Historically, feminist debates around sex work have frequently been centered around notions of harm.
For example, second wave feminist Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography is intrinsically harmful due to its themes of male dominance and consequential acceptance of misogyny, whilst others, like Gayle Rubin, argued that sexual liberation, which includes expression of sexuality through pornography, ought to be a feminist priority.
This focus on whether pornography is “good” or “bad” continues to shape discourse around Bonnie Blue on university campuses, and it continues to marginalise sex workers themselves even when we might feel we’re making progressive, nuanced arguments regarding empowerment and potential collective harms.
Last year when student volunteers at the University of Glasgow were told that Bonnie Blue’s presence was a safeguarding issue, it revealed a perception of her feminine allure as too hard to resist, derailing young men from the correct moral path, and potentially enticing young women into the dangers of sex work through her glamourisation of the profession.
A focus on the moral dimensions of Bonnie Blue’s travelling spectacle, whether as a force for sexual empowerment or a cause of “bad morality,” obscures the fact that her presence on campus is a symptom of the increasingly challenging and complex material situations that we as students’ unions are charged with helping our members to survive.
A deep dive on harm reduction
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before but the purpose of students’ unions is to democratically represent the collective interests of their members, and support their individual wellbeing and personal development.
It isn’t to cast moral judgement on members. The reality is that many students engage in behaviours SUs cannot “endorse” as organisations. However, in many cases, these behaviours are aspects of students’ lives that SUs have neither the right to adjudicate nor the power to really influence.
For example, we know that many students will take drugs during their studies and by and large as a sector we have come to realise that a “war on drugs” approach that sensationalises and stigmatises drug use only serves to exacerbate the potential health risks.
Many SUs have taken an explicit harm-reduction approach. They share information on drug safety, provide free drug-testing kits, and ensure the appropriate support is available to those with individual concerns. These practical steps are widely recognised as best practice and mean that in real terms, students are safer both on- and off-campus.
Back to the drawing board
What if, instead of responding to Bonnie Blue’s “Bang Bus” with alarmism and fear-mongering, universities and SUs alike focused on harm reduction?
When it comes to engaging with the Blue, it’s not just sex at play but the digital spectacle, and while the male participants are supposed to be anonymised, no method is bulletproof.
Records, once uploaded to the internet, are hard to erase or contain and may resurface where you least expect them. And this is not a new issue. Support for students to anticipate digital safety risks and making informed decisions to mitigate them is increasingly relevant across multiple areas of student life, and has been for some years.
Cambridge SU, for example, published an online safety guide in 2020 following a series of incidents in which individual students experienced severe online harassment following sensationalised national media reporting on their activism on-campus.
The harms resulting from the stigmatisation of sex work, however, are overwhelmingly felt by sex workers themselves.
The client demonstrates naivety or poor judgement, being lured into immoral acts by the sex worker’s malign influence, or they have a lecherous disposition, empowered and given form by the sex worker, who therefore also puts other more innocent women at risk.
In either framing, the supposed moral harm is held and remains within the corrupted body of the sex worker (who is not always a woman, but usually is due to a range of historic, social and economic factors). The reputational impact of being identified as a sex worker, compared with being a client, is much more likely to have profound material consequences such as the loss of a home, forcible separation from children and loss of a job and future employment opportunities. As Sunday Blake has previously argued, for student sex workers it may also lead to their university taking disciplinary action against them under vague “morality” clauses.
Student sex work
There are real risks to sex work, but it is patronising in the extreme to assume student sex workers aren’t aware of them.
As the Students4Decrim campaign – a grassroots campaign group “concerned with the rights and safety of everyone who sells sex” – wrote in their 2019 briefing paper, people undertake sex work for a range of reasons, but most commonly sex work is a way to get by, the same as with other work.
We know that students are working more hours per week, in low-paid jobs as a matter of financial necessity. This is a manifestation of the wider trend of increased underemployment during times of economic crisis, which particularly impacts lower-paid, precarious workers with limited options: part-time student workers, for example.
And as has been demonstrated by studies of historical recessions, as people are squeezed out of other opportunities to earn (or as those opportunities themselves become more acutely exploitative), entering sex work increasingly becomes the best – or only – way to survive.
Many of the risks student sex workers face are the same as for students working in any other industry for the sake of financial survival.
The more you need your job to live, the less power you have when it comes to the terms of your employment. Students will forgo hours of contact time to pick up shifts, knowingly missing out on important parts of their university experience to make the money they need to fund it.
The lack of control of their time in many other jobs can contribute to sex work being the most feasible option for some students, especially those studying full-time. And the risks specific to sex work in many cases are the result not of the work itself, but of the criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work which leaves workers without means to protect themselves and assert their rights.
In this context, a harm-reduction approach to student sex work should do the opposite of pounding the moral panic alarm. Of course, some students’ unions are already engaging with this approach. For example, Arts SU have a published student sex worker guide book, Cambridge SU have a list of resources for student sex workers, and the Students’ Union UCL have a page signposting student sex workers to community groups.
The existence of these resources positions the students’ unions as welcoming spaces which care about their members’ safety and wellbeing as well as avoiding moral judgement, which is a stark contrast to encouraging students to report Bonnie’s presence on the Safezone app.
A plaster on the economic wound
The Students4Decrim campaign referenced earlier isn’t new. In addition to their 2019 briefing paper, there’s also a SWARM statement about the occupation of the NUS Conference stage in 2018, in response to (allegations of) NUS attempting to block a motion to renew policy to support the decriminalisation of sex work.
Students’ unions doing what we can do – publishing guides, signposting support, engaging in targeted outreach – is good. But if it feels like a tiny plaster on a gaping wound, that’s because it is.
The way to really tackle students’ exploitation in any type of work is to make their material conditions less desperate: improving housing security, addressing the cost of living and studying, ensuring access to wellbeing support without negative repercussions.
And if an SU considers campaigning for the decriminalisation of sex work to be ultra vires, then at the very least we have a duty to ensure our institutions don’t perpetuate stigma towards or take disciplinary action against our own members for working to survive as students.
Bonnie Blue herself is not immune to economic reality. In fact, her story is at heart a story about money and her success in making it. Even her controversial support of Andrew Tate, regardless of whether these are her true opinions or not, do their job in garnering outrage and exposure, which for her spectacular form of sex work are key to her business success.
While it may seem straightforward to view her arrival on campus as heralding some new battle for students’ souls or “culture war” narratives, they have never benefited students or students’ unions because they serve to sensationalise lived realities that are much more complicated and intractable.
It’s the responsibility of SUs to instead understand the material circumstances in which we all find ourselves, support our members to thrive as far as possible despite these conditions, and do what we can to address the structural causes of harm.
Thank you to both Nathalie and Siyang for recalibrating this debate!