Feminism, Sex Work and The Big Wide World

I once had a commenter accuse me of being a sex tourist because I wrote about the sex workers in Bangkok. Because I didn’t condemn it, or belittle them, or rail about the men who used their services.

Now, Elly writes about a movement of ‘feminists’ in the UK who spend their fundraised money fighting strip club licenses and feeling ‘unsafe’ walking in red-light districts.

It sickens me that these women call themselves feminists. That they have in the past, and continue to, use the spectre of male sexual desire as the uber-boogieman in the closet to frighten women into middle-class somnolent ignorance. They see women who don’t reject it and fear it as they do as traitors to the cause.

What I see is a bunch of lazy people who think there is some short-cut to the evolution of the relationship between the genders. Shutting down a strip joint or a brothel, threatening sex workers or their clients with criminal prosecution is NOT going to make violent men less violent. It’s not going to stop the commercial exploitation of female sexuality.

And the scare-mongering bothers me. Here is a quote that Elly pulled from the leaflet of this ‘feminist’ organization’s objection to the licensing of a lap-dancing establishment:

I have lived in Bristol my whole life, and ever since becoming an adult, I have felt unsafe and unwelcome in Old Market, seeing it as a place that is clearly geared towards the sex industry. It is not somewhere where I feel comfortable going or even passing through.

Why? What makes them uncomfortable about it? Wasn’t feminism about women being strong enough to face what really went on in the world? Are we back to being delicate little flowers who shouldn’t know that some women earn their living on their backs? What kind of neo-Victorian crap is that?

And all this drama about a strip club? Good GOD. Do these women even know what living hell looks like? The toxic brick factories full of women in China? The rubbish heaps of Mumbai? The mines in Burma? Do they imagine that there’s some kind of greater dignity to working for less than minimum wage, day after day, in mind-numbing boredom or fearing for your livelihood with each working hour at the whim of some bad-tempered callous employer, or inhaling toxic solder fumes for 10 hours straight? Are we back to believing that prostitution is a fate worse than death?

I’m not saying there isn’t an ugly face to the sex trade, or that it’s the world’s most fulfilling profession, or that it doesn’t come with risks to life and limb. But the criminalization of the sex trade pushes it underground where those risks become far, far greater. I’m not saying that some people aren’t compelled against their will into the profession – they are. But JESUS. Many people in the world are compelled into all sorts of terrible, dangerous, life-eroding, soul sucking professions and prostitution isn’t the only one. Not by a long shot.

I want to leave these ‘feminist’ ladies with this thought. Your prejudice against the sex industry is passed on to your SONS. Who will grow up to see the women and men who work in that profession as lesser beings who don’t matter. So please take your self-righteous indignation and put it to some REAL humanitarian use. We, men and women, have an obligation to try to see all humans other as valuable, worthwhile beings. We’re not there yet, but we can work towards it. And marginalizing sex workers or persecuting their clients is NOT going to lead us there. It is not the act of prostitution that diminishes people’s dignity – it’s society’s attitude towards it.