Patrick Califia’s essay “Whoring In Utopia” offers a powerful provocation:
- Utopian social & political visions implicitly assume that in an ideal society sex work would not exist
- Examination of that assumption reveals it as foolish at best and poisonous at worst
- Contemplating what utopian sex work in a utopian society might be like is an illuminating exercise for considering our values and ideals in utopias, sex work, and sex in general
I first read it back in the 20th century. Just now it inspired a hypothesis which — in the spirit of provocation — I offer in a voice of certainty:
Califia’s Law
Just as a system which does not make things better for sex workers does not make things better for everyone, a system which does make things better for sex workers will make things better for everyone.
I have a couple of stories about this from my work as a user experience designer demonstrating how huge a blindspot most people in the industry have around sex work.
PhotoBug (not their real name)
A photo-sharing platform — something like Instagram or Flickr — wanted to court professional photographers. They talked about making it easy for folks like your local portraitist to sell high-quality prints and stuff through the service.
“Cool,” I said. “I can design a solution for that. What will be your stance toward porn?”
“Oh, we just will not allow that, obviously.”
“Okay, do you need help with your curation tools, too?”
“What ‘curation tools’? Porn will not be allowed.”
“Um. Well. If you forbid porn on your platform, you have to check every post to make sure it is not porn. Robots can help, but you need people to look. Those people need tools, you need to set policies, and you need to get that set up right away because sex workers are early adopters.”
“Oh no!” said the PhotoBug people. “We don’t want to do all that.”
“There are other approaches,” I told them. “For example, since you are building the infrastructure, you can make two services: PhotoBug and SexyPix. The clever bit is you make the margin for the photographer better on SexyPix, so sex workers do not show up on PhotoBug because you give them a better alternative.”
“But then we are maintaining a porn site! No way!” said the PhotoBug people.
“Okay, then you have to start building out your curation capacity now, as fast as you can,” I told them.
“Let’s stop talking about this. We won’t allow porn. We are paying you to design this for serious photographers.”
PhotoBug were entirely serious in thinking that they would simply “not allow porn”, they therefore did not need to address it in their design, resources, or business model. I was out of line in raising the question.
Guess what happened later.
NiceVideo (not their real name)
A company “democratizing video” asked for a design for “ordinary people” sharing video which was not just YouTube.
I said, “Okay, you have a lot of people posting videos of their kids’ birthday parties to public YouTube because it is easy to send the link to Grandma. It would be better to have a private solution easy enough for anyone to use.” Then I figured out how to do it. Users could create a collection of videos with a list of people who were allowed to see it; people on the list got notified when new videos were posted.
NiceVideo loved it.
I pointed out how the solution would also be useful to sex workers and pirates. The NiceVideo executives said that I should not worry about that, I was being silly.
To my knowledge, they never implemented any curation. They did have problems with server load, though.
Obviously the tech industry has repeatedly made moves hostile to sex workers. I can report that stupidity and consequent panic are every bit as powerful a force as malice, if not more.
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