ABSTRACT
The core of the current radical feminist position is the assertion that sex work is ‘in and of itself violence against women’, that no woman ever freely consents to selling sex and that all clients are motivated by the desire to dominate, humiliate and hurt. This is the contemporary orthodoxy; it is shockingly heretical to suggest any other typology for women who sell sex or men who buy; to do so leaves one open to very serious insinuations, not merely that one is terminally naive, culpably ignorant or colluding with abuse, but quite possibly part of an international conspiracy to promote prostitution and in the pay of international traffickers. 1 Despite such unnerving accusations, because my subject is violence in the sex industry, I cannot wholly ignore the ‘sex-work-is-violence’ line, so I will explain why I think it is a meaningless shibboleth which diverts attention from violence as sex workers themselves define it and from the structural conditions that allow it.
