BARCELONA, Spain – Need a job in unemployment-ravaged Spain? Become a sex worker, with help from an association of professional sex workers.

The group, Asociación de Profesionales del Sexo (AProSex), offers a course titled “Prostitution: Basics for Professionalization.” For about U.S. $52, students learn, among other things, how to cope with negative stereotypes, effective sex tricks, marketing techniques and how to handle taxes. The four-hour intensive is led by clinical psychologist and sex therapist Cristina Garaizábal and prostitute Conxa Borrell.

The February course attracted 15 women ages 22 to 50.

“This isn’t an easy profession,” Borrell, one of eight sex workers involved in the project, told the Gnomes National News Service. “Nobody else can teach these things — not psychologists, anthropologists or political scientists. Only prostitutes.”

Last year, AProSex conducted a “sex for women as taught by prostitutes” workshop. It sold out.

AProSex’s intro course raised the ire of some local, self-described feminists. One of them, Lidia Falcón of the Partido Feminista de españa, refused to credit the notion that some women enter sex work willingly.

“It’s a false, repugnant discussion about liberty, as if being a prostitute is something you can choose to do because you like it,” she said. “They say they’re helping women, but they’re just helping them to be exploited and humiliated.”

Garaizábal disagreed.

Feminists “complain that women are being victimized, but then they’re against any effort by prostitutes to increase their autonomy and decision-making power,” she said. “Women who are being trafficked absolutely did not come to this course. The only thing this course is doing is empowering women who are already interested in working in the sector.”