When Kaytlin Bailey brings her one-woman show “The Oldest Profession” to the Unicorn Bar in Kingston on November 14, she will not be offering titillation or tragedy or tidy answers. She will offer something far more destabilizing to America’s moral furniture: history. Along with comedy. And an unflinching argument that everything we think we know about sex work—its origins, its harms, its legality, its place in culture—is not only wrong, but dangerously backward.
The show, which Bailey has toured across the world, is part stand-up set, part crash course in 10,000 years of sex-work history, part civic intervention. Picture a one-woman grad seminar held at a comedy club, delivered with the righteous intellectual swagger of someone who has read the archives, paid the bills, and lived the stakes. Think Hannah Gadsby if she were funnier, more pissed off, and had a minor in labor economics.
Bailey is a former sex worker, a longtime comic, and the founder of Old Pros, a media and advocacy organization dedicated to rewriting the story of sex work in America. She has been working on this story—and living in its crosswinds—for two decades. And she is done sanding the edges for polite company.
“I’ve been obsessed with the history of sex work as long as I can remember,” she told me recently. While other kids were learning the branches of government, Bailey was discovering the courtesans who bankrolled European art and theater, the frontier madams who financed public schools and city halls, the women who wielded power in the only domain society allowed them—and often paid a price for it. She wrote her college thesis on the economic structure of brothels from 1890 to 1920. This is not a hobby. It is a vocation bordering on compulsion.
That obsession hardened into mission once she entered comedy—an art form powered by taboo, revelation, and the delicate alchemy of telling the truth in a way that makes people lean in instead of turn away. “Humor is a tool,” she says. “If you can make people laugh, you can make them listen.” And in America, a country still powered by the ghost battery of Puritan software, talking about sex work requires every tool you can find.
A Country That Forgot Its Own History
The foundational claim of Bailey’s work is deceptively simple: Sex work has existed in every society in human history. Not as a fringe aberration or a moral failure, but as labor—sometimes pleasurable, sometimes exploitative, sometimes liberating, sometimes coerced, remarkably similar to the messy spectrum we tolerate in every other industry.
But American discourse has never been comfortable with adult nuance when puritanical absolutism is an option. And so we inherited a popular narrative in which sex work is always violence, always victimhood, always trafficking, always something to be eradicated rather than understood. Bailey wipes that surface clean and starts again, with dusty case studies, global models, and the hard modern evidence of what actually keeps people safe.
Prohibition, she argues, has never worked—not for alcohol, not for drugs, not for abortion, not for sex. What it does do, reliably and repeatedly, is increase harm, empower police overreach, and produce the opposite of its stated aims. “We’ve gotten this really wrong,” she says. “And we keep doubling down.”
The irony, she notes, is that the United States didn’t criminalize prostitution until the 20th century. For centuries before that, brothels operated openly—taxed, regulated, policed, woven into the civic fabric. You could hold a brothel license before you could vote. It wasn’t purity that shut them down. It was politics, immigration panic, and Progressive-era social control.
Nordic Myths, Nevada Nightmares, and the Case for a Simpler Idea
Bailey is especially sharp when cutting through policy jargon. She dismantles the so-called Nordic model—the “end-demand” or “partial decriminalization” approach that criminalizes clients but not sex workers—as a well-meaning but catastrophic fantasy. Wherever it’s implemented, violence goes up. Displacement and instability increase. Screening and safety communication vanish. A policy designed to “rescue” sex workers ends up isolating and endangering them instead.
Nevada’s system—legal brothels, everything else criminalized—gets no gentler treatment. Registering with the sheriff’s department, she notes, is not liberation; it’s a lifetime record, a stigma baked into your legal identity. Rural brothel confinement is not empowerment; it’s surveillance with a marketing team. Nevada has the highest per-capita prostitution arrest rate in the country, not because it tolerates sex work, but because it selectively punishes those who don’t fit the sanitized, franchised mold.
Her alternative is not utopian, not theoretical, not speculative. It’s decriminalization—as practiced in New Zealand, New South Wales in Australia, and most recently Belgium—eliminating criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work, allowing workers to organize, share information, leave bad situations, and report violence without fear. These policies have existed for decades in some places. The sky has not fallen. Civilization has not melted. What has risen are safety, transparency, and dignity.
Culture Moves First, Then Law Follows
If Bailey sounds like an academic at moments, she never forgets she’s also a comic—and a strategist. The statehouse wars matter, but cultural storylines matter more. “There are more people having honest conversations about sex work now than ever,” she says. Facial-recognition technology accidentally outed sex workers to their communities; suddenly, they weren’t anonymous shadows but neighbors, coworkers, PTA parents. And when you know someone, fear narratives collapse.
Bailey’s “The Oldest Profession” podcast is part of this strategy—weekly dispatches from the hidden architecture of sex-work history and policy: the madams who built opera houses, the vice-squad crusades that masked political power plays, the surprising role sex workers have played in civil-rights movements, labor organizing, even wartime diplomacy. Bailey is not just correcting stigma; she is restoring memory.
Culture shifts before laws do. Anora can win Oscars. A one-woman show can change a family’s internal history in Australia. An audience member in Kingston might laugh, then think, then talk to a friend differently the next day. Policy is downstream of imagination. Bailey works upstream.
Choosing Dignity Over Panic
This is activism dressed up as entertainment, yes, but it’s also something more difficult: Telling the truth about human behavior without shame or sanctimony. Bailey is not trying to make sex work glamorous or tragic or inspirational. She is trying to make it legible—and in doing so, make the people who do it fully human again. “Sex workers have always been and will always be part of our communities,” she says. Not an enemy to be policed, not a moral contagion to be contained, not an abstraction to legislate around. People. Neighbors. Parents. Workers.
This was so well written and executed, I want to run, not walk to see this. Regrettably Friday is book, but THANK YOU for bringing her work alive. Looking forward to podcast and any UTubes I might. LMK if this gets taped.
It can be funny to savor invented “facts” in a comedy routine, but not in real life when the punch line is to call for the decriminalization of the sex trade, including sex buying, brothel owning, and pimping.
Contrary to popular belief, prostitution didn’t start with the rise of the homo sapiens; it’s a dehumanizing phenomenon invented and institutionalized by the patriarchy, colonization, racism, and slavery. It’s also not steeped in economic empowerment or personal choice, but inherent violence, abuse of power, and lack of choice by those who are purchased for sexual acts. Romanticizing brothel madams of the 19th century can’t erase those facts.
Another comedic creation is asserting that the Nordic Model fosters violence, a falsehood that may hold in stand-up, but contradicted by official statistics. The Nordic or Equality Model is a law that ends the arrests of people in prostitution, who are overwhelmingly marginalized women and girls of color, and offers them services while holding sex buyers accountable for the harm they inflict. Real studies show that it reduces both the demand for prostitution and sex trafficking. To the opposite, Bailey’s call is to expand the sex trade.
The buying and selling of human beings for the sexual pleasure of men and the profit of a multi-billion-dollar commercial sex industry is no laughing matter. Bailey should know: she lost two debates with a sex trade survivor at the Soho Debate Forum (https://www.youtube.com/live/qWkYCUeFBBo?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=fca1c110-52a7-4a9e-af84-86c551d4ad2f) on whether the purchase of sex should be criminalized. The audience believed it should, so The River Reader and Kingston’s residents should check it out before they seek out some giggles about the world’s “oldest oppression.” Truth matters, including on stage at the Unicorn Bar.
No, what’s funnt is you repeating the same old HIGHLY popular anti-sex work narrative as “factual”. It isn’t factual, and it’s been demonstrated again and again that where women (and men) are allowed to legally engage in *work they want to engage in*, the associated problems become minimal, as with every other type of work.
All the oppression you cite is the result of using force to attempt to suppress the activity entirely. Once you ban something entirely you lose any ability to control it once it inevitably sinks into a black market that’s controlled by criminals. By demanding that suppression you create and encourage those criminals. By imagining it as inherently criminal, you are factually putting the cart before the horse.
Contrary to your emotional commitment, the fact remains that as Prohibition led to a crime wave and a marked increase in the drinking that Carrie Nation proudly claimed would vanish in the face of her moral righteousness.
I predict that you or someone who *feels* the same way you do will get angry and talk about some subjective testimony, rather than admit you’ve been misled and learn the awful truths about how all such moralistic crusades have historically played out in the negative. There’s even instructive story regarding sex work in a Union military controlled city during the ACW, and how it was banned and caused an intolerable rise in STDs and crime, but when a general took the issue order, things were accepted, regulated, and kept (much, much) safe(r) for everyone in the area. Of course, when that army moved on, the moralists like you took over, and prostitution returned to the realm of diseases and crime bosses running the black market that resumed.
Why are you promoting crime, if you say you hate crime?
This article is very well written coverage of an important topic.
Not everyone will agree with it — haters gonna hate, and different people have learned different lessons from life. People used to think that people who buy or use pot belonged in jail too — and the public has learned better. The important part is that we’re having the conversation. Rather than continuing to senselessly toss people in jail for no useful outcome.
The Hudson Valley can look to its own history for what happens when sex work is criminalized. Sex work flourished in Hudson in the 1920s and 30s. And with it came tourism and other related economic benefits to the entire community. It helped diversify the economy from that of a blue collar factory based and agricultural based economy. Then the powers at the time decided for various reasons to criminalize the industry and with it they killed the business (and related economic benefits). Eventually factories relocated and agricultural based economy became a tough business. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the area came back. Driven by Lesson learned. Kudos to Kaytlin, Ashley Fires and many other tireless advocates for sex workers rights and decriminalization.
Stop Pretending Sex Work Is “Oppression”
The loudest voices against decriminalization insist sex work is nothing but violence and exploitation. But that narrative erases the lived reality of workers themselves. Kaytlin Bailey reminds us: sex work is labor. Criminalizing it doesn’t end demand—it just makes the work more dangerous.
The Nordic Model is sold as “protection,” but in practice it criminalizes clients, drives the trade underground, and leaves workers isolated. Safety doesn’t come from police raids or moral lectures; it comes from workers being able to report abuse, access healthcare, and organize without fear of arrest. That’s why Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the WHO all support full decriminalization.
Calling sex workers powerless is paternalism dressed up as concern. Many choose this work for money, flexibility, and autonomy. To deny that choice is to deny their humanity.
Bailey’s comedy cuts through the hypocrisy: we criminalize consensual sex while ignoring exploitation in other industries. The truth is simple—sex workers are safer when their work is decriminalized. That’s not a punchline. That’s justice