NEW Year’s Eve is a busy time of year for the hospitality trades – bars, clubs, restaurants, hotels and, yes, sex workers. Like any other business, sex workers worldwide were prepared to meet customer demand. And like any business transaction, it can be hoped both parties walked away happy.

Sex is exchanged for money every day, in brothels, homes, hotels, on the street and in the back seat of cars all over Australia, regardless of legal status, persecution, social stigma, discrimination and expense to the client. Is there anything to be gained by prohibiting it?

Sex workers (most commonly women) make money from sex work. The clients (usually men) pay for sex work. This is a relationship, this is negotiation and this is a system in our culture. Yet our laws, social mores and the morality police tell us it’s scandalous – a one-way ticket to hell. Or jail, if you live in Sweden. All this assumes that sex workers and clients are supposedly doing something wrong.

But what makes it wrong? The government, even when it legalises or reforms laws in favour of sex workers, does not want to be seen to be endorsing sex work – just regulating it for those who are in it and need ”protection”.

What are we being protected from? Why should it be reasonable to criminalise the negotiation of financial arrangements for sex? Rape is criminal. Violent assault is criminal. But consensual sex with a dollar figure attached to it is not. In NSW sex work is decriminalised and workers, clients and health advocates believe it should stay that way.

We are talking about 30 minutes or so of massage, sex, nakedness, talking, showering, then getting on with your life. Is that evil or wrong? Negotiate, pay or be paid, have sex, see ya later.

As sex-worker activist Debby Attenborough put it: ”One million Australian men are prepared to work for days and days in mind-numbing jobs to pay for a single sexual interaction with a woman whom they haven’t even met yet, and will never meet again.” About 20,000 Australian women bypass other careers and risk the social flak associated with sex work to be there to make that money when those men appear.

Now I know what you are thinking. It’s OK for me. I’m articulate, educated. I get articles published by newspapers. I’ve been president of the Australian Sex Workers Association. I can see what you might prefer to imagine: a typical downtrodden, desperate sex worker without any choices or an education, struggling on the streets with pimps breathing down her neck and unable to use condoms. Facing violence. Facing addiction. Facing a personal hell prescribed to her by men who want to pay for quick sex.

Let’s examine some facts. Sydney’s Kings Cross street-working area was the first site of condom use in Australia for sex and oral sex. Why? Because street-based sex workers knew about HIV and didn’t want to catch a life-threatening disease. In the brothels down the street, owners were stopping sex workers from using condoms, threatening sacking, and worried about losing business. But because street-based sex workers were demanding condom use, it made the brothel workers more able to stand up for themselves and demand condom use also. The sex workers who made it a broad campaign actually won the fight against HIV in the sex industry.

Street-based sex workers are organised about their rights in ways that go unnoticed on night-time TV cop shows. With the general obsession in the mainstream media with finding street workers’ corpses in dumpsters, you would think there would be a mirrored concern among law enforcers. But this is not the case.

Street-based sex workers are often imagined as victims; however, the stereotype works against us gaining recognition when violence happens. In fact, street-based sex workers are victimised by laws, police and lack of access to justice. Not by clients who spend money to have sex with us.

The same applies to sex tourism. According to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, about 15 per cent of Australian men have paid for sex. In a population of more than 22 million, with two-thirds old enough to do so, we can estimate there are 1 million Australian men having sex with sex workers.

The population of Thailand is more than three times that of Australia (65.5 million). Even if ALL 1 million Australian clients travelled to Thailand for sex tourism, Thai men even at the conservative estimate of 15 per cent visiting sex workers, STILL outnumber potential Australian clients 3 to 1. This gives some substance to the claim by Thai sex workers that their bread-and-butter income is from local clients and that travelling Anglo men make up only a small – but consistent and welcome – clientele. What’s more, it is our racist Western attitudes when we see a Thai sex worker with a white, fat, old Western man that lead us to believe she is being victimised by him. We shudder at the sight of a small, slight, fresh-faced woman holding hands with a large, sweaty and sunburnt tourist. But as the sex workers in the Chiang Mai offices of EMPOWER say: ”Many fat old men are very respectful, kind, entertaining, generous and polite customers. We don’t discriminate.”

In the words of author and sex worker Juliet November, ”Sometimes sex work is about being gentle with someone’s need for touch; sometimes it’s about being kind toward a man who’s ashamed of his body; sometimes it’s about being friendly and fun with someone who’s lonely; sometimes it’s about holding someone’s vulnerability very lightly in your hands; sometimes it’s about making someone feel desired … sometimes it’s about sharing intimacy, cigarettes and a laugh.”

So let’s rid ourselves of our prejudices and preconceptions and repeat after me: IT’S OK TO PAY!

Elena Jeffreys is a sex worker and former president of the Scarlet Alliance.

Binge Thinking is a journal of contrarian and controversial ideas found at thoughtbroker.com.au.