I’m a queer trans woman, and consequently I exist in spaces where positivity about “sex work” is compulsory. It is very tiresome. God help you if you decide to point out that being a sex slave for rent as a day job seems dehumanizing or horrific, because that’s not very progressive of you!
Kind of shocking and ridiculous that these so called feminists fret endlessly over misogynistic messaging in media, the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, and sexual exploitation in workplaces, but turn into free market libertarians over the distillation of this violence into an industry apart.
All jobs involve selling your body!
No they don’t! I work in a factory. It’s not always pleasant, but when we say “corporate is really bending us over on this overtime,” this is at least a metaphor. My legs hurt from working twenty days in a row, but no one raped me. Are we living on the same planet? Yes, I am using my body to work. This is actually an extremely superficial similarity. I cannot believe this needs to be litigated.
Sex work is part of Queer history!
I find this offensive. Picking cotton is part of Black history, too. Wholesome!
Criminalizing sex work only hurts sex workers!
This is true, but legalizing it won’t help anyone but the existing capitalist class within the industry. The only way to help sex workers is to give them ways to escape. You won’t see me calling the cops on them.
Sex workers should unionize!
A statement dreamt by the utterly deranged. How are they gonna strike? How are they gonna prevent scabbing? Is the economy gonna collapse if your demands aren’t met? Please show your work.
Genuinely, this might be a psyop.
A lot of the conversation is predicated on western onlyfans independent owners, which are petit bourgeois (even if they don’t make money). I’m much more interested in talking about the women in the global south who are being trafficked into prostitution and this is one reason I don’t use the umbrella term sex work.
I have talked to the very people you’re talking about and they do come off as immensely privileged compared to actual sex workers that work the street either to survive or because they’ve been forced to.
They treat their experiences as universal and barely acknowledge the sex industry outside of the camgirl business; dismissing the perspectives and realities of those in these industries as being “outdated” and asserting that feminists who stand up for them are “SWERFs” and “rape apologists” among other disgusting things.
They are 100% the petite bourgeoisie of the sex industry. Absolutely spot on analogy.
Extremely overlooked. Thank you for pointing this out.
Thanks for saying this. It’s a point along the lines of what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the right words or didn’t know enough to put it into the right words.
I feel you, OP.
Thank you, sister
Sex is much better when the livelihoods of the people involved aren’t contingent on their ability to provide it or how well they can provide it.
I feel the same way about art.
At this point I’m convinced that a whole lot of the people defending the sex industry online – those who aren’t, as you indicated, feds – are sweaty dudes sitting in their bedroom, and deciding to pen a manifesto in between rounds 2 and 300 of jerking it to violent porn. Call it the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism-Epsteinism.
You don’t have to attack me like that
Adrian Zenz adding Mzuark to his list right now
Marxism-Leninism-Goonerism
It is a bizarre position to hold since sex work would be done away with under communism I can understand wanting to protect sex workers from exploitation but why would you want to maintain it under communism?
Well, only fans and such are also sex work. I know a good number of people who would love to continue their sex work under communism and also people that would only ever consider getting into sex work under communism.
But it wouldn’t be work then. There is no reason to commodify your sexuality if your survival does not depend on your labor. It would just be a hobby.
Edit: I guess you could make the same argument for other work but I think we can all agree that there is a difference between, for example, building infrastructure or schools or being a doctor and filming your sexuality for others to watch online.
Edit2: this comment was a bit whack and a further explanation is below
But it wouldn’t be work then. There is no reason to commodify your sexuality if your survival does not depend on your labor. It would just be a hobby.
But we would still get paid doing it through only fans or some such system. Would that not be normal work like any other?
Edit: I guess you could make the same argument for other work but I think we can all agree that there is a difference between, for example, building infrastructure or schools or being a doctor and filming your sexuality for others to watch online.
See, I feel like i hear this everytime in these discussions as this self evident point. I don’t really see it as this self evident at all and literally all sex workers i have ever talked to also just see it as another job and chose it because it is less dehumanising for them than McDonalds or other minimum wage jobs.
It’s really hard for me to form a proper opinion beyond just listening to the sex workers themselves (especially marxist sex workers), nodding and saying “yeah, what she said!”. Especially with many marxists still being white men that have pre-revolution thought processes on social issues.
This is all excluding street prostitution and similar of course. I assume prostitution will die off the second these girls and women no longer need it/are forced and the rest who just enjoy it can maybe continue because it will be such a small number of people? Again, really hard for me to form a full ideological opinion on it.
Edit: Your comment here https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/7259454 already answered most of my questions actually :)
I’m not really sure what point I wanted to make with that comment lol but I’ll keep it up anyway
There is no reason to commodify your sexuality if your survival does not depend on your labor.
Huh? Pretty sure you still need a job to secure your livelihood under communism.
I think we can all agree that there is a difference between, for example, building infrastructure or schools or being a doctor and filming your sexuality for others to watch online.
One is socially acceptable, the other isn’t. Aside from morality around sex what is the difference between an actor in non-adult films and a porn actor? Or how do you view acting as a profession?
I wanted to type out something but along the way I realized that we probably agree anyway and that a lack of clear terms in this thread makes people argue while not really knowing what the other means with their term.
My point is that under communism the abusive system that is current day prostitution and/or sex work would and should cease to exist. I don’t think I would be overly dramatic to say that over 90% of the people currently active in these systems are trafficked or forced into it one way or another.
I’m not necessarily against the idea of people working with a sexuality in a system that does not force them to (i.e. threat of starvation / homelesness without a job, patriarchal views on sex, etc.). Just as people wanting to be a movie actor being able to become a movie actor right now.
It’s basically the sex workers discussion: sex workers need rights to function in their job but the larger issue in the industry is that the vast majority of people in it would not be in it if they had a choice. And because of that you get camps of people opposing any progress in the working rights field, not because of puritan reasons per se but because they view the system as rotten to the core to begin with. The sex workers who do it out of pure passion are a tiny minority and unfortunately get grouped together with human trafficking victims in the industry and vice versa, and because of that they also face difficulty in finding allies in left wing circles.
Absolutely, and the path to worker empowerment is by improving their material conditions. And that’s what I think most people want to do when they say “sex work is work”.
The really crazy thing is this “sex work is real work” trend that is said by people who simultaneously think sex workers aren’t people.
Is it?
I dislike sex work simply because it’s unproductive labour at this stage of development.
I read a few articles by a socialist, feminist, transgender, latina, survivor of the sex trade (her words) called Esperanza Fonseca who goes by “Proletarian Feminist” on Medium that I found really insightful.
I think it would really help us in this conversation to critically examine and reflect upon articles such as these:- A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work”
- The Problem with Sex Trade Expansionary Feminism, A Response to Kate
- The problem with the phrase “sex work is work”
She also spoke about this topic alongside Brigid Ó Coileáin, a marxist feminist who hosts the “Probably Cancelled Podcast”, on an episode of Rev Left Radio called “Proletarian Feminism, Women’s Liberation, and the Sex Trade” from 2021.
I think I agree with most of what you say. Sex work is horribly exploitative and most sex workers are driven into sex work from precarity.
On the other hand, who am I to tell someone who finds sex work to be the lesser evil compared to a grueling minimum wage job that they’re wrong?
I think it is important to be pro-sex worker. I think you can be this while acknowledging the harm of the sex industry. Personally I don’t think bans and cops are the right response. You can compare this to how doing drugs is obviously bad for you but sending cops to arrest people with substance abuse disorders is only making things worse.
My personal belief is that the best way forward is harm reduction. Both when it comes to the actual sex work (unionisation, labour safety standards, legal protections) but also when it comes to the social factors that promotes sex work. Nobody should be coerced into sex work because the alternative is poverty or mistreatment, any moral society should help people long before they get that desperate. That help should also include adequate and compassionate responses to substance abuse, such as providing patients with free, safe drugs so that they are not forced into crime or prostitution. I also think harm reduction includes social attitudes to sex work, it doesn’t make anything better that sex work is considered shameful and that terms for sex workers are used as misogynistic slurs.
I’m afraid that pushing for criminalisation acts as a bandaid that allows liberals to call it a day and avoid dealing with the harmful structural social factors that causes sex work and worse its outcomes
Just run trades programs exclusively for former and current sex workers who want to leave the industry for good
I agree on most things, but I do think legalization is important. You might not call the cops on them, but its criminalization is a hanging sword of damocles that the state can use to increase surveillance/policing, keep people impoverished via criminal records, etc.
And while it probably couldn’t be a “union” per se, and definitely shouldn’t result in it being a permanent ficture of society, some form of support group that protects prostitutes from further abuse should be made. I always think back to when I read about a prostitute not being taken seriously by the cops after she was nearly killed by a serial killer.
A ‘normal’ job that would require you to do the things a sex workers would do would require such drastic health and safety measures that it would make it obsolete in the case of sex work.
My job has for a large part now been in social work and I have to get tested for that just because I MIGHT come in contact with bodily fluids of others. I’m talking blood work, vaccines, all that stuff. I have to get coaching to deal with potentially agressieve clients. I have to be able to call police at all times in case I get in danger.
Sex work is hundreds of not thousands time worse even. That’s what many of the clients I see who were trafficked into it also tell me. They would need basically a full hazmat suit to do their job in a proper and safe way. That alone should be concerning enough. But no, we have them out there with nothing.
Using your body to work is not the same as getting r*ped for work, multiple times a day. And getting beaten and whatnot.
THANK YOU! The way people suddenly act like it’s fucking normal is absurd! Who trained these dogs to bark like that?
Yeah and its incredible they’ve made it a global rule on hexbear you must adhere to saying sex work is good and should be upheld for all time as a wonderful thing or else you’re a SWERF and liable for banning. Call themselves non-sectarian yet uphold a rule that goes against common sense and goes against the actual enacted policy and theory of every AES state in history and yet say they welcome Marxists (who accept this kind of perversion of theory by of all people the revolution-less, failure-ridden, navel-gazing, arm-chair western “left” who somehow know better on this than actual practitioners of workers’ states). Same site that had a zionist admin btw who was only recently kicked out. Admits they have a misogyny problem yet let a few apologists sob into existence a ban on positions contrary to being pro-sex-work. The truth is there are a lot of male chauvinists there and they want their treats including their treats of access to women’s bodies for pay.
One quip I love directed towards anarchists on this is that anarchists are people who abhor the idea of paying rent for a building yet would gladly justify renting a woman.
Their argument that sex work is just another kind of labor quickly falls apart. People might resent for example having a job doing data entry and being assigned to spend 10 minutes a day cleaning the bathroom or say it’s beneath them but no one is getting sued for it or coming home with trauma or having their coworkers treat them like a piece of meat as a result. Yet even in bourgeois liberal society your boss for good reason cannot assign you the duty of giving him oral sex as “just another part of your job” if you’re a woman because it’s workplace sexual harassment, it creates an unsafe, misogynistic, horrifying environment for women.
It’s sexual harassment and misogyny and exploitation unless it’s in its purest form. Thank you! I do not get this at all.
What gets me is it’s that Simpsons meme with principal Skinner standing by the fence wondering if he could be wrong, then saying no it’s the children who are wrong.
But instead it’s western arm-chair “leftists” without a revolution, without revolutionary practice and theory doing the same thing and saying no it’s the in-power, successful revolutionary communist party (all of them) that are wrong! It’s the Marxists who fought and died bitterly who are wrong. It’s the Marxists who have a degree in Marxism from within a country under the control of a communist party who are wrong! I an enlightened western consooomer who grew up with a brain addled with liberalism and a consumption drive and a desperate need to justify my moral righteousness compared to those non-westerners know better.
It’s just so comical if it wasn’t sad and depressing.
This is what I understood as the hexbear “party line” regarding sex work. It makes a pretty convincing case imo, that organising sex workers and having them recognised as laborers will lead not just to marked improvements in their quality life (like access to healthcare), but also a decrease in sex work by eliminating some of the threats a bourgeois can leverage and bringing it more in line with the threats every other bourgeois has at their disposal.
Mac and Smith make the argument that […] by first having work accepted as such, the workers may then more easily struggle to resist or reorder such work.
I found this post https://hexbear.net/post/3739639 to be very illuminating in terms of why people want to classify sex work as work or more accurately the sex worker as a laborer. Most importantly, it’s sourced from material written by sex workers.
edit: removed a sentence making a comparison to other peoples trauma.
What I read about sex work getting classified as work is along those lines, it’s about giving the sex workers tools to fight for better working conditions. The idea being that by bettering their life, they are more likely to be able to make a free choice of where to work, which would include no longer doing sex work. A destitute worker with no free time is less likely to be able to improve their life than one with free time during which they can go job-hunting, building a support network etc.
I feel like your piece abour unionization is a bit pessimistic. “Non-essential” industries have unions and go on strike already (e.g. actors, writers, coffee shops, liquor sales come to mind from my view, maybe I’m biased bc I’m in the imperial core but this shows organizing sex work in the imperial core at least could borrow from these industries). Also, it’s good to still have worker collectives even if they cannot directly make demands in cases of attempting general strikes, or if “essential” unions wanted to do solidarity strikes with sex workers to help their cause, no? Also also, I do think there currently exist various sex worker unions already, although they’re small scale.
To be clear, sex work is like one of the worst things to be, but this doesn’t mean that we should admonish the people most acutely affected by this precarity (sex workers) for their circumstance. If we acknowledge that sex workers are exploited on such an extreme level, we should support these workers in their demands.
True it’s complete commodification of a human being, objectifying on another level. I’m very critical of it, especially in a society so exploitative already to place people into desperate and precarious positions. I doubt most people doing it would choose to continue on if there was another way of having their basic needs met.
