"Sex Worker" and Manufacturing Consent

I want to apply Chomsky's concept of manufacturing consent to the public debate on pornography and the use of the term "sex worker."

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argued in Manufacturing Consent (1988) that dominant media systems do not simply report on public debate — they shape the framework through which debate is permitted to occur. Consent is manufactured not by removing disagreement, but by narrowing the range of questions treated as legitimate.

When prostitution and pornography are framed primarily as work, the conversation shifts toward labor rights and away from questions about exploitation, objectification, or whether these industries should exist at all.

The debate largely centers on whether pornography is empowering or disempowering, ethical or unethical, consensual or exploitative. And the answers usually sound like individual choice and personal agency — deflecting, in my view, from far more significant questions.

We ask if they chose it. We ask if they consented. We ask if they were paid fairly. But we rarely ask:

What happens to performers years later? Why aren't we studying performers' mental health, addiction, or suicide more? What role does pornography play in exploitation and trafficking? What about the correlation between pornography use, aggression toward women, and domestic violence? What happens when pornography becomes young people's primary sex education? How does it shape the way we see women, intimacy, and consent? Who makes the money, and who pays the price? Is this entertainment — or a public health issue?

The argument is not that these questions are forbidden. It is that some questions become normalized while others are treated as outside the acceptable debate. In Chomsky's terms, consent is shaped not by removing disagreement, but by narrowing the framework through which an issue is understood.

The term "sex worker" does more than describe a form of labor — it shapes the framework of the debate, directing attention toward choice and rights while making broader questions about exploitation, objectification, and the social consequences of pornography harder to examine.

Language is never neutral. When we adopt a term, we adopt the assumptions embedded in it. Calling pornography production "sex work" is not simply a more respectful description — it is a political act that determines which questions get asked, and which ones disappear.