Across history, there has been a long record of the state shifting issues of sexual health into the carceral sphere for the purpose of building the idea of the nuclear family, and encouraging support of the national project. Nowhere has that become more pointed than in the police response to the Australian covid-19 lockdowns, and the kind of strategies taken to prevent movement and intimacy.

Messages on sexual health almost invariably focus on sex rather than health. Increases in diagnoses are explained as driven by changes in sexual behaviour, and calls are made for individuals to make better choices around sex. But this obscures the reality that STI rates are predominantly driven by testing frequency and access to convenient, non-judgmental sexual healthcare.

Even before Goldman’s radical political-feminist critique of sex work, Marx postulated that ‘prostitution’ might be most basically understood as a signifier or a metaphor for the relations between labourer and capitalist in a capitalist system. The simplicity of this argument, as well as the very complex and sociocultural plurality of the relationship between men and women, makes it a less favourable way of understanding producer-consumer relations in contemporary society.

After that, Pete would tell his housemates that he was ‘off to see Jailbait’. I hated being called that. It depersonalised me, reaffirmed that I was only a plaything to him, and that he also viewed me as some kind of threat: I would get pregnant, dob him into my parents, and his whole life would be ruined.