The popular imagination typically pits feminism and free speech advocacy against each other. But in reality, they often align. The new SESTA-FOSTA bill is a case in point. Both feminists and free speech advocates should strongly oppose this law, and for closely related reasons.

Let’s start with some basic factual information.FOSTA(the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), which incorporates parts of the Senate’s earlierSESTAbill (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) was signed into law on April 11^th. This bill makes website owners liable to both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits,reversing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act这限制了他们的责任。作为回应，许多网络服务提供商先发制人地关闭了有关性的言论。

As a result, sex workers (including the trafficked women the laws were supposedly designed to protect) are silenced in harmful ways. Web service provides are closing venues where they once screened their clients, ordiscussed health and safety issues among themselves, and many areself-censoring.

The most high-profile case concerns Backpage, a classified ad site that was seized by the FBI and shut down shortly before SESTA-FOSTA was signed into law. Backpage’s executives are certainly not heroes; they were already under investigation for money laundering, creating offshore shell companies, and systematically editing ads to cover up illegal activities (including both consensual sex work and trafficking), according toa Senate report.

Nonetheless, the closure of Backpage isharmingsex workers. Those who used Backpage to find and screen clients now face the choice ofworking under more dangerous conditions或者完全失去生计。

SESTA-FOSTA threatens to chip away not just at the speech of sex workers, but at the sexual speech of everyone:Craigslist has shut down its entire ‘personals’ section, and evena niche dating site for furries has closed downfor fear of lawsuits.

这项立法主要是由学院墙外的政治力量推动的。但在我们的小范围内，女权主义学者在创造允许这种情况发生的条件方面串通一通。在哲学学术界，有大量关于色情的文献，助长了人们对性工作和言论之间关系的混淆。

Much of the pornography literature centers on the question of whether pornography harms women by silencing them. Following the terminology of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, many philosophers use the word “pornography” as a quasi-technical term for depictions of sex that subordinate women. This terminology encourages harmful conflations—between bad working conditions on porn sets and the depiction of sexist content; between consensual sex work and the rape/abuse of sex workers; between sexually explicit media and misogynistic media. Furthermore, the focus on whether pornography silences women obscures the fact that censoring sex workers is a common and pernicious form of silencing. Individual philosophers may avoid making false claims by carefully drawing the right distinctions in the right places, but the terms of the debate encourage confusion.

The best way forward is to amplify the voices of sex workers in philosophical conversations about sex work. You can start by browsingSex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP),Tits and Sass,The Black Sex Worker Collective, andSurvivors Against SESTA. You can also support sex workers who have been harmed by SESTA-FOSTA by donating to one of the initiatives recommendedhere.