I recently had an interesting twitter interchange with Mistress Matisse on the subject of sex work. On December 4th, the National Assembly in France passed a bill criminalizing the purchase of sexual services. It is a move overwhelmingly supported by feminists around the world.
I wanted to express my opinion on this matter and my rationale. I am against the criminalization of sex work. I believe that legalizing sex work affords sex workers the rights that all other workers have to demand protection under the law against violence, theft, pandering, etc. I am aware that there has been a study showing that, in countries where sex work is legal, there has been a rise in organized criminal involvement in the sex industry and a rise in the child sex trade. This is awful news, but it doesn’t change my position on the issue. It just makes it patently clear that police have a history of shirking their duties when it comes to sex workers and nothing has changed.
I want to attempt to unpack the issue of why sex work is viewed differently than other forms of labour. We are certainly acculturated to view it differently, but why? Why is working with your mouth or your hands or your cunt somehow criminal, while working with other physical body parts is not? All over the world, women labour in physical drudgery. They do work that damages their backs, their hearing, their lungs, their eyes – and most of all, their minds. Where is the feminist hue and cry against this? Why is the focus on the particular kind of work being done rather than on the conditions under which is it done?
The response from feminists who support the criminalization of sex work is that their main goal is to stop ‘sex trafficing.’ I’d like to point you over to Mistress Matisse’s blog for her fine dissection of the wordplay underlying this issue. The phrase ‘sex trafficking’ is being used to encompass all sex work – including sex work by consenting adults with agency. It masks a very disturbing form of ‘gaslighting’ which argues that no ‘sane’ woman would agree to sex work. So all adult women who consentingly perform sex work are too brainwashed and victimized to know what they are consenting to. They have been, in fact, culturally relegated to the position of women who require the state to make decisions on their behalf because they can’t possible be freely making this decision on their own. This is as offensive and repressive as the laws and attitudes of the past in which women were thought intellectually incapable of voting or having say over their own reproductive functions.
***I am in no way denying that sex trafficking exists. It does and it is already criminal. Kidnapping and forced labour (or slavery) ARE illegal in almost every country on the planet. The fact that the forced labour in question involves working with one’s genitals is, from a purely factual perspective, irrelevant. Similarly sex with individuals under the age of majority IS already illegal and one of the main reasons for this is because it is believed that children cannot know what they are consenting to, so it is statutory rape, whether money changes hands or not. There are laws with teeth to protect both adults and children from being detained and put to work against their will, and when those laws are broken, the breakers should feel the full force of the law.
I am speaking here of adults with agency who wish to provide sexual services for money. Admittedly, it is not my choice as way to make money. I would find working in that kind of physical proximity disturbing. But I wouldn’t want to work as a masseuse, a wrestler or a proctologist either – but no one would have a problem with me doing that. Because it’s not about sex. It’s not about my vagina. It’s not about vaginal penetration. And I would suggest that this is what the history of all the anti-sex work prohibitions have been about. Whose cunt is it really?
What offends me is that we, as women, have somehow gone from religious power structures who sought to tell us what we could and couldn’t do with our cunts for the sake of our souls, or masculinist power structures who sought to dominate our wombs for the purpose of controlling heredity, to feminists who want to do the exact same thing for ideological reasons.
I am no more inclined to let a group of ideologically motivated women tell me what I can and can’t do with my cunt any more than I would let a priest or a medical institution do so. And I would like to challenge that there is anything even remotely feminist about women who seek to take public ownership of my body and legislate what I can do with it.
It seems to me that feminists are guilty of doing the very same thing that the church did, and that male-dominated institutions have done in the past. They are preferencing women’s reproductive organs above other parts of a woman’s body just like those who came before them did. They are seeking to exert control over them in exactly the same way – while telling us it is for our own good. At what point does an adult woman get to determine what her own good is for good and all?
Moreover, I find it deeply disingenuous that these ‘feminists’ are spending so much time obsessing about what sex workers in first world countries are doing with their bodies economically when there is a world full of women living in appalling poverty, working is dangerous and health-threatening labour environments. Why is the waste of someone’s hands, or back or brain less worthy of their concern than my cunt or my mouth? And if it is the risk of sexually transmitted diseases that concern them, then please, let them point their concern towards the millions of young people having unpaid and unprotected sex. Condom use is far more prevalent among sex workers than in the general population.
I don’t see a lot of daylight between the way that some feminists are using the excuse that these laws are to protect society from ‘sex trafficking’ and the way the NSA uses the excuse that they need to spy on us all to stop ‘terrorism.’ This is not about our protection, it’s about our domination. It’s about power – particularly the power to control sexuality.
On a side note, I’d like to say that I don’t have any more time for the 343 French Intellectual Boy’s club who man the ‘Hands Off My Whore’ movement than for the feminist pressing for criminalization. These aren’t THEIR whores. They aren’t the whores of feminists or the whores of French men. They are women who have self-determination and a right to agency over their own bodies.
For anyone who is just itching to comment with… ‘but some of these women don’t have agency and are forced or coerced,’ READ WHERE I HAVE STARRED, I did that specially for you. It is already illegal to force a person to perform ANY labour they do not wish to perform. It is illegal to hold them against their will. There is no need for more legislation. There is need for the enforcement of the legislation that already exists.
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