The Pro-Sex Trafficking Left

A critique of the sex industry and the "left" that defends it

Sex sells. Anyone who has grown up in the tail end of the 20th century or the entire 21st has dutifully internalized that mantra from a young age. Sex sells, and that’s all there is to it. There’s a hesitancy within the mainstream to dissect why sex sells, whose sex sells, and for whom does sex sell. The why, whose, and for whom illuminate deeply disturbing aspects of largely Western society, and its treatment of women, girls, boys, and transgender people. We live under a global economic system where the ruling class will do anything to make profit, and that same ruling class has made sex profitable. They’ve made the exploitation of one’s body profitable. Pimping is one of the most lucrative careers one can take up, with the buyers of bodies ranging from Hollywood celebrities to Washington politicians. And it is these people–the rich, the powerful–that have gone to great lengths to normalize what has been deemed the sex industry; an industry that has sustained itself on forced prostitution, child enslavement, and a generation of people that simply do not see the problem–if they do not themselves participate in it.

The sex industry, consisting of but not limited to porn and prostitution, is one of the most profitable industries in the entire world, and its main buyers and media exports are from the United States, Israel, the UK, and former Soviet Bloc countries. These countries also happen to be the center of sex trafficking. Tens of thousands of women and children are forced into sexual slavery in the United States every year to meet the demand of an ever increasing market. From 2008 to 2011, there was a 774% increase in child sexual exploitation material reviewed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Reports of child sex trafficking doubled between 2004 and 2013 (Department of Justice, 2017). In 2024, these numbers can only have skyrocketed. The prevalence of sex trafficking–particularly that of children–is not a popular topic of discussion among either mainstream political party, legacy media, or even so-called “progressives” that believe they endorse a better world. In fact, we will argue that there is a concerted propaganda effort to instead disguise this industry as empowering and liberating.

One of the primary ways the sex trade expands in the modern day is through the “pro sex work” propaganda campaign that preys on the most exploited women right from the time they are born. This propaganda justifies abuse in the sex trade–to both young women and the men that wish to buy access to them–through normalizing the idea that there is a level of “consensual” participation, that the sexual abuse present is by accident and not by design. But the large majority of those in the sex industry are trafficking victims; California is both the largest producer of the world’s pornographic content (BBC, 2011) and the center of human trafficking in the US. Even porn stars who aren’t necessarily being trafficked are guaranteed to know someone who is. We must confront the myth of the sex industry being largely consensual that benefits no one but the human traffickers that are the lifeblood of the industry.

Consent as we understand it cannot exist within the predatory exploitative sex industry. Consent does not exist in a vacuum, isolated from other societal conditions. Under capitalism, workers are required to sell their only commodity, often their labor, in order to survive. Individuals who are unable to sell their labor are forced to sell the only thing they have left: their body. And who has the hardest time selling their labor, or turning a deserved profit? It is often the most exploited in our society, like racialized and disabled women. In Spain, up to 90% of sex workers are immigrants (TAMPEP, 2009), with little means to escape the industry or report abuse they’ll inevitably run into. If all work under capitalism is coercive–if the reality is that you starve or you die–and people are coerced into sex through money, that is inherently forced sex. If a sex worker would not have sex with someone outside of the coercion of payment, that is forced sex. The sex trade relies on capitalism isolating the most exploited women or otherwise marginalized people from other jobs in which rape is not a necessity, and then humanizing their rapists. When we are told sex work is largely–or even somewhat–consensual, we do the work of the traffickers. As told to publishing company Aceprensa, a Canadian woman by the name of Jessa Dillow Crisp was trafficked by her family from childhood. She described having guns pointed at her during pornographic filming, and that she needed to keep a smile on her face during the rape, otherwise they would kill her. There are many women in Crisp’s situation who, when reporting sexual violence in the sex industry, are written off by police because they “consented” and the smiles on their faces in the recordings are the proof.

We are supposed to believe that being a John (a sex buyer) is normal, is respectable, when the pimps these Johns are buying from almost always run in sex industry circles in which children are involved. Children are the most profitable commodity in the industry. We are meant to see pimps as any other employer, and Johns as any other consumer. But to consume the human body—in an industry inseparable from pedophilia—is a fundamentally different act than consuming a soda or game console. Some people being sex trafficked will be sold up to 40 times a day and not live seven years past the beginning of their tenure in the sex industry (MG Injury Firm, 2023).

This is a reality people are hesitant to acknowledge; it would mean realizing how rampant and normalized sexual abuse is under capitalism. So instead, these “progressives” will pull anecdotes from the top 1% of OnlyFans content creators that say they take pride in their job, putting the context of an entire system onto an individual’s opinion, while also ignoring that 89% of women in the sex trade say they have no other means of survival and would readily escape if able and that women in the sex trade industry experience rates of PTSD equal to veterans--68% (Journal of Trauma Practice, 2003). Even ignoring that OnlyFans is a center of human trafficking particularly of women by intimate partners, to frame supposedly happy OnlyFans workers as representative of the larger sex industry is the sort of propaganda sex traffickers thrive on. 88% of sex trafficking cases in the modern age can be sourced back to digital platforms being used to groom and capture victims (MG Injury Firm, 2023). Even the most “consensual” pornographic films usually depict an eroticized version of graphic sexual violence and actresses that pass for teenagers, with one of the most searched categories on PornHub year after year being “teen”.

Many on the “left” claim the sex industry is “empowering”. They ignore the predatory behavior, abuse, grooming, and violations even individuals that allegedly happily chose the work are forced to endure as a “hazard of the job.” In one instance, a woman filming for PornHub expected that she’d have one scene partner. When she arrived at the shoot, she was met with dozens of men. The director did not allow her to terminate the project and she was gang raped for hours on end, on film, in a video that ended up published to the site. This is not an isolated incident. In 2020, PornHub had to remove 10 million of its 13 million videos for the likelihood that they contained explicitly nonconsensual sexual content.

Once someone becomes a commodity, once their body has been paid for, its “use value” has been unlocked, and it so follows that under capitalism that person’s body is now under another’s authority. When a woman is paid by a porn director or a sex buyer, she is forced into situations where she will have to perform violent acts to avoid possibly being killed. It is normal in prostitution for a woman to expect what we’d consider “normal” sex, only for her to be thrust into being whipped, or choked, or stomped on. Sex buyers will refuse to use condoms–leading to an HIV rate in sex workers that is 13.5 times more prevalent in women in the sex industry than those outside of it (National Institute of Health, 2014). Sex buyers are not respectable members of society–they are rapists looking to harm a woman society will not defend.

Critics of the sex industry–which are also usually those who came from it–are often told they’re somehow excluding those exploited by the sex trade from the movement for women’s liberation. On the contrary, women’s liberation is stagnated not by those that criticize this industry, but by those that pretend as though pimps and prostitutes have the same interests. In truth, to condemn the pimp is to defend the prostitute. No one believes that a CEO has the same interests as a conveyor belt worker, and that criticizing an unsafe factory resulting in workers losing their limbs means you hate the workers. Those against the sex trade are often accused of obfuscating the realities of capitalism–but is it not the pro sex trade left that does these obfuscations, that favors this industry and pretends away its context? Some even say that labor exploitation is (correctly) harmful, but that sexual exploitation is liberating. This pretending away is only to the detriment of sex workers, not their “empowerment”. It would be empowering to abolish the economic conditions that force people into this industry. It would be empowering to abolish the industry entirely and make sure sex is never commodified again. It would be empowering for women’s bodies to not be at the behest of capital. It is not empowering to uncritically back an exploitative industry with a foundation of sexual abuse because liberal academia told you it was feminist.

So, why is it that this industry in particular is given a pass from progressives and ignored altogether in most conversations surrounding exploitation under capitalism? The answer is simple: Because it is the most powerful in our society that profit off of and participate in it. Just as the elite propagandize the average citizen in supporting war for profit, they propagandize the average citizen into supporting sexual abuse for profit. Jeffrey Epstein’s predominantly child sex trafficking ring is now infamous. Epstein was one of the most well known people among the 1%, with some of his most prolific connections being Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and multiple officials of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. But Epstein’s case is not an isolated one–far from it. For the last few decades, as the sex industry has exploded, government officials, celebrities, and billionaires from primarily the Western world have been connected to sex trafficking rings, and even more disturbing, intelligence agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and Mossad have been implicated as direct participants.

In one particular instance in the 1980s, a rising star in the Republican party by the name of Larry King was found to be embroiled in a high profile sex trafficking ring, with witnesses and investigations revealing the involvement of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, billionaire Warren Buffet, and Nebraskan judges, lawyers, police chiefs, and businessmen. According to the Spanish newspaper Pronto--one of if not the only Western media outlet(s) that reported on the event in a way inconvenient to the ruling class--the FBI actively sabotaged the investigation, and the CIA was possibly directly related to King’s pedophile ring. Fifteen witnesses and other important figures in the investigation turned up dead as the billionaire owned American media decried the accusations as a “witch hunt”. In another case, former attorney general Rudy Giuliani buried evidence of a child sex trafficking ring in the Manhattan Beach McMartin Preschool. No indictment ever occurred, despite the FBI conducting hundreds of interviews, and 80% of accusers having physical trauma. Just in December of 2021, the CIA revealed itself that at least ten staffers had been implicated in sex crimes against children, but only one faced legal repercussions.

Sexual violence and the expansion of the sex industry is also inextricable from imperialism. When the US goes to war to expand their markets, it means expanding the sex market, too. Sex tourism by Western men–particularly wealthy ones with political connections–is an increasingly popular industry. This industry is propped up by the US military with its some-750 bases around the world. During the Korean and Vietnamese wars, the US military had “recreational facilities” that surrounded their bases where they bought and sold Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, and Thai war refugees that had no other means of subsistence. In Korea, at least 50,000 American troops bought sex from Korean women (The New York Times, 2023). In 1969, South Korea was earning $160 million from the US military occupation, including the sex trade. Military bases themselves are centers of sex trafficking; in 1987 the Army had received allegations of child sexual abuse at 15 of its daycare centers. In June 1988, it was discovered as many as ten children in the Panama military base had been infected with AIDS (Mercury News, 1988).

Most American sex trafficking happens in California, Texas, and Florida, the country’s immigrant hotspots. Major Texas cities like Houston and Dallas in particular are connected to child sex slave networks in Mexico, where many of those bought end up appearing in brutal and sometimes deadly snuff films. In 1996, the BBC reported that Mexican police broke up an international child pornography ring which had at least four thousand clients in the United States. Simultaneously, the American public is propagandized into hating Mexicans and not sympathizing with their exploitation. Who does that benefit but those that rape and murder Mexican children and want nothing more than for it to be ignored?

Florida is its own beast. Matt Gaetz, a former house representative of Florida, infamously participated in the trafficking of a teenage girl. Jeffrey Epstein’s St. James sex trafficking center was based in Palm Beach. In an industry that is largely underground, still hundreds of cases are reported in the state every year. In August of 2024, 148 individuals involved in the buying and selling of sex trafficking victims were collectively busted in Hillsborough County. Miami alone is a global trafficking destination with traffickers dipping in and out of the Miami nightlife to prey on their next victim.

The American left has an ego-driven obsession with creating as many divisions between them and those they deem “right wing” as possible. Even something the entire American public should find unity on–like the prevalence of sex trafficking and the need for its destruction–the American left is embarrassed to acknowledge because it would have them rubbing shoulders with conservatives. But it is irresponsible to let the right outflank us on this topic, especially considering that they point to the wrong perpetrators: like the Mexican people at large, or solely the Democratic party. We should take it upon ourselves to illuminate the core contradiction that leads to this exploitation–class–and denounce it with all possible energy. Fighting for a better world should not motivate us to form a social club, but a collective body of people from all backgrounds that are willing to serve the causes that will result in a national and eventually international liberation from the capitalist class that would buy and sell our babies for even a measly dollar.
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