Bills aimed at criminalising sex work [1] keep coming, one after another. The logic is always the same: under the guise of protection, they criminalise. Sex workers have already discussed the ideological assumptions behind this legislative fever: a liberal vision of feminism and a senile conservatism. This week, they turn to the latest bill, presented to the National Assembly on 11 August 2026, and here they offer their analysis.
After warning about the extension of digital control, first applied to porn and then to all internet users under the hypocritical pretext of “protecting minors”, we now face a wave of laws aimed at prohibiting our activity online. After two bills tabled in the Senate targeting us, the first by a senator from Les Républicains [the main conservative party] and the second by one from the PS [Parti socialiste, Socialist Party], a third bill, dated 11 August 2026, “providing a comprehensive response to the phenomenon of sexual and sexist violence against women and children”, includes an article, Article 25, that provides for criminalising the purchase of online sexual content between consenting adults, as well as extending the offence of procuring to include: “helping, assisting or protecting the remote performance by a person […] of acts of a sexual nature in exchange for remuneration”.
We are faced with a kind of obsessive neurosis on the part of a few senators and deputies who are as idle as ever and unable to justify their sinecures other than by writing laws against us.
Sex work is thus directly reduced to a form of sexist and sexual violence in itself, one among others, and crudely criminalised in the same way as child sexual abuse, incest, the prostitution of minors, domestic violence and so on. We do not claim here to analyse this law on sexual and sexist violence as a whole, but to describe its effects on our condition. We nonetheless have the feeling that it comes at the end of Macron’s term and that it is an operation by the central bloc (the PS and the Macronists) to buy themselves a clear conscience on the cheap, after so many years of moral bankruptcy on the very problems this law claims to solve, having first covered them up. The latest antics to dodge and hush up the Epstein affair in France, Bétharram [2], the praise lavished on Depardieu, the support for Ary Abittan [3] and so on are quite telling of the absence not only of political will on the matter but of the slightest regard for victims.
As far as we are concerned, all the employees (video editors, assistants, chatters etc.), companies, agencies and platforms involved in our activity, as well as those close to us (flatmates, partners etc.), are liable to be considered pimps under this new definition. Obviously, as online content creators, it is our direct, “sectional” interests that are targeted, that is, the possibility of continuing to earn our living this way, along with all the work we have put in to get this far.
Not a single article in this law, any more than in the previous ones, aims to offer a status that would protect sex workers and guarantee them rights, to strengthen the means of fighting “real” pimping and sexual exploitation, or to make it easier for sex workers to change careers other than by being slotted back into underpaid shit jobs, etc. It is purely the ideological and moral product of a kind of moralising, conservative, crypto-Christian bourgeois pseudo-feminism. For the aim of these bills is never to “protect” sex workers, or those who wish to become sex workers, from “third parties”, but to protect them from themselves by forbidding them from doing what they do, for their own “good”, in the name of their “dignity”, following a paternalistic and infantilising logic that is dismal but well-rehearsed.
Since the emergence of platforms, it would seem that the possibility they offer, notably to women, of supplementing their income or getting rich in relative independence (without depending on production companies, at any rate) through their sexuality constitutes an offence deserving punishment. And to this end the plan is to criminalise clients (subscribers) and to cut us off from every form of potential technical, material, legal and financial support.
We affirm here that this sort of sword of Damocles being brandished over our heads is a direct attack on a strategy by which part of the proletariat seeks to escape conventional wage labour and its shit wages by valorising itself as best it can elsewhere. We need only recall the obscene lament of Les Républicains senator Marie Mercier when she naively observes that: “The Covid crisis was an accelerator: the end of student jobs and internships plunged many of them into great precarity, leading some to post sexual images on platforms to make ends meet.” This vanguard of right- and left-wing neoliberalism and of the start-up nation thus takes offence at the moral consequences, which it deems disastrous, of its own relentless policy of proletarianisation, for which lockdown was merely an “accelerator”, notably when it comes to the monetisation of parasocial relationships.
Now it also seems obvious to us that to put an end to the criminalisation of sex work, we will have to get rid, once and for all, of the PS and its false consciousness, dripping with self-righteous virtue. This moribund party, which is forever dying and rotting, and whose corpse was unfortunately dug up by the NFP [Nouveau Front populaire, New Popular Front], has managed to retain a considerable capacity to do harm to the social movement and our struggles. A veritable machine for co-opting, instrumentalising, neutralising and, once in government, repressing our aspirations. It waged filthy neoliberal, antisocial and authoritarian offensives when in power, expertly preparing the ground for the sort of generalised proto-fascist perversion of political life and language that is Macronism. No one has forgotten the CICE [4], the loi Travail [the 2016 labour law reform], the militarised eviction of the zad [5] at Notre-Dame-des-Landes and at Sivens, where Rémi Fraisse was killed by the police, etc. That the members of such a party buy themselves a progressive conscience under cover of feminism and the fight against sexual and sexist violence, the better to attack once again the few rights and freedoms of a part of the proletariat deemed impure and unworthy, does not surprise us.
But the silence, or the scant attention, of part of the radical left or the revolutionary camp on this subject, which is and remains marginal only because of the prejudices and moral stigmas attached to it, is more dismaying. It is not just a lack of curiosity but a kind of petty cowardice, even an outright hostility towards simply recognising our legitimate place within the social movement. Yet we will have to lance the boil and confront this tail end of prohibitionist pseudo-feminism that is still rife from the PS to the PCF [Parti communiste français, French Communist Party] and all the way into the trade unions, which absurdly refuse to let sex workers join because they refuse to recognise sex work as proper “work”.
The point here is not to defend sex work from a moral standpoint or as an end in itself, as a real job like any other (which in fact it can be), nor to praise mass pornography or prostitution as a form of subversion of patriarchal political economy (making men pay for the sexual services they otherwise enjoy for free as their due), but simply to stop repressing and criminalising it as if that would make it disappear.
It is true that, what with those who call themselves “abolitionists” while claiming to save us from sexual slavery and redeem us; those who call us “petty bourgeois” because we sell services like shopkeepers; the Marxists who distinguish the sale of “labour power” from that of one’s “body” in order to disqualify us as a political subject, so imprisoned are they in their bogus semantic abstraction (when a worker dies at work, is it only his “labour power” that dies, or his body? When one takes part in the reproduction of labour power by fucking, what is one fucking? An abstraction?); the reactionaries and the masculinists who dehumanise us and rejoice at our violent death as the inevitable and deserved end of such a dissolute life (the Sonia Bellina case [6]); the libertarians who see it as just another form of entrepreneurship… it is not easy to defend a materialist and partisan position on our activity.
Finally, between the theories that cast sex workers as agents in the overthrow of patriarchy, resisting the free appropriation of women’s genitals, and those that see them as accomplices, witting or unwitting, in the hetero-patriarchal sexualisation, reification and commodification of women, the gulf is dizzying. For our part, we seek to slip out of this sort of theoretical pincer grip by focusing on the subjectivities and the individual or collective strategies that unfold in the space of sex work, without denying the heterogeneity that constitutes it.
This is because we start from the principle that materialist analysis consists precisely in apprehending reality not independently of any ethical and partisan pursuit of justice and equality, but free of any moralising, puritanical, hygienist and merely prophylactic view of social relations. The point is to escape the futile choice between conservatism and progressivism, to try to grasp reality beyond the binary clash of good and evil, without condemning it in the name of an abstract idealism, to understand the power relations at play within it and to intensify them in a clear ethical, material and political direction.
We must also put an end to the confusion between (hyper)sexualisation and reification, which some, like Aurore Bergé [7], seem to have trouble telling apart. A confusion that often serves to denounce the immoral influence of social media and platforms on young people and thereby to stir up pointless moral panics about the degeneration of mores. Here we find yet another incarnation of that commonplace of reactionary pseudo-critique, which praises capitalist modernity and its development as a source of power while feebly lamenting its supposedly “decadent” cultural and psychological consequences.
There is nothing wrong in itself with constituting oneself as a desirable and desired body through certain behaviours or dress codes, and this does not in itself constitute a form of (self-)reification. Reification designates, rather, the transformation of relations among human beings, and between them and their natural environment, into instrumental object-relations in which we are no more than resources, sexually or productively available. No one truly escapes this process today, or only relatively so. But some see in the commodification of sexuality and the intimate sphere the most immoral and abject face of this reification, when it is only one of its aspects among others, and has been for quite a while. It is not a matter of denying that the sexual act is a singular and decisive moment in a play of distance between bodies, which commodification tends to dissolve, and to desacralise violently in the eyes of those who still indulge in an outdated idealisation of women and their sexuality. But that cannot be the pretext for a form of moral and political banishment of sex workers or for their inferiorisation, which we know has also been theorised in order to divide women among themselves, to rank them according to their sexuality, a sexuality that must be controlled, and, ultimately, to satisfy male desire.
Consequently, if fighting the patriarchal and market reification of the world seems a perfectly commendable project, this fight has nothing to do with the reactionary one that denounces a “sexualisation” of which no one can ever say where it begins or ends, and which always aims to make women feel guilty while denying their subjectivity and autonomy in order to turn them into nothing but passive victims of the male gaze and male desire.
It is therefore time to see sex work, real or virtual, without especially seeking to legitimise it, as the resource that many proletarians, whatever their gender, use to improve their material conditions of life and existence under capitalism and sometimes, for some, to get rich. And to recognise that a truly “abolitionist” perspective can thus only be conceived and elaborated in a process of decommodification of social relations and massive reductions in economic and political inequalities, failing which sex will remain one means of exchange among others, whatever taboos one tries to impose on the subject and whatever repressive and prohibitionist policies one applies to make it disappear from public and political space; and that this repressive policy under cover of feminism and progressivism ends up, in fact, joining the conservative and reactionary one that ranks women according to their sexuality and behaviour. Meanwhile, like any worker in this world, we will seek to defend at the very least our dignity and our elementary social rights, such as that, for example, of normally accessing “banking services” without being debanked. Some readers of this article may find this perfectly trivial. But access to housing, to loans, to investment, and so on depends on access to these services. A sex worker cannot, without some costly subterfuges, buy herself a smallholding in the countryside with her companions to desert the world of the authoritarian commodity. But she is still entitled to cough up her taxes. It is a fairly telling example of how our lives are made hell, administratively and financially for a start.
Finally, what is at stake for us in this fight is also to bring sex workers out of the purely entrepreneurial and individualist logic to which social contempt and the lack of collective protection consign them. Forging ties to confront our adversaries allows us to rethink our condition collectively, just as winning rights would let us escape the wearisome and alienating marketing tactics of pure self-valorisation.
We therefore call on our camp to support us by every media and political means at its disposal, so as not only to join in this power struggle but also to force a materialist, ethical and communist feminism into the debate.
Translator’s notes
[1] The original abbreviates “travail du sexe” (sex work) and “travailleur·euse·s du sexe” (sex workers) as TDS, which is also the authors’ collective name: Quelques TDS means “A Few Sex Workers”. In this translation the abbreviation is spelled out.
[2] Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram, a private Catholic school in south-western France. Former pupils have filed some 250 complaints of physical and sexual violence committed there over several decades. François Bayrou, Prime Minister when the scandal broke in 2025 and a former education minister, was accused of having covered up the abuse, which he denied.
[3] A French comedian accused of rape in 2021; the case was dismissed in 2024, a decision upheld on appeal in January 2025. In December 2025, after feminist activists interrupted one of his shows, Brigitte Macron went backstage to support him and was filmed insulting the activists.
[4] CICE (Crédit d’impôt pour la compétitivité et l’emploi): a tax credit for employers introduced under the Hollande presidency.
[5] A zad (“zone à défendre”, zone to defend) is a land occupation against a development project; the zads at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (an airport) and Sivens (a dam) were evicted by force.
[6] Sonia Bellina, a 29-year-old content creator, was found murdered in a vineyard in southern France in August 2026. A man has been charged with her murder, and her death was followed by a wave of abuse online.
[7] Minister delegate for equality between women and men and the fight against discrimination, and a leading figure in Macron’s Renaissance party. She has called for those who manage creators’ accounts on platforms such as OnlyFans and MYM to be prosecuted as procurers.
The French original of this article first appeared in lundimatin#533 and is republished here in English translation with permission.
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