| "sex work is work" |
[12. Maijs 2025|08:50] |
"In late February 2024, three Chinese women were murdered in Vienna. They were working independently from a small apartment—a discreet, anonymous studio with no red lights, no signage, nothing to indicate what happened inside. It was exactly the kind of work setting that, back in our mapping projects, we had identified as the safest option in the sex industry: no alcohol, no smoking, no bouncers. Women managing their own appointments, their own space, their own rules.
Their killer was a 27-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He had never been to the studio before. There was no advertising, no visible reason for him to find it—yet he sought it out and specifically targeted the women inside. Of the four women present, three were stabbed to death—dozens of times each. One woman survived by locking herself in a room. In court, the perpetrator claimed to have been bewitched by a woman he met en route in Serbia, and cited religious delusions and hallucinations. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
This was, of course, not the first murder, or the first act of extreme violence, against women in prostitution in Austria. There have been others, some equally brutal. But this one pierced the narrative we had spent years defending. If something like this could happen in the very setting we had long identified as the safest, what did that say about the entire framework our advocacy had been built on?
And what did the new generation of advocates in my former organization say about it?
The response—from them and from the broader sex work advocacy network in Austria—was robotic. The same lines about destigmatization, visibility, and labor rights were rolled out, as if this hadn’t been a targeted massacre of women in one of the few environments we had deemed relatively safe. There was no re-evaluation. No one admitted we might have been mistaken about the “autonomy, protection, and community” that this work setting was supposed to offer—where three women had just been slaughtered. No discomfort, either, with the idea that violence might not be incidental to the sex industry, but inherent to it.
The gap between that brutal reality and the sanitized ideology they were promoting had become impossible to bridge. Why keep pretending this industry can be made safe? That women can somehow not be exploited? That migrant women, of all people, could ever find true autonomy in a system designed—by its very nature—to degrade and violate them? But how do you challenge any of it when you’ve already sacrificed conceptual clarity to dogmatic relativism?
In recent years, the language of sex work advocacy has drifted further and further from the actual lives of women. Feminist concerns about male violence were reframed as moral panic. The overwhelming fact that most people in prostitution are women, often migrants, was constantly undercut by qualifiers: but men sell sex too, not all clients are men, queer and trans people are also part of this. Which is all technically true. But allowing marginal cases to reshape the entire analytical framework is reckless. The strategy is clear: dissolve the category of woman to avoid naming male violence and confronting prostitution as a patriarchal system of exploitation. Political clarity is replaced with complexity—and feminism is expected to include everyone, or be called exclusionary and violent.
The more expansive the definition of woman became, the more invisible actual women were—especially poor, migrant women. We stopped saying “men are violent toward women in prostitution,” and started saying “sex workers face violence.” Even naming the perpetrator became controversial. Feminists began apologizing for ever having centered women. Every reference to women now had to include “and queers.” And when race entered the frame, the focus began to widen: migrant women became the entry point for expanding the category, adding identities, layering experiences, until the term itself no longer fit. “Migrant women” became “marginalized communities.” Eventually, prostitution was no longer about sexual violence. It was another feminized labor sector, like cleaning, care work, or tourism.
My former organisation has since gone full asterisk, dutifully adding it to every word that might otherwise be understood to mean women. The feminist colleagues I had learned from are mostly gone. The intergenerational handover failed, as it often does when it requires slaying the symbolic mother. Our once-feminist organisations have become unrecognisable. They’ve been queered—in both form and content. Analysis has been replaced by slogans; politically grounded solidarity by performative allyship. The fierce feminists gave way to punk-styled activists, queered-up NGOs, and a new era of LGBT organisations eager to adopt the sex work agenda as their own. “Sex work is work” became a political posture—a subversive, edgy allegiance to the underdog, performed for visibility and approval."
https://faikaelnagashi.substack.com/p/what-i-want-to-say-about-sex-work?triedRedirect=true |
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