Cash, condoms and the law: Kiwi sex workers reveal all in new book

Mikey Madison in a scene from the movie Anora in which she plays a sex worker.

Just a generation ago sex work was illegal and existed in the shadows. In these exclusive extracts from her new book Untold Histories, Cheryl Ware invites modern Kiwi sex workers, and those from the last 50 years, to tell their stories about the evolution of the industry - and their experiences of the work itself.

Gina gained a job as a receptionist in a South Auckland massage parlour when her son was three or four years old. She remembered ‘all these girls making all this money, and I was just sitting on reception making stuff-all.’

The money was enticing and Gina made her first foray into sex work shortly afterwards, when she accepted a parlour client’s request for a private booking at his house.

She found the work ‘easy. It was at his house, he was a really nice older guy, and he treated me really well.’

That evening marked the start of her decade-long career in massage parlours and later as a dominatrix in the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty.

In the early 1990s, reports started to emerge about police officers confiscating condoms (both used and unused) as evidence of sex work-related offences. Paradoxically, the condoms were funded by the Ministry of Health. Photo / 123RF

The ease of sex work was a dominant theme in Gina’s testimony. Shortly after the private booking she left the parlour and gained a job alongside a friend’s sister at a parlour in central Auckland. She remembered the experience as ‘easy! It was just easy. I was young and had a gorgeous figure ... it was just easy money.’

Professionalisation of sex work

Not everyone maintained a consistent separation from clients during sex. Catherine remembered having ‘a sexually fabulous time’ with two of her regular clients.

For the most part, however, ‘you had that resistance in fact to orgasm, that was kind of in the template as well. Like, it’s not about me having sex, it’s actually about you paying for sex with me, but it’s not about me having sex with you.’

Cherida shared clear memories of sex with her first client in 2003...

“There was this moment when we were having sex that it flashed in my head that I was gonna be paid, and then I had an orgasm.”

Barriers to safe sex

The laws that criminalised soliciting and brothel-keeping posed serious barriers to the NZ Prostitute’s Collective’s (NZPC) HIV-prevention efforts.

In the early 1990s, reports started to emerge about police officers who confiscated condoms (both used and unused) as evidence of sex work-related offences.

The late Georgina Beyer left sex work behind to become a mayor and MP. Photo / Whakaata Māori

The irony that two government departments, the Department of health (which funded the NZPC) and the New Zealand Police were sending ‘completely opposite signals’ was lost on few.

In November 1991 the NZPC threatened to withdraw from its contract with the Department of Health after police arrested four parlour workers during raids in Wellington.

Writing to Associate Minister of Health Katherine O’Regan, Catherine Healy and criminologist Jan Jordan successfully called for an interdepartmental review into how the law ‘perpetuates discrimination against sex workers to the extent that it actively obstructs the promotion of safer sex practices and the prevention of HIV/AIDS’.

They argued that the NZPC faced a moral dilemma by asking sex workers to be open about their sexual practices and to practise safe sex when doing so exposed them to arrest and prosecution...

In 1993 Deputy Commissioner Peter Doone released a statement in Ten One, the New Zealand Police magazine.

He outlined the force’s competing duties to ‘investigate prostitution, brothel-keeping and allied offences when local priorities allow’ while supporting the Department of Health’s safe sex programme, which involved distributing condoms, lubricants and other safe sex material to sex workers.

The police decision to go easier on sex workers was announced in Ten One, the New Zealand Police magazine, in 1993

Doone’s statement indicates a shift away from actively prosecuting sex workers. He instructed police ‘not to seize or use photographs of such materials as evidence of soliciting or prostitution’ and reasoned that they could usually find other evidence for prosecution ‘if warranted’.

Fighting for decriminalisation

The Prostitution Reform Act removed criminal charges for soliciting, brothel-keeping and living off the earnings of sex work, and specified that sex workers were protected under health and safety employment legislation.

Decriminalisation transformed the lives of many of those in the industry. Sex workers have attested to experiencing better working conditions, greater power to refuse particular clients and heightened self-esteem while working in situations where they have described feeling ‘supported and safe’ ...

The passage of the Prostitution Reform Bill into law certainly outraged its opponents. Four months after decriminalisation, in October 2003, police in Wellington launched their first raid on a local massage parlour since the early 1990s. Catherine explained:

“The police stormed in there, threw open the doors of the rooms where the clients were with the sex workers, threw the clients up against the walls, asked them their names, questioned the sex workers, and took their names ...

“It was a real exercise in, ‘We’ll show you. You might think you’ve gotten away with this law change, but we are the real power here’.”

The lessons of history

‘Theoretically, it’s just as valid a job as anything else.’ Elliot had been working as a private escort in a North Island town for thirteen years by the time we met for the interview in November 2019.

Elliot’s career in the sex industry has kept his life exciting and provided him with a steady income, but ‘it’s never been purely about the money, of course. I mean, I’m not getting rich [laughs].’

Despite the 16 years that had passed between decriminalisation and our interview, he attested to the prevailing prejudice that continued to marginalise those working in the industry: ‘There seems to be a disjuncture between the progressiveness of the law and the grassroots reality of what people think out there,’ He continued:

“If it is just another job like everything else, why is it that you can’t just go, ‘Oh hi, nice to meet you. What do you do?’ ‘Oh, I’m a prostitute.’ ‘Oh, are you? That’s nice.’ You’ve still got to be guarded, you’ve still got to choose carefully who you confide in about stuff, you’ve still got to come up against stereotypes and misunderstandings.”

Several interviewees shared similar frustration at encountering negative stereotypes that undermined the intelligence and integrity of people who work in the sex industry.

*Untold Intimacies, A History of Sex Work in Aotearoa 1978-2008 is published by Auckland University Press.

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