For the discourse –or widely circulated myth–of ‘sex workers are molested therefore inferior people’ to be this popular (or vice versa: sex workers are inferior people because they were molested and therefore with low self-esteem), you have to go back to the very origination. I believe it has to do with Freud, and his passing reference to prostitutes and child molestation and their psyche. Look at Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by him. I thought there was literally a curt and insufficient but evident reference to prostitutes and their sexuality. This lazy assumption was attributing their engaging in the labor to molestation they had experienced in their childhood and sexuality developed by it. Since it was omitted and inadequate, I believe it was just another stretch of imagination of Freud’s with no research or data. If there was any ground he had at the time,
1) he was mostly seeing upper middle class women–not men– and studied hysteria and established his theory. (read his earliest records, even before Anna O.)
2) he was rather theorizing by the ground he gathered by seeing non-sex worker middle class women and had hypothesis that later developed into libido and unconscious, which constitutes The Interpretation of Dream; by seeing patients –mostly female middle class who are domesticated to nurse their ailing fathers, he was developing what troubled those women’s inexplicable condition; sexual repression. Paradoxically he began seeing that sexual acts could achieve wholeness in one’s body if practiced in the appropriate conditions. To realize it, however, it would take appropriate investment of time and process and the participants’ wholesome mind.
3) Sex in prostitution is the best example of the opposite–sexual acts that are devoid of what are raised in the above.
His interest was the least in studying what prostitutes and prostitution could be, so the rhetoric to condemn sex worker, women and self-esteem and trauma is rather a product of those who came later to form the discourse over Freud and sex, and their over enthusiasm to establish some theory to justify their fear for women and their own sex.
Prostitution is an economic condition rather than manifestation of pathology. Thus Marx has way more worthwhile regard on sexwork than Freud’s although his view was also negative about prostitution per se for it was theoretically and technically the very condition of the utmost exploitation. On the other hand, Engels’s view might be the very scientific enough to use nowadays if you are a sexworker who needs some back up theory from those who had opinions about our labor.
