Editors Note: The following article contains references to assault and degrading language against sex workers.

“If you’re penetrating, you pay.”

That was the wisdom on who should pick up the bill from an article published earlier this year, which presented etiquette guidelines for “modern society and dating”.

Despite its “modern” claim, this advice has clear implications: the penetrator is the dominant party, with higher social and financial status than the submissive partner. This thinking falls in step with a long human history of linking power and authority to which bits are going where, that persists in spite of widespread shifts away from heteronormativity and binary constructions of gender.

In Ancient Greece, which boasted a famously relaxed attitude to same-sex (male) encounters, society still ascribed a power dynamic classing the penetrator as active and the receiver as passive. These labels are still in use by healthcare professionals today. In Ancient Rome, a man desiring sex with a partner of any gender was accepted as long as he took the penetrative role.

Preoccupation with penetration is all too familiar to sex workers. Opponents to our industry – self-styled “abolitionists”, despite doing nothing to help people leave sex work – regularly betray their obsession with it. A client paying a woman for sex commits an “invasion of her boundaries and her most intimate places”, insists a pro-criminalisation lobby site, inviting readers to imagine “his dick ramming into her orifices”. Sex work “degrades the vagina into a tool,” a speaker told attendees at an anti-sex work conference. “It makes it an object, an instrument that can be penetrated by 20, 30 men a day.” Over on Twitter, sex workers receive charming epithets like “cum dumpster” and “spunk bucket”, hurled unironically, by people claiming desperate concern for the respect and dignity of “prostituted women”.

The message is explicit: penetration is degradation.

It’s a common theme in radical feminist discourse, whose adherents form the main opposition to sex worker rights today. Mainstream conversations skirt round the edges of equating penetration with rape, while the more extreme circles explicitly label it as such. Radical feminist and author Andrea Dworkin is widely credited with popularising the idea; her fifth non-fiction book Intercourse labelled heterosexual sex “use and abuse simultaneously” and “the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Dworkin’s own experiences of sex with men were deeply traumatic. She was molested at just nine years old, endured horrific domestic violence during her marriage and, after leaving her husband, engaged in survival sex work.

Dworkin never explicitly stated that PIV sex is rape, and she insisted that that was not her view when asked for clarification. However, she was unequivocal about its degradation of women, labelling it “the key to women’s lower human status”. Women who engage in heterosexual sex are subsequently traitors and sex workers – when we reject the victim narrative – the biggest traitors of them all, even deserving of violence.

Reality check

As a sex worker myself, I find the radfem fixation on penetration pretty wild. For one thing, plenty of bookings do not involve PIV sex. The idea that someone has to be penetrated is a pretty reductive take – my first relationship never included penetration, not uncommon among queer women – but this reality still seems baffling to some. When Stephen Fry mentioned his preferences did not include penetration in a 2013 documentary, it made the news. Grindr profiles only provided the option for men to state that they did not participate in penetration last year (and it’s called “side”, which still implies secondary status to a main).

For another thing, some bookings involve the sex worker penetrating the client; sometimes just with our fingers but, increasingly, with something a bit more heavy duty. Since Dan Savage’s audience coined the term back in 2001, pegging has grown steadily more popular. Online retailer Lovehoney saw sales of strap-ons double in 2020, while an 81% jump in sales of videos featuring pegging saw one site name it the 2023 fetish of the year. Pegging was never something I offered; I leaned into a pretty vanilla service list and never bothered to invest in much of a toolkit, but it’s increasingly common among services sought from sex workers.

Flipping the narrative

Having said that, it doesn’t really matter how much of our work involves PIV sex, because penetration is not dominance. This lazy mindset is the product of cishetropatriarchy, and an outlook which persists in viewing men – and subsequently penises – as dominant. To persistently follow and parrot this line of thinking feels like a massive failure of imagination. It takes a pretty small thought experiment to conceive of a matriarchy where women are viewed as superior, and vaginas as subsequently dominant. In this landscape of swapped gendered power, PIV sex could so easily be talked about very differently – with vaginas as completely surrounding, encasing, enclosing – could we even say conquering?! – the penis.

Generalisations about biology could very easily serve a completely inverted point of view to what radfems serve up - the stereotype that people with penises fall asleep after sex, for example, could be interpreted as weakness. Or the ability of many vulva-owners to achieve multiple orgasms repeatedly could be seen as a great strength. There's simply very little value in bio-essentialist tropes - a gendered narrative can be made to fit any discourse.

Personal touch

I’ve typically shied away from talking about the sex I have that isn’t for money. It’s largely irrelevant to my activism work and – with the most wonderful partner in my life – it’s honestly hard to describe amazing, hot, loving sex without sounding too cringe and making everyone cringe a bit with me. But it so happens that my partner is a cis man and we generally enjoy a lot of extremely vanilla PIV sex. And I cannot fully articulate how far I feel from subjugated. I feel connected, I feel desired, but more than that: I feel powerful. Not dominant, but an equal partner in making something together, as close as possible, feeling continual feedback loops of joy in each other’s joy.

For a movement ostensibly built on eliminating any and all forms of male supremacy, the radfems’ patriarchal belief in the supremacy and destructive power of the penis smacks of irony. Anyone who has ever seen someone hit in the testicles can tell you that they are not terribly sturdy. Meanwhile, even a gynaecologist cannot tell you a person’s sexual history from their vagina.

Facing such intense sex negativity can sometimes propel us workers towards equally exaggerated sex positivity, “I love my job!” proclamations and empowerment narratives. But sex – penetrative or otherwise – can just be fine. It can be routine. It can be dull. It can be a thing you do to put food on the table. It can make sure your youngest has a new pair of school shoes.

Of course, the sex I had with clients felt nothing like what I have with my partner. I went through the motions and performed the actions – like a fucking pro, I might add – but it was mechanical, and certainly never got me off. And that wasn’t traumatic or degrading. It was just my job.

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