Sex work and COVID-19 in the New Zealand media : avoid the moist breath zone

Abstract

News media coverage of sex work in New Zealand post-decriminalisation has shown some movements towards a destigmatisation of the work. There is a conditional willingness to treat the people who do it as workers, who in a few cases may approach social inclusion and acceptance. The ability to access this acceptability depends on how a sex worker works, and which other social groups and identities they belong to. Sex workers who work indoors, charge higher rates, see fewer clients, are tertiary educated, middle or upper class, and are pākehā or white are more likely to be deemed acceptable. This contingent destigmatisation is often carried out through a process of comparison. One worker is positioned as relatively more or less normative than another, and subsequently closer or further from the rhetorical and stigmatised ‘prostitute imaginary’ who exists in the background of many media texts. Migrant sex workers and street-based sex workers have often been subject to more stigmatising media representations than domestic and indoor sex workers, too. In writing this book I was interested in finding out if these divisions continued, and if their expression changed in any notable way during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was also curious if the tendency to understand sex work as work would continue to progress, or might instead regress, conscious of both the susceptibility of sex work as a scapegoat for moral panics and of the way that during periods of cultural change prostitution law has sometimes become a focus, with sex work seen as a threat to the hegemonic order. New Zealand is a unique case study for these questions, given our unusual sex work law and our unusual success in controlling the pandemic in its initial stages. Our mediascape is also comparatively small, making the collection and analysis of a representative data set more manageable. In the remainder of this chapter, I outline the New Zealand model in more detail, then turn to the relationships between sex work and public health, Covid-19, the media, and stigma, as well as giving an overview of the methodology which I employ in this book.--From Introduction