Pro-Sex Work Advocacy as a Form of Doomerism
Let's talk about liberal feminists' dystopically pessimistic prostitution politics in light of capitalist realism and sex positivity.
Can prostitution be called sex work? Is sex work real work? How should it be regulated? What could be done to improve working conditions? Should disabled people receive government-sponsored “assistance”? How about incels? Is Pascha okay? What about Teenyland? Is saying no to the latter question kink shaming?
Exchanging sex for money is a spicy topic. All sides of the political spectrum loudly exclaim their related positions at each other, with none being as internally divided on this topic as the broader left.
It has always surprised me that while many questions are being asked, people never debate the existence of prostitution itself, unless the conversation takes place in an abolitionist environment. Not only that, people seem to be defending it, focusing exclusively on the better situated women in the practice, neglecting those who are suffering in favour of lifting up the few who claim to have found a fulfilling career in the sex industry. But why is the liberal feminist priority of social justice and advocating for the marginalised suddenly neglected when it comes to women in the sex industry?
This question has eluded me for the longest time, until my last weekend was spent at a conference during which I got to talk to brilliant women who have helped me get a whole lot closer to understanding why so many self-proclaimed socialists turn into raging ancaps at the slightest mention of “sex work”. I’ve always snarkily labelled it as “pimp activism”, but if we want to convince people who aren’t already on our side, we need to understand how they think, so a better faith analysis might be in order.
When Héma Sibi from CAP International, who did an extremely important study about sex, race, and class within the sex trade, mentioned that the success of capitalism and its related ideologies seem to have something to do with it, something clicked in my mind. Of course. Liberal feminists, like most people, are strongly affected by capitalist realism, by the postmodernism of our time that actively discourages us from viewing ourselves as historical actors who can influence the course of the future to realise a greater narrative, all with a large dose of sex positivity as the cherry on top. Now, what do I mean by all of this?
Committing to a mission of changing a whole system is a very optimistic endeavour, and in our current moment, this optimism is not shared by many people. We need to have hope that things can radically transform in a positive way in order to hold the positions we do and advocate for real change instead of “lesser evil” band-aid solutions. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of sexism, one would have to find ways to alleviate some of the suffering instead of eradicating it at its roots, and that is what they believe they are doing.
In their political impotence, liberal feminists become unable to even ask the question: do we want to live in a society in which men find it acceptable to exchange money for permission to masturbate in an unenthusiastic woman’s body, instead of finding someone who sincerely wants to have sex with them or simply using their hand?
Communists of the past, the people who were strongly convinced of their desired future, have had a clear answer to my question. Take as an example this quote by Alexandra Kollontai:
A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.
But one does not have to be a communist to understand that a society that allows prostitution to thrive could never accomplish true liberation for women. A European Parliament report by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality asserts the following:
Forced prostitution and sexual exploitation should be considered as violations of human dignity and, as women are disproportionately represented among victims, as an obstacle to gender equality. (2)
A man who buys access to an otherwise unconsenting woman’s body and thinks nothing of it has to lack regard for women to at least some degree. He learns to understand them as a class of people whose freedom and ownership over their sexual desires are not worth the same as they are for a man. Whereas for him, the traits I just mentioned are an unchanging, undisputable matter of fact, no matter how poor he might be, for her, they can be discarded by a simple wave of a tenner in her pimp’s face, without any consideration for the circumstances that got her into this situation to begin with. As Kollontai says, he has to see her as an unequal creature of a lower order for any of this to make sense. Gender equality as a principle is based on universalism, which is not given in such a scenario.
People who do not dare to think about these greater questions and contexts because they have lost faith in a better future, or in their ability to steer towards it, have to deny their depressing reality and seek to find optimism within the three women who seem to actually enjoy exchanging sex for money. If these women exist, there must be many of them out there who could do it, and if the job was more attractive, no one would ever have to be forced anymore! So all we need to do is to improve working conditions and remove the stigma, right? (Spoiler: No.)
As strange and inhumane as it may seem to those who want to free women from this exploitative practice entirely, advertising for students to do it to support themselves in paying for their education may have less than horrible intentions behind it, despite obviously being completely misguided. Instead of working towards a society without supply or demand, which many believe is impossible because men will always want to exploit women for sex and poverty and global capitalism will never be solved, they appear to be aiming to increase supply of voluntary prostitution, so that less trafficking and economic coercion has to take place. From this it follows that they have to portray the industry as a decent or even aspirational career choice, as if rape and abuse can simply be regulated away. (Spoiler: it cannot.)
The “sex positivity” that has emerged in the past decade has primed liberal feminists to believe that this is all a good idea and anyone who disagrees must be a hater of sex itself. A clear problem with sex positivity as it is currently being encouraged in young girls and women is that it ultimately serves men. Sure, every girl has a vibrator at home, everyone has at this point probably caught on to what a clitoris is, but most kids start being aware of porn before the age of 10, which colours everyone’s first sexual experiences and expectations. Porn is created for men, so whether or not any real life woman would enjoy what is being done to the actors is irrelevant.
So we have boys learning that sex is all about what they want, or what they learn to want after falling down the rabbit hole of consuming increasingly extreme content after being desensitised to the stuff that gets by without choking and slapping. We have girls struggling to make themselves tolerate acts that aren’t pleasant to them from a young age, because being down for all kinds of practices is what sexual liberation looks like, and boys expect nothing less if you want them to like you. We see this on social media or platforms like Reddit where girls share concerns about sending nudes or ask about how to make fisting with cactus gloves suck less, because they have learned to disregard their own preferences to avoid being seen as a sex-negative, conservative bore.
This has created a culture in which women not truly enjoying sex is normalised instead of the problem it should be, especially in the eyes of those who love to go on about enthusiastic consent. Combine this with stripping, sugar-babying and OnlyFans being branded as the woman’s version of “the grind”, which should quite honestly be insulting to all of us – why is content about starting businesses based on novel ideas, getting jacked and investing in the rare fish market targeted towards men, while women get selling feet pics and being some old man’s personal sex doll? – and people start seeing the problem of the sex industry not in the act of women having to engage in unwanted sex in itself – because they already do this all the time for free – but instead only in it being a common avenue for human trafficking and economic exploitation. In their minds, those are the problems that need to be solved.
But why is it that women have to be forced to do it? If you ask me, it’s because sex is not simply about “consent”, a word that implies the tolerance of something being done to a person. Whatever personal stance one has towards sex, most people should be able to agree that desire plays a large role. While consent in the sense of “I’ll mentally zone out while I let you do this and not report you for rape” might be able to be bought for money, true desire, which is the basis of actually enthusiastic sexual interaction and the standard which we should try to meet for all sex, cannot be.
Regardless of how much marketing is done for the “profession”, there will never be enough women volunteering to get the “job” done – the job of exhausting and even injuring their bodies on multiple men whom they otherwise would never touch and often feel actively disgusted by, every single day, all while pretending to love it. People who are mentally in a good condition and socially and financially well adjusted are not going to be attracted to the sex industry in the large numbers that are required by the market.
The only way this would change is if our sexual culture deteriorates to the point where women fully unlearn that they should be enjoying sex with men instead of fulfilling a porn fantasy, which would leave many to agree with the idea that “if I can do it (tolerate bad, traumatic, painful sex) for free, I might as well get paid for it” – but I would hope that we can all agree that this is not a desirable future, especially if we consider the greater implications this would have on the relations between men and women at large.
As I've mentioned previously, we need to look at the world we want to live in and do our best to move towards it. We need to imagine our desired outcomes for 10, 20, 200 years from now, and from there look back and identify what we need to do in order to be the people that have successfully made this a reality.
Instead of increasing supply by encouraging women to get into the industry, we need to find ways to reduce demand, which is the aim of systems like the Nordic Model. As long as there is poverty, as long as we live under capitalism, which requires financial desperation and a reserve army of labour to function, supply for unchanging demand will always be provided by economically pressured and trafficked women from war zones and poorer countries.
Above all, moving past capitalism needs to be at the forefront of our goals. In an economic system in which all women are financially secure and independent, the industry would quickly collapse and men would have to live with the reality that sex is not a human right, and that if no other person wants to engage in it with them, that they are simply out of luck.
Recommended Reading:
Prostitution and ways of fighting it by Alexandra Kollontai
On Marxism, Capitalism and the Sex Industry by Malak Mansour
Sex Work Is Not Work: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Prostitution Part 1, 2, 3 by Ashleigh Barnes
A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” by Esperanza Fonseca
The Folly of Sex Work Advocacy by Leila Mechoui
No Marxist Can Support Prostitution by N.C. Cai