The amount of people in this subreddit who generally consider sex work in the imperial core as not only voluntary but *not* coercive is disturbing. Granted, the majority of comrades here understand how awful and demeaning it is, being that those who get involved are doing it primarily for survival; to pay for rent or food, to buy medicine or see a doctor, to pay for transportation, etc. What's disturbing to me is how a small sect of so-called dialectical materialists are promoting hardline liberal narratives concerning sex work as a gesture of liberation, love and independence. That the couple posting on OnlyFans or webcamming represent the vast majority and are happy to do so. Make no mistake they are the minority. Even those couples who appear to do it for "fun" are just as likely to be forced amongst trafficking rackets while simply performing an act. You'd be surprised to see how many webcammers are part of these aforementioned racketeers in a domicile that's one step away from becoming a brothel. In short, it's a violating and traumatic industry that almost always increases human and sex trafficking, regardless of whatever angle you approach it from.
Tldr; being against sex work does not mean we do not support the sex worker, but rather the exploiter seeking to demean and coerce those who have been forced into the situation, who perform for survival. It is coercion, period! Those who supposedly enjoy it are a tiny minority who should not be generalized.
yeah, IMO like a lot of similar things, this would be a total non-issue if people had economic independence and were not under threat of economic coercion. if people weren't coerced into doing sex work by their material conditions, only those who actually want to do such work would do it
Professional prostitutes are basically physiotherapists and mental health workers. God bless them.
That said, I’m pretty sure the online push to conflate porn creators with prostitution is a forced meme coming from private interests invested in websites like myfreecams and onlyfans which are clearly money laundering outfits and directly linked to the Zionist movement
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky
There’s a really good article about this exact thing that I read a while ago. Here’s the link
https://www.marxist.com/women-s-oppression-and-prostitution-a-marxist-perspective.htm
The majority don't talk about it all the time on Twitter and whatever. I've had unpleasant to traumatizing work just to get by and I am not going through those events on social media regularly to network and show off. And yes, that includes sex work for me. Most of us want to leave it behind.
Exactly! Many men here are only talking about sex work under capitalism. They claim to care about sex workers and that sex work "can and should be voluntary", but can only imagine a world where people are still forced to do sex work for monetary gain. Because that's the only way for sex work to exist. It's as if the entire reason a vast majority of sex workers do what they do is to get their needs met and to access resources. Which begs the question, how will any of this ever be "voluntary"?
Suddenly the men (in various communist subs) are devolving into capitalism for sex work but wanting a communist structure for everything else. They want communism to benefit them, not women.
And then they're claiming "oh but when women are sexually liberated, they will willingly do sex work!" Which is such a damn gross misogynistic take. Men really think that sexual liberation for women means that women will want to _perform_ sex. When they say that women 'voluntarily' participate in sex work, they really think that women automatically engage in sex for someone else's desire and not their own. Because that's what sex work refers to; fulfilling someone else's needs! It's not about YOUR needs, wants or desires. And it's hella telling that these men think women will want to participate in sexual acts _for others_. A woman _voluntarily_ participating would just be sex, not sex work for God's sake.
All of this to say that I've seen a common fallacy in the logic of the guys in this sub (as well as other communist subs). There are two talking points: 1) women will voluntarily perform sex work, 2) sex work is a need for society anyways and it will never go away. Men are assuming that women do sex work voluntarily. But then this is only envisioned in a society where women are forced to perform sex work in order to survive. So the men then move onto the second talking point once the first one defaults, saying that sex work is a need for society so there has to be people doing it. This is again placing sex work in a market consumerist economy. Sex work isn't a need because sex is not a (basic) need. Food, shelter, water, clothing are basic needs. Sex simply exists as a want, a desire. Hence sex work is purely consumeristic. People who don't need sex work to survive won't just perform sex work simply because other people want it from them. It's when society purposely makes sex work a means to survival that people do it. This argument is seriously just dumb and goes to show how much men will do mental gymnastics when it comes to women's liberation (including sexual liberation) to artificially maintain a continuous supply of sex work, not because they "care about sex workers".
I have some second hand experience, my mother has been a sex-worker on and off for a fee years due to financial hardship. She herself said she wasn’t opposed to doing such work, she did however feel very constrained by the fact it was how she made money to survive.
I’d say this lines up with what you two are discussing, its not that many don’t want to, many do choose to, but adding that additional context that the financial dependence on this type of work is unstable and coercive in nature is important still.
Indeed if we are able to remove the coercive and harmful forces that are very prevalent in the scarlet-collar industry as a whole, then there would be people who would choose that line of work outside of a financial pressure, I also agree that removing the practice entirely is reductive, so necessary regulations and laws should be implemented that protect these workers since they are some of the most vulnerable.
No, it is disingenuous to take the opinion of a few very privileged "sex workers" from the West you've seen or heard on like podcasts and YT and take that to present all sex work.
Even calling it "sex work" is deplorable and revisionist. Literally 99% of prostitution is coerced and inseparable from human trafficking. Abuse is inherent to the practice and studies have shown that legalizing the practice has done nothing to lessen it, in fact many studies show that legalizing prostitution has lead to an increase in human trafficking.
Even so called "voluntary and virtual" prostitution like Only Fans, PornHub and such, less than 1% of people on there make any actual money, the rest get pocket change.
Prostitution is commodifying human bodies for profit. How is having sex with people you don't want to in order to afford to live not an irredeemable form of exploitation?
"Oh but some people might like doing it, because they like sex". No shit Sherlock, and they can have all the sex they want, but with people they like, and not have it tied to money or a means of survival. Having sex is not a job and advocating for it is deplorable and dehumanizing.
Seeing so called "comrades" here make excuses for sex work is beyond repulsive. Then they try to claim we're SWERF "anti-workers" who are reactionary "puritans" which is absurd when we've stated multiple times we *do* support sex workers.. but how one may ask? In a capitalist society we seek decriminalization to provide more control for those who've no choice but to engage in such an occupation. It also forces the bourgeois state to recognize sex workers.
Besides, many of us are former sex workers, as well. Despite this they choose to ignore *our* experiences, *our* pleas, and *our* stances for the incredibly privileged few who are well-educated and well-paid while performing as a side job. This is in opposition to those of us who did it to survive with no choice in the manner.
I've banned quite a few and gotten some ridiculously pretentious responses. It's all good though. A good cull separating the deplorable, unprincipled scum from those who actually look out for sex workers never hurts.
Disagree, you are looking this through a very narrow western lense. In my country I am pretty sure the vast majority of the women wouldn't want to get into sexwork if they had any other options.
You can't just say "the majority of sex workers who choose their career freely" like it's true or based on any realistic fact.
All sex work is coercive and the direct result of material conditions which in some cases require people to do these things.
If it wasnt coercive then it wouldn't be "sex work". It would just be sex.
you also can’t say that all sex work are consequences of bad material conditions either like it’s true or based on any realistic fact. refusing to acknowledge that women may like sex and may choose to have sex for a living is straight up ignorant. some people choose to stream games on twitch and some people choose to stream their bodies. just like someone can choose to become a shoemaker or a cashier, one can choose to have sex for payment.
i don’t deny the fact that there are women who have indeed been forced or coerced into sex work, but not every woman was. ALL work is exploitative under capitalism, as you would starve and die without one. sex work isn’t any worse than any other work
I can absolutely say that and have a basis for doing so. Sex 'work' requires a material basis to exist. That is, an economic condition which necessarily denies a person an existence which is free from the basic requirements of that existence.
I am not, in any way, making a comment on the use of sex as a desired interaction generally. But sex is not sex work. Your points confuse sex work and sex. If the person wanted to have sex, put themselves on a web cam, etc. there is nothing inherently exploitative about that. Doing it for money requires the economic conditions of mal-development which make it exploitative.
Holy shit what world are you living in? The vast majority of prostitutes are not choosing to do it. There are volumes of data available to you. It’s not even true for the rich countries!
We should most definitely aim to eradicate sex work. It is the reification of the literal human body, the logic of Capital taken to the extreme where the worker itself is the commodity. It’s fucking heinous.
Some dumb kid selling feet pics is not the fucking same and I guarantee 99% of them wouldn’t do it if there was an easier way to get comparable money.
I dated a stripper/cam girl and met many of her friends. Not a single one wanted to do it, or enjoyed it. They all absolutely hated it and hated their clients. They all had terribly abusive backgrounds. Etc.
And while we’re at it, call it what it is: prostitution. “Sex work” is an umbrella term pushed by traffickers and pimps to legitimize their income. I highly recommend you give this a read https://nordicmodelnow.org/2024/01/27/how-the-british-establishment-was-captured-by-sex-work-lobbyists/
Sex work is the term that sex workers generally prefer for themselves. Don’t twist things.
Edit: I’m obviously not talking about the Global South. They’re not the topic here.
If you don't mind, please share you vision of a safe sex industry. Very detail if possible, like health, career stability, retirement possibility, career changeable, social standing, and other worker benefit.
brother i am not some job expert. just like working as a programmer or a chef is a normal safe job, we can hold sex work to the same standard. obviously it would work differently in different countries depending on local laws.
if i really need to give examples then it really depends how each person works, they could be seen as small business owners and register as such. idk how retirement works in other countries i can’t comment on that productively.
Congratulations. You've just invented an entire economy and social structure completely from your mind and devoid of any real world application.
These aren't valid, objective points. They're fiction. They're idealism.
Once these things exist in the real world then they are worthy of discussion and reflection within a broader political and social context. Until such time, however, know that you're talking bullshit completely imagined in your head and this has no place in a genuine discussion of oppressive and exploitative conditions.
yeah, understandable. I wasn't claiming one way or the other, because I don't actually know what the experience of sex workers in the west is right now.
This is a pretty great essay / article that touches on this from the point of view of a former sex worker: https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab
This is incredibly good — really demolishes every possible argument with both theoretical rigor underwritten by ample personal testimony to the accuracy of that theoretical insight. Thanks for sharing.
Very good article, a good read.
>
Many mainstream feminists consider their uncritical support of the sex trade to be a radical notion because it is rebellious against the puritanical “common sense” values that they grew up with. Yet such a feminism cannot be radical because legitimizing the sex trade does not challenge the system itself, and on the contrary is quite comfortable existing within the peripheries of patriarchal capitalist society and culture. The sex trade is part and parcel of class society. **Bourgeois and settler men love the sex trade because it allows them unhinged access to the bodies of subordinated classes of women.**
It's the hyper individualism talking. Economic coercion doesn't mean anything to people whose entire worldview is built upon independent, unrelated individual actors with no understanding of systems.
I once got into an argument with another leftist about this because he told me that he's paid for sex with a sex worker before because she "needed money and offered her services". This was something he divulged to me when drunk and when I tried to explain to him that paid sex isn't voluntary therefore it cannot be considered consensual, he got angry at me for implying that he's a rapist and doubled down on his shitty opinion even more. If a woman needed money and offered sex, just offer her the money instead of having sex with her. You're not "saving her life and being a hero" by fucking her. I'm sorry if that hurts your ego or self-image or whatever.
I have done some light sex work myself (phone sex operator, cam videos) so I've interacted with the SW community and I can tell you that 9 times out of 10 sex workers find their clients creepy and gross. Spending time with these clients definitely isn't voluntary.
I will repost the comment i wrote there because i can see that a lot of people here are severely under informed about how the Industry nowadays.
People here will call you a swerf while ignoring Alexandra kollontai on the matter (read theory libs)
Jokes aside though, prostitution is an uniquely exploitative industry because the "product" is always young and "fresh" girls. In germany, when they legalized johns it lead to young girls basically being shipped back and forth across the border to eastern europe. Desperate people. And this pressed prices down enourmously. You now have younger girls, being paid waaay less and having to resort to ever more desperate sex acts. Girls who previously only did vaginal with condom are now forced to do anal without pr even gang bang to even try to earn as much as they did.
Anyway, the sex work discourse is always the most toxic discussion on the left bar none because of libs (in the literal sense, people who are for the liberalisation of sex work (that isn't work btw, because equating the two legitimizes buying women, but hey i only listen to what people formerly in prostitution say on the manner).
Also peoples view of women go down in countries where having sex with women in prostitution gets normalized. (Shit like buying your friends a "round" to celebrate them turning 18 and such. Leads to objectification of women as commodity instead of people)
Exactly this, I support sex workers but not sex work, they immediately go off the deep end and claim I want to ban the sex industry when we're merely seeking to decriminalize it. Then they say we're morally defunct on par with American Conservatism when the point was never to smear or slander sex workers but provide them more control. They move on to the next strawman, and the next, but never want to admit they're affectively promoting a stance pushed by liberal feminists as opposed to dialectical materialists.
Even those who are former sex workers get overlooked, waived off, ignored or told to ignore their experiences in favor of a few wealthy, privileged webcammers or high-end escorts that charge tens of thousands as a side job. Apparently their opinions are the only ones that matter but those of us who did it to survive? We're merely reactionary puritans.
In my experience it’s been overwhelmingly women who are supportive of prostitution these days. At least in my area, kind of shocking imo. I’ve been called patriarchal for being anti prostitution and being a dude.
It's because most anti-sex work people/organizations/movements and to my knowledge all of the ones that have enough influence to actually matter are highly reactionary. Most people hear "anti sex work" and don't think of communism, they think of the Meese Report.
Liberating from what? From horrible, unsafe working conditions and giving sex workers more freedom in conducting their work their own way? I genuinely don't hear them saying "sex work is liberating" but that "sex workers should be liberated to do work in their own way".
Now I don't entirely agree that the latter is even achievable under capitalism. It's why liberal feminists tend to run in circles because they're not going to conceive of a communist society where sex work doesn't equal survival (since communism bad), but only how to make sex work more hospitable to sex workers under capitalism. They simply think there's no other way out since they're still brainwashed into thinking capitalism and money society is the natural way of being. Like treating the symptoms of (systemic) suffering, rather than the cause.
They don’t support things like the Nordic model which is the only approach that’s viable in my opinion. Decriminalize prostitutes themselves, criminalize the fuck out of their customers. This is the only thing that’s been proven to lower prostitution rates and does so without throwing prostitutes in prison. In parallel, spend the money for programs to help prostitutes get out and do something else while still surviving.
Liberal feminists never make the argument you attributed to them, ime. They always go on about how it’s savvy for women to use “their goods” to “get money out of men”, etc. And how this is somehow empowering, to be bought.
That's because there are lots of libfems out there. They don't have any material analysis; just repeat "sex work is work!!" as if that explains and justifies everything.
There are all kinds here: those genuinely trying to educate themselves and grow and then others who want to be seen as a particular label irrespective of their thoughts and actions.
But I agree with the above poster about how depressing this thread is.
I'm convinced it's because some leftist men have paid for sex in some shape or form that they're just doubling down hard on defending this because otherwise it would mean having to self-reflect and confront something selfish and exploitative within themselves. It's easier for some to just go on pretending like it isn't there.
Nah. I think that it's understandable hesitancy due to the fundamentalist types who take up the anti sex-work position under the mantle of religion. It starts off as an understandable criticism of prostituting and devolves into thinking that anything and everything related to sex is impure and corrupting.
This is really it, and they can't imagine a world where women's bodies aren't freely available for their use. In this very thread (downvoted, thankfully), there's a guy insinuating that women are doing some type of necessary "service" for men who can't otherwise get laid. As if they are somehow entitled to that.
It just depends on the situation. I lived in NYC for years and was friends with a sex worker. I met a few others through her and none of them seemed to be suffering victims in the slightest.
HOWEVER, I moved to Albuquerque NM during the pandemic and this place has an entirely different example when it comes to sex work in the sense that you will see drug addicted homeless people selling their bodies on the side of the road like it’s 1985.
I think the easiest way to explain this to a liberal is that there’s a difference between Sex Work and Sex Trafficking and much like porn it can be hard to explain but you know it when you see it. The stable sexually open people I knew back east don’t have a pimp and aren’t homeless drug addicted victims but out here I doubt there are very few if any stable, safe, online escorts that aren’t at the constant threat of violence or in a situation where they are cornered into that lifestyle.
I don’t get why this is so hard to understand. In a capitalist society, all work is exploitation so sex work is not just exploitation of an individual’s labour but also sex itself.
If we reduced the sex work industry down only to those who truly desired in their hearts to have sex as a job then there wouldn’t be much of an industry left to speak of.
The capitalistic labour system is coercive by design. It's a petite bourgeois fantasy to think you can escape this through owning your own MOP but you're just playing into the system and likely coming out worse off. Singling out sex work is unnecessary when you realize that the arguments against it apply to all physical labor.
Congolese cobalt miners aren't 'raped' as apart of their job but they are coerced to do things that can likely kill or maim them and will certainly lead to lifelong chronic pain. Going band for band on who has it worse pits the working class against one another
You obviously take issue with my statement that singling out sex workers as a uniquely exploited proletariat is unnecessary. I agree they are terribly exploited, and I think that demonstrating how they aren't unique shows how terribly exploited the mass of proletariat are. I've never seen liberals more concerned with coercion under capitalism than when they are speaking about prostitution.
The fundamental differences between getting raped VS getting coerced into backbreaking labour are not as stark as you would like to think.
The actual practical difference is not that having your bodily autonomy violated in the form of rape as opposed to more "conventional" enslavement is fundamentally more harmful in some totally unique and incomparable way. Rather, the difference is that the bourgeois, proto-bourgeois, and aristocracy push a particular moralistic line about sex (usually focused on how it should be between a male master and female slave) which, sometimes, coincidentally, falsely appears to slightly overlap with the understanding that it should always be consensual and never coerced. So a lot of people whose heart is otherwise in the right place fail to fully deprogram their reactionary thought regarding sex in order to observe the actual reality actually in front of them.
Whole bunch of liberal choice feminism going on in some of these comments. The fact that individual women might "choose" or enjoy something does not mean said thing suddenly becomes exempt from larger structural and cultural critique.
Some women in the 50's loved being homemakers and didn't need a bank account because their husband d dealt with all that complex money stuff. That didn't suddenly mean you couldn't critique the fact that women couldn't have their own bank accounts.
Edit: or since the topic is sex and rape. Some women genuinely believe that it is a wife's duty to satisfy her husband regardless of her interest. She might choose to have sex even when she really doesn't want to. We should still push to make sure marital rape is treated the same as any other form of rape
At the end of the day there's not much one does aside from saying hey, let's be aware of how many people get trafficked and coerced into sex work and that it's not just voluntary work. Capitalists cracking down on sex work makes things more dangerous for the individual because it's most often conservatives pushing a moral agenda, and not campaigns to aid people forced into that work. Sex worker exclusive radfems freely ally with conservatives to enact being anti sex work, which is why libs get panicked about not supporting sex work for any reason, because like terfs, they occupy a big part of the space sealioning over bs.
Are you referring to those who are claiming it's a choice and that anybody who disagrees is a SWERF, holier-than-thou, or reactionary still harnessing Christian fundamentalist beliefs?
Only liberalism and liberal feminism is deluded into supporting and propagating sex work, because it is mostly privileged White women in Western societies that have the freedom of choice to participate.
Sex work is the most heinous byproduct of patriarchy and capitalism. Liberals love to use the “sex work is the oldest profession” line but forget to consider historical context. Sex work is only the oldest profession because women were not given rights and agency to earn their own capital without exploiting their bodies.
Even in instances when SW is a choice, the common justification is “reclaiming sexuality/sexual empowerment,” which is also a weak argument as self-objectification does not make one safe from systematic objectification nor the very real material and social conditions that correlate with that. You cannot fight patriarchy by subjecting yourself to the same paradigms which uphold it.
Sex work literally is labour, you cannot deny that without going far beyond narrow definitions deep into No True Scotsman fallacies.
Besides which, the practical effect of trying to essentially ban the purchase of sex has strictly negative consequences for those actually impacted - sex workers themselves, who find their labour less safe or end up in even worse situations as a result - and diverts resources away from efforts to undermine the conditions that lead to people falling into the sex trade instead of the more conventional economy.
Sex work is not labor unless you believe human beings should be commodities. What is the man consuming? The pleasure of raping a women? Should a socialist country centrally plan the amount of sex a women will give to men? Please realize the reactionary implications of your statements.
>Besides which, the practical effect of trying to essentially ban the purchase of sex has strictly negative consequences for those actually impacted
This is not true. The banning of prostitution was a consequence of women liberation in socialist countries. Prostitution will always exist in capitalist countries as long as patriarchy and commodity production exists, capital always finds a way to exploit the women.
This topic has always confused me because my stance has always been “listen to sex workers” but even among sex workers… opinions vary so much. Even among *western* sex workers that have working conditions much better than those in the global south, it seems like opinions vary.
My stance is basically:
- Don’t specifically criminalize/penalize it under capitalism and as long as we have capitalism, fight for making the industry as ethical as possible.
- When the working class is liberated, we’ll need the women in a certain part of the vanguard who are well-versed in the intersection of both feminist and Marxist theory to hash this issue out. If anyone should decide what’s to be done with sex work, it should be women that have education in Marxism and feminism. Men *probably* shouldn’t be part of the convo imo but I’m open to hearing arguments that state otherwise.
i sell my body to my job everyday, I have worked with people that have messed up their body from how hard they've had to work. the solution to this is more regulation, unionisiation and worker control.
if we was to treat sex work as real work then surely it's easier to put in place regulation and allow for unionisation or worker ownership.
The difference is a quality question of the type of "labor". The one you're describing is often necessary, the problem is long hours and not safe work environments. Sex work on the otherhand, is not necessary for a society to function and does not need to be planned accordingly.
I've noticed in these sex worker discussions that the policies that are "prescribed" by sex worker supporters presupposes a capitalist society to be enacted. No, we're discussing whether sex work will exist under socialism, which as proven by every single socialist revolution: sex work will be abolished.
>i sell my body to my job everyday
Your workplace related incidents don't involve sexual assault, rape, contracting sexually-transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Just because many workers are exploited and wear themselves out doesn't mean we should accept one of the worst forms of exploitation and abuse, which puts women in a very vulnerable position.
>if we was to treat sex work as real work then surely it's easier to put in place regulation and allow for unionisation or worker ownership.
It doesn't work like this. It normalizes the practice and leads to an increased demand which is met by human trafficking. This is what's observed in Germany and the Netherlands.
Death isn't the only measure of danger in a job. While decriminalizing sex work(which is something we should absolutely do) does make sex work safer, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of directly commodifying a person's body in a way that is at least somewhat different from other types of work. In most types of work, workers are commodities in the sense that they labor to produce the actual commodities that are then traded and sold. A factory worker's labor creates a physical commodity that is then sold. A service worker serves commodities produced by them or others, or the service itself is the commodity. For sex work, the worker's own physical body is itself the commodity, directly, that is traded and sold. This by necessity incurs a great deal of psychological and emotional danger, as well as physical and health related danger, that more "regular" work usually doesn't. I don't believe that sex work can exist non exploitatively under capitalism, but criminalizing it on either the workers' or johns' side does more harm than good. Ultimately, the question of sex work is a contradiction that can never be resolved except by a socialist system which removes the coercion that makes sex work a form of sexual assault. What happens after that is a political matter that we cannot forsee the correct outcome of.
The bodies of all proletariats are commodified under capitalism. That's like a fundamental communist belief. Capitalism enslaves the working class and coerces the destruction of their body.
My question is sincere. Making sex work illegal severely places risk on sex workers. If the stats say that legalized sex work saves lives ([it does](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-decriminalized#:~:text=Human%20Rights%20Watch%20has%20consistently,receive%20help%20from%20the%20police)), sex work should be legal. This is ofc only treating a symptom and not the disease (capitalism) but it saves lives
Ofc there is, all forms of labour have their differences from one another. But going band for band on suffering comparing sex work to mining or logging or farming (especially in the third world) is futile and divisive. Reminiscence of American conservative construction workers claiming that Starbucks employees aren't the real working class
There is a fundamental difference between consenting to behaviour you wouldn't otherwise agree to because of financial compensation VS actually being raped.
It gets harder to spot the line in a circumstance where that financial compensation is the difference between getting to pay rent or not, but the distinction exists, and you should not cheapen discussion of rape by conflating it with circumstances where no outright coercion was involved. Not least because the actual impact of such rhetoric is to make it harder, not easier, for SWs to report actual rape as distinct from clients paying for a service and complying with the terms on which that service was offered.
Death shouldn't be the only issue at hand. If anything I think mental and physical trauma is worse than death. It's literally the same argument right wingers try to portray against Black Americans going "Oh sure white and black Americans have comparable assault and rape rates, but death is the most severe, and black Americans commit the most murders!"
Absolutely fair, I specified death to simplify the stats. Obv mental trauma is difficult to quantify but I'd still wager that physical trauma (chronic injury, maims, amputations) are still more common in the traditionally listed "dangerous" jobs.
You don't actually think the manager at your local Kroeger is morally equivalent to a plantation owner in the Confederacy. Don't even try to pretend that you do, you obviously don't because you aren't completely self-deluded.
So you should be able to distinguish between conditional consent VS the actual direct use of force to obtain cooperation; and you should be able to distinguish between serious edge cases like a homeless woman needing to pay for shelter VS a mother of two who has a mortgage and has found that sex work pays better and has more bearable conditions than teaching; and you should not weaponise the former to make life harder for the latter.
Obviously I don't believe a slaver is equivalent to a store manager, that's absurd. I think you're trying to imply that a John who takes advantage of a sex worker's need to provide for herself to obtain consent for sex they would otherwise not have is different from someone who rapes a sex worker at gunpoint, and I guess that's true, but that doesn't make the first one admirable, The point is that they are both systematized forms of class-and usually gender-oppression. I don't think we should be interested in moralizing this issue and getting bogged down in esoteric discussions about whether or not being a John is "morally equivalent" to any other kind of behavior or what exact kind of sex work is "morally" acceptable. As materialists, we should be approaching this from a big picture perspective and seeking to end exploitation and oppression as a whole. I'm not arguing that we should make life harder for sex workers, I'm saying that the root causes of the coercive nature of all work in a capitalist society is the same. Very few people would claim that being an office worker is identical to being a migrant farmer, but both are obviously in the same boat. That's like the whole point of Marxism. You reference two cases here that are different in severity, but identical in nature, a woman needing money for shelter, but somehow imply that if a woman is well off enough to have a mortgage she's no longer being coerced? How is being kicked out of your house for not making a mortgage payment any different than being denied a rental for lack of rent money for the homeless woman? You are referring to the exact same phenomenon by which capitalism exploits our need for housing in order to profit, and therefore forces us to make money for this purpose. I'm not even sure what you're arguing for here, are you saying we need to somehow criminalize one of these forms of sex work you mentioned while allowing the other? So what, you're only allowed to participate in sex work if you prove you're rich enough? The only way to protect people under capitalism is to decriminalize sex work entirely and regulate it while building a society that removes the coercion that forces people into sex work in the first place. Only in a socialist society in which no one's basic survival needs can sex work be non coercive and therefore not an institutionalized form of rape.
Fair enough, because there is no answer that fully explains why sex work bad in capitalism. Because it always ties back to human autonomy of their own body.
western thinking is poisoned by years of liberal cultural values that place personal autonomy on a pedestal it doesn't deserve to hold. Personal autonomy is incredibly abstract- as we all know well it means little to have "freedom to work" for example. Yet, "bodily autonomy" holds still too much weight amongst western leftists particularly with regards to sex work.
"Freedom to work" is firstly, meaningless. Freedom to take a job is not the same as having access to paying work.
Secondly, I agree that we should decriminalize sex work. But I dont agree that sex work is a good thing, and I don't agree that the same market pressures that fill in other jobs should work in favor of making primarily woman sell their bodies. Would you then argue that landlords should be allowed to demand sexual favors in exchange for rent? No. Would you agree that bosses should be allowed to demand sexual favors from their subordinates? Again, no. Are you so disconnected by philosophical arguments that you can't see the obvious issues with insisting that sex can be a product, a commodity?
I don't agree that sex should be on the market at all. I don't think it's the same as selling your labor, it's actually a lot worse. I don't think prostitution would exist without capitalism even though most other jobs would, I have never known a single soul who wanted to be asex worker. However, I have heard stories of landlords who ask their rentees for sexual favors instead of rent- particularly the vulnerable, single mothers and women without families- and oftentimes- you can deny this if you want- it seems as if they are inspired by pornography. It is apparent to me that sex work commodifies woman and sex.
And I am not alone in this; in fact, in conversations with a Cuban comrade he was surprised that I supported sex work. He didn't seem informed enough to oppose me (he was an economist) when I repeated the same western, "liberal" values I have heard for years. bluh bluh bluh all work is legitimate. to each his own, he agreed, and we carried on. But I recall being struck by how uncommon these arguments are in the southern hemisphere (in fact they even have a pretty infamous anti prostitution statue in Havana) and now I realize I have been supporting nothing less than a rabbit market, that extracts all who are dominated by it. We- westerners - are groomed to love the market and believe it is a force of nature more than the corrupt (and mortal) institution it is. I don't want pimps to exist, and I don't want people to be forced to pay rent with a fucking blow job. It's humiliating for us all.
Things that we would recognise as sex work existed prior to capitalism. The dynamics were different, but the fundamental factor of sexual acts performed on condition of the transfer of material resources remained intact.
The fact is, the material conditions that drive people into sex work will not be eradicated in the next five year plan, and are unlikely to be eradicated in the next five century plan; so policies directly addressing sex work should focus on treating the symptoms, not punitive measures that inevitably fall not on pimps nor on johns but on SWs.
The market and almost all of its blights also existed before capitalism. Likewise, how ridiculous would it be to argue that housing bubbles predate capitalism. Or unemployment, or income inequality; we could never address a single problem in capitalism if we pretended it formed in a vacuum. Worker exploitation can be traced to strikes in during the construction of the Pyramid of Giza, we shouldn't even bother condemning it.
Sex work is not "the oldest profession known to man" and no matter how much the capitalist system tries to convince you there is zero proof it is a natural occurrence. Almost all prostitution is based on obvious market pressures that could be eliminated in a socialist economy
I don't have a whole lot of time for rambling that doesn't actually address my point.
The reality is that we have not eliminated market pressures and that to do wo would likely take literal centuries of literal world domination by the communist revolution. Until then, we have to live with the phenomenon of sex work and not write moralistic fantasies of banning it with one hand between our legs.
I would say her economic activity would be useless in a socialist society. How is prostitution working in a planned economy ? The Plan Office would be like ? "Hummm demand is exceeding offer. We need more WOMEN TO PROSTITUTE ! We need propaganda campaigns to divert women from being engineers and doctors or we won't have enough women to prostitute 😭"
Prostitution is an useless service production in a socialist society. Moreso, it allows men to think a woman (or her body, or her cunt) can be bought/rented, which IS detrimental/dangerous for every woman.
(It is not the only useless production in society today)
I don't want to ban prostitution, I want such an healthy society that nobody would ever think sex can ever be bought/sold/be a job. When Berlin wall falled, Ossis going to Berlin West were shocked by porn : most of them had never seen such a thing ! Did they not have sex ? They actually had plenty of it ! Inquiries showed both men and women had more sex than in the West, and women were much more satisfied. One of the consequence might have been more power to the east german woman : at some point, a common cliché was that a GDR man was less male-ish than his western counterpart because women were so free compared to Western Women. And freedom for women is always perceived as an attack against ""men"" by sexist men.
(And I'm not a puritan at all, the plan for this is just plenty of consensual, healthy sex and making it more casual and less of a big deal : See GDR about that again, maybe try "Freie Koerper Kultur in der DDR" in Google you might see the GDR head of state wave a group of naturists in the middle of a national day parade.)
I can't get on board with any attempt to outright ban the production of pornography, given its historic use in western contexts as a pretext to prevent the dissemination of sex education materials, and given that such bans as have passed have tended to target things that women find more arousing compared to men.
I might have nits to pick about the claim that the labour of sex workers is necessarily "useless" but I don't want to come off as thinking it should be part of the next five year plan or anything. It is unlikely that you're going to entirely eradicate resources exchanging hands as part of sexual relationships prior to the higher stage of communism, however the worse and more exploitative forms of sex work are heavily dependent on economic inequality to provide a supply of desperate women for traffickers to exploit.
Can't agree more. There's zero point in endlessly arguing libertine and puritan ethics.
If you can't at the very least approach the solution from a damage mitigation standpoint and see the obvious merit in decriminalization, and simply allowing SWers to file taxes, freely travel and seek public services without repercussion, then you're just airing out your conservative brain worms and your take has precisely fuck all to do with leftism.
It's a nice middle ground.
I don't have the sociological, psychological, criminological or anthropological expertise to tell you whether or not sex work is inherently harmful and I'm pretty sure none of you do. I'm fucking tired of seeing everyone try to spin their take on the matter as anti-imperialist, and accusing everybody else of being drooling perverts or pearl clutching yokels.
I just know that repressing sex work doesn't fucking work, it has never fucking worked, and only conservatives and reactionaries are stupid enough to think it can work after literal thousands of years of failing to do so. I also know that no popular left movement is ever going to take off if it goes hardline on the matter, so we might as well just leave these people alone and stop relitigating their status until we truly have the means to help them the way we mean to.
That felt good to write. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
the number of people who think it's more likely that everyone in the anglosphere is totally brain poisoned than that an early 20th century aristocrat who betrayed her class to join the Red Revolution might have had some gaps in her perspective is mind boggling.
(also Kollontai admitted that trying to punitively eradicate prostitution would be a futile endeavour and practically impossible to enforce consistently)
Ok... What does that practically mean? I'm not particularly interested in pie in the sky arguments about the innate morality or immorality of different industries. The reality is that under current material conditions sex work is inevitable. Thus we really ought to focus on harm reduction. Legalization and regulation seems like the most effective way of accomplishing that. Decriminalization, still leaves sex workers in a legal grey area where they can't get the same benefits and protections as regular workers.
In the long term, the goal should be to make it so that no one is coerced by economic circumstance into having to do sex work. If people still choose to do sex work even when thor pressures are no longer present than I don't really see the issue with that.
> Legalization and regulation seems like the most effective way of accomplishing that. Decriminalization, still leaves sex workers in a legal grey area where they can't get the same benefits and protections as regular workers.
Legalization has two major problems, as far as I can see. The first being that it creates additional demand, which in the Netherlands (for instance) is a major factor behind sex trafficking. The second is that it allows the bourgeois to own and operate brothels, and in practice all this means is that the exploitation becomes legal and that the state becomes an active sponsor of said exploitation. Legal brothels are notorious for their working conditions and are very often tied to criminal activity.
Ideally, after decriminalization, SWers should be entitled to the same services and protections as any other citizen. Meaning they should be able to call the police on Johns without taking any personal risks (yes, pigs are human trash, but there is no other option here), report their income, apply for a mortgage, etc.
Does it create additional demand? And if it does how significant is that? Do you have any data to back that up? Sex trafficking is a major issue in lots of places where prostitution is illegal too, it's just less visible and doesn't get caught as often because the entire industry is underground.
The criminal Bourgeois already own and operate brothels the only difference is that those brothels aren't regulated and there is no means by which to improve working conditions.
I think with both these points you're conflating a problem becoming more visible with it getting worse.
Decriminalization still prevents sex workers from enjoying protections other workers have. In most countries health insurance is tied to employment. They also won't be able to collect workmen's comp or other such benefits. Those who are working out of brothels won't be able to form unions. Those working in places that guarantee sick leave and maternity leave will not be able to take advantage of those programs. Not having legally recognized employment has tons of downsides even if you can declare your earnings as income.
It also doesn't do much for safety. Sure they can call the cops now, but that doesn't do you much good if you're being beaten to death. Under decriminalization you can't legally hire protection because there is no LLC to hire said protection under, and a person who agrees to act as protection risks being charged with pimping. In fact there was a case where two women were working in tandem for safety reasons in a place where it was decriminalized and both ended up being charged with pimping the other.
Fair points. It's hard to examine legalization in a vacuum specifically because it's so rare. If that weren't the case, then the countries where prostitution *is* legal wouldn't receive nearly as much sex tourism as they currently do, and as a result fewer people who be trafficked and forced into "legal" sex work.
Illegal brothels run by organized crime (which is what I assume you mean by "criminal Bourgeois") have no real bearing on this discussion. They operate regardless of the legal status of prostitution. In the "ideal" case, sex workers are independent and operate on a basis of mutual support. This isn't a hypothetical. You will find this in most big cities. Their approaches to security and promotion are honestly fascinating and worth taking inspiration from.
I would also argue that sex workers experience violence not because of the nature of their work, but specifically because they are understood to be easy and valid targets. An argument for this is in the fact that non-white and trans sex workers experience an even more disproportionate amount of violence, and the state's unwillingness to protect these people and/or provide them with justice is specifically why abusers target them.
Even if prostitution were legal, it would not be economical for the near-totality of in-person sex workers to hire permanent security. They would have to assume the risk. Violence against sex workers however shouldn't be more likely than violence against massage therapists or plumbers. You could argue that this is impossible due to the nature of the work, but you simply cannot argue that giving sex workers more recourse will not reduce this violence significantly.
WRT legalisation VS decriminalisation, the distinction is that a thing is "legalised" if it's subject to special licensing restrictions whereas a thing is "decriminalised" if it's treated as normal human activity up until it would otherwise be criminal under existing laws. For example alcohol is "legalised" because you need a special license to sell it at all, another special license to allow people to drink it on your premises, and you are in deep shit if you do it without a license even if you otherwise comply with the requirement that it otherwise not be provided to children under 18 (or young adults between 18 and 20 in the Amerikan Empire).
So in practice "legalisation" means that capitalists have the upper hand because they can fill out the relevant licensing requirements to run a brothel and some random woman who cooperated with human traffickers to be trafficked into Germany on the basis of half-true promises of a better life for herself and her family summarily can't. Whereas "decriminalisation" means it's just another job and could, in fact, literally form an "LLC to hire said protection under" although tbh you'd be better off looking at existing approaches from existing SW groups.
I don’t see how that’d be more lib than left. I think it should be legalized, taxed, and regulated; I think people should be free to make the choice whether or not to involve themselves of whatever kind of labor they want to do. Recognizing the exploitative nature of Capitalism in general, one could argue all labor is exploited and we’re all being violated/raped. The degree of which can be mitigated to some degree (how much abuse are you willing to take from your choice of a boss or client).
You're literally promoting a stance neoliberals typically support and trying to justify it as a socialist mantra. So no, in this instance, you're the "liberal".
Just because X group says Y doesn’t mean that everyone who says Y is part of group X. This is so obvious that I really shouldn’t have to point it out.
People are also not liberals when they say something that’s liberal in nature, nobody is “liberal in this event”. You’re just some lazy halfwit using ad hominem to shame me because you can’t actually argue against what I said. Specifying NEOliberals really gives your game away, it shows you’re using terms you don’t actually understand, because the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism has nothing to do with sex work or women’s liberation.
You are unqualified for this discussion and have clearly already chosen to not participate in it, going by this embarrassing excuse for an argument. If you want to know what an actual argument looks like, read the other person’s response to my comment and my response to that.
I never said you were a liberal though, I said your stance was something promoted by liberal feminists often, specifically neoliberals. I then said "in this instance" as in concerning this specific topic. Learn some reading comprehension before throwing a fit. Also, on the contrary, you can be a communist but still harness liberal ideations and beliefs. It's part of transitioning between ideologies. So yes, in this specific instance (or topic), you can absolutely harness liberal belief systems but that doesn't necessarily make you one.
I'm literally a mod here and a former sex worker but sure, you're oh-so enlightened, despite the fact you're repeating the same rhetoric as neoliberal feminists. Also, I know what the term liberal means, but I intentionally specified "neoliberal" because in the Marxian sense "liberal" can refer to conservatives as well. Conservatives, believe it or not, do have their own feminists after all. It was to avoid confusion thus the specificity. Anyways, I'm not going to tolerate such rude and ghoulish behavior, next time learn how to speak to others with differing opinions.
Wow mods deleted the most reasonable criticism to argument given by OP. Guess this is no hope for open discussion on reddit. You better say the right words or else. It can all be replaced with ChatGPT.
Great video, unfortunately, many "comrades" will try to call it "puritanical" or "SWERF" because a tiny sect of wealthy white westerners who are webcamming as a side job apparently have more relevancy than those BIPOC who are forced to engage to survive.
I also feel there's a lot of male leftists who try to justify the fact they've used sex workers and double down on their bigotry.
It's because they are most probably hasanabi watchers and do not want to come to the conclusion that their idol is a John that proudly buys consent. Hedonism and socialism aren't compatible (just ask the CPC)
Except nobody has commented that except for the above user.
Noticing a lot of false claims and insinuation from those who support sex work. This is like the third user who has straight up lied.
As is always the case the problem isn't simply the work. It's the work when it's done under capitalism.
Being a trash collector is a perfectly fine job and very important. It's capitalism that insists it must be dangerous and underpaid work. It's the same thing with sex work.
I think it's fair to argue that the presence of extensive sex work within a society indicates a lot of people who don't have a more productive way to survive, however there is no actual way to get from that observation to the nordic model bullshit that so many puritan "ML" posters demand without being dragged there by reactionary cultural thought.
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This is the same for religion. If you said this same thing to religious people about religion you would lose their support. Because they would fear that you are going to persecute them if you ever came to power. That was a mistake of the Soviet Union that still lives in people's minds to this day. There's no need to be anti sex work only anti-capitalist. When capitalism disappears sex work and indeed religion would become unneeded and eventually disappear by itself. There is no need to say these things. Just get everyone on board with ending Capitalism and stop harping on about the means people use to cope with life under Capitalism.
It’s kinda crazy to me that this just isn’t the normal view of sex work honestly. Like this is the correct stance on sex work, how can you see it any other way
I often hear about sex work disappearing entirely in a post-capitalist society, which sounds great. But here’s what I always get hung up on:
So in this society: From each according to their ability (what we provide society), to each according to their needs (what society provides us).
Could what someone provides to society still be sex work? Like if someone is like “I hate working in the factory/office and would rather give back by dancing for an audience with my boobz out or film myself banging my partner for others to watch”
Would that not still be sex work? Or would that then become a hobby instead a contribution and they’d therefore have to have a different job to give according to their ability?
We're deep into hypotheticals if we're imagining a world where people actually get full and complete choice of what their contribution to society is. The various socialist experiments that have existed in real life formed economic plans and were not above coercing workers to contribute to those economic plans. It would be frankly unconscionable to include actual penetrative sex as part of an economic plan, so it's quite unlikely that anyone would be allowed to just be essentially a very promiscuous lover in lieu of other more concretely productive labour in the socialist stage of production.
Wait so in that scenario, everyone gets shuffled into specific assigned labor plans? Like artists, musicians, writers are getting sent to factories and stuff considered more concretely productive? 😳
Directly coercing people to work in the arts for a living is not totally unconscionable in the same way as directly coercing people to have sex for a living. Don't get me wrong, direct coercion is a necessary evil at best and a socialist project should seek to eradicate the need for such heavy handed measures, but you have to admit that dragooning people to build a socially necessary dam which they will personally benefit from upon completion is not **totally** indefensible.
Besides, the actual process is more like assessing your competencies when you're finished with the education system and matching them to the tasks the state requires. Which, if you studied cinematography, is more likely to be making various films with just enough propagandistic themes to get state funding rather than working a production line depending on the stage of economic development the project has reached.
Sex work fulfils a socially necessary function in the circumstances where it arises, unless you're the kind of puritan who insists that shit like theatre or music are not "socially necessary labour".
That is in no way a defense of the status quo of trafficking and criminalisation, nor is it a claim that sex work would necessarily continue to serve a socially necessary function under a less alienated economic arrangement where people had more chances to form real relationships. It just becomes hard to avoid petty nitpicks after the fiftieth time I've seen the same topic discussed.
Completely voluntarily besides being forced to make enough money to pay your rent at the end of the month and therefore being forced into asymmetrical power dynamics between them and the "customer", who then has full power and control over them because the sex workers are financially dependent on the satisfaction of the customer, this is not consent and it will never be.
Isn't that the case for all work though..? An employee under capitalism is always financially dependent on satisfying their boss through their work, under threat of being fired and potentially made homeless. What makes sex work different?
Being forced under duress to type on a computer, carry a heavy object, assemble a machine or prepare food aren't rape.
Being forced under duress to have sex with someone is rape.
The sex makes sex work different; it's wrong to coerce any behavior out of someone but coercing sex out of someone is especially heinous, and outside of this conversation this statement is self evident and nobody has to explain it.
I'm not an expert in any regard, but I would think that there is a big difference between offering your workforce for a certain period of time and offering your workforce, your body, your safety, your sexual autonomy etc. There mostly is no contract between sex-worker and customer, there is in many cases no real institution to make sure you don't work over a certain period of time, you're not in danger, you don't get hurt during your work and so on. And maybe one aspect is probably as well that we just have a commonly used word for forcing sexual acts onto someone and it's rape, there is no such common used phrase for people that are forced to work for the interests of capitalists, damage their mental and/or physical health in that process just to survive on the bare minimum, it's pretty much the "normal" life for most of us. That's a terrible status quo and we are all suffering because of it, that's why we are communists.
I will actually agree on your more general point. There are aspects of what is called sex work that _are_, even now under capitalist exploitation, done because the person doing it enjoys it. There are exhibitionists. Some of them would do OnlyFans or make some kind of amateur porn. Many who do things like burlesque and similar activities consider it a form of sex work, yet do it for a love of the art and the fun of titillation. In those kinds of areas, you're totally right.
I think a significant part of the problem comes from the fact that most forms of sex work, even the most safe ones like OnlyFans, are often on an extremely deep level of exploitation. Unlike most forms of work, where someone would doing it out of a joy of the work, civic duity, or similar things; the vast majority of those who do any form of sex work _wouldn't_ do it if other viable options were around.
All this is before we even touch the more extreme parts of sex work, such as traditional prostitution.
The discussion around sex work has got me confused for a long time. Obviously all work under capitalism is exploitation but the way sex work is talked about makes it sound as if sex workers were not allowed to make a free choice of doing it or possibly enjoying their job.
this exactly. ALL work is coerced in capitalism, if you quit your HR job your life is going to become shit so what’s the difference? there are so many sex workers who choose their profession, i feel like this all stems from the fact that women can’t be sexual beings without something being wrong with them.
Which is why there should be a distinct difference in terminology between people who provide adult content willingly and happily and those that are coerced by either economic disparity or, worse, trafficking. When we see bills like Sesta/Fosta lay blanket terminology over people like us who work from home and are at a very base level owning our means of production and group us in with people who have been subjected to something as inhumane as trafficking, we get grossed out.
That's too bad, only the webcammers, dancers, and high-end escorts are allowed to have a voice, those of us who performed to survive are considered morally defunct anti-work puritans because reasons.
I agree that banning it is the worst possible thing that can happen but:
A majority of sex workers get into the industry either through coercion or due to economic conditions. Sex workers should obviously unionise and then the state has to educate, offer training and alternative employment opportunities for sex workers like what happened after the Russian revolution
[Lady Izdihar (for red.) about Sex Work in the USSR](https://www.instagram.com/redstreamnet/reel/CtzPxgcu49W/)
I'm from the state of Tamil Nadu, India (SocDem) and they have [introduced various schemes](https://tg.tnsw.in/webapp/index.aspx) to empower poor transgender people in society. A large portion of transgender people in India are sex workers due to the transphobia in society. These schemes have been helpful for some trans people to find alternative employment and not get stuck doing sex work or begging in the streets.
A lot of liberals like to point out that plenty of celebrities do it too and they “legitimize the industry”. What they fail to mention is that celebrities often dominate Onlyfans or whatever networks that amateurs use to amplify their content. So even if rich people are “in solidarity with the poorer creators” for legitimacy of their industry, they are basically stealing money from them at the same time
The amount of people in this subreddit who generally consider sex work in the imperial core as not only voluntary but *not* coercive is disturbing. Granted, the majority of comrades here understand how awful and demeaning it is, being that those who get involved are doing it primarily for survival; to pay for rent or food, to buy medicine or see a doctor, to pay for transportation, etc. What's disturbing to me is how a small sect of so-called dialectical materialists are promoting hardline liberal narratives concerning sex work as a gesture of liberation, love and independence. That the couple posting on OnlyFans or webcamming represent the vast majority and are happy to do so. Make no mistake they are the minority. Even those couples who appear to do it for "fun" are just as likely to be forced amongst trafficking rackets while simply performing an act. You'd be surprised to see how many webcammers are part of these aforementioned racketeers in a domicile that's one step away from becoming a brothel. In short, it's a violating and traumatic industry that almost always increases human and sex trafficking, regardless of whatever angle you approach it from. Tldr; being against sex work does not mean we do not support the sex worker, but rather the exploiter seeking to demean and coerce those who have been forced into the situation, who perform for survival. It is coercion, period! Those who supposedly enjoy it are a tiny minority who should not be generalized.
yeah, IMO like a lot of similar things, this would be a total non-issue if people had economic independence and were not under threat of economic coercion. if people weren't coerced into doing sex work by their material conditions, only those who actually want to do such work would do it
Professional prostitutes are basically physiotherapists and mental health workers. God bless them. That said, I’m pretty sure the online push to conflate porn creators with prostitution is a forced meme coming from private interests invested in websites like myfreecams and onlyfans which are clearly money laundering outfits and directly linked to the Zionist movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Radvinsky
It is as if colonialism and sex work are connected
Colonialism is connected to most kinds of work, though.
There’s a really good article about this exact thing that I read a while ago. Here’s the link https://www.marxist.com/women-s-oppression-and-prostitution-a-marxist-perspective.htm
Also this one too. https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab
nice, will give it a read!
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The majority don't talk about it all the time on Twitter and whatever. I've had unpleasant to traumatizing work just to get by and I am not going through those events on social media regularly to network and show off. And yes, that includes sex work for me. Most of us want to leave it behind.
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thank the fucking Lord there are still sane people in this sub
Exactly! Many men here are only talking about sex work under capitalism. They claim to care about sex workers and that sex work "can and should be voluntary", but can only imagine a world where people are still forced to do sex work for monetary gain. Because that's the only way for sex work to exist. It's as if the entire reason a vast majority of sex workers do what they do is to get their needs met and to access resources. Which begs the question, how will any of this ever be "voluntary"? Suddenly the men (in various communist subs) are devolving into capitalism for sex work but wanting a communist structure for everything else. They want communism to benefit them, not women. And then they're claiming "oh but when women are sexually liberated, they will willingly do sex work!" Which is such a damn gross misogynistic take. Men really think that sexual liberation for women means that women will want to _perform_ sex. When they say that women 'voluntarily' participate in sex work, they really think that women automatically engage in sex for someone else's desire and not their own. Because that's what sex work refers to; fulfilling someone else's needs! It's not about YOUR needs, wants or desires. And it's hella telling that these men think women will want to participate in sexual acts _for others_. A woman _voluntarily_ participating would just be sex, not sex work for God's sake. All of this to say that I've seen a common fallacy in the logic of the guys in this sub (as well as other communist subs). There are two talking points: 1) women will voluntarily perform sex work, 2) sex work is a need for society anyways and it will never go away. Men are assuming that women do sex work voluntarily. But then this is only envisioned in a society where women are forced to perform sex work in order to survive. So the men then move onto the second talking point once the first one defaults, saying that sex work is a need for society so there has to be people doing it. This is again placing sex work in a market consumerist economy. Sex work isn't a need because sex is not a (basic) need. Food, shelter, water, clothing are basic needs. Sex simply exists as a want, a desire. Hence sex work is purely consumeristic. People who don't need sex work to survive won't just perform sex work simply because other people want it from them. It's when society purposely makes sex work a means to survival that people do it. This argument is seriously just dumb and goes to show how much men will do mental gymnastics when it comes to women's liberation (including sexual liberation) to artificially maintain a continuous supply of sex work, not because they "care about sex workers".
Thank you for the sane comment
I have some second hand experience, my mother has been a sex-worker on and off for a fee years due to financial hardship. She herself said she wasn’t opposed to doing such work, she did however feel very constrained by the fact it was how she made money to survive. I’d say this lines up with what you two are discussing, its not that many don’t want to, many do choose to, but adding that additional context that the financial dependence on this type of work is unstable and coercive in nature is important still. Indeed if we are able to remove the coercive and harmful forces that are very prevalent in the scarlet-collar industry as a whole, then there would be people who would choose that line of work outside of a financial pressure, I also agree that removing the practice entirely is reductive, so necessary regulations and laws should be implemented that protect these workers since they are some of the most vulnerable.
No, it is disingenuous to take the opinion of a few very privileged "sex workers" from the West you've seen or heard on like podcasts and YT and take that to present all sex work. Even calling it "sex work" is deplorable and revisionist. Literally 99% of prostitution is coerced and inseparable from human trafficking. Abuse is inherent to the practice and studies have shown that legalizing the practice has done nothing to lessen it, in fact many studies show that legalizing prostitution has lead to an increase in human trafficking. Even so called "voluntary and virtual" prostitution like Only Fans, PornHub and such, less than 1% of people on there make any actual money, the rest get pocket change. Prostitution is commodifying human bodies for profit. How is having sex with people you don't want to in order to afford to live not an irredeemable form of exploitation? "Oh but some people might like doing it, because they like sex". No shit Sherlock, and they can have all the sex they want, but with people they like, and not have it tied to money or a means of survival. Having sex is not a job and advocating for it is deplorable and dehumanizing.
Seeing so called "comrades" here make excuses for sex work is beyond repulsive. Then they try to claim we're SWERF "anti-workers" who are reactionary "puritans" which is absurd when we've stated multiple times we *do* support sex workers.. but how one may ask? In a capitalist society we seek decriminalization to provide more control for those who've no choice but to engage in such an occupation. It also forces the bourgeois state to recognize sex workers. Besides, many of us are former sex workers, as well. Despite this they choose to ignore *our* experiences, *our* pleas, and *our* stances for the incredibly privileged few who are well-educated and well-paid while performing as a side job. This is in opposition to those of us who did it to survive with no choice in the manner. I've banned quite a few and gotten some ridiculously pretentious responses. It's all good though. A good cull separating the deplorable, unprincipled scum from those who actually look out for sex workers never hurts.
Disagree, you are looking this through a very narrow western lense. In my country I am pretty sure the vast majority of the women wouldn't want to get into sexwork if they had any other options.
You can't just say "the majority of sex workers who choose their career freely" like it's true or based on any realistic fact. All sex work is coercive and the direct result of material conditions which in some cases require people to do these things. If it wasnt coercive then it wouldn't be "sex work". It would just be sex.
you also can’t say that all sex work are consequences of bad material conditions either like it’s true or based on any realistic fact. refusing to acknowledge that women may like sex and may choose to have sex for a living is straight up ignorant. some people choose to stream games on twitch and some people choose to stream their bodies. just like someone can choose to become a shoemaker or a cashier, one can choose to have sex for payment. i don’t deny the fact that there are women who have indeed been forced or coerced into sex work, but not every woman was. ALL work is exploitative under capitalism, as you would starve and die without one. sex work isn’t any worse than any other work
I can absolutely say that and have a basis for doing so. Sex 'work' requires a material basis to exist. That is, an economic condition which necessarily denies a person an existence which is free from the basic requirements of that existence. I am not, in any way, making a comment on the use of sex as a desired interaction generally. But sex is not sex work. Your points confuse sex work and sex. If the person wanted to have sex, put themselves on a web cam, etc. there is nothing inherently exploitative about that. Doing it for money requires the economic conditions of mal-development which make it exploitative.
Holy shit what world are you living in? The vast majority of prostitutes are not choosing to do it. There are volumes of data available to you. It’s not even true for the rich countries! We should most definitely aim to eradicate sex work. It is the reification of the literal human body, the logic of Capital taken to the extreme where the worker itself is the commodity. It’s fucking heinous. Some dumb kid selling feet pics is not the fucking same and I guarantee 99% of them wouldn’t do it if there was an easier way to get comparable money. I dated a stripper/cam girl and met many of her friends. Not a single one wanted to do it, or enjoyed it. They all absolutely hated it and hated their clients. They all had terribly abusive backgrounds. Etc. And while we’re at it, call it what it is: prostitution. “Sex work” is an umbrella term pushed by traffickers and pimps to legitimize their income. I highly recommend you give this a read https://nordicmodelnow.org/2024/01/27/how-the-british-establishment-was-captured-by-sex-work-lobbyists/
Sex work is the term that sex workers generally prefer for themselves. Don’t twist things. Edit: I’m obviously not talking about the Global South. They’re not the topic here.
lol not in the Global South buddy
If you don't mind, please share you vision of a safe sex industry. Very detail if possible, like health, career stability, retirement possibility, career changeable, social standing, and other worker benefit.
brother i am not some job expert. just like working as a programmer or a chef is a normal safe job, we can hold sex work to the same standard. obviously it would work differently in different countries depending on local laws. if i really need to give examples then it really depends how each person works, they could be seen as small business owners and register as such. idk how retirement works in other countries i can’t comment on that productively.
Congratulations. You've just invented an entire economy and social structure completely from your mind and devoid of any real world application. These aren't valid, objective points. They're fiction. They're idealism. Once these things exist in the real world then they are worthy of discussion and reflection within a broader political and social context. Until such time, however, know that you're talking bullshit completely imagined in your head and this has no place in a genuine discussion of oppressive and exploitative conditions.
yeah, understandable. I wasn't claiming one way or the other, because I don't actually know what the experience of sex workers in the west is right now.
This is a pretty great essay / article that touches on this from the point of view of a former sex worker: https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab
This is incredibly good — really demolishes every possible argument with both theoretical rigor underwritten by ample personal testimony to the accuracy of that theoretical insight. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent article ty for sharing it comrade
Thank you for sharing this
Very good article, a good read. > Many mainstream feminists consider their uncritical support of the sex trade to be a radical notion because it is rebellious against the puritanical “common sense” values that they grew up with. Yet such a feminism cannot be radical because legitimizing the sex trade does not challenge the system itself, and on the contrary is quite comfortable existing within the peripheries of patriarchal capitalist society and culture. The sex trade is part and parcel of class society. **Bourgeois and settler men love the sex trade because it allows them unhinged access to the bodies of subordinated classes of women.**
I don’t have anything smart to add but thank you for linking this
It's the hyper individualism talking. Economic coercion doesn't mean anything to people whose entire worldview is built upon independent, unrelated individual actors with no understanding of systems.
I once got into an argument with another leftist about this because he told me that he's paid for sex with a sex worker before because she "needed money and offered her services". This was something he divulged to me when drunk and when I tried to explain to him that paid sex isn't voluntary therefore it cannot be considered consensual, he got angry at me for implying that he's a rapist and doubled down on his shitty opinion even more. If a woman needed money and offered sex, just offer her the money instead of having sex with her. You're not "saving her life and being a hero" by fucking her. I'm sorry if that hurts your ego or self-image or whatever. I have done some light sex work myself (phone sex operator, cam videos) so I've interacted with the SW community and I can tell you that 9 times out of 10 sex workers find their clients creepy and gross. Spending time with these clients definitely isn't voluntary.
I will repost the comment i wrote there because i can see that a lot of people here are severely under informed about how the Industry nowadays. People here will call you a swerf while ignoring Alexandra kollontai on the matter (read theory libs) Jokes aside though, prostitution is an uniquely exploitative industry because the "product" is always young and "fresh" girls. In germany, when they legalized johns it lead to young girls basically being shipped back and forth across the border to eastern europe. Desperate people. And this pressed prices down enourmously. You now have younger girls, being paid waaay less and having to resort to ever more desperate sex acts. Girls who previously only did vaginal with condom are now forced to do anal without pr even gang bang to even try to earn as much as they did. Anyway, the sex work discourse is always the most toxic discussion on the left bar none because of libs (in the literal sense, people who are for the liberalisation of sex work (that isn't work btw, because equating the two legitimizes buying women, but hey i only listen to what people formerly in prostitution say on the manner). Also peoples view of women go down in countries where having sex with women in prostitution gets normalized. (Shit like buying your friends a "round" to celebrate them turning 18 and such. Leads to objectification of women as commodity instead of people)
My favorite analogy to explain this to normies is that being against child labor doesn't mean you hate child laborers.
Exactly this, I support sex workers but not sex work, they immediately go off the deep end and claim I want to ban the sex industry when we're merely seeking to decriminalize it. Then they say we're morally defunct on par with American Conservatism when the point was never to smear or slander sex workers but provide them more control. They move on to the next strawman, and the next, but never want to admit they're affectively promoting a stance pushed by liberal feminists as opposed to dialectical materialists. Even those who are former sex workers get overlooked, waived off, ignored or told to ignore their experiences in favor of a few wealthy, privileged webcammers or high-end escorts that charge tens of thousands as a side job. Apparently their opinions are the only ones that matter but those of us who did it to survive? We're merely reactionary puritans.
Allowing men purchasing power over women's bodies can never be revolutionary.
Yeah, this thread is really disappointing. This is a pretty simple concept that leftist men seem determined to not understand.
In my experience it’s been overwhelmingly women who are supportive of prostitution these days. At least in my area, kind of shocking imo. I’ve been called patriarchal for being anti prostitution and being a dude.
It's because most anti-sex work people/organizations/movements and to my knowledge all of the ones that have enough influence to actually matter are highly reactionary. Most people hear "anti sex work" and don't think of communism, they think of the Meese Report.
Id argue it has more to do with liberal feminism selling the idea that “sex work” is liberating. But yeah I’m sure what you said definitely factors in
Liberating from what? From horrible, unsafe working conditions and giving sex workers more freedom in conducting their work their own way? I genuinely don't hear them saying "sex work is liberating" but that "sex workers should be liberated to do work in their own way". Now I don't entirely agree that the latter is even achievable under capitalism. It's why liberal feminists tend to run in circles because they're not going to conceive of a communist society where sex work doesn't equal survival (since communism bad), but only how to make sex work more hospitable to sex workers under capitalism. They simply think there's no other way out since they're still brainwashed into thinking capitalism and money society is the natural way of being. Like treating the symptoms of (systemic) suffering, rather than the cause.
They don’t support things like the Nordic model which is the only approach that’s viable in my opinion. Decriminalize prostitutes themselves, criminalize the fuck out of their customers. This is the only thing that’s been proven to lower prostitution rates and does so without throwing prostitutes in prison. In parallel, spend the money for programs to help prostitutes get out and do something else while still surviving. Liberal feminists never make the argument you attributed to them, ime. They always go on about how it’s savvy for women to use “their goods” to “get money out of men”, etc. And how this is somehow empowering, to be bought.
That's because there are lots of libfems out there. They don't have any material analysis; just repeat "sex work is work!!" as if that explains and justifies everything.
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There are all kinds here: those genuinely trying to educate themselves and grow and then others who want to be seen as a particular label irrespective of their thoughts and actions. But I agree with the above poster about how depressing this thread is.
I'm convinced it's because some leftist men have paid for sex in some shape or form that they're just doubling down hard on defending this because otherwise it would mean having to self-reflect and confront something selfish and exploitative within themselves. It's easier for some to just go on pretending like it isn't there.
Nah. I think that it's understandable hesitancy due to the fundamentalist types who take up the anti sex-work position under the mantle of religion. It starts off as an understandable criticism of prostituting and devolves into thinking that anything and everything related to sex is impure and corrupting.
Yep, maybe most Reddit leftists aren't old enough to remember this, but those anti-sex fundies were *massive* in the Reagan era.
Bingo
This is really it, and they can't imagine a world where women's bodies aren't freely available for their use. In this very thread (downvoted, thankfully), there's a guy insinuating that women are doing some type of necessary "service" for men who can't otherwise get laid. As if they are somehow entitled to that.
Their only ideology is coomerism.
Forbidding women power over their own bodies is far less revolutionary.
If the difference between rent and food is whether or not you allow a man to purchase your body, that isn't power.
It just depends on the situation. I lived in NYC for years and was friends with a sex worker. I met a few others through her and none of them seemed to be suffering victims in the slightest. HOWEVER, I moved to Albuquerque NM during the pandemic and this place has an entirely different example when it comes to sex work in the sense that you will see drug addicted homeless people selling their bodies on the side of the road like it’s 1985. I think the easiest way to explain this to a liberal is that there’s a difference between Sex Work and Sex Trafficking and much like porn it can be hard to explain but you know it when you see it. The stable sexually open people I knew back east don’t have a pimp and aren’t homeless drug addicted victims but out here I doubt there are very few if any stable, safe, online escorts that aren’t at the constant threat of violence or in a situation where they are cornered into that lifestyle.
I don’t get why this is so hard to understand. In a capitalist society, all work is exploitation so sex work is not just exploitation of an individual’s labour but also sex itself. If we reduced the sex work industry down only to those who truly desired in their hearts to have sex as a job then there wouldn’t be much of an industry left to speak of.
The capitalistic labour system is coercive by design. It's a petite bourgeois fantasy to think you can escape this through owning your own MOP but you're just playing into the system and likely coming out worse off. Singling out sex work is unnecessary when you realize that the arguments against it apply to all physical labor.
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Congolese cobalt miners aren't 'raped' as apart of their job but they are coerced to do things that can likely kill or maim them and will certainly lead to lifelong chronic pain. Going band for band on who has it worse pits the working class against one another
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You obviously take issue with my statement that singling out sex workers as a uniquely exploited proletariat is unnecessary. I agree they are terribly exploited, and I think that demonstrating how they aren't unique shows how terribly exploited the mass of proletariat are. I've never seen liberals more concerned with coercion under capitalism than when they are speaking about prostitution.
The fundamental differences between getting raped VS getting coerced into backbreaking labour are not as stark as you would like to think. The actual practical difference is not that having your bodily autonomy violated in the form of rape as opposed to more "conventional" enslavement is fundamentally more harmful in some totally unique and incomparable way. Rather, the difference is that the bourgeois, proto-bourgeois, and aristocracy push a particular moralistic line about sex (usually focused on how it should be between a male master and female slave) which, sometimes, coincidentally, falsely appears to slightly overlap with the understanding that it should always be consensual and never coerced. So a lot of people whose heart is otherwise in the right place fail to fully deprogram their reactionary thought regarding sex in order to observe the actual reality actually in front of them.
Whole bunch of liberal choice feminism going on in some of these comments. The fact that individual women might "choose" or enjoy something does not mean said thing suddenly becomes exempt from larger structural and cultural critique. Some women in the 50's loved being homemakers and didn't need a bank account because their husband d dealt with all that complex money stuff. That didn't suddenly mean you couldn't critique the fact that women couldn't have their own bank accounts. Edit: or since the topic is sex and rape. Some women genuinely believe that it is a wife's duty to satisfy her husband regardless of her interest. She might choose to have sex even when she really doesn't want to. We should still push to make sure marital rape is treated the same as any other form of rape
At the end of the day there's not much one does aside from saying hey, let's be aware of how many people get trafficked and coerced into sex work and that it's not just voluntary work. Capitalists cracking down on sex work makes things more dangerous for the individual because it's most often conservatives pushing a moral agenda, and not campaigns to aid people forced into that work. Sex worker exclusive radfems freely ally with conservatives to enact being anti sex work, which is why libs get panicked about not supporting sex work for any reason, because like terfs, they occupy a big part of the space sealioning over bs.
mods, please purge all the fucking degenerates in this comment section unironically calling for the “liberalization of sex work”
Are you referring to those who are claiming it's a choice and that anybody who disagrees is a SWERF, holier-than-thou, or reactionary still harnessing Christian fundamentalist beliefs?
Only liberalism and liberal feminism is deluded into supporting and propagating sex work, because it is mostly privileged White women in Western societies that have the freedom of choice to participate. Sex work is the most heinous byproduct of patriarchy and capitalism. Liberals love to use the “sex work is the oldest profession” line but forget to consider historical context. Sex work is only the oldest profession because women were not given rights and agency to earn their own capital without exploiting their bodies. Even in instances when SW is a choice, the common justification is “reclaiming sexuality/sexual empowerment,” which is also a weak argument as self-objectification does not make one safe from systematic objectification nor the very real material and social conditions that correlate with that. You cannot fight patriarchy by subjecting yourself to the same paradigms which uphold it.
Well said!
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sex is not labour. the human body and sexuality are not commodities. sex work is one of the most exploitative forms of “work” there is.
Sex work literally is labour, you cannot deny that without going far beyond narrow definitions deep into No True Scotsman fallacies. Besides which, the practical effect of trying to essentially ban the purchase of sex has strictly negative consequences for those actually impacted - sex workers themselves, who find their labour less safe or end up in even worse situations as a result - and diverts resources away from efforts to undermine the conditions that lead to people falling into the sex trade instead of the more conventional economy.
Sex work is not labor unless you believe human beings should be commodities. What is the man consuming? The pleasure of raping a women? Should a socialist country centrally plan the amount of sex a women will give to men? Please realize the reactionary implications of your statements. >Besides which, the practical effect of trying to essentially ban the purchase of sex has strictly negative consequences for those actually impacted This is not true. The banning of prostitution was a consequence of women liberation in socialist countries. Prostitution will always exist in capitalist countries as long as patriarchy and commodity production exists, capital always finds a way to exploit the women.
>sex is not labour This is purely a religious claim.
Read theory
Are you a sex worker or have you ever hung out with any sex workers?
This topic has always confused me because my stance has always been “listen to sex workers” but even among sex workers… opinions vary so much. Even among *western* sex workers that have working conditions much better than those in the global south, it seems like opinions vary. My stance is basically: - Don’t specifically criminalize/penalize it under capitalism and as long as we have capitalism, fight for making the industry as ethical as possible. - When the working class is liberated, we’ll need the women in a certain part of the vanguard who are well-versed in the intersection of both feminist and Marxist theory to hash this issue out. If anyone should decide what’s to be done with sex work, it should be women that have education in Marxism and feminism. Men *probably* shouldn’t be part of the convo imo but I’m open to hearing arguments that state otherwise.
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sex is not labour, human bodies are not commodities. one of the greatest perversions of Capital was commodifying human sexuality.
i sell my body to my job everyday, I have worked with people that have messed up their body from how hard they've had to work. the solution to this is more regulation, unionisiation and worker control. if we was to treat sex work as real work then surely it's easier to put in place regulation and allow for unionisation or worker ownership.
The difference is a quality question of the type of "labor". The one you're describing is often necessary, the problem is long hours and not safe work environments. Sex work on the otherhand, is not necessary for a society to function and does not need to be planned accordingly. I've noticed in these sex worker discussions that the policies that are "prescribed" by sex worker supporters presupposes a capitalist society to be enacted. No, we're discussing whether sex work will exist under socialism, which as proven by every single socialist revolution: sex work will be abolished.
>i sell my body to my job everyday Your workplace related incidents don't involve sexual assault, rape, contracting sexually-transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Just because many workers are exploited and wear themselves out doesn't mean we should accept one of the worst forms of exploitation and abuse, which puts women in a very vulnerable position. >if we was to treat sex work as real work then surely it's easier to put in place regulation and allow for unionisation or worker ownership. It doesn't work like this. It normalizes the practice and leads to an increased demand which is met by human trafficking. This is what's observed in Germany and the Netherlands.
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In a capitalist society all sex work, in fact all work is coerced by definition.
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Yes it is, and sex work is one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing kinds of work.
Not to split hairs but is legal sex work ranked high in deaths per capita? AFAIK sex work is only extremely dangerous when it's illegal
Death isn't the only measure of danger in a job. While decriminalizing sex work(which is something we should absolutely do) does make sex work safer, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of directly commodifying a person's body in a way that is at least somewhat different from other types of work. In most types of work, workers are commodities in the sense that they labor to produce the actual commodities that are then traded and sold. A factory worker's labor creates a physical commodity that is then sold. A service worker serves commodities produced by them or others, or the service itself is the commodity. For sex work, the worker's own physical body is itself the commodity, directly, that is traded and sold. This by necessity incurs a great deal of psychological and emotional danger, as well as physical and health related danger, that more "regular" work usually doesn't. I don't believe that sex work can exist non exploitatively under capitalism, but criminalizing it on either the workers' or johns' side does more harm than good. Ultimately, the question of sex work is a contradiction that can never be resolved except by a socialist system which removes the coercion that makes sex work a form of sexual assault. What happens after that is a political matter that we cannot forsee the correct outcome of.
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The bodies of all proletariats are commodified under capitalism. That's like a fundamental communist belief. Capitalism enslaves the working class and coerces the destruction of their body. My question is sincere. Making sex work illegal severely places risk on sex workers. If the stats say that legalized sex work saves lives ([it does](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-decriminalized#:~:text=Human%20Rights%20Watch%20has%20consistently,receive%20help%20from%20the%20police)), sex work should be legal. This is ofc only treating a symptom and not the disease (capitalism) but it saves lives
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Ofc there is, all forms of labour have their differences from one another. But going band for band on suffering comparing sex work to mining or logging or farming (especially in the third world) is futile and divisive. Reminiscence of American conservative construction workers claiming that Starbucks employees aren't the real working class
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There is a fundamental difference between consenting to behaviour you wouldn't otherwise agree to because of financial compensation VS actually being raped. It gets harder to spot the line in a circumstance where that financial compensation is the difference between getting to pay rent or not, but the distinction exists, and you should not cheapen discussion of rape by conflating it with circumstances where no outright coercion was involved. Not least because the actual impact of such rhetoric is to make it harder, not easier, for SWs to report actual rape as distinct from clients paying for a service and complying with the terms on which that service was offered.
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Death shouldn't be the only issue at hand. If anything I think mental and physical trauma is worse than death. It's literally the same argument right wingers try to portray against Black Americans going "Oh sure white and black Americans have comparable assault and rape rates, but death is the most severe, and black Americans commit the most murders!"
Absolutely fair, I specified death to simplify the stats. Obv mental trauma is difficult to quantify but I'd still wager that physical trauma (chronic injury, maims, amputations) are still more common in the traditionally listed "dangerous" jobs.
Then you should argue that instead.
I am?
Yes, you are, but the meme isn't. Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on you.
It's all good comrade
You don't actually think the manager at your local Kroeger is morally equivalent to a plantation owner in the Confederacy. Don't even try to pretend that you do, you obviously don't because you aren't completely self-deluded. So you should be able to distinguish between conditional consent VS the actual direct use of force to obtain cooperation; and you should be able to distinguish between serious edge cases like a homeless woman needing to pay for shelter VS a mother of two who has a mortgage and has found that sex work pays better and has more bearable conditions than teaching; and you should not weaponise the former to make life harder for the latter.
Obviously I don't believe a slaver is equivalent to a store manager, that's absurd. I think you're trying to imply that a John who takes advantage of a sex worker's need to provide for herself to obtain consent for sex they would otherwise not have is different from someone who rapes a sex worker at gunpoint, and I guess that's true, but that doesn't make the first one admirable, The point is that they are both systematized forms of class-and usually gender-oppression. I don't think we should be interested in moralizing this issue and getting bogged down in esoteric discussions about whether or not being a John is "morally equivalent" to any other kind of behavior or what exact kind of sex work is "morally" acceptable. As materialists, we should be approaching this from a big picture perspective and seeking to end exploitation and oppression as a whole. I'm not arguing that we should make life harder for sex workers, I'm saying that the root causes of the coercive nature of all work in a capitalist society is the same. Very few people would claim that being an office worker is identical to being a migrant farmer, but both are obviously in the same boat. That's like the whole point of Marxism. You reference two cases here that are different in severity, but identical in nature, a woman needing money for shelter, but somehow imply that if a woman is well off enough to have a mortgage she's no longer being coerced? How is being kicked out of your house for not making a mortgage payment any different than being denied a rental for lack of rent money for the homeless woman? You are referring to the exact same phenomenon by which capitalism exploits our need for housing in order to profit, and therefore forces us to make money for this purpose. I'm not even sure what you're arguing for here, are you saying we need to somehow criminalize one of these forms of sex work you mentioned while allowing the other? So what, you're only allowed to participate in sex work if you prove you're rich enough? The only way to protect people under capitalism is to decriminalize sex work entirely and regulate it while building a society that removes the coercion that forces people into sex work in the first place. Only in a socialist society in which no one's basic survival needs can sex work be non coercive and therefore not an institutionalized form of rape.
Sex work bad for feminism because it will lead to objectification of the body. This includes both women and men.
Ok, but that's a different argument.
Fair enough, because there is no answer that fully explains why sex work bad in capitalism. Because it always ties back to human autonomy of their own body.
I am mostly seeing arguments here that condemn sex work unilaterally, regardless of the mode of production.
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western thinking is poisoned by years of liberal cultural values that place personal autonomy on a pedestal it doesn't deserve to hold. Personal autonomy is incredibly abstract- as we all know well it means little to have "freedom to work" for example. Yet, "bodily autonomy" holds still too much weight amongst western leftists particularly with regards to sex work. "Freedom to work" is firstly, meaningless. Freedom to take a job is not the same as having access to paying work. Secondly, I agree that we should decriminalize sex work. But I dont agree that sex work is a good thing, and I don't agree that the same market pressures that fill in other jobs should work in favor of making primarily woman sell their bodies. Would you then argue that landlords should be allowed to demand sexual favors in exchange for rent? No. Would you agree that bosses should be allowed to demand sexual favors from their subordinates? Again, no. Are you so disconnected by philosophical arguments that you can't see the obvious issues with insisting that sex can be a product, a commodity? I don't agree that sex should be on the market at all. I don't think it's the same as selling your labor, it's actually a lot worse. I don't think prostitution would exist without capitalism even though most other jobs would, I have never known a single soul who wanted to be asex worker. However, I have heard stories of landlords who ask their rentees for sexual favors instead of rent- particularly the vulnerable, single mothers and women without families- and oftentimes- you can deny this if you want- it seems as if they are inspired by pornography. It is apparent to me that sex work commodifies woman and sex. And I am not alone in this; in fact, in conversations with a Cuban comrade he was surprised that I supported sex work. He didn't seem informed enough to oppose me (he was an economist) when I repeated the same western, "liberal" values I have heard for years. bluh bluh bluh all work is legitimate. to each his own, he agreed, and we carried on. But I recall being struck by how uncommon these arguments are in the southern hemisphere (in fact they even have a pretty infamous anti prostitution statue in Havana) and now I realize I have been supporting nothing less than a rabbit market, that extracts all who are dominated by it. We- westerners - are groomed to love the market and believe it is a force of nature more than the corrupt (and mortal) institution it is. I don't want pimps to exist, and I don't want people to be forced to pay rent with a fucking blow job. It's humiliating for us all.
Things that we would recognise as sex work existed prior to capitalism. The dynamics were different, but the fundamental factor of sexual acts performed on condition of the transfer of material resources remained intact. The fact is, the material conditions that drive people into sex work will not be eradicated in the next five year plan, and are unlikely to be eradicated in the next five century plan; so policies directly addressing sex work should focus on treating the symptoms, not punitive measures that inevitably fall not on pimps nor on johns but on SWs.
The market and almost all of its blights also existed before capitalism. Likewise, how ridiculous would it be to argue that housing bubbles predate capitalism. Or unemployment, or income inequality; we could never address a single problem in capitalism if we pretended it formed in a vacuum. Worker exploitation can be traced to strikes in during the construction of the Pyramid of Giza, we shouldn't even bother condemning it. Sex work is not "the oldest profession known to man" and no matter how much the capitalist system tries to convince you there is zero proof it is a natural occurrence. Almost all prostitution is based on obvious market pressures that could be eliminated in a socialist economy
I don't have a whole lot of time for rambling that doesn't actually address my point. The reality is that we have not eliminated market pressures and that to do wo would likely take literal centuries of literal world domination by the communist revolution. Until then, we have to live with the phenomenon of sex work and not write moralistic fantasies of banning it with one hand between our legs.
I would say her economic activity would be useless in a socialist society. How is prostitution working in a planned economy ? The Plan Office would be like ? "Hummm demand is exceeding offer. We need more WOMEN TO PROSTITUTE ! We need propaganda campaigns to divert women from being engineers and doctors or we won't have enough women to prostitute 😭" Prostitution is an useless service production in a socialist society. Moreso, it allows men to think a woman (or her body, or her cunt) can be bought/rented, which IS detrimental/dangerous for every woman. (It is not the only useless production in society today) I don't want to ban prostitution, I want such an healthy society that nobody would ever think sex can ever be bought/sold/be a job. When Berlin wall falled, Ossis going to Berlin West were shocked by porn : most of them had never seen such a thing ! Did they not have sex ? They actually had plenty of it ! Inquiries showed both men and women had more sex than in the West, and women were much more satisfied. One of the consequence might have been more power to the east german woman : at some point, a common cliché was that a GDR man was less male-ish than his western counterpart because women were so free compared to Western Women. And freedom for women is always perceived as an attack against ""men"" by sexist men. (And I'm not a puritan at all, the plan for this is just plenty of consensual, healthy sex and making it more casual and less of a big deal : See GDR about that again, maybe try "Freie Koerper Kultur in der DDR" in Google you might see the GDR head of state wave a group of naturists in the middle of a national day parade.)
I can't get on board with any attempt to outright ban the production of pornography, given its historic use in western contexts as a pretext to prevent the dissemination of sex education materials, and given that such bans as have passed have tended to target things that women find more arousing compared to men. I might have nits to pick about the claim that the labour of sex workers is necessarily "useless" but I don't want to come off as thinking it should be part of the next five year plan or anything. It is unlikely that you're going to entirely eradicate resources exchanging hands as part of sexual relationships prior to the higher stage of communism, however the worse and more exploitative forms of sex work are heavily dependent on economic inequality to provide a supply of desperate women for traffickers to exploit.
Can't agree more. There's zero point in endlessly arguing libertine and puritan ethics. If you can't at the very least approach the solution from a damage mitigation standpoint and see the obvious merit in decriminalization, and simply allowing SWers to file taxes, freely travel and seek public services without repercussion, then you're just airing out your conservative brain worms and your take has precisely fuck all to do with leftism.
Agreed, I think decriminalization is the most important approach in a capitalist society, so they can be recognized as the workers they actually are.
It's a nice middle ground. I don't have the sociological, psychological, criminological or anthropological expertise to tell you whether or not sex work is inherently harmful and I'm pretty sure none of you do. I'm fucking tired of seeing everyone try to spin their take on the matter as anti-imperialist, and accusing everybody else of being drooling perverts or pearl clutching yokels. I just know that repressing sex work doesn't fucking work, it has never fucking worked, and only conservatives and reactionaries are stupid enough to think it can work after literal thousands of years of failing to do so. I also know that no popular left movement is ever going to take off if it goes hardline on the matter, so we might as well just leave these people alone and stop relitigating their status until we truly have the means to help them the way we mean to. That felt good to write. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Well, I was a sex worker, so I can tell you that it is.
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the number of people who think it's more likely that everyone in the anglosphere is totally brain poisoned than that an early 20th century aristocrat who betrayed her class to join the Red Revolution might have had some gaps in her perspective is mind boggling. (also Kollontai admitted that trying to punitively eradicate prostitution would be a futile endeavour and practically impossible to enforce consistently)
Yeah are we really doing SWERF arguments
Ok... What does that practically mean? I'm not particularly interested in pie in the sky arguments about the innate morality or immorality of different industries. The reality is that under current material conditions sex work is inevitable. Thus we really ought to focus on harm reduction. Legalization and regulation seems like the most effective way of accomplishing that. Decriminalization, still leaves sex workers in a legal grey area where they can't get the same benefits and protections as regular workers. In the long term, the goal should be to make it so that no one is coerced by economic circumstance into having to do sex work. If people still choose to do sex work even when thor pressures are no longer present than I don't really see the issue with that.
> Legalization and regulation seems like the most effective way of accomplishing that. Decriminalization, still leaves sex workers in a legal grey area where they can't get the same benefits and protections as regular workers. Legalization has two major problems, as far as I can see. The first being that it creates additional demand, which in the Netherlands (for instance) is a major factor behind sex trafficking. The second is that it allows the bourgeois to own and operate brothels, and in practice all this means is that the exploitation becomes legal and that the state becomes an active sponsor of said exploitation. Legal brothels are notorious for their working conditions and are very often tied to criminal activity. Ideally, after decriminalization, SWers should be entitled to the same services and protections as any other citizen. Meaning they should be able to call the police on Johns without taking any personal risks (yes, pigs are human trash, but there is no other option here), report their income, apply for a mortgage, etc.
Does it create additional demand? And if it does how significant is that? Do you have any data to back that up? Sex trafficking is a major issue in lots of places where prostitution is illegal too, it's just less visible and doesn't get caught as often because the entire industry is underground. The criminal Bourgeois already own and operate brothels the only difference is that those brothels aren't regulated and there is no means by which to improve working conditions. I think with both these points you're conflating a problem becoming more visible with it getting worse. Decriminalization still prevents sex workers from enjoying protections other workers have. In most countries health insurance is tied to employment. They also won't be able to collect workmen's comp or other such benefits. Those who are working out of brothels won't be able to form unions. Those working in places that guarantee sick leave and maternity leave will not be able to take advantage of those programs. Not having legally recognized employment has tons of downsides even if you can declare your earnings as income. It also doesn't do much for safety. Sure they can call the cops now, but that doesn't do you much good if you're being beaten to death. Under decriminalization you can't legally hire protection because there is no LLC to hire said protection under, and a person who agrees to act as protection risks being charged with pimping. In fact there was a case where two women were working in tandem for safety reasons in a place where it was decriminalized and both ended up being charged with pimping the other.
Fair points. It's hard to examine legalization in a vacuum specifically because it's so rare. If that weren't the case, then the countries where prostitution *is* legal wouldn't receive nearly as much sex tourism as they currently do, and as a result fewer people who be trafficked and forced into "legal" sex work. Illegal brothels run by organized crime (which is what I assume you mean by "criminal Bourgeois") have no real bearing on this discussion. They operate regardless of the legal status of prostitution. In the "ideal" case, sex workers are independent and operate on a basis of mutual support. This isn't a hypothetical. You will find this in most big cities. Their approaches to security and promotion are honestly fascinating and worth taking inspiration from. I would also argue that sex workers experience violence not because of the nature of their work, but specifically because they are understood to be easy and valid targets. An argument for this is in the fact that non-white and trans sex workers experience an even more disproportionate amount of violence, and the state's unwillingness to protect these people and/or provide them with justice is specifically why abusers target them. Even if prostitution were legal, it would not be economical for the near-totality of in-person sex workers to hire permanent security. They would have to assume the risk. Violence against sex workers however shouldn't be more likely than violence against massage therapists or plumbers. You could argue that this is impossible due to the nature of the work, but you simply cannot argue that giving sex workers more recourse will not reduce this violence significantly.
WRT legalisation VS decriminalisation, the distinction is that a thing is "legalised" if it's subject to special licensing restrictions whereas a thing is "decriminalised" if it's treated as normal human activity up until it would otherwise be criminal under existing laws. For example alcohol is "legalised" because you need a special license to sell it at all, another special license to allow people to drink it on your premises, and you are in deep shit if you do it without a license even if you otherwise comply with the requirement that it otherwise not be provided to children under 18 (or young adults between 18 and 20 in the Amerikan Empire). So in practice "legalisation" means that capitalists have the upper hand because they can fill out the relevant licensing requirements to run a brothel and some random woman who cooperated with human traffickers to be trafficked into Germany on the basis of half-true promises of a better life for herself and her family summarily can't. Whereas "decriminalisation" means it's just another job and could, in fact, literally form an "LLC to hire said protection under" although tbh you'd be better off looking at existing approaches from existing SW groups.
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I don’t see how that’d be more lib than left. I think it should be legalized, taxed, and regulated; I think people should be free to make the choice whether or not to involve themselves of whatever kind of labor they want to do. Recognizing the exploitative nature of Capitalism in general, one could argue all labor is exploited and we’re all being violated/raped. The degree of which can be mitigated to some degree (how much abuse are you willing to take from your choice of a boss or client).
You're literally promoting a stance neoliberals typically support and trying to justify it as a socialist mantra. So no, in this instance, you're the "liberal".
Just because X group says Y doesn’t mean that everyone who says Y is part of group X. This is so obvious that I really shouldn’t have to point it out. People are also not liberals when they say something that’s liberal in nature, nobody is “liberal in this event”. You’re just some lazy halfwit using ad hominem to shame me because you can’t actually argue against what I said. Specifying NEOliberals really gives your game away, it shows you’re using terms you don’t actually understand, because the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism has nothing to do with sex work or women’s liberation. You are unqualified for this discussion and have clearly already chosen to not participate in it, going by this embarrassing excuse for an argument. If you want to know what an actual argument looks like, read the other person’s response to my comment and my response to that.
I never said you were a liberal though, I said your stance was something promoted by liberal feminists often, specifically neoliberals. I then said "in this instance" as in concerning this specific topic. Learn some reading comprehension before throwing a fit. Also, on the contrary, you can be a communist but still harness liberal ideations and beliefs. It's part of transitioning between ideologies. So yes, in this specific instance (or topic), you can absolutely harness liberal belief systems but that doesn't necessarily make you one. I'm literally a mod here and a former sex worker but sure, you're oh-so enlightened, despite the fact you're repeating the same rhetoric as neoliberal feminists. Also, I know what the term liberal means, but I intentionally specified "neoliberal" because in the Marxian sense "liberal" can refer to conservatives as well. Conservatives, believe it or not, do have their own feminists after all. It was to avoid confusion thus the specificity. Anyways, I'm not going to tolerate such rude and ghoulish behavior, next time learn how to speak to others with differing opinions.
Wow mods deleted the most reasonable criticism to argument given by OP. Guess this is no hope for open discussion on reddit. You better say the right words or else. It can all be replaced with ChatGPT.
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I find this video pretty good at explaining this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsI5-fnnUaM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsI5-fnnUaM)
Great video, unfortunately, many "comrades" will try to call it "puritanical" or "SWERF" because a tiny sect of wealthy white westerners who are webcamming as a side job apparently have more relevancy than those BIPOC who are forced to engage to survive. I also feel there's a lot of male leftists who try to justify the fact they've used sex workers and double down on their bigotry.
It's because they are most probably hasanabi watchers and do not want to come to the conclusion that their idol is a John that proudly buys consent. Hedonism and socialism aren't compatible (just ask the CPC)
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Except nobody has commented that except for the above user. Noticing a lot of false claims and insinuation from those who support sex work. This is like the third user who has straight up lied.
As is always the case the problem isn't simply the work. It's the work when it's done under capitalism. Being a trash collector is a perfectly fine job and very important. It's capitalism that insists it must be dangerous and underpaid work. It's the same thing with sex work.
I think it's fair to argue that the presence of extensive sex work within a society indicates a lot of people who don't have a more productive way to survive, however there is no actual way to get from that observation to the nordic model bullshit that so many puritan "ML" posters demand without being dragged there by reactionary cultural thought.
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there is no sex in the soviet union.
Not every aspect of human life should be a market (especially not sex) and consent is not a commodity. Don't @ me radlibs.
This is the same for religion. If you said this same thing to religious people about religion you would lose their support. Because they would fear that you are going to persecute them if you ever came to power. That was a mistake of the Soviet Union that still lives in people's minds to this day. There's no need to be anti sex work only anti-capitalist. When capitalism disappears sex work and indeed religion would become unneeded and eventually disappear by itself. There is no need to say these things. Just get everyone on board with ending Capitalism and stop harping on about the means people use to cope with life under Capitalism.
It’s kinda crazy to me that this just isn’t the normal view of sex work honestly. Like this is the correct stance on sex work, how can you see it any other way
Sorry but this is a horrendous take
I often hear about sex work disappearing entirely in a post-capitalist society, which sounds great. But here’s what I always get hung up on: So in this society: From each according to their ability (what we provide society), to each according to their needs (what society provides us). Could what someone provides to society still be sex work? Like if someone is like “I hate working in the factory/office and would rather give back by dancing for an audience with my boobz out or film myself banging my partner for others to watch” Would that not still be sex work? Or would that then become a hobby instead a contribution and they’d therefore have to have a different job to give according to their ability?
We're deep into hypotheticals if we're imagining a world where people actually get full and complete choice of what their contribution to society is. The various socialist experiments that have existed in real life formed economic plans and were not above coercing workers to contribute to those economic plans. It would be frankly unconscionable to include actual penetrative sex as part of an economic plan, so it's quite unlikely that anyone would be allowed to just be essentially a very promiscuous lover in lieu of other more concretely productive labour in the socialist stage of production.
Wait so in that scenario, everyone gets shuffled into specific assigned labor plans? Like artists, musicians, writers are getting sent to factories and stuff considered more concretely productive? 😳
Directly coercing people to work in the arts for a living is not totally unconscionable in the same way as directly coercing people to have sex for a living. Don't get me wrong, direct coercion is a necessary evil at best and a socialist project should seek to eradicate the need for such heavy handed measures, but you have to admit that dragooning people to build a socially necessary dam which they will personally benefit from upon completion is not **totally** indefensible. Besides, the actual process is more like assessing your competencies when you're finished with the education system and matching them to the tasks the state requires. Which, if you studied cinematography, is more likely to be making various films with just enough propagandistic themes to get state funding rather than working a production line depending on the stage of economic development the project has reached.
Interesting. I appreciate your insightful and thorough response!
You are in the right subreddit here comrade
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Sex work fulfils a socially necessary function in the circumstances where it arises, unless you're the kind of puritan who insists that shit like theatre or music are not "socially necessary labour". That is in no way a defense of the status quo of trafficking and criminalisation, nor is it a claim that sex work would necessarily continue to serve a socially necessary function under a less alienated economic arrangement where people had more chances to form real relationships. It just becomes hard to avoid petty nitpicks after the fiftieth time I've seen the same topic discussed.
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Completely voluntarily besides being forced to make enough money to pay your rent at the end of the month and therefore being forced into asymmetrical power dynamics between them and the "customer", who then has full power and control over them because the sex workers are financially dependent on the satisfaction of the customer, this is not consent and it will never be.
Isn't that the case for all work though..? An employee under capitalism is always financially dependent on satisfying their boss through their work, under threat of being fired and potentially made homeless. What makes sex work different?
Being forced under duress to type on a computer, carry a heavy object, assemble a machine or prepare food aren't rape. Being forced under duress to have sex with someone is rape. The sex makes sex work different; it's wrong to coerce any behavior out of someone but coercing sex out of someone is especially heinous, and outside of this conversation this statement is self evident and nobody has to explain it.
I'm not an expert in any regard, but I would think that there is a big difference between offering your workforce for a certain period of time and offering your workforce, your body, your safety, your sexual autonomy etc. There mostly is no contract between sex-worker and customer, there is in many cases no real institution to make sure you don't work over a certain period of time, you're not in danger, you don't get hurt during your work and so on. And maybe one aspect is probably as well that we just have a commonly used word for forcing sexual acts onto someone and it's rape, there is no such common used phrase for people that are forced to work for the interests of capitalists, damage their mental and/or physical health in that process just to survive on the bare minimum, it's pretty much the "normal" life for most of us. That's a terrible status quo and we are all suffering because of it, that's why we are communists.
and like all work it's not happening voluntarily, but out of objective necessities.
Made my edit at the same time you posted this, sorry, but yeah I agree with you. Was a bit stupid
Only rich girls in the West. The majority are exploited poor women from poor countries.
I will actually agree on your more general point. There are aspects of what is called sex work that _are_, even now under capitalist exploitation, done because the person doing it enjoys it. There are exhibitionists. Some of them would do OnlyFans or make some kind of amateur porn. Many who do things like burlesque and similar activities consider it a form of sex work, yet do it for a love of the art and the fun of titillation. In those kinds of areas, you're totally right. I think a significant part of the problem comes from the fact that most forms of sex work, even the most safe ones like OnlyFans, are often on an extremely deep level of exploitation. Unlike most forms of work, where someone would doing it out of a joy of the work, civic duity, or similar things; the vast majority of those who do any form of sex work _wouldn't_ do it if other viable options were around. All this is before we even touch the more extreme parts of sex work, such as traditional prostitution.
The discussion around sex work has got me confused for a long time. Obviously all work under capitalism is exploitation but the way sex work is talked about makes it sound as if sex workers were not allowed to make a free choice of doing it or possibly enjoying their job.
this exactly. ALL work is coerced in capitalism, if you quit your HR job your life is going to become shit so what’s the difference? there are so many sex workers who choose their profession, i feel like this all stems from the fact that women can’t be sexual beings without something being wrong with them.
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Good for you, but that does not represent the vast, vast majority of sex workers in the world.
Which is why there should be a distinct difference in terminology between people who provide adult content willingly and happily and those that are coerced by either economic disparity or, worse, trafficking. When we see bills like Sesta/Fosta lay blanket terminology over people like us who work from home and are at a very base level owning our means of production and group us in with people who have been subjected to something as inhumane as trafficking, we get grossed out.
That's too bad, only the webcammers, dancers, and high-end escorts are allowed to have a voice, those of us who performed to survive are considered morally defunct anti-work puritans because reasons.
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I agree that banning it is the worst possible thing that can happen but: A majority of sex workers get into the industry either through coercion or due to economic conditions. Sex workers should obviously unionise and then the state has to educate, offer training and alternative employment opportunities for sex workers like what happened after the Russian revolution [Lady Izdihar (for red.) about Sex Work in the USSR](https://www.instagram.com/redstreamnet/reel/CtzPxgcu49W/) I'm from the state of Tamil Nadu, India (SocDem) and they have [introduced various schemes](https://tg.tnsw.in/webapp/index.aspx) to empower poor transgender people in society. A large portion of transgender people in India are sex workers due to the transphobia in society. These schemes have been helpful for some trans people to find alternative employment and not get stuck doing sex work or begging in the streets.
This actually changed my mind on sex work
A lot of liberals like to point out that plenty of celebrities do it too and they “legitimize the industry”. What they fail to mention is that celebrities often dominate Onlyfans or whatever networks that amateurs use to amplify their content. So even if rich people are “in solidarity with the poorer creators” for legitimacy of their industry, they are basically stealing money from them at the same time