The Nature of Choice

A client once asked me, with what seemed like genuine puzzlement rather than hostility, why I had chosen to be a sex worker. The question was preceded by a list of my apparent advantages—the education, the social position, the corporate experience, the financial record.

The list was offered not as flattery but as evidence for the question’s logic: given these things, why this? The question assumed that the items on the list constituted a trajectory, and that sex work represented a departure from the trajectory rather than an expression of the same capacity that had produced the items.

I replied that this was the nature of choice.

The reply was not evasive, though it may have appeared to be. It was the most precise answer available to the question as it had actually been asked. The client had asked why, given the advantages, the choice had been made. The answer was that the advantages included the freedom to choose, and that this particular choice had been made freely, and that a freely made choice requires no further justification than the freedom that produced it.

The question had assumed that the justification lay in the trajectory—that a choice was explicable if it continued the established direction and required explanation if it departed from it. The answer returned the question to what choice actually is: the exercise of agency in conditions where alternatives exist.

 

The question contained a hierarchy that the question did not acknowledge as a hierarchy. The items on the list—education, social status, corporate experience, financial success—were presented as advantages, which they are in many contexts, but the presentation also placed them in a sequence that implied a direction. The direction was upward, in the specific sense that the items represent movement toward the positions that the culture treats as markers of successful adult life. Sex work, in the question’s logic, was not on this trajectory. It was below it, or outside it, or a departure from it—something that the listed advantages were supposed to make unnecessary.

The hierarchy is real in the sense that it is operative—it structures how people assess their own situations and how institutions assess the people they encounter. The person with the education and the corporate experience and the financial record is, within the hierarchy’s logic, someone who has demonstrated the capacity for the kinds of work the hierarchy values. The question of why this person would choose work that the hierarchy does not value in the same way is a question that makes sense within the hierarchy. It assumes that movement within the hierarchy is the goal, that the advantages are instruments for achieving positions within it, and that a choice that does not use the advantages for this purpose requires explanation.

The assumption that movement within the hierarchy is the goal is the assumption the question could not see itself making. It was invisible because it is the assumption that the hierarchy requires its participants to share in order for the hierarchy to function. The person who does not share it—who uses the advantages for purposes the hierarchy did not intend, who moves in directions the hierarchy does not recognise as upward—is the person the hierarchy cannot process. The question was the hierarchy’s attempt to process me.

 

Sex work is the example that makes the argument most visible, because it sits at the point where the cultural hierarchy of legitimate occupations intersects with the moral hierarchy that the culture applies to the body and its commercial use. The intersection produces a double judgement: not only is sex work outside the trajectory of the listed advantages, but it is also the kind of work that the culture treats as a marker of desperation or exploitation—something that people do when the other options have failed, not something that people do as a genuine expression of autonomous choice.

This is not a description of what sex work is. It is a description of how the culture frames it, and the framing shapes the question that my client asked. The question assumed that the advantages were supposed to have protected me from the necessity of sex work, and that the choice of sex work despite the advantages was therefore anomalous—either a failure of judgement or a circumstance that the listed advantages had been unable to prevent. The question was puzzled rather than hostile because the client genuinely could not locate the choice within the framework available to them.

The framework was not adequate to the choice. This is not a criticism of the client. The framework they were using was the dominant framework—the one that most people use, the one that the culture produces and the institutions reinforce. The dominant framework does not contain a coherent account of a person with advantages choosing sex work as an expression of those advantages rather than as a departure from them. The choice sat outside the framework’s categories, and the question was the framework’s way of asking to be helped back to coherence.

 

Legitimacy is the word that the dominant framework uses to distinguish the work it endorses from the work it does not. Legitimate work is work that the framework’s institutions can accommodate—that can be credentialed, taxed, insured, and placed within the occupational hierarchies that the framework uses to organise the distribution of status and income. Illegitimate work is work that the framework cannot accommodate in the same way—that sits outside the credential structures, that challenges the moral categories the framework uses to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of exchange.

Sex work sits at this boundary in most Western jurisdictions, and the boundary is policed not only legally but culturally and morally. The cultural policing produces the assumption embedded in my client’s question: that sex work represents a departure from the legitimate trajectory rather than a continuation of the same capacity for autonomous choice that produced the trajectory.

The assumption requires that legitimacy descends with deviation from the approved occupational categories—that the person who moves from corporate employment to sex work has moved from a higher to a lower form of activity, and that this movement requires explanation in a way that the reverse movement would not.

The reversal is worth noting. A person who moved from sex work to corporate employment would not typically be asked, with puzzlement, why they had chosen to do so. The direction of that movement is explicable within the framework without requiring any account of the chooser’s psychology. The advantages of corporate employment are visible within the framework’s categories. The movement toward them requires no explanation. The movement away from them does.

The explanation the framework requires is an explanation of why the hierarchy was not respected—why the advantages were not used in the way the hierarchy expects advantages to be used. The answer that the nature of choice is the nature of choice declines to provide this explanation, not because the explanation is unavailable but because the question’s premise was not accepted. The question assumed that the hierarchy determines the value of the choice. The answer located the value in the freedom of the choosing rather than in the position of the choice within the hierarchy.

 

The advantages that my client listed were real. The education, the social position, the corporate experience, the financial record—these are genuine resources, and they do make certain choices more available than they would be without them. The point is not that advantages are irrelevant to choice. The point is that the freedom to choose is itself one of the things that advantages can provide, and that the freedom to choose includes the freedom to choose things that the hierarchy does not endorse.

The person who uses their advantages to move further up the hierarchy has made a choice that the hierarchy can understand and accommodate. The person who uses their advantages to move outside the hierarchy, or to move within it in a direction the hierarchy does not recognise as movement, has made a choice that the hierarchy cannot process in the same way. The processing failure is the hierarchy’s, not the chooser’s.

My client’s puzzlement was genuine and understandable and entirely a product of the framework they were using to assess the situation. Within that framework, the question made complete sense. The advantages were supposed to be used for ascent. Sex work is not ascent within the dominant occupational hierarchy. The question followed from the framework as naturally as any question follows from any premise.

The answer declined the premise.

 

This connects to the thread running through the preceding essays more directly than it might appear. The essays have been examining what happens when systems mistake standard pathways for optimal pathways, when frameworks designed for a particular model of adult life encounter people whose lives do not fit the model. The clinical encounter with the expert patient. The school’s encounter with the student whose cognitive style does not match the curriculum. The bank’s encounter with the freelancer whose income pattern does not match the mortgage framework. The loneliness service’s encounter with the person who does not fit the imagined user. The culture’s encounter with the person who has the advantages and chooses something the advantages were not supposed to be used for.

In each case, the framework produces a judgement that is a judgement of the framework’s adequacy rather than of the person being assessed. The patient is non-compliant. The student has a learning difficulty. The freelancer is a risk. The person is outside the service’s scope. The person with advantages is puzzling.

The judgements are the framework’s. The people being judged are simply people whose situations do not fit the framework’s categories. The question of whether the framework is adequate to the situations it encounters is the question that the framework does not ask, because the framework’s categories are the framework’s instrument and the instrument cannot assess its own limitations without ceasing to be the instrument.

 

That is the nature of choice.

The sentence does not mean: choice is self-explanatory and requires no examination. It means: the choice was made from within the conditions that made it possible, and those conditions included the freedom that the question’s listed advantages represent. The freedom was used. The choice was made. The question asked why the freedom had been used this way rather than another way.

The answer was that this was what freedom is.

A hierarchy that produces the freedom and then expresses puzzlement when the freedom is used outside the hierarchy’s preferred directions has produced something it did not fully intend.

The puzzlement is the evidence.