I see sex work as somewhat analogous to coal mining. It’s not that it isn’t real work, or that those who work in that capacity don’t deserve rights, dignity, or a society that works for them. The problem, of course, is the ever-present exploitation of the workers coupled with the severe unpleasantness of the occupation which ensures that the people who do work these jobs are those with few other options. That isn’t to say that all sex workers and/or coal miners are miserable. Even so, the patterns around this kind of work are unmistakable.
Given these facts, I think most reasonable people understand that sex work should go extinct. That isn’t to say that you can’t make pornography or have sex with strangers. However, it’s impossible to gauge enthusiastic consent when money is changing hands, and enthusiastic consent is a vital component for an ethical sexual encounter.
My question for the community is how exactly this is meant to be accomplished. How can sex work be abolished without harming the very people it’s meant to protect? The number one problem western sex workers face, more so than creepy clients, is the cops, who profile them, steal their wages, and arrest them on a whim. Clearly, criminalizing sex work hasn’t done much for sex workers. What are some alternatives?
I see it as quite different to coal-mining in many ways. The coal miner never digs coal in their personal lives just for fulfillment or fun, sex is absolutely a human interaction and any commodification of that special human connection is fucking disgusting. I’m no “sex is between a loving couple” type, I could give less than one single shit about who is fucking, if people are putting out quickly or not, I don’t care. But when sex becomes a way of making money, and sex is obviously a private thing, abuse is inevitable. And that’s not even to mention how prostitution’s consent works. I am absolutely not a “Sex work is work” person. Yes it is work, but is it socially necessary or even helpful to the people that do it? I would argue that it doesn’t. It’s an illegal industry(I in no way want it to be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I absolutely support the prostitute’s struggle and they should not be arrested for this) that has no testing or training whatsoever, it has no basis for wages or benefits or unionization. I absolutely hope all prostitutes can get to a better place in life, because I don’t think anyone should be in the sex industry. Obviously some people DO get into this industry on purpose, hats off to them I suppose but if it meant kicking out all the consenting prostitutes in exchange for freeing the marginalized masses that are forced ( “voluntarily” or totally involuntarily) into sex, the answer is pretty obvious to me.
Prostitution is indeed not work. In a work or labour relationship, the proletariat sells their labour power; their capacity to work is their commodity. Prostitutes are those who have not even that labour power to sell and so they must resort to selling the only thing they have left, their own body. Thus they live on the fringe of the proletariat class and experience oppression in its purest, harshest form. This comes from Esperanza’s medium article, an ex-prostitute. She also doesn’t use the term sex work because she was a prostitute meeting up with clients in their cars or motels, not an onlyfans content creator or a camgirl.
And this relationship of being even below the oppressed class has existed throughout history. Some slaves were not r*ped, but many slave women were. In feudalism, serfs were tied to the land and had to work on it. Prostitutes were even lower than the serf as they could not work on the land for whatever reason, which meant they were of no use to the lord and thus not allowed his protection.
Prostitutes are even exploited by the proletariat itself (and indeed were exploited by their own class in history); proletarian men create a false consciousness for themselves where they seek to attain bourgeois status and thus buy the services of the prostitute. It is inter-class warfare.
Prostitutes are proletariat but do not perform labour. Tbh there’s some marxism that goes out the window in some people the moment this topic comes up, as if prostitution was something inherently different or special to consider under its own rules. There’s petit-bourgeois women in porn, and there’s the proletarian victims that get trafficked by pimps. The two never intersect even if their job is the same. The victims need help to get out of this situation and an actual solution. The petit bourgeois will get with the program and get an actually productive job no matter how much they loathe it.
I in no way mean this as being crude, it’s literally just the best way I can describe it. I feel like prostitutes that have no pimp that essentially owns them and their labor, the ones that sell their sex by themselves, I view it almost like a street vendor that owns their own stand on the sidewalk of a busy city, insofar as they are not selling their labor to any other individual but they still further a market economy nonetheless. Obviously I still take issue with my comparison as these street vendors DO (like I mentioned in another comment before) have standards that they must adhere to. If a street vendor has a rat in their ketchup and cockroaches all over their buns and hot dogs, they will be shut down and have their permit removed. The same protection does not exist for prostitution as it is a black(some would argue gray market due to “meet-up services” that duck the law by promising an encounter rather than promising sex which is illegal, but obv those are just bourgeois routes of legality, it’s still prostitution but under another name of companionship) market and the law treats the sex worker as a criminal rather than a small business owner that would be revoked for lets say getting an STI, I still don’t really know what “sex work advocates” want when it comes to STIs, which I imagine are unfortunately common. If they are tested and are positive for an STI, under this legal market of sex, either it becomes a very dark dystopia where you pay extra for “clean prostitutes” while the “infected” ones go broke while still legally working and spreading STIs all the while suffering through their exploitative job, desperately needing a cure but not being deemed worthy enough by the market to afford to live, Or is this regulated better and you just lay off the ones with STIs? Then the people who had turned to prostitution because they have no other viable alternatives(I.E, most of them), they probably go homeless if they aren’t already and they most likely die. In any legal situation for prostitution I just see things going horribly wrong in so many ways. And that’s just dealing with the topic of STIs, I don’t even wanna talk about how they would have to go about dealing with abuse. Sorry for the long rambling message, it’s just that you brought up good points and it made me think more. Thanks comrade
Exactly. Coal-mining (or whatever form of extraction the current form of energy-production requires) is materially necessary for the reproduction of society. Thus it is linked to real wealth production and real economic growth, the material base from which all of human society arises. Now are there legitimate human enterprises, and legitimate forms of economic activity, which do not work to advance the economic base? Of course there are – owning a mom-and-pop restaurant, for example, or being a concert violinist. But as these sorts of enterprises are materially unnecessary, they have no particular right to exist, and are to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis; if they are or become exploitative, the state should shut them down. As you pointed out, sex work seems to be the sort of thing which is almost automatically exploitative. Since it fulfills no materially useful function (i.e., it is something we can very well do without), it has no place under socialism.
Also, why are we rehashing this topic again? I would have thought we’d done it enough on r/genzedong.
If you’re tired of this now. Just wait until this place is linked with a certain oddly shaped bear lemmy instance. They are going to throw multiple, probably monthly shit-fits about the Marxist take on that and break into angry rants about us being “Swerfs”.
I get not having the Marxist take on it for a place like that, I don’t get banning the Marxist take as “reactionary” which they do.
Is the site majority anarchist? I know it’s riddled with them, but overall I haven’t seen disastrous foreign policy takes.
Most of the people who run it, and a good amount of their userbase, are based Marxists. They do have some anarchists, new leftists, or streamer-brained liberals, but that wouldn’t mean that we wouldn’t federate with them, nor is it required that our two instances adopt the exact same policies or moderation styles. We have a good relationship with them, and there’s zero reason to have isolated islands rather than a united left fediverse.
Once we do federate, if there are specific users that are so liberal that they become a problem, they can be banned, but that doesn’t mean we’d de-federate by any means.
Oh I know, I’m so excited to federate with them, I just was curious with the much more unhinged nature of it, but that could also be size, if it was majority anarchist.
Don’t get me wrong I love Hexbear, just a little taken aback with the “Swerf” take.
When you type my username into the search bar on Lemmygrad, my top comment from r/genzedong is literally on this topic😂🤣it’s about how Sexting is not a problem imo, it’s just 2 people fulfilling a kink and since no money is traded, why make an imaginary issue of what is essentially just people sending pictures to one another.
RIP r/genzedong, but the site did have a certain measure of that overall reddit horniness
My head is hurting today so please nobody Horny bonk me but I kinda missed it lmao
Stalin says: when you stop the horny, the bonking stops, and when bonking stops, the hurting stops…
But seriously, feel better soon comrade!
Lol I was just joking, my head is fine, but I WAS serious about not being horny bonked😈 /s
All right, no excuse, here they come:
Also I completely agree, a mom and pop restaurant, while not entirely socially necessary, does have a standard to follow, if they have rats running around the kitchen they get shut down, if a prostitute is lied to by a client and receives an STI, they are hampered by their new health risk and they are likely not able to leave their corner because they need to pay for treatment. It’s a sad reality but how can we as humans make an excuse for this by saying “sex work is work”? I personally think there are too many glaring flaws in prostitution and sex work to support it.
You can make this same critique against any service industry work that involves intimate, personal human interaction: hair care, therapy, life coaching, etc. Some people need more trust and connection to another person for these services than they do for sex.
As comrade juchebot said, non-essential things must be evaluated on a case by case basis, some things like therapy or art are socially positive despite being materially unnecessary, unlike the sex industry which is neither.