The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny is the latest book from Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.
Drawing on years of research into gender-based violence, deep dives into forums, and interviews with victims of AI-assisted abuse, the book explores how new technology is turbocharging misogyny across seven sobering chapters. It’s an alarming picture of how AI amplifies and entrenches existing attitudes and harms, with devastating consequences for women and girls.
This technological and societal shift is particularly dangerous for sex workers. Many of the emerging technologies explored in The New Age of Sexism have the potential to increase sex workers’ experiences of discrimination, policing and violence. Unfortunately, the book largely fails to make those connections explicit for the reader.
Bates’ discussion of sex work in the context of the AI revolution is limited almost entirely to sex robots and cyber brothels, which consistently capture headlines. She describes in disturbing detail the violence that male customers enact on sex robots. She argues, compellingly, that these technologies entrench and normalise this behaviour, rather than provide a harmless outlet. Bates is refreshingly careful to distinguish sex robots from actual, human sex workers, and expresses concern for their rights and safety as the likely future targets of misogynistic violence.
But the book’s failure to lay out the risks to sex workers beyond the spectre of a cyber brothel-saturated future is a missed opportunity. The AI revolution’s potential for harming sex workers is vast. It goes far beyond the transfer of violent impulses from dolls to humans.
Net gains, and losses
The internet transformed sex work, substantially improving sex workers’ ability to operate autonomously, ensure their safety, and increase their earnings. In a 2018 UK study, 89% of sex workers reported that online and digital technologies had decreased their dependence on third parties, 85% reported improved client screening, and 81% reported greater peer support. These technologies were also instrumental in shifting most sex work indoors, consistently found to be far safer than outdoor work.
Where technology once offered greater anonymity to sex workers, it now makes it easier than ever for their identities to be compromised
On top of facilitating safer in-person work, digital platforms also enabled novel forms of sex work like camming and selling user-generated content. These now mainstream services provide incomes to the countless sex workers who prefer to work from home and not offer in-person services.
But despite some clear benefits, the full impact of the internet on sex work is hardly all positive. The threat of law enforcement now permeates digital platforms. Where technology once offered greater anonymity to sex workers, it now makes it easier than ever for their identities to be compromised.
In 2017, federal raids on the advertising website Eros enabled US border officers to identify, detain and deport sex workers who had earlier been verified by the site. Now, AI facial recognition can perform similar invasions of privacy at scale, identifying sex workers from photos scraped non-consensually from their ads and matching it with other personal data. The Covid pandemic accelerated law enforcement’s capacity to identify people wearing face masks and unblur photos, meaning that even sex workers who intentionally hide their faces are not safe.
Criminalisation and aggressive policing of sex work have long been justified in the name of fighting human trafficking. AI algorithms are now a staple of the arsenal, to the great concern of sex worker rights activists and anti-trafficking experts alike. Sweeping, poorly informed generalisations are rife, and algorithms trained on misleading, biased and stigmatising data reproduce and perpetuate harms. Some of the supposed indicators of trafficking informing these algorithms include such simple things as tattoos, duplicate ads, not offering incalls (i.e. being unable to host clients), and even inappropriate or revealing clothing.
Rather than identifying genuine victims in need of support, the broad deployment of poorly trained algorithms is far more likely to wrongfully target sex workers operating with agency. Given that sex work is criminalised almost everywhere in the world, those identified by these systems are now far more likely to face surveillance, raids, arrest and criminal charges than in the past.
Discrimination on autopilot
It doesn’t stop there. Since the passing of the notorious FOSTA/SESTA acts in the US in 2018, ostensibly a wide-reaching effort to shut down any websites that facilitate trafficking, financial institutions have been scrambling to ensure that they cannot be found liable for enabling exploitation. AI algorithms are being deployed to automatically clean their books of anything or anybody remotely connected to the adult industry.
Unfortunately, Bates ignores how the same AI tools are being used against sex workers to deny them access to financial services altogether
One result of this is that sex workers are being “debanked”. Their accounts are frozen or closed, and sometimes their funds are confiscated. This is causing enormous pain to workers operating with agency, with no evidence of it effectively preventing trafficking to justify the cost.
Bates’ book does touch on how AI algorithms in the financial sector facilitate various forms of discrimination. This includes credit-scoring systems that exclude women from accessing loans or other financial systems and exacerbate the gender financial gap. Unfortunately, she ignores how these same tools are being used against sex workers to deny them access to financial services altogether.
Over in the social media space, algorithmic content moderation is used to censor, silence and erase sex workers, compromising both advertising and self-expression. While less devastating than being targeted by police or losing one’s bank account, this impact should not be underestimated. Shadow bans reduce visibility and income, making sex workers poorer and more vulnerable. They also erode community, safety and compound societal stigma, with profound impacts on physical and mental health. As with other AI technologies, the impact is not uniform. It disproportionately affects those who are queer, trans and racialised.
On top of all this, lawmakers in many countries are seeking to extend existing carceral approaches to digital spaces. In Sweden, ground zero of the Nordic Model/End Demand approach to sex work, which criminalises the purchase of sex but not its sale (and which sex worker led organisations uniformly oppose worldwide), politicians voted in May to broaden this criminalisation to the purchase of “sexual acts” online. This includes camming, custom content, even simply watching any pornography.
Staggeringly, this law passed without a word of objection or debate. Adherence to the Nordic Model approach in Sweden is so rigidly enforced that any politician who dares question it is essentially committing career suicide. For now, the law is practically unenforceable, as anyone with a VPN can instantly bypass blocked sites. But emerging technologies could easily undermine VPN effectiveness as a tool for privacy, expanding law enforcement’s reach even further. When that happens, sex workers will again pay the price.
The book fails to point out the obvious: the harms faced by criminalised communities cannot be mitigated unless the laws criminalising them are overturned
Sex workers are fending for themselves as best as they can amidst all this. They share information and strategies between themselves for everything from avoiding detection when travelling and challenging financial discrimination to evading social media censorship. Platforms rarely disclose data management practices for the sensitive information they gather, but some have confirmed that they do share data upon request by government or law enforcement. For sex workers, that power of discretion can be a matter of life and death.
Harm Reduction
The New Age of Sexism concludes on a tentatively hopeful note. Bates accepts that no technology is inherently bad. The problem is society’s deep tolerance for misogyny, inequality, and stigma. These all existed long before AI showed up, and they are what truly needs addressing. Harm reduction strategies are crucial, but there is no silver bullet as long as these persist.
Unfortunately, in the absence of proper exploration of the AI revolution’s impact on sex workers, The New Age of Sexism fails to point out the obvious: the harms faced by criminalised communities cannot possibly be mitigated until the laws criminalising them are overturned. As long as law enforcement sees sex workers as a target, technologies will be deployed to facilitate policing, punishment and structural violence against them.
Elsewhere, technologically-aided harms will continue unchallenged as long as sex workers do not have the legal right to ask for help. Full decriminalisation of sex work is essential to allowing access to justice mechanisms and support services, and to improve sex workers’ safety and health, whatever the technological era.
The New Age of Sexism is a compelling, sobering read. It shines an important light on the intersection of emerging technologies and misogyny. But by omitting the threats posed by enhanced policing, financial discrimination and erasure to real human sex workers, is does those most at risk a massive disservice. Sex workers will survive the robots. It’s all the rest they’re worried about.
Thank you to Yiğit Aydınalp and Sabrina Sanchez from the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance, and Vaughn Hamilton from Human Computing Associates, who all provided valuable context that helped inform this article.
About the author: Marin Scarlett is a sex workers’ rights and reproductive justice activist. She is the founder of The Scarlett Letters and volunteers for Supporting Abortions For Everyone (SAFE). She has also worked for the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance, National Ugly Mugs and Umbrella Lane.
