“Scratch a Communist, and find a Philistine. Of course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women.” - V. I. Lenin
In this I will be clarifying the essential nature of solidarity with sex workers to any serious leftist movement, especially in regards to migrant rights, women’s rights, queer rights and anti-racism.
I am not interested in any discussions about personal feelings in regards to the sex trade, nor do I care about any utopian conversations about a society in which sex work does not exist. The fact is that sex work does exist, and any discussion therefor must focus on ways to protect the lives, rights and dignity of sex workers right now.
I acknowledge that there are cis men who engage in prostitution, and I have no desire to erase or ignore their experiences and marginalisation. However, statistically speaking the overwhelming number of sex workers are women, particularly migrants and people of colour, and queer people, especially trans people, are over-represented. This is due to the economic marginalisation and enforced precarity of women, racialised people, and trans people who are excluded from employment, education and institutional access to social services, especially for migrants in a border regime that creates a tiered system of access to rights and criminalises entire populations based upon their location of birth.
Firstly I will address the term “sex work” itself. There is an oft propagated notion that defining sex work as work is somehow indicative of a glamorization of the sex trade, apologia for sexual violence and exploitation, or a desire to expand and increase the amount of sex work that happens. There is, at the same time, an argument that all sex work is inherently assault, and as such to term it work is to ignore the reality of the sex trade’s exploitative nature.
"Part of believing me when I say I have been raped is believing me when I say I haven’t been." - Nikita, 2017 Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International UK.
I really don’t understand why you’re so hostile to me, but it’s quite simple: there are sex workers who do the work and don’t consider it sexual assault. End of story.
As long as a single instance of sex work isn’t sexual assault to the sex worker, then it is wrong to say that all sex work is sexual assault, because no individual can decide for another what is and is not sexual assault. At no point is it acceptable for someone to tell another person that what they experienced as consensual was in fact sexual assault.
That is what is at the heart of respecting people’s boundaries of consent and believing survivors of assault. No one can determine for someone else what constitutes rape. If a sex worker considers all the sex work they did to be assault, then that is because their consent was violated. However that can not be applied to everyone else because not everyone has the same experiences. I can guarantee from personal experience and also discussions with sex workers that not every instance of sex work is sexual assault.
As far as “I talk too much,” no one is making you participate in this conversation, and frankly, you’ve done nothing but angrily yell at me over something you’ve personally never experienced by your admission, so kindly contribute a meaningful dialogue or fuck off.
It’s truly incredible that people can recognize that pestering someone for sex or nudes is a violation, that situations where someone has too much power over another in the workplace etc makes it inappropriate, but when it comes to actual money, it’s suddenly alright.
Great news: it smelled so nice outside that I am doing a nightwalk. Was just dehydrated.
I am hostile to you because you are downplaying rape using classic shit like “no penetration” & “it wasn’t that bad” & “maybe they enjoyed it 😉😉” while using a sanctimonious, long-winded manner.
Lunacy! All the time we have to educate people to help them understand they were violated in social work. People who can’t even see what’s happening to them is a violation until long after the fact are common in a rape culture that allows them to get away with it and punished victims. People cope however they can.
I am fully aware that people cope however they can, as I’ve mentioned before I am personally and intimately familiar with sex work and sexual violence, as are Mac and Smith, the people whose book I referenced for most of my discussion. I know many sex workers who do not consider the work they do to be assault in every instance.
However, the fact that there are people who cope by downplaying their assaults does not in fact mean that you can extend to all people that their experiences were sexual assault. It is not your place to tell me or anyone else when something we do not consider assault was actually assault, that we’re wrong and do not have the right to differentiate our experiences.
And this is such an incredibly specific and contentious bone for you to pick about a conversation about how essential it is to work in solidarity with sex workers, a thread I wrote specifically because people use the “all sex work is rape” argument to dismiss sex worker unions and to promote criminalisation, a thing which directly leads to an increase in danger, violence, and precarity of sex workers.
It seems to me that your moral crusade against people thinking differently than you is more important than engaging with the ideas of people who are currently and immediately affected by this conversation. In any case I’ve made my point, and you’ve made yours, so unless there’s something new to discuss, we’ll disengage here.
Your axiomatic approach to this is the problem. Your inability to separate this argument from criminalization of being a prostitute.
Being a John is a sex crime, so is getting reluctant consent for nudes or sex, so is physically attacking someone and forcing them to have sex with you. Not saying these are the same crimes with the same severity. Those would be separate charges.
In the same way that people once were not even allowed to recognize date rape as being a crime, sex workers with a positive mindset about it are deceiving themselves.