Prompted by the federal shutdown of Rentboy.com, a gay male escort website, the New York Times recently ran an opinion piece by Rachel Moran under the headline “Buying Sex Should Not Be Legal.” To be sure, her personal story as a trafficking victim is atrocious and is precisely the kind of sexual exploitation we should be working to end. However, Moran makes a critical conflation: equating sex work with sex trafficking. These are not the same things.
Sex trafficking involves the coercion of people (usually women and girls) into sex work, and often preys upon women in the most vulnerable social positions — those who are marginalized by race, class, gender, and migrant status. Aside from those who profit from this exploitative system, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who supports sex trafficking. Sex work, by contrast, includes a wide variety of practices, ranging from stripping to prostitution.