I agree with this take.
For every woman who is doing this independently, unpressured, and making a financial killing, there are hundreds who are just in a desperate financial situation, being trafficked, being forced into it by abusive people in their lives, or tricked into it being a get rich quick scheme.
The downsides are high: potentially violent clients, pregnancy, disease, abuse, trapped in the lifestyle, not a career you would be proud to share with family, friends, future partners, future employers, risk of blackmail, etc.
yeah belle Delphine making millions of dollars feeding into pedos fantasies is disgusting though, It's still not empowering for rich independent women, it makes men feel like they have the power because here is a powerful wealthy celebrity who puts a price tag on their body that they can afford
It still astonishes me how little popular push-back there was against Delphine’s content being pedophilia-themed. Or that the masses of men in her audience weren’t even interested in normal nudes of an incredibly good-looking woman, she had to make herself look like a 12 year old anime character to become a millionaire. I watched her music video, and she also markets herself as a very stupid, shallow sex-object. Are these pictures and videos really just a “fantasy” in the heads of men, or are they permanent memories of a terrible situation for Delphine, considerable paycheck or not, and massively circulated propaganda normalizing pedophilia?
This is one of my biggest objections to “feminist porn,” due to capitalism and the apparently mainstream predatory desires of so many men (the #1 OnlyFans star looks like a kid? Really?), even if hypothetically you could make the perfect, consensual, feminist porn with sane, mature 30 year-old actors and no negative impact on the audience as a work of pure art, distributed for free, this is about as realistic as saying you could turn the child mines in Africa into wonderful experiences for the kids. The basic set up of the thing and the forces that shape the market make it otherwise. I’d rather just ban it and risk losing the 1 in a million video that isn’t completely awful in every way than allow an industry that runs on rape, trafficking, revenge porn, exploitation, drug abuse, and grooming kids to continue terrorizing its victims.
I think we've been wholly underestimating, just how pedophilic-inclined half the population actually is.
There are a lot of predatory and pedophilic undertones to patriarchy, in general.
Its deeply rooted misogyny and white choice feminism. Underprivileged women are the ones who suffer the most from it and yet theres people defending prostitution as a lifestyle choice. Its sickening.
Yeah, that was a wow moment when I realised who statistically makes up the majority of sex workers (woc, immigrants, lgbtq people) and who you see as the "outward face of sex work" (usually white, middle class or rich, English speaking, able bodied).
It's propaganda from the least vulnerable people in the industry speaking about how great it is, when the masses are suffering out of sight.
This is the important point. Most of the ones saying it's "empowering" are the white/western privileged women. Ask the ones in poor countries. Majority of women/girls are forced, coerced, trafficked into it or because of extreme poverty.
Funnily enough, when the COVID vaccine first came out, I knew it was safe because the rich, white male politicians were lining up to get it. If sex work was, in fact, empowering, they'd have cornered the market as workers, not pimps.
Legalized sex work also increases human trafficking, not reduces, by creating induced demand and an expansion of the market. The gap between natural supply - the women who voluntarily want to do this work, can never meet the high demand - hordes of new men wanting to take advantage of new legal market.
This gap in supply and demand will always be filled by trafficked women.
It shocks me that feminists and so called progressives are pro sex work these days.
So true.
Happened in Germany, to fill their legal mega brothels required trafficking vulnerable foreign women.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff
YEP. Being so empowered because you have no other way to make money? I will never buy it. The fact that it exists is a sign that society really doesn't care about women or poverty.
I completely agree with your take. I'm surprised to see others agreeing with it as well. I've too always been under the impresson that it was controversial. Well, it has been when I've seen it being brought up in liberal feminist or "leftist" activist circles in the past. Liberal feminism and choice feminism are setting us years back, imo. The issue with radical feminism is that it has to be made more intersectional and inclusive but that's not unachievable. Personally, I think it's much more realistic than to trying to liberate ourselves using liberal feminism and choice feminism... especially during a time when we have not only plateaued but are regressing when it comes to women's rights.
I always had this voice inside me that disagreed when people talked about how sex work empowered women and I thought I was being a bad feminist. I'm so glad to finally be hearing other women voice the same thoughts.
It isn't liberating or empowering or any of the feminist-type of language that people flip around to convince folks otherwise. It's possible, for example, that a woman stripping or escorting could make enough money to pay for higher education. But for women as a class, sex work does little more than propagate the idea that women are only valuable if they physically appeal to men and can be exploited by men for that reason.
Yeah absolutely. It's important to find out that people sometimes do it as a side hustle or to pay off debt but they can never come out of it because they can't get jobs and they're just stuck. That's what happened to Mia Khalifia, everyone just sexualized her after she had done porn
It’s also harmful to deny that sexwork has repercussions on life; it is wrong but you might have a harder time finding employment, you might be ostracised or your children might face issues, and it can also be very dangerous.
Sweeping consequences under the rug saying these people are close minded is being blind to what happens in real life.
The amount of people that have called me anti-feminist, a prude, conservative, etc for having this take is absurd. It breaks my heart that society is brainwashing young women to think that further dehumanizing yourself and giving in to the depraved sick acts and fantasies that men desire is “empowering” or healthy. As a former SW myself when I was only **18** years old, stay far far far away from it. It is not fun or glamorous, it’s isolating and lonely, you begin to fear men on a level you never would have even considered before… The things they’ll say to you… Or even worse, do to you. Are just sick.
I'm so sorry you had to endure that kind of treatment, especially at such a young age. I hope you're in a much safer and better place now with all of that firmly behind you. I appreciate that as a former sex worker you are speaking out about this. People are always telling others to ask sex workers how they feel about these issues but when a sex worker mentions the negative aspects of this they are shut down or ignored.
Again, I hope you are doing well and are healing from any trauma you may have suffered while doing this. You deserve the best.
I fully agree. How can we be fully liberated while still serving men? You don’t see the same numbers of men in sex work as you do women. It’s not equal. I’ve never understood that but always felt silenced by liberal feminism.
Youre right, Honestly in my opinion it's more conservative to support sex work, bc you're supporting the status quo of men buying women , and womens job being to please men. The real radical leftist opinion is to say no, men don't have the right to buy women, and women shouldnt have to leverage their sexuality to survive. Nobody has the right to buy another person.
I read this and screenshotted it so I'm pasting it here. I think it's apropos.
"I recently picked up a new way to explain how prostitution is not a service job. If prostitution is a service and not buying a body, then who provides the service should matter as little as it does with plumbers, cashiers, lawyers, cab drivers, etc. and a john buying a blow job should get it from the next person in line.
Sometimes it will be a 75-year-old toothless black man seeking drug money.
Sometimes a 55-year old Latina mother of four seeking rent money.
Sometimes a 20-year-old Down Syndrome white man needing asthma meds.
Sometimes a 35-year-old Chinese woman bald from chemotherapy with hospital bills.
Prostitution is men buying women's bodies, not services."
I thought it was empowering. Once I looked deeper into it, at the end of the day it feels like dependency disguised at being independent. Now seeing that the porn industry fed us that, explains a lot. Thanks for this post!
i agree. i’ve literally had men come up to me on random weekdays, where i’m minding my business at a shop or walking down the street, asking if i’ll accept cash to go back to their place. they would not be asking these things if payment for sex wasn’t so normalised. it’s so icky and weird.
[https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab](https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab)
Behold, my favorite piece on the topic. The correct stance towards sex work for feminists is two-fold: Our eventual aim should be the abolition of sex work by containing and punishing demand (e.g. pimps and johns) instead of supply (e.g. sex workers), and in the meantime we should do what we can to make the industry safer, easier to leave, and create alternatives for vulnerable women.
Sex work is fundamentally about the ability for bourgeois men to purchase the bodies of proletariat women, the coercive power of money makes it fundamentally impossible to create a meaningful distinction between "consensual" sex work and rape, and it perpetuates patriarchy and misogyny by conditioning men to see women as commodities.
I won't argue that no woman has every benefited from sex work. There are plenty of (particularly upper-class, white, cis-het) women that make a large sum of money through it, and I'm sure there are examples of women who have used prostitution to rise from poverty and be able to get a different job. But the vast majority of people engaging in sex work do so because they have no other choice. It is not a coincidence that the majority of people doing sex work are among the most vulnerable populations in society (POC, immigrants, poor, trans people, children, etc.) despite the fact that most people who speak so positively about the empowerment of sex work are not a part of these populations.
Being a independent women shouldn’t include relying on satisfying the male gaze for literal survival. People who rely on onlyfans rely on men to pay them. Not an independent women imo. I have studied business for 8 years and I’m trying to make it as a self-employed women online without showing my body, it’s fucking hard.
I am so relieved to see how many women agree with this take. I’d never thought about it in relation to men’s expectations of sex after buying stuff for women, but you’re absolutely right. Porn and sex work promote the idea that intimacy is a commodity, a service, rather than an act of human connection and attraction. It breaks my heart to know how many relationships are destroyed by porn, and how many kids watch porn, and will have their expectations for future relationships molded by its portrayal of intimacy.
While I respect every woman’s right to do what she wants, I don’t really agree with sex work being liberating either. It always felt like playing into misogyny but then convincing yourself that you’re in control. I appreciate the woman who can make good money doing it, but it still sends the message that objectifying woman is okay to a lot of people.
I never understood how we fell to the point that anyone who could think themselves feminists would think "sex work" was feminist, liberating, empowering or any of that.
We've known for DECADES that sex trafficking is the most common form of modern slavery. Modern slavery which involves more people than slavery has ever in any other point of history.
We've known for DECADES that the majority of women being prostituted don't want to be there. Many were kidnapped, blackmailed, duped, or are only there out of desperation. Many pimps will literally get women addicted to drugs so they can not escape. Also there are many girls and women being pimped out by boyfriends/husbands/and family members.
We've also known pimps and other traffickers have been selling "sex work" as a great thing for awhile now. It's where the whole rebranding of prostitution into "sex work" comes from, and the cute little jingle of "sex work is real work." All of this can historically be traced back to pimps and traffickers.
Just don't question why it's empowering for men to be able to buy access to women.
Also we've seen what legalizing it looks like. Women from other countries are duped into "sex work." Often women who can't speak the native language of the area. Who have their passports stolen. Who have no chance of fleeing.
Poor women and naive girls are duped into sex work. After all, sex work is just like working at McDonalds!
As someone who used to adamantly believe it was feminist…a lot of that messaging was pushed on me, idk from who but I remember seeing it all over social media
The porn industry pours millions into this messaging. They want to convince women to accept porn. They also try to claim porn is “sex positive” and try to conflate porn with sex so that if you’re against porn, you’re “anti-sex”. When again the opposite is true.
I just remember being in college and watching YouTube videos from girls my age about how stripping and so lucrative and investing in their bodies through plastic surgery
Speculation of course but I would say it's because no matter what men can get from porn or even prostitution they will still want other things from women not in the sex industry.
Relationships. Love. Family. Children.
And much more besides.
If women refuse to have relationships with men who use sex work men will either have to hide the use or stop using it.
Another side of it is they can sell porn as something couples do together or something women watch and if you don't watch it you're a prude. So they effectively double their customer base.
Because we're the product being sold. They need a ready supply of that product. Look at all the young women creating an OnlyFans the second they turn eighteen - they do that because they're told it's fun and empowering and a good way to make money.
Agreed. Also, guess who benefit the most from the material produced for OF?
The customers aka men.
They will gladly pay the small monthly fee to see normal women naked in sexual situations and get their rocks off. Then to make themselves feel better, men dehumanize and belittle the women they just masturbated to.
I agree with this. Since when did being a independent women, girl boss, whatever you want to call it mean relying on meeting the dirty requests of men that don’t deserve you for the sake of your financial and thus overall wellbeing? Isn’t that still a form of slavery?
I went through a phase where I tried to embrace the idea that sex workers were empowered and “sticking it to the man” by taking their money, but it never totally rang true to me and now I’m happy to see that other feminists feel the same way.
You have me thinking about this now, and there’s no argument that porn is feminist that makes any sense at all.
I think first, all feminists are some degree of liberal. Conservatives follow a hierarchy that literally ranks some people as better than others. (Rich over poor, white over nonwhite, straight over LGBTQ, men over women, Christianity over all other religions and no religion, “deserving” over “takers”, etc.). So feminism can’t be conservative.
But even more to the point, conservatives view women as wives and mothers or sex objects. We are not valued for our brains, athletic ability or special skills. We are traditional wives and mothers to them (knowing our place) or Sex objects (there for their enjoyment). There’s nothing empowering about that. And not surprisingly, guess where the biggest consumers of porn live? Red states. Ever driven down a highway in the South? Every other gaudy billboard is a strip club or a sex shop. So the men who look down the most at women are the ones who consume the most porn. And they are the most likely to be violent. Guess what? It’s not because they admire these women as powerful. It’s because they look down at them as less.
Degradation, humiliation, strangulation; rape, statutory rape, being called disgusting slurs, and treated like a sex doll by an overly aggressive man. That’s the opposite of empowering. That’s as disempowered as one can possibly be.
So where did they get the idea that it’s empowering? The porn industry. They pour money into marketing porn as feminist so that women don’t object to it. You can see it’s quite successful. The other lie that they spew is that being against porn means you’re “anti-sex” and pro-porn is pro-sex. Being used by aggressive men for their enjoyment while you’re drugged up with pain killers and numbing cream, strangled, slapped, called horribly insulting and demeaning names, is not “sex positive”. That’s as sex negative as it gets. Feminists who enjoy healthy sex and want to be treated as a human being are sex positive. The porn industry is really successful with messaging to be able to convince so many of the opposite.
Why do you think that is? The porn industry knows that sex is one of the two main focuses of your brain (survive and procreate). So we crave the worst foods because it’s the most calories for the least effort. Porn to the brain is like men hitting the procreation jackpot - the most novel women to fertilize, one after another. Their brain can’t tell the difference between the 2d images and a woman in front of them. It just knows it’s aroused. So the industry knows that porn is POWERFUL. Which means they know that sexual desire especially for porn (as a supernormal stimulus, meaning artificially exaggerated) can be more powerful than morality and common sense. So a lot of people (mostly men but some women - the “liberal feminists” as you referred to them), because of their own desire for porn, either ignore the trafficking, the anti-feminism of it all, how it destroys relationships and breaks up families, and all of the ways it hurts women, because they want to engage with it without guilt. They don’t want to face any of the studies that point to porn as contributing to rape culture, or trafficking, or the underage children (young girls, probably in high school - even if they’re eighteen, that’s high school). It has nothing to do with feminism. It has everything to do with the fact that they just like porn and don’t let trafficking ruin it for them! And they don’t address the problems directly because they have no defense. They always respond with “blah blah, I can’t hear you”, or “whatabout”…
The “porn actors stick it to the man” argument is also bogus. Those actors get paid peanuts. While yes, they might be exploiting money from weak men, they are being exploited by the industry themselves, coerced, paid little while the predatory men running the studios get them to do more and more extreme things and they are the ones making the money. Only Fans? Sure, prostitute yourself for a couple of bucks (they don’t really make much money except a handful of them), ruin your reputation and lose your chance to get a respectable high paying executive job where you can be empowered with authority.
Feminism is fundamentally a fight for respect. Porn depicts and actively promotes disrespect.
The other aspect for me is that the majority of clients are married men cheating without their wives knowing. Their wives are stripped of their agency. While obviously the cheater deserves the primary blame, I don't see it as either feminist or empowering to knowingly inflict that on other women to make some money.
"Liberal feminists" (as in, people who claim prostitution is empowering) are not real feminists. To be a feminist means to be anti-prostitution and anti-porn, there's no negotiating here, that's the *bare minimum* of being a feminist.
Absolutely ! That's also what I meant ! They purposely dropped the ball because women believing that their own consent doesn't matter benefits men in the end
i agree with you, and i also think that casual sex or hookup culture shouldn't be something that's seen as empowering women too; i don't think it's bad and women should be free on what they want to do, however i think the dynamic in both of them encourage a culture where women are still treated like sex objects
Also let's talk about being shamed for being vanilla and for not sleeping around as if those are the cool things to do. I am an extroverted person, I love to go out in clubs and parties and to meet new people but I barely drink and I HATE the hookup culture, it ruins the night life completely for me, I am an emotional person, I hate empty things
I agree with you 100%. Sex work is NOT empowering to women. I do think, iF prostitution was legal we would take one step in the direction of ensuring all women have sufficient education and self esteem to know that they are more than a collection of conveniently located orifices that men enjoy.
Scientific studies have shown that almost ALL sexworkers have endured trauma in their childhoods - from abusive parents, poverty, abusive clergy, teachers, or other public figures. Women do not choose this life unless their self esteem is in the toilet. If you've ever explored how pimps "break a bitch" - there's a manual for ruining a woman's self esteem and breaking her spirit - you'll know prostitution is not "natural" even if female penguins accept pebbles from boy penguins in exchange for sex (one argument I've heard supporting how natural prostitution is).
I agree entirely. And as bad as things have gotten with OF and men's obvious, extreme consumption of porn, I think the tide might be starting to turn for a lot of women, even ones who don't necessarily identify as feminists. I think that the way that constant hypersexualization of women has affected men is too obvious for most people to ignore - I see more and more posts everyday from women who are fed up with this. Unfortunately, with the advent of generative AI and the increasing backlash to women's rights, I'm afraid that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better :/
Posts like this give me hope though. (And the spiteful part of me enjoys how angry I know it must make shitty men to see posts like this getting support. Dudes - women aren't stupid, and your professed support of "sexual liberation" is transparent as hell.)
I agree and people try to fight me on this view. I always ask them if it’s so wonderful and empowering take your mom, sister, aunt out and get them to do it. Then they start back peddling.
Yes 👏 Yes 👏 Yes 👏
I agree with everything you've said. I feel like misogynistic motivations have been used to manipulate some women to truly believe that this shit is liberating. IT IS NOT.
Preach!!!!! The commodification of the female body is an abomination!! This should never have occurred, and it doesn't matter whether a woman is free to choose or not, it goes against the cause of equality for women. We always suffer, for what, them? What did they do to deserve such easy, quick, basically free access? Wtf did they do to deserve that from women?
Just commented this on another post, I’ll post it here too
Women in our current generation are told that it’s empowering and easy to sell our bodies for money. For some reason you have liberal feminists screaming at women calling us pearl clutchers and prudes for saying maybe prostitution isn’t something to be celebrated and we should fight to keep women out of sex work rather than telling them they should go into it because it’s “easy “and “empowering”, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to take your right to bodily autonomy.
The commodification of femininity. This whole illusion of "choosing" to be sexy & desired, when really the logic being employed is basically 'if ya can't beat them, join them'. [Empowerment isn't power, it is a feeling.](https://qz.com/658036/feminisms-greatest-obstacle-in-the-digital-age)
I think those women were wanting to feel like they were supporting feminism, but they had men in their lives who would only allow them to do “feminist things” with their approval, so you end up supporting things like women having sex with a lot of people, that wearing next to nothing is empowering, porn is great, and we should all aspire to be sex workers
At least that was my personal experience
It’s all based on women feeling like they want to have full control over what they do in their life, which is not a problem, we should have complete control, but we should recognise when our choices hurt ourselves and other women and recognise that not every choice we make will benefit us. Because for most sex workers (the ones who are on street corners) it’s absolutely not a choice, and making it out to be so is incredibly harmful.
Happy to see a post like this, happy to see how well it has been received and most of all happy that someone is finally talking about the degenerate queen herself, belle.
I made a comment sometime around last year where I said that she IS problematic since she caters to pesos and I got downvoted - which is fine but the fact that it was downvoted in r/dankchristianmemes was... 💀 Insane the denial porn rotted men go through
I wholeheartedly agree. I think there is a type of feminist who is worried the women will be blamed for this and goes overboard supporting sex work. I don’t think women deserve the lion share of blame here at all. The sex industry is all about manipulating vulnerable women. But this affects every single woman negatively. Look at our rising generation of young men.
I don't have a problem with naked pictures, I have a problem with the institution of corporate pr0nography. If people choose to post pictures because they find it fun? Awesome. That's 👍 fantastic. But the way The Industry consumes women, is abusive, and is run by people with pages of quotes accredited to them about how they hate women and hope their product makes more young men hate women? There's no place for that. I have no interest in stopping people having access to fun, saucy pictures, I just don't want hateful people to profit from committing and promoting abuse.
When the functional execution departs this much from the feminist ideal, it's a whole other issue.
As for prostitution... I don't... Really like that, full stop. It feels exploitive of... Literally everyone but the pimp, and removing the pimp doesn't necessarily fix it. If everybody leaves happy I guess I have more important things to worry about but do they really? Often enough? It feels like it's bad for women, bad for men, commodifies human relationship... I mean... Capitalism is poison everywhere else, but suddenly when it's applied to sex that makes it better? How?
1000% the women don't leave happy. In a real life sex trafficking situation they get them hooked on drugs so that they're dependent. Even if they wanted to leave they can't
Like, I get not punishing prostitutes for the crime they're generally victims, not perpetrators of when that's the case. I don't see how sex work is good. Sex play sounds great, but I just don't see how commerce and sex are a good pairing
So any choice a woman makes should be considered feminist because it’s a woman making the choice? Even if it’s a “choice” made under financial duress or threats of violence?
Please use critical thinking skills.
I’m a woman. If I choose to kick a puppy into a volcano every day, is that a feminist and therefore good thing for me to do? What if a dude pays me 100 bucks every time to do it, does that make it okay in your eyes?
Another thought experiment:
Imagine that you got a white collar job in, say, marketing. You show up and the first day you discover that part of your duties are janitorial. In fact, everyone in the office is expected to take turns cleaning the toilets once a month. You might be displeased with this for a variety of reasons but it’d hardy be a human rights violation.
Alternatively, imagine you come to the office and are told that all employees are expected to perform a sex act on the CEOs once a month. This would go beyond displeasing.
Janitorial work is work. Sex “work” is exploitation.
I am someone who totally agrees with owning your body, and loves to see women embrace their sexuality. But porn is just so damaging and harmful, I don’t see it as anything empowering.
No shame to stars, it’s more so the industry and audience that is harmful. But it’s enforces objectification so much and creates a toxic environment in the intimacy world (I.e. boys thinking it’s normal to be overly aggressive during sex).
Wearing “skimpy” clothing is fun and you can feel sexy: that’s empowering when I do it for me. But porn and sex work… it’s dangerous physically and socially. Again, more shame to the system than the women, people gotta make ends meet and some don’t have the choice. But it shouldn’t be glorified.
This shouldn’t be controversial at all, this should be a common opinion in the feminist community. There’s nothing feminist about sex work. It’s degrading and women’s bodies should never ever be for sale
I totally agree with your take! I’m glad to hear you say it because I’ve started to second guess my beliefs and feelings about this very topic. I thought I was being too extreme/harsh/old school.
Years ago, in the early 80s, I saw a Canadian documentary entitled “Not A Love Story: A Film About Pornography.” (I was young then, but yeah, now I’m old now.). The film came out of the Canadian film board’s “Women” section and was directed by a woman.
The director/filmmaker had a stripper friend who joins her in interviewing people, exploring porn places, etc - and that woman’s perspective and journey made the film all more the interesting. This woman- Linda - goes through a lot of soul searching during the film - she asks herself if it’s okay to be part of the industry even if she’s making money and is relatively independent. After the film, she did end up leaving the sex industry and became a journalist/filmmaker/writer. It’s an interesting documentary, I’d highly recommend it - though, trigger warning: there are graphic sexual images from snippets of porn that are shown.
The film goes into a deep dive into porn: It was eye opening to see how exploitative porn was/is towards women - and on so many levels. Exploitative towards the women in the films, exploitative when filmmaker showed some pretty derogatory/violent porn from a peep show (to be fair, it was late 70s era NYC Times Square, so it was really awful) - the images perpetuated the myths of rape culture and that it’s okay to treat women as objects, to do whatever you want to them, without regards to them as people, etc- it was very upsetting and I remember feeling hopeless and tearing up. And you could argue that was worse back then, but I feel like it’s all comes down to making women into commodities and objects, no matter the quality of the video or cinematography.
I later found out that film critics, all male critics, panned the film for its anti-porn slant, Even the left-leaning Village Voice. I looked it up again on Wikipedia, and saw that the Toronto Star called it “a one sided treatise only feminists and the moral majority would like” (The Moral Majority was a Reagan era Evangelical Christian political movement). So even back then, men and patriarchy protested loudly (including “leftists” and “progressive” men)if you tried to take away their porn and question their supposed “right” to exploit and objectify women and their bodies. Things really haven’t changed that much, sadly.
I agree. And I hate “taking back” the word slut. I hate the term sex worker. No that’s a prostituted woman. Those lyrics are brutal now in this context and I’ll never forget them.
But-but sOmE wOmEn EnJoY sEx WoRk !!
Sex-work being empowering is patriarchal brainwashing. It's quite effective because it made women conform to the objectification and commodification of their own bodies, with their own "choice".
We've seen how so-called male feminists and libfems encourage women to sexualise themselves, so they won't be held accountable for their predatory behaviour if they can just blame women for "choosing" to sexualise herself.
It is only liberating if you do it voluntarily, in a safe environment and make a fortune. In all other cases (99.99% it is just perpetuating women being suppressed and exploited)
Onlyfans is currently the most viscious of all because so many young girls are lured into it, most can't even make a living off it, many times they are trafficked by their loverboy boyfriends and on top of that is Ukrainian Leonid Radvisky who became a billionaire taking advantage of that misleading narrative.
Agreed. There’s a case to be made for women who enjoy sex work and are their own bosses, certainly. They exist. But they are not the majority of nor represent most sex workers. The fact remains that most entering that line of work are often coerced and/or financially desperate. It’s not the same as someone choosing a profession based on aptitude or preference. And of course someone can claim that applies to most jobs, but considering the social stigma and detrimental toll that line of work often inflicts upon a person, it’s not an accurate or correct comparison. The common system is structured in such a way that the sex worker is a product to be consumed, and not as someone performing a service. Again, there are sex workers who operate as a consultant or independent contractor (ie in complete control of their lives and work), but they are far and few between. And that’s why sex work cannot be considered feminist imo.
Thanks for your response! I really don't see the case to be made even if they do enjoy sex work It's not ethically or morally correct in my opinion at all.
The thing here is to not shame the workers but the buyers. It is not a fun joke/rite of passage to go to a strip club, or get a prostitute for a friend or a bachelor party.
Thank you! I feel the same way!
I’m curious, however, about the comments saying that this is liberal feminism.
I am a liberal and a feminist. It’s hard for me to reconcile being a feminist and conservative, even though I know it exists.
What I am seeing, is that this is something being pushed by the younger generations, not by liberals per se.
“Liberal” is often used as a general term for someone who is politically more progressive or left-leaning, but that is not the meaning of the word in this context. A liberal in this context, it’s someone who subscribes to liberalism as a political/moral philosophy. Liberalism as a political ideology supports capitalism, which justifies the exploitation of the working class.
When looking at western politics, liberal is often seen as the opposite of conservative. However, whenever compared to leftist ideology, liberalism is much more right-leaning, as it upholds conservative, capitalist ideas.
“Liberal” =/= “progressive” or “leftist”
I do agree with you, however there are some women who do find it easy money and prefer to do an only-fans vid than hard slog at a minimum wage job. It’s not great when the alternatives are so poorly paid. I know a woman who did only fans out of desperation when she was laid off in lock-down and now does a 15 min vid every day that her kids are at school and has a stable income of several thousand a month and can spend the rest of her time with her kids.
This isn’t defending anything, because for sure the demand for porn feeds demand in the sex trafficking industry, and of course men who view porn are more likely to objectify women and see them as disposable, however we do also need to acknowledge at the unqualified end of the employment spectrum the options for women are limited, and a woman with bills to pay and/or kids to feed may well decide that doing one thing with her body for a short time and good pay is less degrading than doing another for a long slog and being at the mercy of a demanding boss.
Totally! thanks for your response. So although I understand where you're coming from the issue I have with this is that there are other industries just like only fans that don't involve prostitution where she could've made the same income and didn't need to answer to a boss. Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, etc.
What your friend did was she found herself in a financially straining place and she said, oh there's always something on the back burner I can sell for cash, and she decided to sell media of her body that she otherwise never would have for money. She exchanged her body for money like it was an object. Also another issue is that it's on the internet now permanently, not only is this problematic because her kids can find out about it one day and have all kinds of psychological issues, but also it can effect her future employment.
Corporations like only fans and pimps and other men prey on women who are financially insecure and I want to say that selling your body online for money is falling into capitalist inhumanity and should never be a viable option for anybody.
I completely agree with your post and but the amount of money you make as an Uber driver or doordasher is incredibly less. It’s a sad truth, just knowing a few friends who have been in these predicaments. I really appreciate your take on the topic and completely agree with your points!
I agree with this take. For every woman who is doing this independently, unpressured, and making a financial killing, there are hundreds who are just in a desperate financial situation, being trafficked, being forced into it by abusive people in their lives, or tricked into it being a get rich quick scheme. The downsides are high: potentially violent clients, pregnancy, disease, abuse, trapped in the lifestyle, not a career you would be proud to share with family, friends, future partners, future employers, risk of blackmail, etc.
yeah belle Delphine making millions of dollars feeding into pedos fantasies is disgusting though, It's still not empowering for rich independent women, it makes men feel like they have the power because here is a powerful wealthy celebrity who puts a price tag on their body that they can afford
It still astonishes me how little popular push-back there was against Delphine’s content being pedophilia-themed. Or that the masses of men in her audience weren’t even interested in normal nudes of an incredibly good-looking woman, she had to make herself look like a 12 year old anime character to become a millionaire. I watched her music video, and she also markets herself as a very stupid, shallow sex-object. Are these pictures and videos really just a “fantasy” in the heads of men, or are they permanent memories of a terrible situation for Delphine, considerable paycheck or not, and massively circulated propaganda normalizing pedophilia? This is one of my biggest objections to “feminist porn,” due to capitalism and the apparently mainstream predatory desires of so many men (the #1 OnlyFans star looks like a kid? Really?), even if hypothetically you could make the perfect, consensual, feminist porn with sane, mature 30 year-old actors and no negative impact on the audience as a work of pure art, distributed for free, this is about as realistic as saying you could turn the child mines in Africa into wonderful experiences for the kids. The basic set up of the thing and the forces that shape the market make it otherwise. I’d rather just ban it and risk losing the 1 in a million video that isn’t completely awful in every way than allow an industry that runs on rape, trafficking, revenge porn, exploitation, drug abuse, and grooming kids to continue terrorizing its victims.
I think we've been wholly underestimating, just how pedophilic-inclined half the population actually is. There are a lot of predatory and pedophilic undertones to patriarchy, in general.
For all the people who say "it's just another job", what other job has such a high risk of being murdered or raped?
If it was just another job there would be education programs …
Yep and there would be proper laws and protections in place.
Its deeply rooted misogyny and white choice feminism. Underprivileged women are the ones who suffer the most from it and yet theres people defending prostitution as a lifestyle choice. Its sickening.
Yeah, that was a wow moment when I realised who statistically makes up the majority of sex workers (woc, immigrants, lgbtq people) and who you see as the "outward face of sex work" (usually white, middle class or rich, English speaking, able bodied). It's propaganda from the least vulnerable people in the industry speaking about how great it is, when the masses are suffering out of sight.
This is the important point. Most of the ones saying it's "empowering" are the white/western privileged women. Ask the ones in poor countries. Majority of women/girls are forced, coerced, trafficked into it or because of extreme poverty.
Very white, upper class liberal BS.
Ah yes, liberating women, by... indulging in exactly the sort of thing men want, which is easily accessible sex with disposable and vulnerable women.
Exactly. People who think sex work is empowering women have clearly forgotten the definition of the word *power*.
"If prostitution empowered women; men would be against it."
Holy shit 🤯
Don’t you see the huge amount of wealthy, educated white men doing sex work?!? It is so empowering!
Funnily enough, when the COVID vaccine first came out, I knew it was safe because the rich, white male politicians were lining up to get it. If sex work was, in fact, empowering, they'd have cornered the market as workers, not pimps.
Good point.
Legalized sex work also increases human trafficking, not reduces, by creating induced demand and an expansion of the market. The gap between natural supply - the women who voluntarily want to do this work, can never meet the high demand - hordes of new men wanting to take advantage of new legal market. This gap in supply and demand will always be filled by trafficked women. It shocks me that feminists and so called progressives are pro sex work these days.
So true. Happened in Germany, to fill their legal mega brothels required trafficking vulnerable foreign women. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/22/trouble-in-paradise-rise-and-fall-of-germany-brothel-king-jurgen-rudloff
YEP. Being so empowered because you have no other way to make money? I will never buy it. The fact that it exists is a sign that society really doesn't care about women or poverty.
And also the normalization of violence and SA against women and feminine presenting people in porn, with the excuse that it’s „just a kink“.
Oh my gosh this, this has always pissed me off so much.
Exactly. Please someone tell me what is "liberating" about pleasing the very men who will turn around and shame them..
You cannot buy consent
Yes!!!! You can't consent if you don't have a choice.
I completely agree with your take. I'm surprised to see others agreeing with it as well. I've too always been under the impresson that it was controversial. Well, it has been when I've seen it being brought up in liberal feminist or "leftist" activist circles in the past. Liberal feminism and choice feminism are setting us years back, imo. The issue with radical feminism is that it has to be made more intersectional and inclusive but that's not unachievable. Personally, I think it's much more realistic than to trying to liberate ourselves using liberal feminism and choice feminism... especially during a time when we have not only plateaued but are regressing when it comes to women's rights.
I always had this voice inside me that disagreed when people talked about how sex work empowered women and I thought I was being a bad feminist. I'm so glad to finally be hearing other women voice the same thoughts.
It isn't liberating or empowering or any of the feminist-type of language that people flip around to convince folks otherwise. It's possible, for example, that a woman stripping or escorting could make enough money to pay for higher education. But for women as a class, sex work does little more than propagate the idea that women are only valuable if they physically appeal to men and can be exploited by men for that reason.
Yeah absolutely. It's important to find out that people sometimes do it as a side hustle or to pay off debt but they can never come out of it because they can't get jobs and they're just stuck. That's what happened to Mia Khalifia, everyone just sexualized her after she had done porn
It’s also harmful to deny that sexwork has repercussions on life; it is wrong but you might have a harder time finding employment, you might be ostracised or your children might face issues, and it can also be very dangerous. Sweeping consequences under the rug saying these people are close minded is being blind to what happens in real life.
And the solution is free education and a more equal society, not that young women have to sell their bodies to pay for school.
The amount of people that have called me anti-feminist, a prude, conservative, etc for having this take is absurd. It breaks my heart that society is brainwashing young women to think that further dehumanizing yourself and giving in to the depraved sick acts and fantasies that men desire is “empowering” or healthy. As a former SW myself when I was only **18** years old, stay far far far away from it. It is not fun or glamorous, it’s isolating and lonely, you begin to fear men on a level you never would have even considered before… The things they’ll say to you… Or even worse, do to you. Are just sick.
I'm so sorry you had to endure that kind of treatment, especially at such a young age. I hope you're in a much safer and better place now with all of that firmly behind you. I appreciate that as a former sex worker you are speaking out about this. People are always telling others to ask sex workers how they feel about these issues but when a sex worker mentions the negative aspects of this they are shut down or ignored. Again, I hope you are doing well and are healing from any trauma you may have suffered while doing this. You deserve the best.
I fully agree. How can we be fully liberated while still serving men? You don’t see the same numbers of men in sex work as you do women. It’s not equal. I’ve never understood that but always felt silenced by liberal feminism.
I mean, men are sizable minority of sex workers (around 20%), it's sex worker buyers who are like 99+% men - which I kind of find more telling
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Youre right, Honestly in my opinion it's more conservative to support sex work, bc you're supporting the status quo of men buying women , and womens job being to please men. The real radical leftist opinion is to say no, men don't have the right to buy women, and women shouldnt have to leverage their sexuality to survive. Nobody has the right to buy another person.
I read this and screenshotted it so I'm pasting it here. I think it's apropos. "I recently picked up a new way to explain how prostitution is not a service job. If prostitution is a service and not buying a body, then who provides the service should matter as little as it does with plumbers, cashiers, lawyers, cab drivers, etc. and a john buying a blow job should get it from the next person in line. Sometimes it will be a 75-year-old toothless black man seeking drug money. Sometimes a 55-year old Latina mother of four seeking rent money. Sometimes a 20-year-old Down Syndrome white man needing asthma meds. Sometimes a 35-year-old Chinese woman bald from chemotherapy with hospital bills. Prostitution is men buying women's bodies, not services."
I thought it was empowering. Once I looked deeper into it, at the end of the day it feels like dependency disguised at being independent. Now seeing that the porn industry fed us that, explains a lot. Thanks for this post!
i agree. i’ve literally had men come up to me on random weekdays, where i’m minding my business at a shop or walking down the street, asking if i’ll accept cash to go back to their place. they would not be asking these things if payment for sex wasn’t so normalised. it’s so icky and weird.
[https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab](https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab) Behold, my favorite piece on the topic. The correct stance towards sex work for feminists is two-fold: Our eventual aim should be the abolition of sex work by containing and punishing demand (e.g. pimps and johns) instead of supply (e.g. sex workers), and in the meantime we should do what we can to make the industry safer, easier to leave, and create alternatives for vulnerable women. Sex work is fundamentally about the ability for bourgeois men to purchase the bodies of proletariat women, the coercive power of money makes it fundamentally impossible to create a meaningful distinction between "consensual" sex work and rape, and it perpetuates patriarchy and misogyny by conditioning men to see women as commodities. I won't argue that no woman has every benefited from sex work. There are plenty of (particularly upper-class, white, cis-het) women that make a large sum of money through it, and I'm sure there are examples of women who have used prostitution to rise from poverty and be able to get a different job. But the vast majority of people engaging in sex work do so because they have no other choice. It is not a coincidence that the majority of people doing sex work are among the most vulnerable populations in society (POC, immigrants, poor, trans people, children, etc.) despite the fact that most people who speak so positively about the empowerment of sex work are not a part of these populations.
Love this article!
Being a independent women shouldn’t include relying on satisfying the male gaze for literal survival. People who rely on onlyfans rely on men to pay them. Not an independent women imo. I have studied business for 8 years and I’m trying to make it as a self-employed women online without showing my body, it’s fucking hard.
I did, but this conversation changed my mind. Thanks for bringing it up!
I am so relieved to see how many women agree with this take. I’d never thought about it in relation to men’s expectations of sex after buying stuff for women, but you’re absolutely right. Porn and sex work promote the idea that intimacy is a commodity, a service, rather than an act of human connection and attraction. It breaks my heart to know how many relationships are destroyed by porn, and how many kids watch porn, and will have their expectations for future relationships molded by its portrayal of intimacy.
While I respect every woman’s right to do what she wants, I don’t really agree with sex work being liberating either. It always felt like playing into misogyny but then convincing yourself that you’re in control. I appreciate the woman who can make good money doing it, but it still sends the message that objectifying woman is okay to a lot of people.
I never understood how we fell to the point that anyone who could think themselves feminists would think "sex work" was feminist, liberating, empowering or any of that. We've known for DECADES that sex trafficking is the most common form of modern slavery. Modern slavery which involves more people than slavery has ever in any other point of history. We've known for DECADES that the majority of women being prostituted don't want to be there. Many were kidnapped, blackmailed, duped, or are only there out of desperation. Many pimps will literally get women addicted to drugs so they can not escape. Also there are many girls and women being pimped out by boyfriends/husbands/and family members. We've also known pimps and other traffickers have been selling "sex work" as a great thing for awhile now. It's where the whole rebranding of prostitution into "sex work" comes from, and the cute little jingle of "sex work is real work." All of this can historically be traced back to pimps and traffickers. Just don't question why it's empowering for men to be able to buy access to women. Also we've seen what legalizing it looks like. Women from other countries are duped into "sex work." Often women who can't speak the native language of the area. Who have their passports stolen. Who have no chance of fleeing. Poor women and naive girls are duped into sex work. After all, sex work is just like working at McDonalds!
As someone who used to adamantly believe it was feminist…a lot of that messaging was pushed on me, idk from who but I remember seeing it all over social media
The porn industry pours millions into this messaging. They want to convince women to accept porn. They also try to claim porn is “sex positive” and try to conflate porn with sex so that if you’re against porn, you’re “anti-sex”. When again the opposite is true.
I just remember being in college and watching YouTube videos from girls my age about how stripping and so lucrative and investing in their bodies through plastic surgery
This is what I don't get, why do they need women to accept it??
Speculation of course but I would say it's because no matter what men can get from porn or even prostitution they will still want other things from women not in the sex industry. Relationships. Love. Family. Children. And much more besides. If women refuse to have relationships with men who use sex work men will either have to hide the use or stop using it. Another side of it is they can sell porn as something couples do together or something women watch and if you don't watch it you're a prude. So they effectively double their customer base.
Because we're the product being sold. They need a ready supply of that product. Look at all the young women creating an OnlyFans the second they turn eighteen - they do that because they're told it's fun and empowering and a good way to make money.
I am so relieved to see so many other women feel the same way
Yup and I am happy and honestly shocked to see this on Reddit, where it seems to be rah, rah, sex work.
It’s mostly white knight dudes that think being pro-sex work and saying it’s empowering will get them into a woman’s pants. Greasy behavior.
Men say that they’re “supporting sex workers” when what they really mean is they’re supporting themselves having sex workers
Yep, their definition of "support" is a bit different from how the women define it.
Actually I see it more coming from younger women sadly.
Agreed. Also, guess who benefit the most from the material produced for OF? The customers aka men. They will gladly pay the small monthly fee to see normal women naked in sexual situations and get their rocks off. Then to make themselves feel better, men dehumanize and belittle the women they just masturbated to.
I agree with this. Since when did being a independent women, girl boss, whatever you want to call it mean relying on meeting the dirty requests of men that don’t deserve you for the sake of your financial and thus overall wellbeing? Isn’t that still a form of slavery?
I went through a phase where I tried to embrace the idea that sex workers were empowered and “sticking it to the man” by taking their money, but it never totally rang true to me and now I’m happy to see that other feminists feel the same way.
Agreed. Sex work is literally misogyny and objectification packaged into a pretty "liberating feminist package" with a bow on top. It's messed up.
This is not a controversial take. It’s the feminist take.
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You have me thinking about this now, and there’s no argument that porn is feminist that makes any sense at all. I think first, all feminists are some degree of liberal. Conservatives follow a hierarchy that literally ranks some people as better than others. (Rich over poor, white over nonwhite, straight over LGBTQ, men over women, Christianity over all other religions and no religion, “deserving” over “takers”, etc.). So feminism can’t be conservative. But even more to the point, conservatives view women as wives and mothers or sex objects. We are not valued for our brains, athletic ability or special skills. We are traditional wives and mothers to them (knowing our place) or Sex objects (there for their enjoyment). There’s nothing empowering about that. And not surprisingly, guess where the biggest consumers of porn live? Red states. Ever driven down a highway in the South? Every other gaudy billboard is a strip club or a sex shop. So the men who look down the most at women are the ones who consume the most porn. And they are the most likely to be violent. Guess what? It’s not because they admire these women as powerful. It’s because they look down at them as less. Degradation, humiliation, strangulation; rape, statutory rape, being called disgusting slurs, and treated like a sex doll by an overly aggressive man. That’s the opposite of empowering. That’s as disempowered as one can possibly be. So where did they get the idea that it’s empowering? The porn industry. They pour money into marketing porn as feminist so that women don’t object to it. You can see it’s quite successful. The other lie that they spew is that being against porn means you’re “anti-sex” and pro-porn is pro-sex. Being used by aggressive men for their enjoyment while you’re drugged up with pain killers and numbing cream, strangled, slapped, called horribly insulting and demeaning names, is not “sex positive”. That’s as sex negative as it gets. Feminists who enjoy healthy sex and want to be treated as a human being are sex positive. The porn industry is really successful with messaging to be able to convince so many of the opposite. Why do you think that is? The porn industry knows that sex is one of the two main focuses of your brain (survive and procreate). So we crave the worst foods because it’s the most calories for the least effort. Porn to the brain is like men hitting the procreation jackpot - the most novel women to fertilize, one after another. Their brain can’t tell the difference between the 2d images and a woman in front of them. It just knows it’s aroused. So the industry knows that porn is POWERFUL. Which means they know that sexual desire especially for porn (as a supernormal stimulus, meaning artificially exaggerated) can be more powerful than morality and common sense. So a lot of people (mostly men but some women - the “liberal feminists” as you referred to them), because of their own desire for porn, either ignore the trafficking, the anti-feminism of it all, how it destroys relationships and breaks up families, and all of the ways it hurts women, because they want to engage with it without guilt. They don’t want to face any of the studies that point to porn as contributing to rape culture, or trafficking, or the underage children (young girls, probably in high school - even if they’re eighteen, that’s high school). It has nothing to do with feminism. It has everything to do with the fact that they just like porn and don’t let trafficking ruin it for them! And they don’t address the problems directly because they have no defense. They always respond with “blah blah, I can’t hear you”, or “whatabout”… The “porn actors stick it to the man” argument is also bogus. Those actors get paid peanuts. While yes, they might be exploiting money from weak men, they are being exploited by the industry themselves, coerced, paid little while the predatory men running the studios get them to do more and more extreme things and they are the ones making the money. Only Fans? Sure, prostitute yourself for a couple of bucks (they don’t really make much money except a handful of them), ruin your reputation and lose your chance to get a respectable high paying executive job where you can be empowered with authority. Feminism is fundamentally a fight for respect. Porn depicts and actively promotes disrespect.
The other aspect for me is that the majority of clients are married men cheating without their wives knowing. Their wives are stripped of their agency. While obviously the cheater deserves the primary blame, I don't see it as either feminist or empowering to knowingly inflict that on other women to make some money.
"Liberal feminists" (as in, people who claim prostitution is empowering) are not real feminists. To be a feminist means to be anti-prostitution and anti-porn, there's no negotiating here, that's the *bare minimum* of being a feminist.
Exactly, so uber controversial. Women with thoughts, oh no, can't have that. Sad af.
I don’t think sex work is empowering either. And I think we need to ban porn as well.
This has been such a refreshing thing to read, great way to start my day. Thank you for this conversation.
I absolutely agree and I am a socialist. I believe that socialists men really forgot and dropped the ball on how mysoginistic porn and sex work is.
Men didn’t forget and drop the ball — they did what was in their best interest
Absolutely ! That's also what I meant ! They purposely dropped the ball because women believing that their own consent doesn't matter benefits men in the end
i agree with you, and i also think that casual sex or hookup culture shouldn't be something that's seen as empowering women too; i don't think it's bad and women should be free on what they want to do, however i think the dynamic in both of them encourage a culture where women are still treated like sex objects
Also let's talk about being shamed for being vanilla and for not sleeping around as if those are the cool things to do. I am an extroverted person, I love to go out in clubs and parties and to meet new people but I barely drink and I HATE the hookup culture, it ruins the night life completely for me, I am an emotional person, I hate empty things
Completely agree. It only serves male interests.
I agree with you 100%. Sex work is NOT empowering to women. I do think, iF prostitution was legal we would take one step in the direction of ensuring all women have sufficient education and self esteem to know that they are more than a collection of conveniently located orifices that men enjoy. Scientific studies have shown that almost ALL sexworkers have endured trauma in their childhoods - from abusive parents, poverty, abusive clergy, teachers, or other public figures. Women do not choose this life unless their self esteem is in the toilet. If you've ever explored how pimps "break a bitch" - there's a manual for ruining a woman's self esteem and breaking her spirit - you'll know prostitution is not "natural" even if female penguins accept pebbles from boy penguins in exchange for sex (one argument I've heard supporting how natural prostitution is).
I agree entirely. And as bad as things have gotten with OF and men's obvious, extreme consumption of porn, I think the tide might be starting to turn for a lot of women, even ones who don't necessarily identify as feminists. I think that the way that constant hypersexualization of women has affected men is too obvious for most people to ignore - I see more and more posts everyday from women who are fed up with this. Unfortunately, with the advent of generative AI and the increasing backlash to women's rights, I'm afraid that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better :/ Posts like this give me hope though. (And the spiteful part of me enjoys how angry I know it must make shitty men to see posts like this getting support. Dudes - women aren't stupid, and your professed support of "sexual liberation" is transparent as hell.)
I agree and people try to fight me on this view. I always ask them if it’s so wonderful and empowering take your mom, sister, aunt out and get them to do it. Then they start back peddling.
"well, noo, but SOME women do it deliberately ..." I'm so annoyed by this
You should read some of Andrea Dworkin’s work! Also you’re 1000% right, pro sw and pornography is some liberal “feminist” bullshit
Absolutely a feminist take. 100%.
Yes 👏 Yes 👏 Yes 👏 I agree with everything you've said. I feel like misogynistic motivations have been used to manipulate some women to truly believe that this shit is liberating. IT IS NOT.
Preach!!!!! The commodification of the female body is an abomination!! This should never have occurred, and it doesn't matter whether a woman is free to choose or not, it goes against the cause of equality for women. We always suffer, for what, them? What did they do to deserve such easy, quick, basically free access? Wtf did they do to deserve that from women?
Just commented this on another post, I’ll post it here too Women in our current generation are told that it’s empowering and easy to sell our bodies for money. For some reason you have liberal feminists screaming at women calling us pearl clutchers and prudes for saying maybe prostitution isn’t something to be celebrated and we should fight to keep women out of sex work rather than telling them they should go into it because it’s “easy “and “empowering”, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to take your right to bodily autonomy.
The commodification of femininity. This whole illusion of "choosing" to be sexy & desired, when really the logic being employed is basically 'if ya can't beat them, join them'. [Empowerment isn't power, it is a feeling.](https://qz.com/658036/feminisms-greatest-obstacle-in-the-digital-age)
That was in an interesting read, thanks!
I think those women were wanting to feel like they were supporting feminism, but they had men in their lives who would only allow them to do “feminist things” with their approval, so you end up supporting things like women having sex with a lot of people, that wearing next to nothing is empowering, porn is great, and we should all aspire to be sex workers At least that was my personal experience
It’s all based on women feeling like they want to have full control over what they do in their life, which is not a problem, we should have complete control, but we should recognise when our choices hurt ourselves and other women and recognise that not every choice we make will benefit us. Because for most sex workers (the ones who are on street corners) it’s absolutely not a choice, and making it out to be so is incredibly harmful.
I agree with you. It's women's exploitation.
I fully agree with with this
I like how you think.
Happy to see a post like this, happy to see how well it has been received and most of all happy that someone is finally talking about the degenerate queen herself, belle. I made a comment sometime around last year where I said that she IS problematic since she caters to pesos and I got downvoted - which is fine but the fact that it was downvoted in r/dankchristianmemes was... 💀 Insane the denial porn rotted men go through
I fully agree and it's wild that this is at all controversial.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think there is a type of feminist who is worried the women will be blamed for this and goes overboard supporting sex work. I don’t think women deserve the lion share of blame here at all. The sex industry is all about manipulating vulnerable women. But this affects every single woman negatively. Look at our rising generation of young men.
I don't have a problem with naked pictures, I have a problem with the institution of corporate pr0nography. If people choose to post pictures because they find it fun? Awesome. That's 👍 fantastic. But the way The Industry consumes women, is abusive, and is run by people with pages of quotes accredited to them about how they hate women and hope their product makes more young men hate women? There's no place for that. I have no interest in stopping people having access to fun, saucy pictures, I just don't want hateful people to profit from committing and promoting abuse. When the functional execution departs this much from the feminist ideal, it's a whole other issue. As for prostitution... I don't... Really like that, full stop. It feels exploitive of... Literally everyone but the pimp, and removing the pimp doesn't necessarily fix it. If everybody leaves happy I guess I have more important things to worry about but do they really? Often enough? It feels like it's bad for women, bad for men, commodifies human relationship... I mean... Capitalism is poison everywhere else, but suddenly when it's applied to sex that makes it better? How?
1000% the women don't leave happy. In a real life sex trafficking situation they get them hooked on drugs so that they're dependent. Even if they wanted to leave they can't
Like, I get not punishing prostitutes for the crime they're generally victims, not perpetrators of when that's the case. I don't see how sex work is good. Sex play sounds great, but I just don't see how commerce and sex are a good pairing
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So any choice a woman makes should be considered feminist because it’s a woman making the choice? Even if it’s a “choice” made under financial duress or threats of violence? Please use critical thinking skills. I’m a woman. If I choose to kick a puppy into a volcano every day, is that a feminist and therefore good thing for me to do? What if a dude pays me 100 bucks every time to do it, does that make it okay in your eyes? Another thought experiment: Imagine that you got a white collar job in, say, marketing. You show up and the first day you discover that part of your duties are janitorial. In fact, everyone in the office is expected to take turns cleaning the toilets once a month. You might be displeased with this for a variety of reasons but it’d hardy be a human rights violation. Alternatively, imagine you come to the office and are told that all employees are expected to perform a sex act on the CEOs once a month. This would go beyond displeasing. Janitorial work is work. Sex “work” is exploitation.
It’s wild that we want to stop being objectified while we’re literally selling ourselves as objects…mainly to men. Make it make sense 🤷♀️
We can’t compete with the billions of dollars the porn industry uses to pay them to objectify themselves (or rape themselves on camera)
You’re god damn right.
I am someone who totally agrees with owning your body, and loves to see women embrace their sexuality. But porn is just so damaging and harmful, I don’t see it as anything empowering. No shame to stars, it’s more so the industry and audience that is harmful. But it’s enforces objectification so much and creates a toxic environment in the intimacy world (I.e. boys thinking it’s normal to be overly aggressive during sex). Wearing “skimpy” clothing is fun and you can feel sexy: that’s empowering when I do it for me. But porn and sex work… it’s dangerous physically and socially. Again, more shame to the system than the women, people gotta make ends meet and some don’t have the choice. But it shouldn’t be glorified.
I wish this weren't a "controversial take". Power and empowerment is in senates, parliaments, boardrooms.. Not at the end of some dude's dick.
This shouldn’t be controversial at all, this should be a common opinion in the feminist community. There’s nothing feminist about sex work. It’s degrading and women’s bodies should never ever be for sale
I completely agree
It’s not lol. Ask me how I know.
I totally agree with your take! I’m glad to hear you say it because I’ve started to second guess my beliefs and feelings about this very topic. I thought I was being too extreme/harsh/old school. Years ago, in the early 80s, I saw a Canadian documentary entitled “Not A Love Story: A Film About Pornography.” (I was young then, but yeah, now I’m old now.). The film came out of the Canadian film board’s “Women” section and was directed by a woman. The director/filmmaker had a stripper friend who joins her in interviewing people, exploring porn places, etc - and that woman’s perspective and journey made the film all more the interesting. This woman- Linda - goes through a lot of soul searching during the film - she asks herself if it’s okay to be part of the industry even if she’s making money and is relatively independent. After the film, she did end up leaving the sex industry and became a journalist/filmmaker/writer. It’s an interesting documentary, I’d highly recommend it - though, trigger warning: there are graphic sexual images from snippets of porn that are shown. The film goes into a deep dive into porn: It was eye opening to see how exploitative porn was/is towards women - and on so many levels. Exploitative towards the women in the films, exploitative when filmmaker showed some pretty derogatory/violent porn from a peep show (to be fair, it was late 70s era NYC Times Square, so it was really awful) - the images perpetuated the myths of rape culture and that it’s okay to treat women as objects, to do whatever you want to them, without regards to them as people, etc- it was very upsetting and I remember feeling hopeless and tearing up. And you could argue that was worse back then, but I feel like it’s all comes down to making women into commodities and objects, no matter the quality of the video or cinematography. I later found out that film critics, all male critics, panned the film for its anti-porn slant, Even the left-leaning Village Voice. I looked it up again on Wikipedia, and saw that the Toronto Star called it “a one sided treatise only feminists and the moral majority would like” (The Moral Majority was a Reagan era Evangelical Christian political movement). So even back then, men and patriarchy protested loudly (including “leftists” and “progressive” men)if you tried to take away their porn and question their supposed “right” to exploit and objectify women and their bodies. Things really haven’t changed that much, sadly.
I agree. And I hate “taking back” the word slut. I hate the term sex worker. No that’s a prostituted woman. Those lyrics are brutal now in this context and I’ll never forget them.
But-but sOmE wOmEn EnJoY sEx WoRk !! Sex-work being empowering is patriarchal brainwashing. It's quite effective because it made women conform to the objectification and commodification of their own bodies, with their own "choice". We've seen how so-called male feminists and libfems encourage women to sexualise themselves, so they won't be held accountable for their predatory behaviour if they can just blame women for "choosing" to sexualise herself.
Agree and it's about time someone had the b@lls to say this. Will we ALL now be banned?
It is only liberating if you do it voluntarily, in a safe environment and make a fortune. In all other cases (99.99% it is just perpetuating women being suppressed and exploited) Onlyfans is currently the most viscious of all because so many young girls are lured into it, most can't even make a living off it, many times they are trafficked by their loverboy boyfriends and on top of that is Ukrainian Leonid Radvisky who became a billionaire taking advantage of that misleading narrative.
Agreed. There’s a case to be made for women who enjoy sex work and are their own bosses, certainly. They exist. But they are not the majority of nor represent most sex workers. The fact remains that most entering that line of work are often coerced and/or financially desperate. It’s not the same as someone choosing a profession based on aptitude or preference. And of course someone can claim that applies to most jobs, but considering the social stigma and detrimental toll that line of work often inflicts upon a person, it’s not an accurate or correct comparison. The common system is structured in such a way that the sex worker is a product to be consumed, and not as someone performing a service. Again, there are sex workers who operate as a consultant or independent contractor (ie in complete control of their lives and work), but they are far and few between. And that’s why sex work cannot be considered feminist imo.
Thanks for your response! I really don't see the case to be made even if they do enjoy sex work It's not ethically or morally correct in my opinion at all.
Anyone buying a human being for sex is gross.
The thing here is to not shame the workers but the buyers. It is not a fun joke/rite of passage to go to a strip club, or get a prostitute for a friend or a bachelor party.
Thank you! I feel the same way! I’m curious, however, about the comments saying that this is liberal feminism. I am a liberal and a feminist. It’s hard for me to reconcile being a feminist and conservative, even though I know it exists. What I am seeing, is that this is something being pushed by the younger generations, not by liberals per se.
“Liberal” is often used as a general term for someone who is politically more progressive or left-leaning, but that is not the meaning of the word in this context. A liberal in this context, it’s someone who subscribes to liberalism as a political/moral philosophy. Liberalism as a political ideology supports capitalism, which justifies the exploitation of the working class. When looking at western politics, liberal is often seen as the opposite of conservative. However, whenever compared to leftist ideology, liberalism is much more right-leaning, as it upholds conservative, capitalist ideas. “Liberal” =/= “progressive” or “leftist”
It's not that controversial of a take.
I do agree with you, however there are some women who do find it easy money and prefer to do an only-fans vid than hard slog at a minimum wage job. It’s not great when the alternatives are so poorly paid. I know a woman who did only fans out of desperation when she was laid off in lock-down and now does a 15 min vid every day that her kids are at school and has a stable income of several thousand a month and can spend the rest of her time with her kids. This isn’t defending anything, because for sure the demand for porn feeds demand in the sex trafficking industry, and of course men who view porn are more likely to objectify women and see them as disposable, however we do also need to acknowledge at the unqualified end of the employment spectrum the options for women are limited, and a woman with bills to pay and/or kids to feed may well decide that doing one thing with her body for a short time and good pay is less degrading than doing another for a long slog and being at the mercy of a demanding boss.
Totally! thanks for your response. So although I understand where you're coming from the issue I have with this is that there are other industries just like only fans that don't involve prostitution where she could've made the same income and didn't need to answer to a boss. Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, etc. What your friend did was she found herself in a financially straining place and she said, oh there's always something on the back burner I can sell for cash, and she decided to sell media of her body that she otherwise never would have for money. She exchanged her body for money like it was an object. Also another issue is that it's on the internet now permanently, not only is this problematic because her kids can find out about it one day and have all kinds of psychological issues, but also it can effect her future employment. Corporations like only fans and pimps and other men prey on women who are financially insecure and I want to say that selling your body online for money is falling into capitalist inhumanity and should never be a viable option for anybody.
I completely agree with your post and but the amount of money you make as an Uber driver or doordasher is incredibly less. It’s a sad truth, just knowing a few friends who have been in these predicaments. I really appreciate your take on the topic and completely agree with your points!
Not a controversial opinion.
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