Sex work may not be all it’s cracked up to be. If there’s one thing that comes out in this week’s feature on the sex industry – and the lesbians involved – it’s that sex work is hard work, often weighted with fear, violence and sometimes shame and desperation.

As writer Jen Millis, a lesbian and former sex worker, points out in her feature in this issue, bisexual and feminist powerhouse icons like performance artist Annie Sprinkle, writer Susie Bright and sexologist Carol Queen have done a lot to reduce the shameful stigma associated with sex work. Taking away this stigma can go a long way toward encouraging women, and their transgendered sisters, in the sex industry to organize and speak out about their needs and issues.

But there’s a flip side. While many women working in the sex industry are educated, consciously feminist and aware of the choices they’re making (like Renee, April and Jane in our feature), many are also making the choice for sex work because they are economically disempowered, sometimes desperate and feel trapped with limited options (like Renee, April and Jane in our feature). Sex workers – mainly prostitutes, but women throughout the sex industry are affected by the same dangers – are working in the shadow of crimes like the Green River serial murders where 48 prostitutes were killed in the Seattle area by someone who assumed they wouldn’t be missed. International sex traffic rings take advantage of women who work outside the bounds of law. Sex workers don’t have access to healthcare, health education or social safety nets that the rest of us take for granted – all because they choose to engage in private, consensual sex between two adults, for money.

As is sometimes the case, in its enthusiasm for choices, the feminist movement has overlooked those who don’t have any – particularly women of color and poor women.

While we champion the strides taken by the Annie Sprinkles, it’s time to take a look at what will really help these women out.

First of all, let’s decriminalize sex work. A San Francisco-based movement is gaining momentum through SWOP USA (Sex Workers Outreach Project) and other groups working to get a proposed initiative on the Bay Area ballot that would repeal all laws prohibiting private consensual adult sexual behavior, even where money is transacted. The proposal is known as Angel’s Initiative, after Angel Lopez, a transgendered sex worker who was murdered while working in the Bay Area. The initiative, which can be read over the Internet, provides what SWOP hopes will be a proposal that other cities can pick up and use for activism and awareness throughout the country.

A lot of the issues on the cutting edge of morality and politics today involve taking a hard look at complex social problems and being willing to take these problems out of the hands of police and put them in the hands of health professionals, social workers, ministers and others who are more qualified to deal with them. Should people with AIDS and cancer and other painful illnesses be able to use marijuana to relieve their pain? Yes. Should drug addicts have access to clean needles and a clean bed in a shelter rather than in a jail cell? Yes.

Should prostitutes and other sex workers be able to seek health care and turn to the law when they become victims of a crime? Yes. Repealing prostitution laws won’t solve all of the problems of sex trafficking and the sex trade – it would simply grant equal rights and provide protection to the people our society labels as “victims” and “criminals” at the same time. Most sex workers are neither victims, criminals nor powerhouse feminists – they’re adults making a choice that they should have a right to make, even if it’s a bad choice.

Speaking of adults, we’ve received word that the women who organized the VaginaFest – an annual health education day that provides education and free health services, like pap smears and breast exams, to women of all ages, economic and age groups throughout San Diego County – were banned from placing a paid ad in The Reader. Why, when nearly every other city under the sun has a progressive alternative weekly to counter the reports of the mainstream press, do we in San Diego have a weekly that bans advertising for gay and lesbian content, family planning resources, and nonprofit women’s health organizations who choose to flaunt references to female body parts? Since VaginaFest is nothing more radical than a health fair with a creative name, The Reader couldn’t have had an objection to anything but the festival’s name.

So to The Reader we say: Vagina! Vagina! Vagina! And also, Vagina! Got a problem with that?