No little girl has ever said, “When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute.”
Not one. She says nurse, or archeologist. Veterinarian. Teacher. Singer. Astronaut. She draws pictures of herself in a lab coat or on a stage. Somewhere between that drawing and the moment a grown woman decides selling sexual access to her body is her best available option… something happened. A lot of somethings, usually. That gap is what I care about. That gap is what this essay is about.
I recently said, with my full chest on the internet, that I don’t believe sex work is a legitimate career path for women. The responses came fast. People broke their legs running to my comment section! Most agreed. Some pushed back thoughtfully. Some called me names, told me I was doing a white man’s bidding and one even predicted I’d eventually call ICE on someone, which in itself, was a very bizarre response. I wanted to take the serious objections seriously though, because many of them came from people who’ve lived this and they deserve better than a fancy slogan from another white lady.
The hardest part of these sorts of things is getting the conversation started and if you’ve been following me for a while now, you know I’m not shy.
So I said, in my usual full-Eevie eloquence:
And I’m not moving from my position. Instead, I’m going to explain it.
I’m not shaming the women doing this work. Not now, not ever.
A single mother commented and told me that phone sex kept her and her son out of homelessness after his father walked out and never paid child support. Another woman told me she’d seriously considered stripping or OnlyFans more than once, because, well… money. I believe them. I understand them. Women do what we have to do to survive. I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t, in some way, doing exactly that.
When I went through my divorce in 2016, I seriously considered things like OnlyFans too, out of pure desperation. It was terrifying. I was leaving an extremely abusive man who had controlled every dollar for nine years. I'd had to give up my early childcare business. I had cut contact with every single person I knew at the time, so outside help simply didn't exist. I was lonely, I was scared, and more than once, I was desperate.
But, my anger isn’t at her, the woman. It’s at the conditions that made selling her body the most reliable paycheck in reach and at the men who built a market on that fact.
Those are two different targets. The sex work debate keeps collapsing them into one, and that’s where people get hurt.
The root cause is the question I think everybody keeps skating around. We need to dig deeper.
Both sides of this debate tend to skip the same question: why are so many women here in the first place?
Look at what women actually describe. Abandonment. Abuse, often starting in childhood. Addiction. A paycheck that can’t carry a family. A child support order that’s never enforced. A benefits system that yanks help away the moment you earn slightly too much. Families that aren’t safe to go home to.
That’s not a career pipeline. That’s a trap they’ve convinced us is “choice.”
When the alternative is eviction, calling it a choice lets the system off the hook. It lets the deadbeat father off the hook. It lets the state that won’t pay teachers enough to raise a family off the hook. It lets every lawmaker who cut the safety net off the hook. And it lets the buyer, the sexually depraved man who has other options, walk away clean.
I refuse to rebrand survival as empowerment. Survival is survival. It deserves respect, support and a way out. It doesn’t deserve a marketing campaign.
“But what about women who genuinely choose it?”
This is the strongest objection I received.
Yes, some women say they choose this freely and are glad they did. I believe some of them mean it. Personally, it’s hard for me to believe any woman freely chooses this.
I believe that somewhere along the way, she learned her worth was her body. Maybe from a father who left, or a man who hurt her, or a culture that rewarded her looks long before it ever noticed her mind. Every magazine, every ad, every algorithm pushing skin to the top of the feed told her the same fucking thing. That this is what you’re worth. So she did what smart, resourceful women do with the one asset the world keeps telling them matters. She used it. She got good at it. Some women perfected it and built businesses on it.
That’s impeccable survival skill applied to a rigged game. But calling it a free choice is a lie, one the culture tells us and one we sometimes end up telling ourselves because the alternative, admitting how little the world offered us, hurts too much to look at.
I don’t blame her for believing it. I blame everything that taught it to her. And I want to raise a generation of girls who never learn it at all.
But one woman’s genuine choice doesn’t change what the industry is, or what it does to the rest of us.
Every choice is made inside a patriarchal culture. Ours tells girls from the time they’re small that their value is measured by how desirable they are to men. It shows up in the toys, the ads, the music videos, the algorithms, even religion — especially religion. A woman who “chooses” sex work, chooses it in a world that has spent her whole life telling her that her body is her most valuable asset. That doesn’t make her a dupe. It makes her a person responding rationally to the market she was handed.
The problem isn’t her reasoning. The problem is the goddamn market.
Give every woman real options, a living wage, affordable childcare, safe housing, and a world that values her for more than sexual access. Then ask more of men. What if men healed their pathetic sexual depravity, stopped seeing women as fuck-toys, and finally began to see us as the human beings we are? Build that world, and then let's see how many women choose this with eyes wide open. I suspect the number would be very small. Maybe even zero. I'd love to live in the world where we find out.
“What about safe sex work?”
People raise this in good faith. Some point to ethical production companies with background checks and anti-trafficking protocols. Others point out that online work puts far more control in women’s hands than street work ever did. Those are real differences that can’t be ignored. A woman on a camera in her own home is safer than a woman getting into a stranger’s car. If we’re talking about reducing immediate physical danger, I’m all for it.
But safer isn’t the same as harmless.
Even the cleanest, best-run version of this industry are still selling access to women’s bodies for male consumption. It still pays women the most for performing desirability. It still teaches millions of men that women’s sexuality is something you can buy, rate, subscribe to and cancel. We have "barely legal" porn that blurs the line on purpose, handing grown-ass men false permission to undress my 15-year-old daughter with his eyes in the carpool line.
…I’m fucking tired.
You can put the patriarchy in a nicer building with better lighting and an HR department. But, it’s still the fuckin’ patriarchy.
Safe sex work makes the transaction less dangerous for the woman in it. It does nothing to change what the transaction says about all of us.
Why it Harms ALL Women
When a society accepts that women’s bodies are a commodity, every woman gets priced directly and indirectly. The girl in middle school gets rated by boys who learned the vocabulary from porn. The woman at work gets treated as decorative. The teenager learns that likes and attention come fastest when she shows skin, and the platforms reward her for it. The wife, the nurse, the cashier, the lawyer, all of us live in a world where a significant market says our sexual access has a price tag.
The individual woman in the industry can make a sensible choice. The system can still do collective damage. Both things can be true — and they are.
That’s why I refuse to call it a legitimate career. Legitimizing it doesn’t just protect the women in it. It normalizes the demand. And the demand is the entire engine.
“Aren’t you just a SWERF?”
First of all, I had no idea what a SWERF was, so I had to look it up. And the answer is, no. I’m not a SWERF for fucks sake. Sex worker exclusionary would mean shutting sex workers out of the conversation, out of feminism, out of support. I want the opposite. Their voices belong here, especially the voices of women who’ve gotten out and can tell us what the pipeline really looked like. Sex workers aren’t a monolith. Some will tell you it was liberating. Others will tell you it nearly destroyed them. Both deserve to be heard.
It was also mentioned that white feminist campaigns against sex work have historically empowered police and hurt women of color the most. That history is legitimately valid, and it’s exactly why any solution I support puts the legal weight on buyers and profiteers, never on the women. You don’t help a woman by arresting her. You help her by giving her somewhere to go.
So What’s the Alternative?
Someone asked me this directly. They said, “if you’re going to criticize the thing that kept my lights on, what are you offering instead?”
So, here’s what I’m fighting for:
Enforce child support like it matters, because it does.
Pay teachers, caregivers and service workers enough to raise a family.
Make childcare affordable and available.
Fix the benefits cliff that punishes women for earning a little more.
Fund real exit programs: housing, job training, trauma care, addiction treatment, legal help, no strings attached.
Invest in recovery. I know what it takes to rebuild a life and I know how difficult it is to do it alone. Women need solid support.
Go after demand, the buyers and the people profiting, instead of the women.
And raise our daughters and our sons, to understand that a woman’s worth has nothing to do with the male gaze.
None of that shames anyone. All of it makes the “choice” less necessary.
I don’t judge the women. I will fight for every one of them to be safe, housed, fed, respected and free. I was upset with Sidney Sweeney after she did that degrading commercial for Novig and directed my anger toward her. That was wrong of me and I apologize sincerely, because what I’m really angry at, is everything that the patriarchal ideology has taken from us.
We are more than just tits and ass.
I’m done pretending that an industry built on buying women’s bodies is just another job. I won’t call desperation a career path. And I won’t tell the next little girl drawing herself in a lab coat that one day, if things go badly enough, this is where her value will be.
She deserves the lab coat. We all did.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.
☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman
No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
~Eevie
Women are often funneled into sex work because they are denied reliable income from nonsexual work. I know several brilliant women—freelance marketers, web designers, and other highly skilled professionals—whose clients delay payment, refuse to pay them altogether, or overlook them despite extensive records of success. They believe, with good reason, that being women is part of the problem. To stay financially afloat, they sell pornographic images—what they call “monetizing male horniness.” It isn’t that they lack talent, discipline, or legitimate professional experience. They do excellent work. But when women cannot reliably get paid for their labor, while men will reliably pay for access to their bodies or images, that is not a genuinely free choice. It is an economic funnel.
I am terribly teared up at your precise writing as to why and how women end up sacrificing their bodies for economic and survival reasons.
In India, girls as young as 12 and in poverty are “pushed” into prostitution as they have to support themselves and their orphaned siblings, or their drunk and abusive father ran off, their parents are ill; there’s a myriad of reasons.
Again, my blood boils in agonized anger and tears at the fucking patriarchy, the fucking religion, the fucking government, for all the ills that keep befalling girls and women over and over for not only decades, for centuries.
Then I see all these Bollywood and Tollywood movies where this hero, again a fucking male, rises to avenge the rape or murder or sexual abuse of a girl or woman. It’s very rare for a woman to do all this.
There used to be a woman bandit who used to live in the North Indian forests and she would run around killing men till it took the fucking Indian Army to scour the hilly terrain to shoot her dead! She became a folk shero.
Seriously, we need mandatory education for boys from early on about how to treat and preserve girls and women.
There should be more media coverage, law enforcement support, medical care, mental health care for girls and women’s welfare. This is a serious womens rights matter that should be addressed over and over at the UN, by NGOs and other rights organizations until this violence is eradicated. It is a huge pandemic!
Laws need to be put in place with death sentence for the rapists, pedos and sexual assaulters. It’s so fucking evil and grotesque to violate a human being and their honor by rapes, assaults and trafficking.
Fuck the patriarchy!! Fuck religion!
I need to get this off my chest. This is exhausting. I appreciate and support you, Eevie and all of us including myself who are survivors and victims. My heart goes out to the girls and women who are oftentimes left with no choice other than prostitution.