The Complicated Politics Around Sex Work and the NYC Mayoral Race

My first sign that something was a little off with some of the New York City mayoral race coverage came on September 3, courtesy of a New York Times piece that purported to document a pattern of Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani walking back controversial policy positions: 

“Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, once called for defunding the police and decriminalizing prostitution. He says he has changed,” read the article’s subhead. 

As a longtime supporter of sex work decriminalization, a follower of the New York State campaign to decriminalize sex work, and (cards on the table) a Zohran Mamdani fan, my curiosity was piqued. But as I read further, what I got was, not clarity, but instead confusion. 

“Despite his support for decriminalizing prostitution in his early days as a state assemblyman, Mr. Mamdani would not say whether he still supports the idea when the Times asked him last week. He has instead said that any issue he has not campaigned on will not be part of his agenda as mayor. And he has said that he supported former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s position of focusing on arresting sex traffickers, and offering support services to sex workers,” the article explained. Hardly a full-throated renunciation of his past position, let alone a particularly strong basis on which to build an argument.

I had a suspicion I knew what was going on here, and indeed, as the weeks wore on, the source of this framing started to become more clear. Andrew Cuomo, the New York Times reported, was aggressively trying to make an issue of Mamdani’s support of sex work decriminalization, loudly accusing him of supporting legalization of sex work, seemingly with an intent to stoke fear about a return to the “bad old days” of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square where sex work was rampant. By the time the first mayoral debate rolled around, the chatter had gotten so loud that it made it on to the debate stage, where Mamdani stressed that he had never supported the legalization of sex work.

If you’re not well versed in the politics of sex work advocacy — and, let’s be real, most people are not — this all might seem like a vindication of the original New York Times framing. As a lefty assemblymember, Mamdani had jumped aboard the sex workers’ rights movement; now, on the debate stage, he’d turned his back on sex workers. On Bluesky, I’ve seen people float the possibility that Mamdani might be considering throwing his support behind the Nordic model, a regulation system backed by anti–sex work feminists that criminalizes sex buyers and people who profit from the labor of sex workers while supposedly protecting sex workers themselves.

But to me, all of those reads seem wrong. I don’t get the impression that Mamdani’s stance on sex work has shifted one bit. I think he is deftly navigating an obviously bad faith attempt to misrepresent his past and present stances, all while avoiding getting sucked into a conversation that’s far too complex to be appropriately addressed in brief sound bites or during a debate.

In order to understand why I feel that way, it helps to have a basic understanding of the landscape of legal responses to sex work. On a basic level, the camps that people fall into include full criminalization, partial criminalization (also known as the Nordic model), decriminalization (which can be both informal and formal), and legalization. 

Under full criminalization, all parties involved in a sex work transaction — both buyers and sellers — are breaking the law. Under partial criminalization, sex workers themselves are allegedly protected while all other parties face criminal penalties. Decriminalization removes all criminal penalties from buying and selling sex — but that’s still very different from legalization, which creates a regulated system for buying and selling sex, like the brothels found in Nevada or Amsterdam’s famous red light district. (For a more involved explanation of all of these models, I recommend reading Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith.)

So when Mamdani says that he’s never supported sex work legalization, he’s not lying or walking back a past position. Legalization would mean creating an entire regulatory system for sex work, similar to what’s been set up for cannabis dispensaries. That’s never been seriously floated in New York State — and, notably, that’s not what sex worker advocates want. Because while legalization might sound good on paper, in practice, it often creates major hurdles and can even increase exploitation. Brothels in Nevada might be legal, but sex workers who wish to work independently, or outside of the remote desert communities where brothels are located, are still breaking the law. As we’ve seen with cannabis, legalization can create profit opportunities for the already wealthy while shutting out the marginalized populations that have endured the worst penalties under criminalization. Hardly a fair or desirable outcome.

But, you may be asking, if Mamdani supports sex work decriminalization, then isn’t it a red flag that he hasn’t included it in his campaign platform? Given that the mayor doesn’t have the power to decriminalize sex work — that’s an issue for the New York State Assembly and Senate, as well as the governor — it’s not really clear why he’d forefront such a charged issue. More tellingly, many policy proposals that did make it into Mamdani’s platform, including a sweeping affordability agenda and a vision for a Department of Community Safety that would reduce reliance on the police in certain situations, are completely in line with the philosophy of sex work decriminalization, which seeks to increase the safety of the vulnerable, marginalized populations that are most likely to turn to sex work by making it easier for them to earn an living and reducing contact with the police. 

Also? It’s important to not ignore that Mamdani has positioned himself as being in alignment with former mayor Bill de Blasio on sex work. Because while De Blasio didn’t have the power to pass a law decriminalizing sex work, he did focus on ending arrests of sex work — something he explicitly aligned with the goal of sex work decriminalization.

Now, granted, much of what I’ve said about decriminalization could sound in line with the Nordic model, which claims to support sex workers by recognizing them as victims and “ending demand” for their services. Yet real world applications of partial criminalization have found, time and again, that they make sex workers and their loved ones less, not more, safe. In particular, the crackdown on supposed pimps can criminalize the family members whom sex workers are financially supporting with their work; it can also lead landlords to refuse to rent apartments to sex workers out of fear of being incarcerated themselves. Given everything we know about Mamdani’s values, it’s hard for me to believe that he’d sign on to a system that puts marginalized people at greater risk of homelessness. But instructing his campaign to issue a vague statement about “talking to experts” in order to avoid launching a complex conversation about sex worker rights in the final weeks of his campaign? Yeah, that seems very likely.

Fundamentally, the discussion of Mamdani and sex work has mimicked the discussion of his stance on Israel-Palestine, with his opponents injecting the issue into the race in the hopes of stirring up scandal and drama around a popular candidate whose campaign has been an unstoppable juggernaut to victory. If I were in Mamdani’s shoes, I’d be equally inclined to refuse to engage with such obvious bad-faith bait. And fortunately for Mamdani, if there’s one group that can understand the logic behind keeping your mouth shut so that you don’t fuck up the bag, it’s sex workers.