I used to think that people who did sex work had found themselves in a situation where they had no choice but to do sex work, and that the job of feminists was to help sex workers find alternative sources of income.
In 2010, at the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria, I attended a session on sex work. There I asked a question that today I feel embarrassed to own up to: “Why would anyone choose to do sex work?”
You can imagine how the temperature of the room – full of sex worker rights activists – plummeted. I can’t even remember what response I got from the panel, but I do recall the conversation I had later with Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, then the executive director of the African Women’s Development Fund, which I worked for at the time.
