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The New Age of Sexism: AI impact on sex workers overlooked [1]

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Date: 2025-08

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.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/the-new-age-of-sexism-ai-impact-on-sex-workers-overlooked/

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