way more psychologically harmed... I still wake up in a cold sweat, panicking, having nightmares about my time as a waitress here in New York. I was a terrible waitress. It was not a good fit for me. But there are a lot of ways to experience trauma, and there are a lot of jobs out there that are really, really bad for people. I just don't think that sex, whether the consent is freely given from a place of arousal and mutual interest, or negotiated consent for more transactional sex, is the worst thing that you can do. I'm a soldier's daughter. I saw what multiple combat tours and 30 years in the military did to my dad; that was real psychological harm. I see people who work in slaughterhouses or in prisons or in mines. There are so many jobs out there that actively erode not just your physical body, but also your humanity. But we're not having that conversation. We're still having the conversation about who women have sex with. And so, even when that conversation is couched in a place of concern, I think it's important for us to look at the history there and ask what we're really talking about.

SPENCER: I don't know if you'd agree with this, but my view is that sex occupies a kind of special place in the human mind where it's not like other activities. I kind of think of it almost like the human brain thinks of sex as being magic, whereas if you go hang out with someone and shake their hand, that's not the same as a person putting their penis in someone's vagina. There's a fundamental difference there that's very, very important to the human psyche, and because the brain treats it so differently, it's plausible to me that it could have much bigger psychological effects than even if someone engages in it willingly. I'm just curious to hear your reaction to that.

KAYTLIN: Leaving aside the fact that you can pay people to do magic, there are lots of really intimate jobs out there. Childcare is an example that comes to mind. Really, really intimate, both emotionally and physically. The child-parent bond is, I think, one of the most important, maybe even sacred, relationships in the human psyche and consciousness. Nannies, babysitters, and Au Pairs exist. So just because sex occupies a very special place for you and for lots of people doesn't negate the diversity of experiences that people have, because there are absolutely people out there who think about sex differently. There are also people out there who think about sex as being a broad spectrum, like food, for example. The Holy Sacrament exists, family meals around holidays with special traditions and special meanings exist, and so does McDonald's. I think that we need to make space for the fact that sex, like so many things in our very adaptable species' history, has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts.

SPENCER: Supposed that it turned out to be the case, and I'm not saying it is, but suppose it turned out to be the case that, let's say, 1/3 of sex workers ended up feeling really psychologically harmed, even when they went into the sex work willingly. Would that kind of change your opinion on sex work or would that still not really change anything?

KAYTLIN: I'd want to know what the numbers are on soldiers. I think when asking ourselves the question of, "Okay, so if a third of people who do this job end up having a really negative experience, what other professions is that true for?" Do two-thirds of people that wait tables walk away saying, "I feel so fulfilled this was the best thing?" What about people that work in nail supplies or other sectors of the service industry? What about people that do corporate law? What about people that engage with harmful chemicals? There are lots of jobs out there where I feel the ratio of people walking away saying, "Hey, I really wish I didn't have to do this work to feed my family," is way higher than it is in sex work, and I don't see a similar movement or impulse to try to radically alter or eradicate those professions.

SPENCER: I find that people have strong individual differences on this topic, where some people can view sex as just the thing they do for fun, or they can view sex as something that maybe doesn't require so much emotional attachment. I think for other people, it is so fundamentally tied into strong emotions and a deep bond that the idea of doing it with someone they didn't know, or doing it for money, might actually be psychologically damaging to them, or they would see it that way. Of course, those are also going to be people less likely to go into it unless they're kind of forced into it through desperation. So I suspect that there are actually a lot of people who do believe that it's going to be psychologically damaging to do, but that does not necessarily mean that they're the ones doing it.

KAYTLIN: Correct. So all labor exists on a spectrum of choice, circumstance, and coercion. And as I said, there are absolutely people that enthusiastically and consensually choose to do this work. They become experts in their field. They take it very seriously. They feel called to it. There is a much larger group of people that do this work because, under the circumstances, it is the best, fastest, most flexible, least onerous way of getting what they need, which is money, whether that money is to meet their immediate survival needs or to put their kids through school. We all need money. Then there's a smaller group of people who, like other forms of labor, are coerced into this work, whether it's by a domestic abuser, an abusive employer, or a pimp, or sometimes, an abusive landlord will take somebody who really doesn't want to do this work, and even under incredibly dire circumstances, definitely doesn't, and force, fraud, or coercion is used to get that person to perform that labor against their will. That is wrong across labor sectors. Whether you're forcing somebody into a mine or forcing somebody into a brothel, it's the forcing that is the problem, not the erotic part of it. But at least for the last few hundred and maybe a few thousand years, we have been confusing eroticism with exploitation, and we've put a lot more energy behind trying to erase hits from the internet than raise the collective bargaining power of vulnerable laborers across professions.

SPENCER: I imagine it's difficult to study, but how well is it known what percentage of sex workers are essentially coerced in some way?

KAYTLIN: It is difficult to get good numbers about a criminalized and stigmatized class, but there have been some studies that suggest that somewhere between three and six percent of people in the sex industry are either underage or violently coerced, manipulated, or lied to in some way. The overwhelming majority of people that do this work are adults and consensual adults.

SPENCER: How big a role do pimps play in sex work? Is it something that used to be common and has become less common?

KAYTLIN: Yeah, actually, pimps are a direct product of criminalization. Before the 19th century, prostitution was not illegal in the United States. You had a lot of licensed red-light districts in every major city, not just in the US, but really all over the world. In the aftermath of the white slave panic, specifically World War I, and efforts around combating venereal disease, we criminalized not just prostitution, but also promiscuity. We shut down the brothels and empowered law enforcement to round up any woman suspected of immoral behavior, subject her to incredibly invasive and often unsanitary venereal disease tests, and if she was found to be infected, she would be sent to a lock hospital, an insane asylum, or a prison. This was decades before we had accurate STI tests or effective treatment. Because it became literally dangerous for women, especially known sex workers, to solicit their clients on the street and in the places they used to go, where clients knew to go, like brothels, had been shut down, a male intermediator became necessary.

SPENCER: So brothels didn't have men running the show.

KAYTLIN: No, it was madams who were often former sex workers themselves. In fact, madams settled the West. People that owned brothels, overwhelmingly women, were some of the largest landholders for a while. It was a place of real female entrepreneurship, and many of those brothels also existed as cultural centers. We would not have jazz without the community and culture and incubator spaces that brothels created in New Orleans.

SPENCER: So then after these changes that occurred, you're saying pimps kind of rose and became a common occurrence?

KAYTLIN: Yes. So then sex workers, especially female sex workers, required males, whether those were taxi cab drivers or concierges. Women needed a guy that would help her facilitate connecting to clients if she was unable to work in a brothel because it had been shut down and she was unable to put herself in public spaces because she risked arrest. So that's the role of a pimp. And like any management role, you have good managers and you have abusive managers. There's nothing necessarily violent about being the person that helps connect sex workers to their client base, but because we are members of a criminalized class and because we are stigmatized, this creates a lot of vulnerabilities. So that's where the violence and the criminality come from. It's not inherent to the work.

SPENCER: So I've watched a few documentaries about pimps. I don't know too much about the topic, but it does seem like a system that was just incredibly abusive, very often, where people often didn't even get to keep any of the money that they made.

KAYTLIN: Yeah, trafficking is gross, and that's what that is. When you're talking about somebody who is being violently coerced into doing work they don't want to do and don't get to keep any of the money, that's not sex work — that's abuse. Whether that person was being forced to provide sexual services, work in a mine, or work in a restaurant, if somebody is beating them and taking all of their money, that's wrong.

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems like there's this pattern that would occur where the pimp would often start dating the person, and then eventually pressure them into engaging in sex work, which they may or may not have done before, and then would end up in a scenario where they would take all or most of the money, and often drugs would be involved as well, and the pimp might provide the sex worker with drugs. Is this something that is much less common today?

KAYTLIN: I don't know that it's more or less common than it's ever been. Vulnerable people are vulnerable, and what you're describing sounds a lot more like domestic violence, which, of course, is an endemic and systemic issue than it is to other forms of labor trafficking or drug trafficking. You're not talking about an interconnected global community. You're talking about individual men dominating individual women, and that happens in and out of the sex trade.

SPENCER: I don't know. I feel a little uncomfortable with that because it does seem like a very...well, I absolutely agree with you. Obviously, it's evil when this occurs, and it's not inherent to sex work. It does seem like a common pattern that crops up in sex work in particular, and that it's not the same as sort of regular domestic violence.

KAYTLIN: I think it's important to think about all of the unique vulnerabilities that engaging in sex work creates. So you're committing a crime. You're committing the kind of crime that is very likely to get you isolated from your community. These are all things that abusers and predators take advantage of. I have a girlfriend of mine who was in what could be described as an exploitative and trafficking situation with a pimp in Seattle, and he would threaten to have his workers arrested when they started organizing, trying to trade information, trying to negotiate better terms. So the fact of our criminalization doesn't protect anyone in this industry from violence, but rather compounds the vulnerabilities around it, making it more likely for us to be abused.

SPENCER: One thing I find fascinating about this topic is that there's a division between people who care a lot about sex workers and what they advocate for is giving sex workers more freedom, more rights, and then a group that cares about sex workers and says, "No, they're kind of being inherently exploited, like sex work is inherently exploitative fundamentally, and the solution is to try to eliminate sex work essentially." And it seems like both groups claim to be fighting on behalf of sex workers. Obviously, you're on one side of this. Then I'm wondering, how do you react to people who really, genuinely care about sex workers, maybe they're coming from a feminist perspective or leftist perspective, but say that actually the best thing to do is to kind of get rid of it entirely.

KAYTLIN: Well, I think it's really difficult to help a group of people whose livelihood you're trying to eradicate. Even though many people fighting for end-demand laws, sometimes this is referred to as the Swedish model or the Nordic model or the feminist model, but these are laws designed to try to eliminate the oldest profession by criminalizing the demand side, sort of buying or facilitating sexual services. Sweden was the first country in the world to adopt this law in 1999. Norway and Iceland followed suit in 2009, and then lots of other countries and some places here in the US have also adopted these policies. But the problem is how they are implemented. For example, in Sweden and Norway and in a lot of these places, it is not technically illegal to sell sexual services, but it is illegal to rent to a sex worker. So when the police discover that you're doing sex work, they don't arrest you, but they alert your landlord to the fact that they're committing a crime, making you suddenly homeless. That doesn't reduce your vulnerability to violence and exploitation, and we saw the devastating impact of this across Sweden and across Norway when these policies were adopted. In fact, Amnesty International wrote a scathing report on how Norway specifically treated their sex workers, specifically, their immigrants, specifically, Nigerian sex workers. Although many people who support this law purport to be interested in reducing violence and exploitation among sex workers, they are often speaking over us and pursuing policies that actively and directly harm us. Many people who are engaged in sex work are doing it for the money. Many places that have implemented these policies have not funded exit programs or alternatives for people to get their very real and often urgent survival needs met. So punishing somebody for doing a kind of work that you find distasteful, or trying to chase their clients away, or trying to make it impossible for them to advertise, for example, in Sweden, when they implemented end-demand laws, they also defunded people that were giving out information and specifically free condoms to sex workers. Sweden decided that this was "encouraging people to break the law" so it not only didn't fund exit programs, child care, health care, housing for sex workers that are trying to live, but it also took away free services that were making it safer for people to do this work. I think fundamentally, it's really hard to help people that you're hunting. And if your number one goal is to make prostitution go away, then you have to understand that people engaged in this work are not going to see you as a savior. They're going to see you as a threat to their livelihood and conduct themselves accordingly.

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SPENCER: For sex workers working under the Nordic model, where it's illegal to buy but not illegal to sell sex work, what is the general sentiment? Are there surveys of sex workers and how they feel about it?

KAYTLIN: Absolutely, not only have sex workers conducted their own research on this, Red Umbrella Sweden has done a lot of qualitative data around this. So has the NSWP or the Global Network of Sex Worker Rights, as has the World Health Organization and Amnesty International. They've looked into how this law impacts people in the community, and one of the most devastating consequences is that when clients are criminalized but not sex workers, it changes the dynamic between clients and sex workers, making it harder to screen for safety. If we are living in a country where buying sexual services is illegal, but selling it isn't, and I'm a sex worker trying to keep myself safe, if I ask for industry references and your real legal name, if you won't give that to me, I don't know if it's because you're a predator posing as a client or if it's because you're a reasonable, rational person that doesn't know whether or not you're talking to an undercover police officer, and you want to protect your identity and you don't want to provide evidence that you've committed this crime before. So it really complicates the dynamics around screening for safety, and it also disrupts the market, forcing sex workers to do more for less, to take more risks, all because it's reduced our negotiating power.

SPENCER: The surveys in those countries show that sex workers generally oppose that model?

KAYTLIN: Yes.

SPENCER: And then, of course, there's the model of making it legal but regulated. Hairdressers, or accountants or whatever...

KAYTLIN: Amsterdam, Nevada.

SPENCER: So, what's that? Tell me about that model.

KAYTLIN: So legalization or regulation has always served to try to contain and control sex workers. Nevada is a really good example of this. There are only a few legally licensed brothels in a few rural counties in Nevada, which is the only example of legal regulated prostitution in the United States. It has the highest arrest rate per capita for prostitution-related offenses because it's impossible and illegal to work independently. It's illegal to work in Vegas or Reno where the highest demand is, and it's illegal to work outside of the constricted circumstances of a legally licensed brothel. In order to work at one of these brothels in Nevada, you have to register as a prostitute. That becomes a significant fact about you for the rest of your life. You can imagine how this comes up in child custody cases, for example. You have to work at one of these brothels in the middle of the desert, working 12 or 24-hour shifts. You have to undergo mandatory STI tests, and you have to follow a lot of house, county, and state laws that really reduce your freedom of movement. In some counties in Nevada, if you are working at a brothel, you cannot leave that brothel to go to the movies or go to a bar for more than two hours without incurring another STI test. So this is not a model that increases the negotiating power of workers, and it's not something that sex worker advocates are asking for. It's a system that really only benefits brothel owners and transfers a lot of what we think of the problem around pimps and makes the state enforce those laws effectively.

SPENCER: What makes sex work special in this regard? Because virtually all other professions are legal. And that's just sort of the normal way of professions to go. And there will be some rules around it. You point out that the regulations are really strict, but you could imagine a legalization model that has less strict, less severe regulations.

KAYTLIN: I think Victoria, Australia, is doing a really good job of this. Queensland, Australia, also just decriminalized with this model in mind. Belgium just became the first country in Europe to decriminalize sex work and has a good balance of worker protections and community standards.

SPENCER: Just to clarify, you're saying decriminalized?

KAYTLIN: Yes, yes.

SPENCER: Which isn't that a different model?

KAYTLIN: So places that do a really good job of balancing community concerns with the personal autonomy and humanity of sex workers are places that have decriminalized sex work. Queensland, Australia, Victoria, Australia, and Belgium just recently decriminalized sex work. There's a lot in the details of how that happened that balances these concerns. The problem with legalization and regulation and licensing and mandatory STI tests, and all of the things that we see around the regulatory framework, is that they're grounded in coercive control. Decriminalizing sex work removes the criminal penalties from buying, selling, and facilitating sex work, but it maintains a lot of community standards. New Zealand became the first country to decriminalize prostitution, and they made it possible for independent sex workers to do sex work without getting a license, without notifying anyone, working in the privacy of their own home. They're not committing any crimes, which means that if something bad happens to them, they can report that to the police. However, if you are running a brothel with more than three people in it, you have to register for a business license. So, I think that babysitting or hair care is a really good analogy. It's not illegal for you to charge your friends tens of dollars or whatever for braiding their hair, sometimes. It's not illegal for you to hire somebody from the neighborhood that doesn't have a professional license to watch your kid. But if you want to open up a nursery or you want to open up a hair salon, obviously there are going to be larger legal hurdles that put this in the category of the rest of the work world, because sex work is work, but it is also sex. We really have to privilege and prioritize people's privacy and autonomy when we're talking about regulating this very old thing.

SPENCER: You're saying that if someone just practices it one-on-one, then you think it should be decriminalized, whereas if they practice it in a more organized way, like ten people all working together, then they'd have to be licensed in some way.

KAYTLIN: I just think that sex between consenting adults shouldn't be a crime, whether money is exchanged or not. If you're throwing the kind of disruptive party that upsets your neighbors, it doesn't matter whether you're charging people for that or not. We have community standards, and traffic, noise, litter, all of these things can be dealt with in a civil way and not in a criminal way.

SPENCER: And presumably, then, for example, they'd have to pay taxes on that income?

KAYTLIN: Sure. Sex workers already pay taxes in the way that comedians and other independent contractors pay taxes.

SPENCER: Yeah. Obviously, we could discuss whether there is too much licensing in general in many areas, and there probably is. A lot of things don't need such strict licensing. It's probably gumming the system up and increasing transaction costs. If I can kind of devil's advocate, I think some people would argue that, in particular, licensing might be useful for sex work because of concerns about STIs. Do you think that is sort of unreasonable?

KAYTLIN: I do. I think it's unreasonable to cite public health concerns as the reason that sex workers should put themselves on a stigmatized list. If we had the same long history of incarceration, discrimination, and abuse around lawyers or hairdressers, then it would make sense why we wouldn't want to force those people to register either. But we don't. There are a lot of common-sense regulations that, outside of a horrific society, could make a lot of sense. But again, because we have such a long history of stigma, I think it's really important to balance the anonymity of sex workers as being critical to their safety. I will also say that organizations like the World Health Organization have looked into this. When sex workers have access to care, clinics, testing, and prevention, they use it, but mandatory STI tests don't actually reduce sexually transmitted infections. Making healthcare more accessible to sex workers and making it easier for us to tell our healthcare practitioners the truth about what we do does. And that, you can achieve through decriminalization.

SPENCER: Why would mandatory testing not reduce STIs?

KAYTLIN: Because STI testing, like all restrictive regulations, creates a two-tiered system. It pushes the most vulnerable segment into the criminal market. So Nevada is a perfect example of this. You have legally licensed brothels, but the overwhelming majority of people selling sexual services in Nevada are doing it in the black market because they don't, for whatever reason, want to work at these brothels. So creating a system where in order to do sex work legally, you have to get an STI test isn't going to make people with sexually transmitted infections less likely to do sex work. It's going to make them do sex work in the black market.

SPENCER: One thing I wonder about when you look at advocates for sex workers, they tend to be educated. They tend to not be from really impoverished backgrounds. Obviously, there are exceptions. But I worry a little bit about who is representing the sex workers that probably represent most sex workers, where they're living in a situation where sex work is probably not their favorite work, it's not what they would choose to do, but they need money, and it's a little bit of a desperate situation. Do you feel like it's difficult to represent the majority of sex workers?

KAYTLIN: I think that the media has a pretty white woman bias, but sex worker rights advocacy doesn't. Some of the first sex worker rights advocates in the country were Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women of color that were fighting for their lives within the context of the LGBTQ movement, but they were explicitly fighting for sex worker rights. Globally, the most well-organized, most impactful, effective sex worker organizing actually comes out of India. In September, there's a holiday that's celebrated every year that celebrates the largest gathering of sex workers in the world and that happened in India. Sex workers have effectively fought for labor rights there, and it's not the most privileged folks among them. Thailand is considering decriminalizing sex work because of the advocacy of sex workers, and one of the most important living sex worker rights advocates of our generation, Ceyenne Doroshow, is a black trans woman. So, I'm sorry if they're not getting enough media attention, but there are absolutely all kinds of people of all genders, of all races, across the socioeconomic spectrum, who are all asking for the same thing, which is not to be arrested for doing this work.

SPENCER: So you think fundamentally, what sex workers who are higher-end escorts are getting paid thousands of dollars want, and what sex workers who are getting paid $30 to do a service in someone's car in a dangerous neighborhood, do you think what benefits them is similar?

KAYTLIN: We are all asking for decriminalization. And whether you're making $30 or $3,000, having your work criminalized does not make you less vulnerable to violence or exploitation. I think a clarifying example here is looking at the food and beverage industry. In restaurants, you have sommeliers, you have executive chefs. You also have busboys, cashiers. You also have people who are violently bullied or trafficked into doing this work, and you have people who are exploited or sexually harassed while they're doing this work. But criminalizing either eating at or working at restaurants doesn't help any of the people involved.

SPENCER: You're saying that in this particular issue, they're aligned, even if other elements of their work are not.

KAYTLIN: On this particular issue, they are aligned, yes.

SPENCER: One thing we haven't talked about, but it sometimes is brought up in this context, is the issue of fidelity, because I think that some people believe that having sex work be decriminalized or legalized would increase infidelity in relationships. What do you think of that argument?

KAYTLIN: I'm sort of against government regulation around morality on its face. I think that there are a lot of things that people shouldn't do that they do, and I don't think that criminalizing those things historically has made any of them go away. The prohibition of gambling, the prohibition of alcohol, prohibition of many drugs. We know what prohibition does to markets, and it doesn't make them safer. I think it's a fantasy to believe that we can legislate or criminalize either prostitution or promiscuity or infidelity out of our society. I don't think that's a good goal, but even if that is your goal, we have a very long history of trying to criminalize this, and it hasn't made it go away.

SPENCER: I've done some research into drug usage in the US. One thing that seems to be a pattern that occurs is that when people are addicted to drugs, it can be very expensive to feed their addiction. And you see, what can you do if you're addicted to drugs to make money? One thing is, you can commit theft. Another thing you can do is sex work. It seems like this is something that happens fairly often. I'm wondering, how do you think about the intersection between drugs and sex work?

KAYTLIN: It's interesting that proximity to other forms of criminality has been used as a justification to criminalize things in the past. Pinball machines are a really good example of this. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, governors and mayors — I don't know if this was at the state or national level — we criminalized pinball machines all over the country. We had big raids. We confiscated them, we threw them into the Hudson, and we did it all in the name of reducing and cracking down on vice, because pinball machines had become associated with bars and organized gangs. But pinball machines are fine. So yes, there's an association between sex work and drugs, but there's also an association between drugs and people that work on Wall Street. I don't know that that association, or trying to make those kinds of associations, is helpful for us in any way. Sex work is a survival strategy because it is flexible. There are a lot of different ways to do it. There are very low barriers to entry. But that's going to be true whether you're trying to make money to get the drugs that you need or whether you're trying to get money to pay the rent on your apartment. I don't think that cracking down on the method of getting money is helpful for people that are in the throes of addiction or not.

SPENCER: How have attitudes toward sex work changed? Do you feel people are becoming more accepting over time?

KAYTLIN: I certainly think that sex work has increased visibility recently. I think OnlyFans is part of this. I think there's a big cultural phenomenon around people talking about this after decades and decades. Sex worker rights organizers are starting to be heard, which is encouraging. And also, there's a big cultural backlash. A majority of Zoomers who are polled think that pornography, for example, is violence against women and a public health epidemic. We just lost Roe v. Wade, and I think it's important for people to see the intersections behind trying to erase or eradicate the places that sex workers use to advertise our services from the internet and cracking down on information about contraception and women's bodies generally. The Comstock Act (sic) of the 1870s specifically conflated obscenity with information about contraception. Anthony Comstock used obscenity laws to push Margaret Sanger and, before her, Victoria Woodhull out of the country. I think it's important for feminists to understand that they should be standing with sex workers. Protecting the places that we use to trade information with each other and that we use to do our work is protecting reproductive health, access to contraception, and women's rights generally.

SPENCER: When I was looking at statistics about this, there's a YouGov poll from 2016 where they tried to do statistical reweighting to get estimates for the general population in the US. Of course, we should expect these to be underestimates because many people may fail to report their true activities. That poll found that about 12% of males and 1% of females said they had ever paid someone else for sex. They also asked, "Have you ever been paid for sex?" About 6% of males said yes, and 6% of females said yes.

KAYTLIN: I feel really out of my depth making quantitative claims about the number of people that do this work, and I know that with my work, I meet a disproportionate number of people who have engaged in this work, either as buyers or sellers. I will say that there are periods of time where historians feel they have gotten a really good handle on the number of people participating in this work. During the mid-1700s, for example, in Paris, they found that three-quarters of middle-class men had been to a brothel, and that one out of five women of reproductive age in the city were engaged in some form of sex work. There were a lot of things happening historically; women's wages had just been drastically reduced, scientists had just decided that women don't enjoy sex, especially if you're of a certain class, and brothels were a real center for socializing for men. The whole cultural context is different, but from several hundred years ago in an urban area during this very specific period of time, I don't think that at any point in human history you could describe it as super uncommon.

SPENCER: It's obviously something that people tend to hide about themselves for a variety of reasons, but it also seems highly culturally dependent. There are certain cultures in the world today where it seems much more socially acceptable to go to sex workers, and even when you're married, it's viewed less negatively in some areas.

KAYTLIN: That makes a lot of sense to me. I do think that there's a fundamental difference between paying a professional for professional services and having an affair, for example.

SPENCER: One thing you talk about is the importance of stories in terms of creating change. How do you think about that in your own work when you're trying to improve the lives of sex workers?

KAYTLIN: My background is in stand-up comedy. In my capacity as a sex worker rights advocate, I've focused a lot on history because I think it's easier for us to see the missteps or foundational misunderstandings of previous moral panics than for us to see the one we're currently in. If people look back and think about the way that we've tried to police this in the past, they'll recognize some of the tactics that are being sold to us now, and hopefully they'll further recognize that these laws, policies, or restrictions haven't reduced venereal disease. They haven't reduced violence against women generally or sex workers specifically, and they've made it a lot harder to do this work safely.

SPENCER: What is the story that you're kind of combating, that you see on the other side that you have to address or deal with?

KAYTLIN: In so many ways, we are still reinventing the white slave panic of the early 19th century. So many people seem to genuinely believe that the only people who do this work are literal slaves, either to some horrible, violent person or to their own addiction, that nobody would do this work voluntarily, and that there's some stranger, an immigrant or somebody from outside the community, that is forcing innocent girls to do this horrible work against their will. The reality is much harder for people to swallow. We have a real problem with gender-based violence in this country. We have a real problem with exploitation, but the call is coming from inside the house: domestic abuse, violent sexual exploitation of children. This is often done at the hands of people in our own households and in our own community. So the white slavery narrative of a person from out there, a Black or a Brown person coming and kidnapping often a white person or white girl and forcing them to do some horrible work, that's the story of Taken, that's the story of The Searchers, that's the story of Sound of Freedom and Birth of a Nation. But those are movies. They're not what actual sex work looks like in real life.

SPENCER: Do you think it was more true in the past, where a higher percentage of sex workers were being exploited?

KAYTLIN: I think it's easier to exploit people that don't have property rights. Women weren't able to get our own credit cards until the 1970s; all of our property legally belonged to our husbands until too recently. So absolutely, women were more vulnerable to exploitation in textile mills in the same way that they were more vulnerable to exploitation in brothels. In fact, sex work throughout history has given people, especially women, ways to leave abusive relationships, make money, and start businesses hundreds of years before women won property rights or the right to vote in this country.

SPENCER: From the polls that I looked at, it seems that women are more opposed to legalizing sex work than men. Is that your understanding as well?

KAYTLIN: Yeah, that polling aligns with my experience.

SPENCER: Why do you think that is?

KAYTLIN: Prostitution has become a symbol of violence against women. Gloria Steinem, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin spent a huge part of their careers trying to outlaw pornography and eradicate prostitution. Back in the 1970s and 80s, at the height of the porn wars, when Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin succeeded in having pornography banned from some cities, those laws were almost immediately used to ban and confiscate their own books as obscene. Yes, there are people in the mainstream feminist movement, there are a lot of women, who think of sex work as being violence in and of itself. However, I am asking those people to listen to sex workers and to help make distinctions between respectful paying clients who would like to pay a professional for advertised services and violent predators that prey on vulnerable people, including sex workers. Because if we can't distinguish those things, the predators are going to keep thriving.

SPENCER: My understanding is that part of their argument is that engaging in sex work somehow demeans women broadly or increases the view of women as sexual objects, etc. Do you think there's anything to that argument, or do you think it's misguided?

KAYTLIN: I do think it's misguided, and I think that the evidence really bears this out. People who are selling erotic services in a professional context have a lot more negotiating power than our adversaries give us credit for. For example, New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003, and about 10 years ago, a sex worker successfully sued her brothel manager for sexual harassment. Recently, there was another sex worker who was working in a licensed brothel in New Zealand who successfully prosecuted a client for removing a condom. So sex workers exert a lot of negotiating power when our work is not criminalized, and paying for sexual services and violently assaulting a sex worker that you have paid or violently assaulting a sex worker period are actually distinguishable things, and we've seen that play out in places where sex work has been decriminalized.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, I'm curious what the current demographics are in terms of people's support or opposition to decriminalizing sex work.

KAYTLIN: In 2018, there was a Public Policy Polling that found that 44% of the American electorate believes that consensual sex between consenting adults shouldn't be a crime. In 2020, 55% of people living in DC believed that to be true. There haven't been any ballot initiatives led by sex workers. There have been lots of legislative sessions, there have been lots of proposed bills or study commissions that have looked at the impact of potentially decriminalizing sex work or looked at the impact of laws like SESTA-FOSTA or criminalization, but we haven't been able to put this to the ballot yet, which I would absolutely love to see in the next couple of years.

SPENCER: I imagine that Christian conservatives are probably more opposed to sex work than others. But how does it break down in terms of Democrats versus Republicans?

KAYTLIN: I was actually surprised to find that this is a bipartisan issue. People across the political spectrum both believe that sex work should be eradicated for a variety of reasons and also understand that criminalizing consensual sex between consenting adults is wrong and leads to bad outcomes. Small government conservatives, harm reduction liberals, libertarians, there are all kinds of people that really do come down on both sides of this issue.

SPENCER: Final question for you, what do you want to leave the listener with on this topic? If there's one thing that you want to really impart to them, what would it be?

KAYTLIN: When people think about sex work, they often think about their daughter doing sex work, and it brings up a lot of big feelings, which makes a lot of sense around trying to protect people from violence and exploitation, which I absolutely understand. But I want people to think about their grandmothers engaging in this work. I want people to recognize that sex workers have always been and already are contributing members of every community that they're a part of, which is all of them. Similar to abortion and contraception, people are allowed to have their own personal feelings about this. You can choose to engage in that or not, but we will never eliminate this work. We can only make it less safe.

SPENCER: Kaytlin, thanks for coming on.

KAYTLIN: Thank you so much for having me.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks, "How do you know when it's time to quit something versus sticking it out? And have you ever stayed in a situation that in hindsight you wish you'd quit much sooner?"

SPENCER: It's certainly happened to me many times. I think, you know, if you think about the theory of when to stick something out versus to quit, you want to think about the future expected value, right? If you were to consider all the possible outcomes that could result from continuing with it and the probabilities of those outcomes, and you could compute an expected value in theory, that would be a pretty good way to decide. You know, there's some maybe theoretical caveats to that, but that is a pretty good way to decide most of the time. However, given that we're real human beings, we can't actually do that calculation. And even if we could, there's important psychological factors that might make that not optimal. For example, some people tend to stick with things not nearly enough, and any kind of excuse to stop might be enough for them. And so if they were doing this expected value calculation, and some new shiny project comes along, and then they do expected value calculation for that, maybe they'll jump ship from their last project. But then it's just a few months until the next shiny project comes along. And then that seems even higher expected value. And maybe even, you know, from day to day, their expected value estimates change based on their mood. And so given that we're real humans, we might consider heuristics like: "Hey, you know what? Maybe I should finish some things, you know? I shouldn't just switch as soon as something seems higher expected value; I should stick some things out." But then, on the other side, we might have biases that get us to stick too much. We might say: well, we have default biases, where once we're doing them for a while, we don't even think about doing something else. Or once you're doing them for a while, it becomes scary to do something else, or we're going to let someone down to do something else. And then we might have a bias towards sticking with it too long. And so I think you could actually see biases on different sides of this issue. And for different people, the different biases might be different strengths, where some people actually might have a bias towards sticking too long. And some people might have a bias towards switching too fast. And so then you have to know yourself, and you have to think, "Well, what sort of person am I? Am I someone where I have to find systems to get me to stick things out longer, so I get things completed, and put them out in the world — so at least, you know, they're out there? Or am I the sort of person who tends to get stuck in things, and I have to learn to combat, you know, the sunk cost fallacy, or combat default bias, or be willing to let people down sometimes for a greater benefit in the future?" and so on.