Thanks to Harpy reader heykoukla, who emailed me today on the subject of the British sex-work blogger Belle de Jour, pointing me to a recent post on Belle’s blog about the recent Shapely Prose post quoted far and wide, entitled “Schrödinger’s Rapist.” The SP post is itself worth reading, on the subject of the near-constant low-level awareness of sexual violence women live with. If only I could say the same for Belle’s, wherein her general agreement with the SP post is qualified by the following:
If you’re reading my blog, then you know I’m a long time, dyed-in-the-wool A-number-1 Fan Of Men.
I’m glad she got that out of the way, though I can’t imagine myself saying I’m a Fan of Women because I’m a feminist (it would be absurd, right?), but no matter. Onwards:
Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn’t exist. Fact.
She gives no support for this statement and I’m not even sure what this means. Is it her contention that men seek the comfort of sex workers to… escape the violence of the outside word? Baffling.
But fear not: her idea is that the problem here really truly is privilege, because otherwise there is, in her view, no basis to the claim that women face a particularly high level of physical danger:
Bottom line, it takes a particular kind of self-consciously middle-class gynecentric view of the world to imagine that the only physical danger men face is in a war zone. As someone who has lived in more than a few dodgy neighbourhoods – because sponging off my parents was categorically Not An Option – and been privy to the secrets and fears of my male friends, I do not think they have it easier than we of the XX-type. Different, yes. Easy, no.
Ooooohkay. You can sort of imagine how it goes from there. But I’m not really interested in doing just an interblogular hit piece today. No, what’s interesting to me about this sort of thing is how it dovetails with my general skepticism of feminist discourse surrounding sex work.
Let me emphasize here that I am talking about how “feminism” talks about sex work, not the culture at large. Because let’s be clear: in a patriarchy, sex workers don’t get bonbons for being sex workers. They get ostracized and degraded as less than human. As a recent reminder of this: “Belle de Jour” is of course a pseudonym, and she recently identified herself in the press. It appears to have been under some duress, though she hasn’t said explicitly that she was “forced” to come out.
But once I am safely ensconced in conversations with people who agree that sex workers are entitled to human dignity (a regrettable minority), though, I find it hard to get behind the general sort of “chosen sex work” banner that Belle and her ilk espouse. Not for nothing, but I’ve never heard the sort of “sex work is a valid choice” argument come from anyone who wasn’t young, white, cisgendered and relatively well-educated. That is to say: privileged, and thus relatively able to call on certain defenses when necessary. And I don’t understand, and am not sure I ever will, because believe me I have tried, the impulse to insist that this perspective be permitted to enter into a conversation about women’s exploitation. In other words: if she isn’t being exploited, bully for her, but I am not sure why this is relevant to a discussion, say, of human trafficking. And yet there it always is.
I would catch a lot of hell in the feminist blogosphere for this kind of statement, however, or at least some of the fora I frequent. Because at the end of the day, these people say, if I don’t embrace sex work, I am slut shaming those engaged in it.
This confuses me. See, I come back again and again to the same old question: is there a feminist obligation to defend sex work writ large as a practice, or is it merely that feminism demands the defense of sex workers as human beings?
It will come as no surprise to anyone that I fall on the latter side of the fence. While I absolutely would support the “right” scheme for the legalization of sex work – i.e. a scheme designed around the founding principle that humanity does not fly out the window the moment one engages in sex work – it is because I believe the people who engage in sex work deserve the same dignity as anyone, not because I think of sex work as a particularly liberatory practice. Personally, I do not understand how the liberation of women, or anyone else for that matter, can possibly be connected to a practice that contructs their bodies as ones for hire. Yes, I would agree that “sexual purity” is overly personalized and fetishized in this society, and I do not advocate that we start setting out rules for what kinds of consensual sexual behaviour are acceptable. Not only is it offensive to do so, it would be unenforceable anyway.
But: I think if the abortion rights fight has shown us nothing else, it is that the body, in this culture, still matters. What I mean by this is that for all our training in deconstruction and inscriptions, at the end of the day feminism still values the integrity of women’s bodies. I really think it is hard to argue that anyone’s body ought to be leverage in a negotiation. It simply shouldn’t. Call me an idealist, tell me I am using the master’s tools. But I cannot look at any person and think to myself: there’s something I could rent.
It strikes me that in a world where we were all considered fully human, nothing tied very closely to our bodies would be for rent or sale. You may say that sex is just work, but the connection between my work and my body begins and ends with my fingertips. Sure I use my brain, my legs to walk there, but other than that, it demands very little of me.
Of course we all live in a world that is capitalist, and people have to eat, I agree. I guess I just don’t know that feminism can sign up for capitalism quite so easy. As a professor of mine once said in another context, this notion that it’s okay to express value in dollar signs turns the world into eBay. And I like eBay for cheap jewelry, I guess, but I don’t particularly want to live there.
See, to come back to Belle: I think of her view as a somewhat purely capitalist one. she’s just earning a living! It’s economically sound! (Paging Levitt and Dubner!) Why are people so uptight about it? The danger is illusory, or at least exaggerated by people who want to keep women’s sexual agency in check!
I guess all I have, for that sort of thing, is this: I think your concern is misdirected. If you want to go after the Christian right for wanting to rescue you as “fallen women,” I’m on your side. I will defend your right to safety no matter where you are and what you are doing. But I will also continue to consider the people who purchase these services as engaging in an essentially objectionable activity. I will continue to consider the commodification of human beings essential to the continued practice of sex work, and I will lament that commodification. And if that makes me the uncool kid on the playground, so be it.
Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn’t exist. Fact.
I’ll post a cogent comment when I pick up the pieces of my brain that exploded when I read that statement.
Yes, yes, and more yes to your argument. Especially “is there a feminist obligation to defend sex work writ large as a practice, or is it merely that feminism demands the defense of sex workers as human beings?” I happily throw my lot in with yours in this issue. Well said, much better than I ever could. Thank you.
“…it is because I believe the people who engage in sex work deserve the same dignity as anyone, not because I think of sex work as a particularly liberatory practice.”
Now I know what to say when I get into debates about sex workers. It is simple and straight to the point.
The funny thing is I think these women (and men) are trying to convince themselves more so than others, that sex work is liberating.
It seems that Belle defines “being a man” as “getting all the sex to which you think you are entitled, for free!”
To the main point: Yes. I’ve spent some time thinking about this lately, and while the main issues don’t necessarily need repeating (both because you covered most of them so well, and because I can only handle being called a judgmental, prudish, homophobic (!!) slut-shamer so many times in one week), one thing that really bothers me in all of these discussions is the inevitable comments about how some men are socially awkward, and need hookers because they couldn’t get laid any other way. Wow. So the fact that there are men for whom sex is not readily available justifies an entire system of organized commodification of women and children, and cancels out any criticism of the same? Good to know. Seeing unironic posts on feminist websites defending prostitution on the grounds that all men deserve sex makes me wish I kept more alcohol in my house.
Wait, so this sex worker is arguing that it’s anti-feminist to oppose an institution wherein male bodies are privileged over female bodies, yet she is basically turning her back on women as a whole by claiming – in a roundabout way – that men *need* to use sex workers because it’s hard out there for a man and men do not pose a disproportionate threat to women?
Fuck no.
I support sex workers’ rights. I still believe prostitution harms all women, whether they are involved in the sex trade or not. I will never be a (gag) “sex-positive” feminist as long as porn and prostitution are considered “sex.” How do women win when their bodies are considered commodities? How do we win when our sex lives are influenced so heavily by the misogynist porn that’s seeped into our partners’ minds? That’s not freedom.
“…it is because I believe the people who engage in sex work deserve the same dignity as anyone, not because I think of sex work as a particularly liberatory practice.”
Yep, that pretty much sums up how I feel about it. Well said.
I noticed that her argument that men have it worse is supported by the conflicting claims that 1) men don’t complain about how bad it is for them in the Sunday supplement and 2) there are two, widely acclaimed and distributed films about how bad men have it.
I really need some help understanding why sex work commodifies women/children/workers more than other kinds of physically and/or emotionally demanding labor with historical roots in oppressive practices. I feel like this is where I get so stuck in this conversation. How is this different than a regular old Marxist critique of labor?
I definitely don’t think sex work is inherently empowering or liberatory, but I also think it’s far from the only type of work that commodifies the body. A lot of labor (everything from construction work to waiting tables) is dependent on the body and the worker’s willingness to sacrifice her health and bodily comfort in exchange for her wages. Is any commodification of the body inherently degrading? What makes selling a kidney different from selling sex different from a coal miner selling his dust-free lungs or a waitress selling her aching back? (Not being snarky, I’m really asking. This is something I wonder about all the time.)
Ok, being devil’s advocate (for a change): how is sex work different than other work that involves the selling of labor? If you build roads or clean houses for a living, you’re selling your physical services along with the set of skills the job requires. Are those commodification?
What about if the sale is by a man to a man or by a woman to a woman? Is that commodification?
If the seller of sex is selling willingly and freely, without compulsion or economic necessity, how is that harmful to her or to us? Do you not agree with the idea, a la Dan Savage, that there can be legitimate reasons for one adult to hire another one for sex?
I’m not disagreeing, just throwing out some thoughts. Saying we’re all hurt by a woman’s free choice to sell sex sounds suspiciously like saying that all Jews are hurt by Bernie Madoff. The prejudice is in the eyes of those who don’t belong to the group in question.
Glad I’m not the only one confused by the sex work vs. other work question.
I’m not sure if self-linkage is kosher here (feel free to delete if it’s not), but I fleshed out my thoughts on this topic a little more fully on my blog:
http://jennyknopinski.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/what-makes-sex-work-different-from-other-work/
““sex work is a valid choice”… I don’t understand, and am not sure I ever will, because believe me I have tried, the impulse to insist that this perspective be permitted to enter into a conversation about women’s exploitation.”
Bingo.
I’m with you on this one. The number of women who safely, happily and genuinely *choose* sex work is so infinitesimal that to insist on raising it every time is to derail the rest of the conversation. The risk of overemphasizing the extent to which sex workers can and do choose sex work far outweighs any damage done by leaving this minute group of individuals out of the dialogue.
Well, let’s start here: sex work allows one particular person to manipulate, in a near marionette-like fashion, the body of another person. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that it is not an intimate experience, at least in terms of closeness to the body.
JennyK, I don’t think we should be encouraging a kidney marketplace either. So that’s my answer to that. Self-linkage is fine so long as it is not excessive.
Perhaps because sex work is more intimate by nature than other types of difficult physical work, and because it is (I’m using this for lack of a better word) a perversion or a commodification of something that is ideally done for mutual love or pleasure. Not many people mine coal for kicks in their free time; you can’t say that about having sex.
@MM: You can’t seriously claim that sex work is identical to all other forms of physical labor. If you seriously want to know why I think it’s different from, say, scrubbing floors or digging ditches, I’d answer: because I don’t have to use my genitals (or anyone else’s) to do those things.
Let’s stick with commodification, dillene, though I think you’re in good faith here I can see other people having issues with “perversion.”
JennyK, I went over and saw your post and I noticed in the comments a sex worker said: “I’ve found that my clients respect me as a person more than the customers at any other job that I’ve had, and the people I work with view me less as a machine and more as myself.”
It’s funny, and I’m not going to articulate this too well, here, but I think we do need to get away from a comparative perspective here, particularly one on the level of “respect.” I mean, I can imagine any number of fucked up dynamics in which the sex-worker might feel respected – and I would admit that’s not nothing – but which overall say very little about whether sex work as a practice is defensible.
@SkiptoMyLou: Very well put.
Brooke Magnanti aka Belle, may be one of those very rare women who genuinely chose sex work when she could have made money–albeit less money, by her own admission–doing other work. She’s white, socialy privileged, healthy and highly educated. However, those same facts set her apart from about 99.99999% of prostitutes worldwide, so her experience is hardly representational of sex workers as a whole.
I also think there’s an element to commodification that involves subsuming the whole person. Making the whole person a commodity of the purchaser. A coal miner can, at the end of the day, take off their boots and go *not be a coal miner* at the local pub. A sex worker has her whole identity absorbed by her work. Her morals, her personality, her future and reputation are defined by the physicality of her work.
I keep trying to reply but your website is telling me I’m spam. Pro sex work may be a misguided position but I assure you I argue in good faith! Does anyone have hints for me on how to change my post so it is allowed?
Aaaaah, the spam filter is crazy now! I will try to post the second half of my comment and then work on the first…hmm…
Honestly, what bothered me more about her post was the, “well, men face violence too” parallelism, and she’s not the only person I’ve seen this argument from. If you say “women face violence from men on a daily basis” and the response is “men face violence on a daily basis as well”, the clearly implied end to that statement is “…from women/from people in general” when in fact men generally face violence from other men. Violence in our society is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon (not that women are never violent — statistically speaking, however, female violence is extremely rare compared to male violence). When we bring up the violence that women face from men and suggest that it is men bear some responsibility to fix this and the response is that men also face violence — yes, well, men bear responsibility to fix that one, too. The fact that men face violence from other men should be contributing evidence to our point, not posed as evidence contradicting it.
I apologize for the spam filter problem, we were hacked recently. I’ll see if I can loosen things up but I don’t see anything in our spam queue.
I do think that in conversations about sex work in general (not about women’s exploitation therein) there is a useful identification of the tiny minority of professionals (not necessarily prostitutes per se) who are engaged in something essentially pedagogical — teaching people how to and helping them navigate their own bodies and desires. In this sense I think it can be a form of therapy, physical or otherwise, although this does require that the client view the worker as someone skilled and more learned than the client.
I like to think that if we had a healthier attitude about sexuality, then this school would be the most, rather than the least common, but as it is that’s clearly not the case. Certainly there is no need to mention this minority in a conversation about how women are exploited by prostitution, but I do think that if you’re talking about sex work as a discipline, it’s a useful thing to mention as a goal of what sex work could be.
Great, that worked — JD, I tried to take out some instances of the word “sex”. I think there might be a trigger limit.
Bizarre. Anyway I’m working on it.
@skiptomylou “A sex worker has her whole identity absorbed by her work. Her morals, her personality, her future and reputation are defined by the physicality of her work.” I think this is very true and one of the many reasons I would not choose to do s** work. But is this phenomenon inherent to the act of selling s** or more a function of society’s attitudes towards s** and s** workers? (Maybe the answer is that there is no way to separate the two, so it doesn’t really matter?)
**Edited to evade spam filter
I’m just gonna leave my comment behind and respond to your much more interesting one, baraqiel. Just know that when I say “prostitution” I am really wanting to say s. w. I am interested in liberatory models of prostitution. I think part of what I am responding to in arguments like PhDork’s is that it seems so totalizing — prostitution is always bad for women, it always means the same thing no matter the context, no matter who is taking part or what their actual bargaining positions are.
I suppose what makes me uncomfortable about saying that this work is different than other forms of labor is that it seems to admit or agree with a sort of traditional-gender-role view of the world that women ARE defined by who we are available to sexually, or by our acts, that what we do sexually needs to be tamed and contained or at least mean something about us as a gender. I don’t understand how this doesn’t feed a fundamentally conservative notion of women.
That is why I am always asking about what it means to our understanding of this work that there are female dominitrixes, there are multiple genders buying and selling, there are worker-owned collectives. I am aware that it is not the norm but I think that “exceptional” cases are worth looking at because it shows us whether this work is oppressive just because of particular contexts that can be transformed or regulated, or because of something inherent in the work. I understand PhDork’s position to be that it is something inherently oppressive no matter what. Maybe I’m wrong.
I really don’t know if I am making any sense.
Jenny that is another question that I have, how much of the danger of this work is because of the stigma?
This is one of the best discussions of this problem I have seen on the internet in a long, long time.
I used to be much more laissez-faire about prostitution. Then I worked on a long-term project about human trafficking, and of course became much more exposed to the realities of prostitution, forced and otherwise. I came to think that VERY few of them were really deciding to do it as a liberated choice. A very high number had a sexual trauma in their past (some estimates as high as 90%). In addition, most entered ‘the profession’, not because it had always been their dream, but because their economic circumstances required it and they seemed to be lacking other options for one reason or another. The job is bound up in risks (mental, physical, economic) that no other career has, and is thus not really ‘a job like any other’ (as prostitutes’ unions – yes, in some countries they exist – would claim).
So I do see prostitution very critically, but not because I think the women who engage in it are sluts. I would compare my attitude towards prostitution to my view of the military (not a fan): it similarly involves putting yourself at risk for physical and emotional harm.
The problem with the spam filter–it’s rejecting my comments too–seems to be specific to LONG comments, and comments with words like “sex” and “prostitution” in them.
So the more you repeat the words and the longer the comments are, the more likely it’ll be identified as spam with this new system. We’ll try to fix it but in the meantime, try to work around those words or abbreviate/respell them a bit, i.e. secks work.
Sorry, y’all.
God military is a really interesting comparison I have not heard before. I need to think about that one for a long time.
Maybe the difference between sex work and other physical labor is context. Rape culture, misogyny, gendered experience of submission/domination, etc. All of that effects a paid sexual encounter (and is in turn enforced by prostitution), in a way that’s not true for an interaction between a waitress and a customer.
Spark, context definitely has something to do with it, but then, as JD points out, that does get me back into the problem of whether or not by letting the context govern the value I am reifying the context.
P.S. I have turned off the spam filter, let me know if you’re still getting blocked.
Another way of saying my poorly thought out line of argumentation is: for those who believe that sex work requires or implicates our whole person, what does that say about sex? And us? Why can’t my genitalia be just like my hands? Why do I have to accept that man’s dick inside me degrades me or implicates me on some existential level? Isn’t it because of sexism that these things are true? Why are we accepting them as true for all women?
@BeckySharper Yes, I noticed that Brooke seemed to fit into the “Killer Queen”, upper class courtesan mold. I haven’t read her article but I wonder if she references people like Emilienne D’Alencon or Liane de Pougy- the “Grandes Horizontales” who were well-known in their time and made incredible amounts of money.
There is an entire mythology devoted to women like this, but it ignores the experiences of the vast, vast, VAST majority of sex workers throughout history. It is almost never a glamorous life, and even the highest paid prostitutes are still expected to ignore their own desires and make themselves sexually available to anyone who has purchased their services.
Thank god Pilgrim Soul can talk right and somehow understand my ramblings.
I like the military comparison too, and it works for a number of reasons…but I still think that overall you can’t accurately compare work work that involves genitalia with work that doesn’t. It’s inevitably apples and oranges (at best).
Spark: Agreed. This is why I am unmoved by stories of particular individuals that aren’t negatively affected by sex work, or think of prostitution as super cool or whatever the argument is. It’s about reinforcing patriarchal norms and legitimizing a system that hurts us all. The fact that one particular woman can get rich doing it and wants to do it doesn’t matter at all to me. It actually makes the women that are doing it “completely voluntarily” kind of jackasses, IMO. If you have a bunch of other options but choose the one that’s the most pro-patriarchy, I don’t understand why I’m supposed to applaud your initiative. Yay for money?
Isn’t that a seriously gender essentialist viewpoint Becky? Why DO you think something that requires your genitals is something you shouldn’t charge for?
Well, JD, not to sound too biologically totalizing but… I mean, at some point a vagina is different from a hand. But then I’m not thrilled about someone purchasing the right to fuck your hand either, if you get my drift.
Also it’s SarahMC’s, not PhDork’s point that you’re respondingto, yes?
ETA: Does a hand have pleasure-value, for example? I mean, men would tell us it’s not the same as a vagina, sex-wise. And wouldn’t we have to believe him?
Um, no. It’s you, the original poster. Sorry. Those P names always mix me up.
As long as the vast majority of sex work is exploitative, the belle-du-jour exceptions are tainted. Not tainted because feminists don’t address them theoretically–tainted because it’s impossible to realistically view some kinds of sex work as liberatory/non-exploitative when the dominant model is so very very dominant, and threaded through the rest of society. I do believe prostitution is on the rape spectrum, and there it will remain until rape-culture is wiped out.
PS it really does sound biologically totalizing to me. I don’t get it. I just feel like we are buying into this notion of sex as some special, powerful thing that should be set apart.
I found yvanehtnioj’s point about voluntary (for lack of a better word) sex work being the most pro-patriarchal career going really interesting. I hadn’t looked at it that way before, but now that I think about it, that’s definitely another reason to take issue with it.
Well, JD, I don’t know that I would say I think it’s “bad for women,” (some prostitutes are men) but I would say that I don’t understand why your context is limited to what is going on between the two immediate parties. I mean, then you’re reintroducing context too!
Well, but then the dominatrixes would tell you that sex is a special, powerful thing, no, JD? I mean, you’re having it both ways a bit here.
@Spark: this is my exact thinking as well. I don’t have much else to add. I, like yvanehtnioj, am a little tired of being told I’m a sex-hating prude for questioning the supposed freedom with which any women in a patriarchal society enters into sex work and that a transaction involving sex has a fundamentally unequal power balance.
I don’t know Endora. Wealth managers, tax preparers, Vogue editors, priests — all kinds of professions injure me more obviously on a day to day basis than sex workers do.
I am really enjoying this discussion. I would like to state for the record that in its current social context I am against sex work and agree with those who say that specific instances of women being empowered by prostitution are rare to the point of statistical non-existance. But in the abstract, what is different about the sexual transaction? I feel like the only real argument is that sexuality is sacred under some sort of natural law. But even if society as a group views sexuality as sacred, does it have the right to impose that view on an individual who doesn’t view her own sexuality that way (or who doesn’t think that commodification is necessarily degarding or devaluing)?
JD Regent: Because on every possible level, society treats my vagina in a VASTLY different way than it treats my hands. The same is true of men’s dicks, as well. Our genitals and what we do with them are freighted with the heaviest possible cultural/political significance. To pretend that’s not the case by saying “oh, it’s jus the same as work you do with your hands!” is stunningly naive.
(Although I’m with PSoul–I’m not particularly into the idea of someone fucking my hand, either).
Also, JD, I guess generally my answer to high theories about biological essentialism is this: I’d love to live in a sex-neutral world, in some ways, but we don’t, and pretending we do, in order to “support” sex work, strikes me as a bit dishonest. We live in a world that has constructed sex as an intimate experience, and one involving control and domination (however subversively wielded), and in that context, sex work is, on the whole, not particularly useful as an agent of change.