Am I My Brothel's Keeper?

Author and former sex worker Tracy Quan talks about human trafficking, legalizing prostitution, and 15 years in The Life.

Kerry Howley | November 7, 2005

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I think outlaws are more trustworthy people. They're forced to think about what they think is right and wrong. You are forced to think about the ethics of your behavior in terms of loyalty. It's a very tribal mentality: us against the world. In the respectable world, it's about what you can get away with legally. There are a lot more loopholes in the respectable world. People will tell themselves: "It's OK because it's legal." An outlaw doesn't have that option.

Reason: What do you make of claims that sex workers are motivated by deep-seated psychological problems?

Quan: All human beings have deep-seated psychological problems. That's what makes us interesting. Writers have deep-seated psychological problems, and I would hope a prostitute has deep-seated psychological problems. I think those claims come from people who have been brainwashed by the medicalization of therapy; they want everyone to be flat and have no problems. But that's never been the goal of serious psycho-therapeutic thinkers. The goal is to understand what lies beneath the human condition. These people are bureaucrats and they aren't thinking about the range of human experience.

Reason: Has the acknowledgement of female desire led to women taking greater enjoyment in sex?

Quan: I think we're enjoying sex more than we did in the past because we have birth control. The methods have become better and better. My parents didn't have access to condoms in four different sizes. It makes a difference.

Reason: What effect has it had on men?

Quan: I don't think our enjoyment of sex is separate from men's enjoyment. I'm sure that in my grandmother's time it was more of a zero sum game. In a society where women have more access to birth control, our pleasure comes to be seen as more important to the man. The fear of getting pregnant would have stopped me from enjoying the experience. The idea that something you like to do is going to lead to physical hardship really puts a damper on things.

Reason: Prostitution in the developing world has been getting a lot of attention lately, much of it because of the effort to stamp out human trafficking. Has the attention been positive or negative for sex workers?

Quan: The movement led by prostitutes themselves is really concerned about trafficking. But we are concerned about it in a larger human rights context. We are really upset about people who use trafficking to attack the whole concept of prostitution. I think there is a lot of unexamined hatred toward prostitutes that gets expressed as compassion.

Reason: So the issues of voluntary prostitution and human trafficking are being conflated.

Quan: They're being exploited. People are exploiting, psychologically and emotionally, the issue of trafficking to turn a human rights problem into an anti-prostitution agenda.

Reason: Is the argument that prostitution is necessarily exploitive?

Quan: I'm not concerned that prostitution is exploitive. What does exploitive mean? People exploit minerals and their own power and each other. Exploitation is a fairly neutral term. The question is whether somebody is being abused or harmed physically. These people are trying to cast prostitution as something evil rather than something exploitive.

Prostitutes exploit their clients all the time. And they're often exploited by madams. The idea of clients exploiting anyone is kind of laughable. It's like someone saying that someone running a shoe store is exploiting the labor of an employee. That's how businesses run. It's a fairly neutral term. The question is whether it's abusive.

Reason: And the assumption is that it is always abusive?